Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick.
We have something a little different and a little familiar for you here today on today's episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. In a way, this is kind of a spin off from our old anthology of horror series that we used to do, but it's also a response to listeners over the years who've written in about their nostalgia for marathons of TVs The Twilight Zone on the Sci Fi Channel on New Year's Eve and or New Year's Day?
Do you know why they do that? Like, what's the connection with New Year's Is it just a coincidence or a coincidence?
Is it random? I'm not entirely certain. I mean, I've been thinking about it a lot, Like why the Twilight Zone at New Year's And I guess it's because it's this space between right, I mean, I feel that heavily. Right now. It's like, all right, we're done with Christmas. The New Year's about to start, but it's not there yet, and even once it has started, it's not going to feel real for a little bit, so I don't know,
it seems like maybe a fitting time. I'm also not super hip to all of like the cable channel business side of all of this, Like why does it even make sense to run, say a Turkey Day marathon? There may just be very like strong and pretty straightforward industry reasons why, you know, it's like, I don't know, you've got to put something on. Maybe there are more people watching at that time, but I don't know, over the years, you've seen these kind of holiday marathons really take root.
Be it MST three K, Turkey Day, or I forget which turner channel would air a Christmas story just over and over again for like twenty four hour period.
I wonder if it's that on days people are expected to be off work and home for a holiday, that they're more likely to just leave the TV on on a certain channel where they can expect to kind of some kind of like predictable stream in the background.
Yeah. Yeah, it could be it's something comforting and if you're like if you're a fan of the Twilight Zone or just old timey television in general, like there's a pretty good choice to put on in the background now
for my own part. I think I probably watched episodes of the Twilight Zone this way because I believe they started doing these marathons on the Sci Fi Channel around nineteen ninety five, so I was definitely watching the channel, but I don't have strong specific memories of these marathons in the same way I do for the Turkey Day marathons or for particular tales from the crypt marathons that I caught like semi scrambled on HBO back in the day.
And I think I was looking around. I think there may be some regional channels that did Twilight Zone marathons as far back as the nineteen eighties. So depending on where you are and where you were watching television, this might be very deeply rooted. So we figured, okay, let's
lean into this idea. Let's take an episode of the Twilight Zone and consider it, give it sort of the old anthology of horror treatment, where we would in that we would take a horror anthology episode and we kind of like squeeze it out see what kind of science or culture we could get out of it. And we figured, Okay, there are a lot of episodes of the Twilight Zone we've talked about episodes of The Twilight Zone before, so
there's got to be a good one. There's got to be a really juicy one that we can start juicing here on the show. And so we decided were to juice that it's got to be juicy. Yeah, it needs to. It needs to have at least three types of juice in it. So we decided to pick a season two episode. This is episode twenty four, the Rip Van Winkle Caper, which originally aired April twenty first, nineteen sixty one. Joe, is this one that you had seen previously?
I think I had not seen this before, but I was aware of it, at least in part because a listener wrote in about it sometime in the past couple of years. And I forget what the original context of that was, but a listener wrote in about it, and so I had to explain it briefly in that listener mail episode where I was talking about that message. But yeah, I had not seen it before, at least as far
as I remember. And so I laid down horizontally in my bed last night and watched it with a laptop sitting on my chest the way Rod Serling intended.
Yes, clearly. Well, there's no bad way to watch a Twilight Zone episode. So this is one that I had seen on television a long time ago, and I do I do remember this one having an impact on me, Like it was clever and it's plotting, but also in its treatment of human value systems, so as we'll discuss,
you know, it's it's very economic piece. And that's the thing about the Twilight Zone that they didn't have a lot of time to bust out their stories and their twist and really hit you over the head with some meaning. But you know, they generally managed to do a pretty good job of it. Sometimes they would, you know, these episodes would be more sci fi in nature, other times
a little more magical realism or outright magical. This one, this one's I guess, more in the sci fi area, but not so much concerned with the SI so much.
Well, yeah, a significant chunk of it does take place in the future from our perspective, but also is only the slightest bit concerned with what that future is like. I mean, the characters barely encounter the future. They're just mostly wandering in a desert in the future, which would have been the same if it was one hundred years beyond or one hundred years ago.
Yeah, And one thing that becomes clear if you watch a number of Twilight Zone episodes is that they'll frequently come back to the well on sort of a base,
sort of gimmicks. So this is one of I think several wandering in the Desert episodes, you know, because it was it was a location that was attainable, and there are all sorts of stories you can tell about wandering through the desert, be it a situation where time traveling bandits, bandits are trying to get their gold to the nearest town, or astronauts who think they're on an alien planet but they're actually just outside of Las Vegas. There are so many different ways to spin it, you know.
This episode does have the significant plot point of people trying to get their stash of gold ingots from a cave in the middle of the desert back to town by foot, and they're like dying along the way. You would think they would just stash the gold somewhere and walk without carrying it. I think they might have lived if they had done so, if they had made choices, Well, what is they think a porcupine is going to find their gold and take away or something. I don't know
what lives in the desert. Not a porcupine, armadillo or something.
Yeah, heavily, this will come for the gold, all right. Well. This episode was written by Twilight Zone maestro Rod Serling, who lived nineteen twenty four through nineteen seventy five, and it was directed by TV director Justice Attis who lived nineteen seventeen through nineteen seventy nine, who also directed two films, fifty eight's Cry Baby Killer and nineteen sixty six is the Magnificent Stranger, though this late. This latter picture was
cobbled together from two episodes of TV's Raw Hide. This sounds great, Well, you know, I don't know. I've seen watchable films that were cobbled together in that manner, so who knows.
