Imagine an ocean consisting entirely of gold
coins, near which you are lying on a lounger made of dollar bills. Only someone like Scrooge
McDuck can really afford such a thing. Well...him and Jeff Bezos. In
2013 Forbes estimated the net worth of the richest dude on the planet to
be about 65.4 billion dollars. But this is just a tiny drop in the ocean
of the total amount of money in the world. And as you may remember, the
Disney character’s bank vault was huge. What will happen if you collect
all the finances of the world in one place? How much space will they
occupy and what will be their mass? Let’s figure it out. To turn every last cent into real, physical
money...we may need as much as an entire continent to hold it all. The fact is, most standard valuables,
such as banknotes, coins, and bank accounts deposits, make up only a
tiny part of all the money that exists. And when I say “only”, I mean about
5 trillion dollars. The overwhelmingly vast majority of modern
wealth is stored electronically or as securities. Let’s start with our little baby currency
bitcoin. After all the recent
volatility of bitcoin’s exchange rate, the total value of the digital currency
has now settled at roughly 5 billion dollars. That’s nothing compared to
all the silver used in the entire world - which comes in at about 14 billion
dollars. Jeff Bezos, for those of you who don’t know,
is the richest man on the planet. To overtake his total net worth using silver,
it would be necessary to extract from the Earth about
10 times more of this valuable metal. According to Forbes, Bezos now has at his
disposal about 139 billion dollars. This founder of uber-successful online retailer
Amazon dot com can be envied somewhat his riches, as
he can buy literally anything he wants. Except for Apple Incorporated - you may have
heard of them - - Amazon is now the second most valuable company
in the world. Both
companies recently achieved a total market capitalization of over 1
trillion dollars though they have fallen back a bit since then. With growth rates like this, these two giants
of Silicon Valley may soon become more valuable than gold itself, in
that the total value of the precious yellow metal in the world comes to
slightly less than 8 trillion dollars. We shall see. But even an amount this large - the value
of all the gold in the world - pales in comparison to
the total value of all the shares of stock on the world market. If you join the club, become another “Wolf
of Wall Street”, and somehow manage to collect it all, you will become
the proud owner of approximately 70 trillion dollars in total capital. And if by some chance you manage to collect
all of the IOUs for all of the world’s debt, the amount you will get will
be an incredible 199 trillion dollars! But that’s not all. There is also a financial security traded
around the world known as derivatives - contracts
for the future value of an underlying asset. This can be almost anything: from any product,
to even the state of the environment. It’s impossible to calculate the total amount
of derivatives at play in the world at the moment, but approximate
calculations give a figure of several quadrillion dollars. Let’s try to put
into perspective the immense scale of such an amount of money. A
quadrillion has fifteen zeros after the number. To understand just how
much space this capital would take, let’s calculate its approximate
mass... So, a million dollars in 100 dollar banknotes,
even though you could cram it in a large briefcase or small suitcase,
would weigh about 22 pounds, or 10 kg, by itself. So don’t be too
quick to believe Hollywood movies where the characters run out of a
bank with multi-millions loaded in bags after robbing the joint. It’s just to
dang heavy to do that. To transport 4 billion dollars
you’re gonna need a 40-ton cargo container. So, our entire money
supply: including banknotes, coins, and bank deposits, is about 81 trillion
dollars, which would weigh more than 800 thousand US tons - or 1.6
billion pounds. To transport an amount that big, you’re
gonna need a whole convoy of trucks...or perhaps several
container ships. A
hypothetical 1 quadrillion dollars would have a mass of 10 million tons. If
you made a stack out of it, it would be tall enough to reach the Moon, return to back to the Earth, and then reach
back up into the upper atmosphere once more. I should mention that I am using a standard
Ben Franklin $100 bill for all of my calculations. If you don’t convert all this money into
$100 dollar bills, but into single dollars, then the total
weight can be safely multiplied by 100. And this isn’t even counting all the coins,
unregistered banknotes, outdated bills, and counterfeit
cash in circulation. We should
be glad that our world banking system is gradually moving to an
electronic format. Banknotes with large denominations are slowly
being withdrawn from circulation... So, let’s assume you have managed to somehow
get all the cash from all around the world and gathered it in one
location. Saving this money -
or dealing with it in just about any way, shape or form - is gonna be a
huge problem. If you throw it all into a big pile, the resulting
heap of money will be about the same height as the
Empire State Building. An overwhelming portion of this mound of dough
will be coins, and the most common of them will be the 1 cent US
penny. At the moment, there
are about 150 billion of these coins in circulation, with a total weight of
about 30,000 tons. Overall, American money will make up about
30% of your wealth, with the European Union’s contribution
being about 15%. The rest will come from a variety of different
