Gold is the Metal

According to John Emsley in the third edition of his weird The Elements, there is an estimated 0.2 milligrams of gold in a 70 kilogram human body. That’s probably a smidge massy for a global per-human average, but let’s assume it for purposes of this asinine post, so that 1 gram of gold = 5,000 people.

As of 05:57 GMT (20-4-22), the global population was estimated by Worldometer to be 7,941,528,342. So I’ll round that up to eight billion, slightly before our species does.

8,000,000,000 people * 1 g Au / 5,000 people = 1,600,000 grams of gold.

The spot gold price is currently $62.48 USD per gram.

1,600,000 g Au * $62.48/1 g Au = $99,968,000. In the antique spirit of rounding, let’s call it $100,000,000 USD of gold that’s currently locked up inside living human beings.

Not that I’m imagining ways to extract it from them or anything.