Sure.
So this particular episode of The Twilight Zone concerns a band of criminals working for a mastermind by the name of Farwell. Farwell is an intellectual we'll come to realize. He has expertise at least a couple of different areas, and he is played by Oscar Bareiki Junior lived nineteen eighteen through nineteen seventy six, a Hungarian born actor, whose father, Oscar Bragi Senior, escaped the Holocaust and had previously appeared in Fritz Lang's The Testament of Doctor Maiboos in nineteen
thirty three. Baggie Junior did a lot of TV work and appeared in such films as seventy four as Young Frankenstein, but is perhaps best remembered for three Twilight Zone appearances, including sixty one's Deaths Had Revisited and also the episode Mute.
I don't know if I know either of those.
Yeah, they're not two episodes. I'm that familiar with it, And I'm not sure if they fall into any of the sort of like standard buckets of like desert wanderers or weird airplane Shenanigans and so forth.
Or Monkeys Paul scenarios.
Yeah, so Farwell's band here includes criminals played by John Mitcham that's Robert's younger brother, and most notably Simon Oakland, who lived nineteen fifteen through nineteen eighty three as the merciless D'Cruz.
Ooh, D'Cruz. He's a mean one, isn't.
He he is? I remember being rather impressed by his meanness as a young viewer, because we learned pretty quickly that he's ruthless when it comes to the gold. Oakland will be familiar with many film fans out there for his roles in Psycho, West Side Story from sixty one, The Sand Pebbles from sixty six, and Bullet from sixty eight, And I realized, oh, yeah, that's as I was rewatching this episode. I think that's where i'd primarily seen it before Bullet.
Now I'm trying to remember who is he in Psycho. He's not the detective or is he one of the cops At the end.
He plays doctor Richmond. I haven't seen Psycho in a long time, so I don't remember who this character is.
Could he be the psychiatrist who comes out at the end of the film to explain things.
Yeah, he could be. He's like each Psycho analysis one bar of gold. I think that's pretty standard. So this
is a fun episode. Like I said, the location was readily available Death Valley National Park, and looking around at different rankings, this episode tends not to rank as highly as some of the really iconic episodes like Time Enough at Last or The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, or certainly the Airline episodes like Nightmare twenty thousand Feet or the Odyssey of Flight thirty three, but it does seem to be generally very well regarded by Twilight Zone fans,
Like this is not one of those that people seem to just completely forget that it exists. I don't know if it's anyone's absolute top episode, but it's really solid and again, I remember being impressed by its brutality, its twist ending, and so forth when I watched it for the first time.
Yeah, like a lot of Twilight Zone episodes, not all, but a lot hinges a lot on the twist endings to really make its point.
But it's a pretty great twist. So yeah, we'll just run through the plot really quickly here. So a crew of criminals, again led by former chemistry and physics professor mister Farewell, sets out to steal a bunch of gold. We're told it's ten million dollars worth of gold bars that are bound for Fort Knox.
I think they had them in a truck going for a train. No, a train, right, yeah, yeah, a train because D'Cruz blows up the tracks. Yeah that's how they get the train to stop.
Yeah, yeah, we we we do learn that each member of the crew has a different skill set as his standard for your heist. Though we don't see the heist really, right, it's just it's we're just kind of told it worked, they pulled it off, they got the gold. But then what And those skill sets, by the way, were mechanical engineering, firearms, and demolition.
Right, so D'Cruz does demolition, mechanical engineering. Is this other guy named I forget his name, And then there's this this guy named Brooks who is sort of at odds with D'Cruz at multiple points, and he just seems to be the gun guy. He's the button man.
So, as the characters point out, all right, we've got the gold, but one thing about crime is how do you get away with it? Where are you going to take your gold? Where are you going to spend it, where are you going to hide out? And indeed, where are you going to run to? But farwell as a smart cookie, and he has it figured out. They're going to escape into the future.
The last place that the cops would look, and.
They're going to They're going to accomplish this, you know, not via the standard method of going to the future by just continuing to exist at the normal pace of things. They're also not going to use a time machine, but they are going to use a set of suspended animation chambers that are secreted away in a death valley cave.
Right, So their method of traveling into the future is to sleep for one hundred years when when at the time they emerge, it will be safe to spend their gold without raising any suspicion.
Yeah, the statute of limitations on stealing a bunch of gold from the US government will be will be, it will be over. Yeah, probably not. But their idea is like, okay, but by this time, like we'll be in the clear. Nobody will be looking for us this this gold will just be lost. There will maybe be you know, conspiracy theorists out there. They're like, remember the story the lost Gold and so forth. They'll they'll be in the clear.
So that's that's the tactic here. They're just gonna park the loot and hibernate within these high tech chambers for a century and then then they're free. What could possibly go wrong?
You know, maybe I don't know enough about gold. I would have assumed that gold is fairly easy to get, because it's not like you know, banknotes or something that would have serial numbers, or it's got a die pack in it. You know, gold you can melt down, and can't you just turned I don't know. Maybe maybe they could have special radioactive isotopes in them or something that would make it traceable. But but who knows. But my assumption would be the gold is fairly easy to disguise the origin of.
Yeah, yeah, it could melt it down, right, I don't At any rate, we can disagree on whether this is really a great plan or not, but it seems like a great idea within the context of the show. It's a best laid plan in fact, and we know what happens to those. So let's start talking about how things
go wrong, the complications that occur. Yeah, So, first of all, in this one, I've strongly remembered from watching this when I was younger, When they wake up in their simplistic cryogenic chambers and they begin to emerge, they quickly learned that one of the criminals, mister Irby, is long dead because a random rock had fallen from the cavern ceiling and broken open the top of his suspension chamber. So it's just a skeleton in there.
