Imagine an Earth where there is NO gold. Absolutely zero grams. Reason? Just chance. For some spectacular reason, no gold would've found its way on our planet. Gold would exist everywhere in the universe, just not on our planet.
But the concept of gold exists very clearly. It's an arrangement of X protons, Y neutrons, and Z electrons. Comes after platinum, comes before mercury.
How would scientists deal with this gap in the table of elements? They would predict there being an element with 79 protons, but never finding it. Would they re-design the entire table of elements? OR would they formulate magical laws and matter like 'dark gold' or 'dark energy' preventing magical number 79 from appearing?
Ryan Bell
Look up technetium
Alexander Young
we can make gold it's just very difficult and expensive
there's plenty of things on the periodic table that don't seem to exist naturally, and we don't treat them like dark matter.
there would however be theories as to why there is no gold on this planet, because it seems incredibly unlikely that would happen
Levi Hall
We would know it must exist but we would probably have hypothesis to explain why we don't find any atoms of element 79 but we do find atoms of numbers 78 and down and 80 and up. Most likely it'd be an interesting textbook fact that for some reason element 79 is so unstable that it decays instantly upon formation, so we don't see any of it in nature. That would be the most likely explanation, because we'd know at that point that some elements are unstable and others are so unstable that they have very short half lives.
However if we ever tried to test that hypothesis by combining atoms in an accelerator we'd find that gold is actually very stable and would scratch our heads as to why it doesn't exist in Earth' crust. We'd find it by probing the solar system both in asteroids and in the crusts of the other planets so further head scratching would ensue. Eventually through some means we'd acquire a sample of gold and learn that it is yellow, very corrosion resistant, conducts heat and electricity well, and so forth.
Samuel Butler
Astatine is also practically absent from earth.
Lucas Johnson
>we can make gold Oh yeah true :D I forgot about that...
William Kelly
There are quite a few elements that don't occur naturally except in minute amounts of short-lived isotopes from rare radioactive decays, we knew they existed and were eventually able to create and detect them.
Andrew Harris
But we have that and use it in medical devices.
Christopher Harris
They would assume that gold has a very short half life or is otherwise unstable, so it has all already decayed, which would probably contradict other theories about how atomic nuclei work, causing them much headache. Or maybe they'd think that gold atoms can be stable, but don't form naturally for reasons. Then they would get to the level technologically where they can synthesize gold atoms in very small amounts, notice that they don't decay and that they aren't that hard to create, and shit brix. Now imagine a universe where every time they do the double slit experiment, the pattern that is drawn by the photons hitting the plate clearly says "death to all Jews". How would scientists react to that?
James Mitchell
they would just theorize that its there and look for it.
this happened more than once with many elements early on in chemistrys life.
Joshua Long
We would probably think its stable since its position in the table would insinuate that.
Christopher Torres
>"Miserable to make and he'll to work with"
Blake Lee
Maybe we would come up with some geological explanation about how all the gold sunk into the planet's core so deep when the planet formed that it isn't present in surface rock or in volcanic lava.
Zachary Torres
Your hypothetical example is shit because it requires magical intervention to scoop away all gold from a planet and in a universe that otherwise follows all regular laws of physics.
Of course they'd be fucking puzzled. A goddamn spacetime-bending prankster decided to remove an element to see what happens.
Jayden Phillips
It's not impossible and it requires no prankster, it can simply happen by chance, and it is interesting to consider what would happen if we witnessed an event so ridiculously unlikely.
Oliver White
No, not impossible but the chance of it occuring is still 0.
Aaron Cox
>the chance of it occurring is 0 Are you retarded? There is no law that says says there have to be at least x atoms of gold in every planet. Statistically, there is clearly a non-zero chance of a planet containing no atoms of gold, and if the universe is infinite, or if some multiverse theory is true, it has almost definitely happened somewhere.
Eli Hill
Plutonium didn't exist until somebody invented it, right?
Michael Clark
>Statistically, there is clearly a non-zero chance of a planet containing no atoms of gold OK so since its so clear you should have no issue proving it,
David Long
Even if it's possible that doesn't make the chance of it occurring non-zero. Learn to probability.
Ryder Brooks
Nothing. The only thing that would change would be named similarly to Americium or Thorium.
It would be given a silly ass name after being created in a lab.
Chase Sanchez
Yes, but by that logic a version of you has already been handed a better refutation than this, so we won't bother to refute your argument.
Levi Morales
Gold is not the only rare element used for barter. They would leave the element "zychorsi" blank and look for it in spectroscopic analysis of other planets or stars. Zychorsi? Well it sure wouldn't be called Gold. The earth, of course, would look different; but it'd be the same as it's always been.
James Foster
There is a chance that random neutrons from space radiation would hit all the gold atoms which would in turn decay into mercury.
That's why I said it has almost definitely happened, and not that it definitely happened.
That is fallacy because you prove something by assuming a proof exists.
