Timeline for Aftermath of a Midas-weapon war - what to do with all that gold?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
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| Aug 7, 2018 at 13:30 | comment | added | rsandler | All good points--I added a comment to the question as to whether the statues are volume-preserving or mass-preserving. It does make a big difference in the amount of gold to deal with, by a factor of around 20. | |
| Aug 7, 2018 at 12:11 | comment | added | Ruadhan | I was thinking in the scenario where the body is either a hollow shell of gold (replacing the mass of the person 1:1 with gold) or a distributed lattice of gold mimicking the original internal structure and maintaining mass. Either way, the gold doesn't take up the same space as the internal organs of the victim and there has to be cavitation. Meaning there's likely a true-vacuum inside the statue. If the statue walls are thin enough in the shell scenario then it would immediately be crushed by external air-pressure. The only scenario where this isn't a factor is a solid volumetric statue. | |
| Aug 7, 2018 at 11:40 | comment | added | Tschallacka | @Ruadhan How would there be a vacuum? Most cavities are filled with liquids and gasses. They will maintain the pressure. | |
| Aug 7, 2018 at 8:24 | comment | added | Ruadhan | I would assume gold lattice rather than shell. match the mass, volume and mass-distribution, so you could cut open a body and find internal organs and bones converted to gold, rather than a hollow shell. The real question is what's inside the cavities in the bodies, because if it's a vacuum there's a very real possibility of the midas-corpses imploding. | |
| Aug 7, 2018 at 5:05 | comment | added | Daniel | A good point about the weight. It would be difficult for thieves to swoop in and steal it. On the other hand, gold is soft and this is presumably pure gold, so at the very least you could break off hair easily, maybe even a finger or two without having to resort to saws and other tools. It would be processed on site with metal workers brought in to do that. | |
| Aug 6, 2018 at 23:32 | comment | added | craq | So you're assuming that people are converted to gold with constant volume? That's the way it's shown in all the illustrated versions of the original Midas tale I've seen. But right now I'm thinking it I would make more sense to assume constant mass. Since it's fiction, I guess all assumptions are valid. (Perhaps both mass and volume could be conserved if the bodies were converted to a hollow gold shell.) | |
| Aug 6, 2018 at 16:32 | comment | added | user38304 | It's actually more than the total amount of gold extracted from California since 1848, and about 1000 times what Europe produced in a year during the middle ages. (see here and here) | |
| Aug 6, 2018 at 14:51 | history | answered | rsandler | CC BY-SA 4.0 |