Now, yeah, just a skeleton with rings on.
Yeah, which pretty impressive. I liked it. And then things get more complicated because D'Cruz, again the demolition guy, the nastiest member of the team. He ends up killing Brooks, their firearm expert. In what are they fighting over? Who's going to drive the truck into civilization?
That's what happens immediately before he kills him. But it is I think rather confusing. So it for yeah, they're arguing about who's going to be driving and who's going to be in the back of the truck watching the gold while they drive. Also, they have a truck that's been sitting in a cave for one hundred years and it still just starts up fine.
It's for tough, right.
But so yeah, they start up their truck just works fine after one hundred years, and for some reason, Brooks is out walking ahead of where the truck is and D'Cruz drives the truck into him, like runs him down with the truck, but jumps out of the truck so that the truck after that goes over the edge of a cliff and crashes on the rocks low and then he you know, says to Farwell, who's standing there looking on incredulous. He's like, you know, it looks like poor
mister Brooks had an accident with a truck. But I was thinking, who is he trying to fool here? And how does it What does it mean that the truck was wrecked, Like, why would that affect anything? It just seems like they're I don't know, it seemed like they had to get rid of the truck somehow. Yeah, and that part made the least sense to me of anything.
Yeah, so it does deliver us to this resulting scenario. Yeah, we're down to just two people. Farwell again, the intellectual d'cruze the nasty demolitions expert. They have all the gold between them, but they don't have a truck. They're gonna have to lug what however much gold they can carry across the desert into civilization all by themselves. So they set out. They travel by day. Of course, that's the only proper time to travel with an enormous amount of gold.
During the middle the day through the desert, they clearly needed a ranger or a desert survival expert in their crew.
Yeah, but I think they just couldn't have anticipated that Dacruz would have this amazing idea of what to do with the.
Trallic I mean, he demolished it. That's his skill set, right, you're right, yeah, they should have seen it coming. So our two surviving criminals, they're hiking along and Farwell quickly discovers that he's lost his canteen. They have one canteen each, apparently, which is the appropriate amount of water for trekking across the open desert during the middle of the day, and D'Cruz begins to sell Farwell SIPs from his own canteen at the extravagant price of one gold bar per sip.
And I really like this. I think like it's an excellent introduction to the episode's core themes of the shifting value of resources. How much is a gold bar worth? Well, how much is a sip of water worth? The answers are highly conditional.
Right, So obviously Farwell's logic is that gold is worth nothing if I'm not alive to spend it. So I will give you a whole gold bar for one sip of water, because that's my only chance to make it to the town we're going to. And D'Cruz is not going to take pity on him.
Yeah, So eventually Dacruz, relishing the Cruelty of it all, ups the price one more time, saying, what it's like two bars of gold for a sip or something, and Farwell's just basically out of gold. So Farwell loses it, beats the Cruz to death in the desert with one of the blocks of gold, I think maybe his last block of gold, and so now we just have Farwell as the lone survivor. He scoops up as much gold as he can carry, which isn't much at this point.
He marches on, but as he wanders, you know, more and more through the desert and he doesn't encounter a single living soul, He's forced to steadily shed his gold bars until he collapses with just a single bar of gold clutched in his dying hands.
Note that they have not met anyone in the future at this point, and at one point while they're walking, they speculate, They're like, you know, what if there is nobody to meet here, what if there's a war, and what if there was a war, what if we're living? You know, what if humanity no longer exists? And they decide that they think that there is somebody out there to meet because they see airplanes flying over in the sky.
I remember, so they're like, okay, so there is still civilization, but who knows what it'll be like.
It could the airplanes could be full of apes. Yeah, yeah, Serling of course. Yeah, credit due with that twist as well, but it did any rate. Farwell loses consciousness. Having collapsed, he opens his eyes and he finds a man looming over him. He offers this stranger his one remaining bar of gold and says, it's you know, this is gold. This is gold. It's yours if you just take me
to the nearest town. But then he dies before the stranger can really respond to him, and the stranger is just kind of puzzled by this, and he turns around. He walks back to his future car, which I'm to understand is a reused prop from Forbidden Planet.
Oh with the little bubbles in front of the face.
Yeah, yeah, I didn't do a side by side, so I don't know if they augmented it at all or if they just drove it right out of the lot and reused it.
But I was wondering why it looked so familiar.
Yeah, so he returned. He walks over to the future car and who we presume is his wife, I guess, is setting there and she's like, what's going on with that man? Is that dead man over there? And he's like, yeah, yeah, he totally died. And the weird thing is is he gave me this piece of he said it was gold. What's he doing with gold? Out of here? Out here? And then they both reveal, uh, oh, gold is useless in this future getting there like, didn't gold used to
be worth something? Didn't people make a big deal out of it? And he's like, yeah, yeah, back before we could just manufacture it. It will.
So in Farwell's defense, based on what they say there, I would say gold is not worthless in this future. It's probably worth I don't know, twenty dollars a pound.
Yeah, yeah, it's worth something. That's why people make all they need of it, you know. And from our certainly we can assume it's used in all sorts of crazy futuristic electronic parts there. You know, there's probably a fair amount of gold in that future car that they're driving in.