slightly less popular and even exotic currencies. So, if you wanna even try and spend all that
cabbage, you’re gonna have to travel all around the world...probably for
the rest of your life. But if you still want to repeat Scrooge’s
entertaining diversion, I implore you to be careful: that many coins can be
fatal. Don’t believe me? Well
let’s looks at something related that occurred way back a hundred years
ago in 1919. In Boston Massachusetts in the USA, a huge
molasses storage tank burst. I know...you’re thinking, “Molasses? Who can that
hurt?” But the syrupy liquid turned into a tsunami,
moving at a speed of 100 miles or 60 km/h. It swept through the city, killing 21 people
and sending 150 more to the hospital. This is known as the Great Boston Molasses Disaster. And that was just molasses. Now imagine the
consequences if a mountainous wave of coins moved with such a
stunning momentum… And don’t even think about trying to protect
yourself from all these shekels and six-pence by putting it behind
walls. Every building needs a
solid foundation, the size of which is proportional to the size of the
building. Given the weight of total money supply, building
something with such a foundation is well-nigh impossible. You would have to pave over
something like the entire Australian continent to build a building for your
money that doesn’t cause any harm. In addition to all of the bills and coins
of the world, we might also try and count some of our natural wealth. Romantics say that our planet has
tremendous aesthetic value that cannot be valued in mere dollars and
cents - literally, it is priceless. But pragmatic scientists have begun to
view things differently. They believe that by adding up the total worth
of some of our environmental riches, we might
then realise its true value, and so better cherish and preserve it. There is a BBC Earth index, based on research
within the framework of the United Nations Environment Program. According to this index, each
useful resource has a cost, based on its impact and value to the planet:
so, for example, fresh water comes in at 73 trillion dollars. The lives of
everyone, and the state of our economies, depend on fresh water, so
they value it equal to the total value of one year of world GDP;
Trees and coral reefs, which form the basis of our ecosystem, are
estimated at 26 trillion dollars.Sea fish and plankton that clean our oceans and feed
us cost about 496 billion dollars; Bees and other pollinating
insects, the foundation of agriculture, receive a price tag of 170 billion
dollars; Wetlands in the US, protecting the coasts from hurricanes, are
estimated at 23 billion dollars; And national reserves
and certain types of fauna, without which the balance of nature would be
disturbed, are worth hundreds of millions. However, there is another perspective on the
wealth of our world. A
number of scientists believe that we Earthlings are ecological
bankrupters. That
is, over the very short period of our existence on the planet, we have
managed to spend, use up, or severely deplete almost all available
resources. And yet, our planet is still quite valuable. Astrophysics from the University of California
derived a universal equation that allows one to calculate the
value of celestial bodies. This
formula takes into account the age, mass, and size of the planet, as well
as it’s temperature and potential suitability for humanity for human
colonization and habitation. It turns out that the value of our home the
planet Earth is “only” 5 quadrillion dollars. But our neighboring planets
are far, far cheaper: our future colony Mars is estimated at 14 thousand
dollars. I’d snap it up in a second at that price. And Venus has no price
tag at all due to its poor climate. All of the different exoplanets found in
the last 3 years, which NASA says are possibly suitable for human life,
are also in the “discount department” of the planetary Department Store. The most Earth-like of these exoplanets, Gliese
581, is worth a measly 150 thousand bucks. And KOI 326.01
- is valued at 250 thousand dollars. But
yeah...When the astronauts get there, prices will surely double…. But back to Earth. In order to continue to maintain its balance,
the planet need something real and tangible to offset
previous losses. So, NASA
has come to the rescue. In 2022, the intrepid space agency plans to
launch a mission to explore Psyche-16, an asteroid located in the Jupiter region. Unlike most cosmic bodies, which consist of
stone with an ice mantle, Psyche-16 is rich in metallic iron
and nickel. Given the asteroid’s
width, which is about 124 miles, or 200 kilometers, the researchers were
able to an estimate of its value. This space pebble quietly puttering
around the solar system has a value of as much as 10 thousand
quadrillion dollars! It is likely that billions of years ago, Psyche-16
was the core of an early planet, comparable in size to Mars. But due to frequent collisions with
comets, it lost its rocky shell. American company
Planetary Resources called this asteroid “a gift from the heavens”, and
are planning to send special robots to do some space mining, retrieve
some of those valuable resources, and bring them back to good old
Earth. On the other hand, some scientists believe
that dreams of mining such space riches are in vain. The cost of launching robots may exceed
all permissible limits, and, in addition, even if successful, the global
economy could change entirely, leaving no space for simple
metallurgy… So, in the end, big riches don’t always
provide the endless happiness that some believe... The old saying is true: money isn’t
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