LYRICFLUENT
LYRICFLUENTWhere Does Gold Come From? Lyrics by Addison Anderson Addison Anderson
Below, you will find the lyrics for Where Does Gold Come From? by Addison Anderson.
In medieval times
Alchemists tried to achieve the seemingly impossible
They wanted to transform lowly lead into gleaming gold
History portrays these people as aged eccentrics
But if only they'd known that their dreams were actually achievable
Indeed, today we can manufacture gold on Earth
Thanks to modern inventions
That those medieval alchemists missed by a few centuries
But to understand how this precious metal
Became embedded in our planet to start with
We have to gaze upwards at the stars
Gold is extraterrestrial
Instead of arising from the planet's rocky crust
It was actually cooked up in space
And is present on Earth because of cataclysmic stellar explosions
Called supernovae
Stars are mostly made up of hydrogen
The simplest and lightest element
The enormous gravitational pressure of so much material
Compresses and triggers nuclear fusion in the star's core
This process releases energy from the hydrogen
Making the star shine
Over many millions of years
Fusion transforms hydrogen into heavier elements
Helium, carbon, and oxygen
Burning subsequent elements faster and faster
To reach iron and nickel
However, at that point nuclear fusion
No longer releases enough energy
And the pressure from the core peters out
The outer layers collapse into the center
And bouncing back from this sudden injection of energy
The star explodes forming a supernova
The extreme pressure of a collapsing star is so high
That subatomic protons and electrons are forced together in the core
Forming neutrons
Neutrons have no repelling electric charge
So they're easily captured by the iron group elements
Multiple neutron captures enable the formation of heavier elements
That a star under normal circumstances can't form
From silver to gold
Past lead and on to uranium
In extreme contrast to the million year transformation
Of hydrogen to helium
The creation of the heaviest elements in a supernova
Takes place in only seconds
But what becomes of the gold after the explosion?
The expanding supernova shockwave propels its elemental debris
Through the interstellar medium
Triggering a swirling dance of gas and dust
That condenses into new stars and planets
Earth's gold was likely delivered this way
Before being kneaded into veins by geothermal activity
Billions of years later, we now extract this precious product by mining it
An expensive process that's compounded by gold's rarity
In fact, all of the gold that we've mined in history
Could be piled into just three Olympic-size swimming pools
Although this represents a lot of mass
Because gold is about 20 times denser than water
So, can we produce more of this coveted commodity?
Actually, yes
Using particle accelerators, we can mimic
The complex nuclear reactions
That create gold in stars
But these machines can only construct gold atom by atom
So it would take almost the age of the universe to produce one gram
At a cost vastly exceeding the current value of gold
So that's not a very good solution
But if we were to reach a hypothetical point
Where we'd mined all of the Earth's buried gold
There are other places we could look
The ocean holds an estimated 20 million tons of dissolved gold
But at extremely miniscule concentrations making
Its recovery too costly at present
Perhaps one day, we'll see gold rushes to tap the mineral wealth
Of the other planets of our solar system
And who knows?
Maybe some future supernova will occur close enough
To shower us with its treasure
And hopefully not eradicate all life on Earth in the process
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