But yeah, that's that's the big twist of this episode, is this precious commodity that these criminals you know, stole, gave up their lives for, you know, traveled essentially traveled through time with and then killed each other and died for it. Turns out it was worth nothing.
You can tell. Rod just loves this irony. Yes, he's really relishing the narration in this one, especially because I always forget that it does this where you don't you don't just get his narration at the beginning and the end. There's also a mid point stinger where you're in the cave with these four criminals and they're arguing, and the camera just pans over. Oh there's Rod. He's right there in the cave and he's like four men arguing over gold.
You know what will become of them? We can only find out in the twilight Zone.
Yeah, he can appear at any moment, you never know. But yeah, his closing narration is juicy. He says, the last of four root van Winkles, who all died precisely the way they lived, chasing an idol across the sand to wind up bleach to dry in the hot sun. As so much desert flotsam worthless as the gold bullion, they built a shrine too Tonight's lesson in the Twilight Zone.
I love how in these little narrated segments they're simultaneously trying to do so much in so few words, but also just recapping the plot of what you just saw.
You know.
I wonder how much of that, too, was thinking like, well, people might not have caught the beginning of the episode, and you can't just run it back, So yeah, you've got to do everything you can to make sure that meaning is at the forefront of the viewer's experience, even if they didn't catch the whole episode.
Yeah, no, TVO in nineteen sixty.
Yeah, all right, well let's get into it. Obviously we're gonna be talking about value, because that's ultimately what this episode is about, and particularly when it comes to metals and specifically when it comes to gold. And I'll be honest, I grew up watching this episode and the Bond movie Goldfinger Finger, and my understanding of the economics of gold
value still probably hinges mostly on these two treatments. Like I over heard something on NPR the other day where they were talking about, you know, the value of gold and the gold standard, and you know it, most of it made sense to me. But at heart, I just still come back to this episode, the Rip Van Winkle Caper and Goldfinger is my way of understanding the value of gold Man.
When I was a kid, I thought the plot of Goldfinger was just brilliant, and I was like, I thought it was amazing. Oh my god, he's gonna, yeah, use a nuke on all the gold to make the gold he's already got worth so much more. That's nobody else would have thought of that. That's really good.
Yeah. Essentially his plot was to lick all the role dinner rolls. Yes, and then the unlicked dinner roles which are on his plate are the most valuable ones. Valuable ones. Then you know, I guess there's some there's a fair amount of economic truth to all of that. But yeah, I left these two media properties knowing that number one, less non radiated gold in circulation makes non radiated gold
worth more. Okay, gold is worthless if you're thirsty. Gold is only worth as much as people are willing to pay for it.
True, basically anything true.
Yeah, an excess of gold makes that gold worthless. And if you paint a naked woman gold, she'll die. All these statements I think are essentially correct.
I don't know, does painting somebody gold actually kill them? I have questions about that.
Well, you know, I haven't really done a deep biology dive on that recently. I guess that the logic was that her skin couldn't breathe anymore because she was covered in gold, right.
Yeah, but we breathe through our lungs, not our skin.
Well lungs too. I don't know. We'll put a pin in this one. We'll come back to the gold gold finger question in the future.
Yeah.
Maybe I only learned four things.
I'm sure it wouldn't be good for you. Maybe it's fatal. I don't know. I'm just raising the question.
All right, So why is gold valuable? Well, I mean it's gold, right, I mean it kind of comes back to like that's you know, everybody wants money, that's why they call it money. Right. But you know, the answer basically comes down to three factors in our modern age. The first one is that it's pretty. It's great to look at. It's the color of the sun all always has been and maybe always will be. Another aspect, of course,
is that it's rare. Estimates very on this, but the amount of gold that has ever been mined on Earth can fit into something like three Olympic swimming pools. I've also read inside a twenty two meter cube. These these types of analogies can be a little confusing because you can sort of picture it, but you can't, and then you can think, oh, that doesn't sound like a lot of gold, and then you can easily be reminded that's
an awful lot of anything. And then there's also the fact that most of it was mined since then, since nineteen fifty. So gold is rare throughout the universe, produced in high energy cosmic events, and rare on Earth because most of what wound up here sank deep into the Earth long ago, and most of what we do have came via asteroid bombardments later on. So gold is literally not of this world. I think we can say that, especially in an episode that we started via discussion of
the Twilight Zone. It's rare, and it's made by cosmic events that are high energy in nature.
Yeah, and so the constrained supply of gold is one of the attributes that people prize it for when it's used as a currency or basis of currency. So the idea is like, well, you can't just, you know, infinitely inflate your currency if it's based on gold or so the thinking was.
Yeah, and that's where we get the you know, the idea of the gold standard, the historical monetary system where the currency value is tied to gold. This is what British economist John Maynard Keynes referred to as the barbarous relic, the idea that it was an outdated thing to base the nations and international wealth in general on, and yet it continues to to stand as a significant asset. Gold
has not gone away. And then, of course, while gold was long valued for its decorative aspects, during the nineteen thirties and the nineteen forties, it began to become important in telecommunications, and then again during the fifties and sixties as a semiconductor. It also has various uses in aerospace. So we now live in a world where gold is
valued for both esthetic and highly practical technological reasons. Gold is valued by people who just want to wear it, by people who want to shut it away in a vault, and by people who want to use it in the circuitry of a microchip or on the visor of a space helment. So it does make sense that we would want more of it from a number from a number of a vantage points. Right, want more of it because it's great to look at it, and I want to
make more things out of it. But also there are all these practical applications for it, and one can imagine that the need for such precious metals will just continue in the future. So what can we do to get more of it as opposed to just the normal mining efforts that we already have. And there's some really interesting science here. One idea that scientists have discussed is, of course, to get it somewhere else, somewhere not of this Earth.
