https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/YJgBi8_WZy3xIfG2VoNr1w
00:2103:23
NB: This may not be a word-for-word transcript.
How Much Money Could We Sell the Earth for?
Hey there! Welc-c-c-c…
Hologram: “President Blocko, this is General Glorp from Planet 555MFB. We want to buy your planet for all its materials and also maybe turn it into a giant petting zoo. We will provide your people with another planet to live on, but we want Earth. It has to be Earth. Give us your price today and we will pay it.”
Hmm, this seems like a totally real scenario. And I think society would be up for a change of scenery. So, how much could we sell the Earth for?
A lot of things come into play in determining the value of our planet, but if these aliens want their answer today, we don’t have time to go through every valuable resource on Earth. So, we’re going to focus on some main ones.
Let’s start with our water. Earth is the only known planet with liquid water on its surface and we’d definitely want to take advantage of that. Aliens could use this as rocket fuel by splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen, effectively allowing them to turn Earth into an intergalactic gas station, so let’s start with a price point of $50 trillion for this resource.
Our planet is chocked full of valuable elements that we’d want to include in our price for the aliens. Take gold for example. It’s impossible to say exactly how much gold our planet holds, but many experts believe we’ve already found about 193,000 tons, which would be worth a whopping $8 trillion dollars.
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We’ve also got a lot of aluminum. It makes up 8% of the Earth’s crust and is used to fuel rocket boosters, which aliens would probably need. So, we’ll tack on $10 trillion for that.
We don’t know what they use for energy, but maybe they’d value our oil and coal reserves. It’s hard to know exactly how much of these the Earth has left, but our available oil supply is thought to be valued at about $109 trillion and coal, at about $71 trillion.
These aliens seem friendly, but they’re making a huge investment in our planet and I’d imagine they’d want to protect it.
Well, the 1,400 tons of highly-enriched uranium believed to exist on Earth would probably help. This is a key ingredient in nuclear weapons. It’s incredibly valuable with the price of one kilogram ranging from about $3 million to $36 million. This means the Earth’s highly-enriched uranium supply could be worth up to $46 trillion.
And we don’t want to leave out diamonds. They could be an alien’s best friend, too. Figuring out the value of Earth’s diamonds is especially difficult since one diamond’s value depends on so many things, like cut, color, carat and clarity, but taking annual diamond industry profits into account, let’s factor in $3 trillion for our global diamond supply.
But if you think about the bigger picture, what’s inside the Earth, all this surface level stuff becomes irrelevant. We did some digging – pun-intended – and found that just the solid iron core of our planet would be worth 4.8 sextillion dollars. And yes, I said that correctly, get your giggles out now.
Our planet is filled with various precious metals and elements that would be worth a crazy amount of money. So, I wouldn’t let this home planet of ours go for anything less than 10 sextillion dollars! I think that’s a pretty fair price tag for a habitable planet with water, air and lots of beautiful sights to see. Don’t you, Triangle Bob? Oh, okay...he’s just trying to wear jars of peanut butter shoes. Never mind, anyway.
Would you go live on the other planet they’re giving us or would you want to stay here? And what should we name this new planet? Let me know in the comment section below.
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