And granted we have the universal rarity factor to consider, but that doesn't mean it can't be found in reasonable abundance in specific places, such as possibly the asteroid sixteen Psyche in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. In fact, NASA's Psyche spacecraft launched in twenty twenty three. It's not actually going to get to the asteroid toll I think twenty twenty nine, and even then it's just going to study it. It's not going to bring anything back. It's
also not expressly going there to prospect for gold. There are a number of astrogeology objectives in play, and we used to think that Psyche was mostly metal. More recent estimates look at a possible thirty to sixty percent metal composite alongside rock. But it very well may contain significant amounts of metal from the core of a Planetismal, and that could mean a fair amount of gold. So that's
one possibility. This asteroid is most like a survivor of multiple collisions during the formation of the Solar System, and thus it might have, on one level, just much to reveal, perhaps giving us a better understanding of how Earth's core and the cores of earth like worlds formed. But it could be a potential source of gold, as are various
other suspected metal monster asteroids out there. So in theory, yes, we could harvest them, mine them, bring back gold, and bring it back in enough abundance to destabilize the value of gold here on Earth.
So by mentioning this, are you trying to address the question of could we actually have a scenario like in the Rip Van Winkle Caper where we have criminals go to sleep and then they wake up and all the gold they stole is no longer as valuable as it once was.
Correct, Yeah, could we have a situation like that occur? Essentially, could gold be devalued to such a degree on Earth?
And it seems like yes it could. And the main way that it could happen would be if something like this occurred, if we did actually reach the point where we were harvesting gold from asteroids and bringing back to Earth, bearing in mind, of course, that there are multiple technological hurdles to that, and it would have to be you know, there would have to be some major will behind the
quest to get that particular gold. Now, another possibility, and one that we've discussed in greater depth in the show before, is the capture of trace amounts of gold and seawater via absorption, electrochemical extraction, and biomineralization via gold loving bacteria. Yeah.
We talked about this, I believe in an episode about the I don't remember if it had a specific name, but the Lubec Main Great Gold Hoax. There was a guy who went there and convinced a bunch of people that they could harvest vast amounts of gold from the seawater. Uh, And it turned out and he didn't actually have a method for doing that.
It was all a.
Scam, but that it is possible in principle to harvest some amount of gold from the ocean, and it has in ways been done with The question would be what is the efficiency of doing so?
Right? Yeah? Yeah? The problem, as I understand it, is you'd need to process and success successfully process a colossal amount of sea water in order to get even a gram of gold. And this means that it's it's currently not all that feasible as a primary process, but in the future, the idea is it might prove useful as a secondary process for something like industrial scale desalination. So you're already carrying out an industrial process with the salt water.
Is it possible that you have this secondary process going on that is generating gold for you?
Interesting?
Okay. Likewise, there's apparently this one. I was not familiar with it because I don't think we talked about this. Maybe we did and I've forgotten it. But there's also the potential for gold capture in sewage like human sewitch. Okay, cool, there's gold and den Derek toilets.
Is this from people drinking gold schlager. There's enough of that worldwide that you could recapture some of that and repurpose it.
I think the answer is yes, But I don't think goldslager is is really singled out as like one of the primary factors here. But yeah, you're dealing with trace amounts of gold in our wist, in our waste water, and this apparently comes from traces of gold lost off of jewelry industrial waste, but also food additives, which I think that includes goldslagger. I'm going to throw it in there that in your like gold foil based fancy pastries and so forth. So essentially human.
Life eat some of that gold.
I mean, you know where it's going to go. But essentially, I guess the idea is lot human life lived alongside gold means tiny bits of gold make their way down our drains and toilets, and the process to reclaim this gold could also prove environmentally helpful in keeping harmful substances out of the environment.
Oh you mean other things would be filtered out seage, Okay, yeah.
Yeah, so not just the gold, but various other substances as well. Kathleen Smith of the US Geological Survey is quoted in the twenty fifteen Guardian article gold in feces is worth millions and could save the environment. That was authored by Hannah Devlin at the time said that that gold had been found at the level of minimal mineral deposits in human sewage systems, and once more, kind of like with the oceanic gold capture example, there's a potential
here for a secondary process. So you wouldn't have a harvesting scheme that was just going straight after the gold in the sewage, but perhaps it could become a secondary process alongside basic sewage management. Okay, cool, Though to be clear here, of the tactics we've discussed here, the sewage and the saltwater options are not going to devalue gold.
I couldn't find anybody making that argument. I think the main way it could potentially happen at some point in the future would be if we were bringing a lot of gold back from asteroids.
Okay, so if we have a space mining program, then there would be a significant impact obviously, right.
But then there's another option. What about the alchemical solution the generation of gold as it's alluded to in this episode. So as already mentioned, we already mentioned gold is an extraterrestrial product of intense stellar energy, so we're talking neutron star collisions and supernova and this would surely mean that humans would need to have such power at their fingertips. Right, one would think, yeah, but this is not I mean, it's one of those things. The reality of it is
not far fetched. The scalable reality of it might might be far fetched. But yeah, I was reading a bit
about this. Much has been written on this topic. Tom Bartlett had a great article about this recently in the Atlantic The profiling a new San Francisco company that was arguing that gold could be generated as once more a byproduct of another process, in this case a byproduct of nuclear fusion, which of course is in many ways the holy grail of atomic energy, entailing not the splitting of the atom as in fission, but the process by which two or more atomic nuclei combine to form a larger
nucleus and potentially release a tremendous amount of energy in the process. So the San Francisco company in question argues that by tweaking the process, one could create gold as a secondary byproduct of nuclear fusion, thus offsetting the cost of the energy production. Specifically, they think one could create gold from mercury one ninety eight by bombarding it with neutrons, changing it into the less stable mercury one ninety seven, which would then decay into gold one ninety seven, the
stable isotope of gold. This is hypothetical, however, and the results in gold might be gold fingered and require lengthy storage before it could be utilized.
Yeah, And as with anything about nuclear fusion, always you know, let's wait until we see the results, because they're you know, for years and years, always lots of claims about what could be done with nuclear fusion. And but yeah, interesting to think about.
Yeah, So again, the idea of creating gold through a technique like this at scale open question. But the basic idea, the basic thing they're hypothesizing about here isn't isn't all that new. It's called nuclear transmutation, and we've already successfully carried it out via particle accelerators. In fact, scientists pulled
this off for the first time back in nineteen forty one. Granted, the resulting gold was radioactive and it was also an unstable isotope that decayed within days, but still quite an alchemical feat. And I think we have to acknowledge that given that this was achieved in nineteen forty one. That experiment was likely partial inspiration for this Twilight Zone episode, or at least they might have factored that into the plotting.
Interesting though again obviously the amount of gold that you would be transmuting in particle accelerators once again would be quite physically tiny.
In physically tiny, and then also if it's radioactive and or decays, then it's also useless in terms of all these uses for gold that we have. In nineteen eighty Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seborg was able to successfully transmute bismuth into gold and an accelerator, producing several thousand atoms of statele gold, but it was essentially microscopic, and more recently, Cern has produced minuscule amounts of gold via the Large
Hadron collider by colliding lead ions. So I mean that in itself is interesting because we're finally talking about the alchemical dream of turning lead into gold. But I believe the result here was also unstable and radioactive. Yeah, so in essence, yes, it can be done. We've done it, but we're a long way off from being able to do it at scale and in a way that could actually on any level impact the value of naturally occurring gold on Earth.
Yeah, so I agree. Based on what I've been reading, it seems unlikely to me that we will ever be able to manufacture gold in an economically efficient way. But I did want to talk here at the end of the episode about how something like the scenario described in the Rip van Winkle caper not only could happen with some metals, it actually has happened in history, not with gold, but with a very surprising substance, and that is aluminum. So I just want to riff on aluminum here for
a second. So, aluminum is the third most abundant element in Earth's crust, after only oxygen and silicon. It is more abundant than iron. Iron is only about five percent of the Earth's crust. Aluminum is about eight percent, so more abundant than iron. Today, aluminum is the second most important metal in human industry, with more than one hundred
million tons produced annually. When you combine refinement from primary sources and recycling, and especially when combined with other materials as an alloy, aluminum is I think one of the most useful raw materials on Earth. It's strong, it's lightweight, it's highly versatile, which is why it's used in so many wide ranging applications, so many different things. You know, aluminum is it's the substance of your beer can, it's
the substance of power lines, of airplane wings. I mean, there's a real range of what you can do with it. But there's a curious thing about aluminum. I wonder if you've ever noticed this, Rob, how come when you go looking through the artifacts of ancient civilizations in a museum, you never come across aluminum swords or aluminum arrowheads, or aluminum chariot wheels or plowshares or helmets. You see all these important ancient tools made out of iron, which is
less abundant in the Earth's crust than aluminum. And you see them in bronze made from copper and tin, both of which are significantly harder to dig up than aluminum. So, if aluminum is so useful in human industry, and if there is more aluminium in the ground than iron, and it's always been this way, where are all the aluminum artifacts from history?
You know, I'd never thought about this before, but you're right, there's like no aluminium age in the history books.
Yeah, totally. The aluminium age does not emerge until the nineteenth century. In fact, the reason for this, I think is really interesting. I found this one of the most fascinating chemistry rabbit holes I've gone down in a bit. So metallic aluminum basically does not exist in nature. There are some extremely tiny exceptions to this, tiny globules from rare, strange kinds of sources, maybe like volcanic or extraterrestrial sources.
But basically you can't find aluminum metal in nature. Almost all of the unrefined aluminum found on Earth comes in the form of a compound called aluminium oxide or AL two O three, also known as alumina, most of which is found within a type of reddish brown sedimentary rock called box side. Now, if you think you've never seen aluminium oxide on its own, and you can only picture, you can only picture aluminium as a metal. Here's a
kind of strange fact. Did you know that rubies and sapphires are made mostly out of a crystalline form of aluminum oxide.
I was not aware.
Yeah, So it's the crystalline form of aluminum oxide called corundum a CO r U n d um, and different trace elements or impurities within it give it the different colors that make it a ruby or a sapphire. So like, if there's chromium in it, it'll turn red and it'll be a ruby, and there are other other elements and traces give it the sapphire color. And you know that just doesn't seem right. You don't look at a ruby
or a sapphire, think I'm looking at aluminum. But remember the aluminum doesn't take on its metallic properties when in compound with oxygen, so forms of crystalline aluminum oxide really can look like precious gems. But when you separate the aluminum atoms from the compound, you get the opaque aluminum metal that we're familiar with today. So it's a complex
process to get it. To get pure aluminum metal, you have to mine raw boxide or from the ground and then crush it up and heat it with caustic chemicals like sodium hydroxide like LYE to extract and isolate the aluminum oxide from it. And then at this point the aluminum oxide takes the form of a white powder that looks like sugar. And then so you've got this powder, and after that you have to find a way to
isolate the pure metallic aluminum from the aluminum oxide. But for most most of history, this last step was really really difficult to do, so the amount of metallic aluminum produced in this way was minuscule now according to a commemorative article on something called the Hall Herald process, which I'll explain in a minute, this article is produced by the National Historic Chemical Landmarks Program of the American Chemical
Society in nineteen ninety seven. According to this article, before the year eighteen eighty six, aluminum was a rare and precious metal with a price similar to that of silver.
Scientists had by this point in the eighteen eighties they had already figured out ways to refine metallic aluminum, but they were complex, inefficient procedures with multiple steps, like one involved first producing aluminum chloride and then reacting that with metallic sodium to squirt out some tiny bits of aluminum metal. In the end, really inefficient, expensive, difficult to.
Do, and so it was rare and it was as expensive as silver. I can't help but wonder if at the time, any like fiction writers were dreamed up a monster that could only be killed with aluminum. Oh, that's a.
Good point, like the werewolf. Yeah, I heard, I can now I can't remember where I read this, but in one of the sources I was looking at for this episode, somebody was quoted talking about the appearance of this fad for aluminum jewelry in the mid nineteenth century because it was so precious, and I think the person said that it had the luster.
Of the moon.
People thought it was like a kind of moon metal. So one common way of illustrating the preciousness of aluminum before before the Hall herald process is that people point out that when the Washington Monument was deleted in eighteen eighty four, again this is two years before the whole heralds process in eighteen eighty six. It was completed in eighty four the tower was capped with a one hundred ounce cast aluminum pyramid, which was supposed to be an
ornament of great power and ceremony. So this would be roughly six and a quarter pounds of aluminum, roughly enough to make two hundred Lacroix cans today. And just look on my work see mighty in despair. Look at all these cans worth.
Oh wow. So this would have been exactly the wrong item to steal and then run into the future with.
Oh yeah, so we're about to see exactly how wrong you would have been. But you wouldn't You wouldn't have been able to predict necessarily. You know that this would be good. I mean, this would be a precious, precious item to steal and take into the future for your
group of criminals in eighteen eighty four. So, according to that ACS article, the pyramid at the top of the monument, weighing again a little over six pounds, was by itself about twenty percent of the roughly one hundred and twenty five pounds of aluminum produced in America in the year
eighteen eighty four. So if the entire country's aluminum production infrastructure in eighty four eighteen eighty four had been harnessed, we could have made about five of these pyramids, or about one thousand La croix cans.
Wow.
So, as hard as it is to believe, aluminum in the eighteen eighties, the early eighteen eighties was rare, precious and highly valuable like gold or silver. Another anecdote that people often cite to show the value of aluminum at the time is actually one that couldn't verify, but a figure it's worth mentioning because you come across it a lot. So the story is that the French Emperor Napoleon the
Third would serve his most honored guests on aluminum plates. Mean, you know, if you got like the less pritt you know, silver plates or whatever, the less precious metals, you weren't quite as honored. I could now find a good early source for this claim, and as far as I could tell, it only pops up unsourced in later books from the twentieth century. But there absolutely were lavish royal luxury items in the mid nineteenth century, especially in France, made out
of aluminum. So one example I came across is that a German chemist named Friedrich Wohler who was very much working on processes for isolating and extracting aluminum from these ores. Wohler designed an aluminum and gold rattle for the infant Prince Louis Napoleon in the eighteen fifties. This would have
been Napoleon the third baby son. And at the eighteen fifty five Paris World's Fair also known as the eighteen fifty five Paris Exposition or the Exposition Universal Bars or a like, ingots of aluminum were exhibited in the same venue as the crown jewels of the French royals, and they were calling it the I don't remember the French phrase, but the French phrase they were using to describe it was the silver from clay, you know, because it came from this reddish brown ore and they could extract it
through this laborious, expensive process and create a new type of silver from it. Apparently, aluminum jewelry, for a time in the mid nineteenth century became quite fashionable among the rich in Paris, and I think to some degree in England as well, but especially in France. Not just because
it was novel and expensive. It's not just like this is a rare status item, but it did have some intrinsic qualities that made it desirable, like its light weight, it didn't it was thought not to tarnish, and it was considered beautiful by some, which is funny because you can imagine now like making jewelry out of aluminum foil from your kitchen, and you think you the same.
I remember playing with aluminum foil a lot as a kid, where you could you could like take a little bit of it and wrap it around a g I. Joe figure's head and like, oh, now there is another desk stro kind of a situation. You know, there arell sorts of things like that you could do or make little arrow heads out of it, you know. And then over time we we come to realize, or at least we we get into our heads that aluminum isn't beautiful. It's just this thing you wrap up leftovers in.
Yeah, but that's because it's abundant now, industrially abundant. So how did we get from preciousness to abundance. Well, it all changed in the year eighteen eighty six, when, at roughly around the same time, two different people on opposite sides of the Atlantic discovered a radically more cost effective
process for refining metallic aluminum from aluminum oxide. And these two inventors were the American chemist Charles Martin Hall, who lived eighteen sixty three to nineteen fourteen, working out of the woodshed behind his house in Ohio, and a French scientist named Paul Harold who lived eighteen sixty three to nineteen fourteen, also working in France. Note they share the
same birth and death years. Neither of these inventors, I think it's worth noting we're working in a vacuum lots of chemists in the university systems, in private industry, and even just in like independent laboratories at the time were working on the aluminum problem. So this was like a big thing a lot of people were feeding into. And these these scientists were you know, they had they had mentors and had been inspired by others, So they were not they were not just like loan geniuses striking.
Getting an idea in a dream about right slated.
But what Hall and Harold discovered was that you could produce metallic aluminum quite efficiently by well it's actually depending it's only efficient relative to the other processes. It's still quite costly, an energy intensive process, but you could do it by first melting the aluminum oxide in a furnace alongside a solvent mineral called cryolite. Now you might hear that name and intuitively detect some interesting etymology. You think, like, wait,
cryo meaning ice and light meaning stone, ice, stone. Yes, that is what the name means. And if you look up pictures of cryolite, it will all become clear because it really does look like ice. It looks like a kind of a snowball or a chunk of ice somebody has squished together I couldn't find a a I was trying to find a video of this right before we got started, and I didn't turn it up. Maybe there
is one out there I didn't connect to. But allegedly, if you submerge this rock in water, it becomes nearly invisible or takes on a kind of ghostly translucent appearance because it has a similar refractive index to water. The first major deposit of cryolite discovered on Earth was found on the southwest coast of Greenland at a place called Ivetut, and an important mining community sprang up there to support
the extraction of this mineral. And so important was cryolite for the industrial production of aluminium that the protection of this mine in Greenland became an important point of strategic defense in World War II for the Allies, for the fear of what would happen if this big source of
natural cryolite fell under Nazi attack or Nazi control. But coming back to the chemical properties of cryolite, So the chemical name for cryolite is sodium hexafluoro illuminate, and it's made from three sodium atoms, one aluminum, and six fluorines. When melted in an industrial furnace. Cryolite has the special attribute of dissolving and then greatly lowering the melting point of aluminum oxide dissolved with it, and this makes the
aluminum oxide molecules susceptible to separation by electrolysis. So when you run electric current through this solution of cryolite with aluminum oxide dissolved in it, it causes the aluminum oxide to separate into waste products based on oxygen like carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and stuff. And then on the other end
you get nearly pure metallic aluminium which gathers near the cathode. Now, this process uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of waste products, especially fumes released into the air. You get carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, perfluorocarbons. But fortunately, once the metal has been separated like this, it can be melted down, reused, and recycled pretty efficiently compared to the
initial smelting process. So recycling aluminum is actually quite important when it comes to saving energy and preventing pollution, but getting it out of the oxide where it's found in nature initially is quite rough. But once the aluminum is in circulation, we can continue to do a lot with it over the life cycles of many products and uses. But coming back to the idea of a metal devalued
like the gold and the rip Van Winkle caper. According to the ACS, within a few years of the invention of the Hall Herald process, the price of aluminum it just dropped through the floor, like as suddenly vastly greater amounts could be produced. So to read a quote from that article, quote, as Hall improved his process, the price of aluminum ingots dropped from four dollars and eighty six
cents per pound. Remember that's eighteen eighty dollars four dollars and eighty six cents per pound in eighteen eighty eight to seventy eight cents per pound in eighteen ninety three. And then later they say, by the late nineteen thirties, a pound of aluminum costs just twenty cents. Its use is numbered more than two thousand. Oh wow, So drastic, drastic reduction. And you know remember in the episode they
sleep for one hundred years. So if you you know stole, yeah, stole your one hundred pounds of aluminum in the early eighteen eighties, and you think I'm rich, I'm rich. I'm rich. I just need to go sleep for one hundred years and then wake up when I can put this into circulation and cash out. You would be, you know, not worthless, Like one hundred pounds of aluminium is I don't know. You can get something for that, but wouldn't be worth the squeeze.
Yeah, yeah, Wow, it is fascinating how well this line's up with the idea here and in Indet. Maybe this was partially on the mind of Rod Serling as well. I don't know, but but but yeah, that's that's fascinating. This this brief aluminium age in which it was a highly valued moon metal, and you know, the richest people and most powerful people on Earth were wearing it and eating off of it. I mean, we're still eating out of it and off of it and drinking out of it,
but without the air of sophistication. Now, this would be a good Twilight Zone twist. Some sort of an aluminium sensitive werewolf type creature escapes from the past to go into the future. Finally I'll be rid of my hunters, and then they realize no, every household in the world has a copious amounts of aluminum at its disposable they have sheets of it in their drawers, they have you know, cans of it all over the place. That would be good.
Yeah, the kids are fighting the werewolf by just like ripping out the foil. Yeah, makings just mummifying him in tenfoil from the kitchen.
There you go. It rights itself, rights itself.
Tonight's lesson in the Twilight Zone.
Submitted for your approval. All right, well, we're gonna go ahead and close this episode out here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts about the science and history that we've discussed here, if you have thoughts about this particular episode of the Twilight Zone, your history with this episode right in as well, and
in general. Hey, you know, when New Year's rolls around once more, maybe we'll do another one of these if if that is something you want to see happen, let's get on top of it. Write in and let us know which episode we should consider. With the understanding that we have already covered to serve man and I believe we also discussed the one with the Grimlin on the wing of the plane. We've done those two, so we've done three now, but the rest are fair game.
I talked about the one where the guy is sentenced to death and then he tells people that they are all exists within his dream and if they put him to death that they will stop existing.
Okay, so we've done. We've essentially covered four episodes of the Twilight Zone. Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot more of them, so there's still a lot of possibilities. So if you have thoughts right in, we'd love to hear
from you. Just to remind it that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then we have a short form episode on Wednesday and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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