For reference, my sources, as taken from a universally respected and trusted academic publication: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_zirconia I wasn't familiar with zirconia, but its not the same thing as cultivated diamonds. One is chemically different from natural diamond, the other isn't. It's worthwhile to note that market forces have controlled for the presence of both cultivated gemstones and zirconia, and while natural diamond seems to have suffered a little, it's not hurting any. Anyway, my point did, in fact, rest on industrial diamond. Note that, according to that article, we get 90% of industrial diamond from cultivation at this point. Since the real money in natural diamonds is gemstones, it makes no sense for diamond miners and cutters to stop selling their scraps for industrial purposes, so we can only conclude that the market for industrial diamond is 10 times larger than the available supply (or thereabouts). So clearly, even though we can now cheaply create diamond its usefulness has increased, meaning there's no need for synthetic diamond makers to restric productivity. I feel that the same applies to any hypothetical meathod of increasing gold supply. The easiest would be to harvest it from the oceans, which contain a supply of disolved gold that I've heard estimated as more than five times the supply in human hands. The problem is, whether we're fissioning it or collecting it from the ocean, we're going to wind up spending money on equipment to make money. Of course the value of a resource is going to drop drastically if we add a large supply of it to circulation, but people have long ago stopped counting on leperachauns as an indicator in economics. We're going to have to spend money to get gold, and that's going to make it valuable. People are only going to be willing to spend that money if there is a return. So, if it seems likely that making gold will lower prices below the cost of making it, then people won't make it. But, as prices lower gold will present new possibilities. I know that some experimentation was doen with gold wiring as a solution to current loss in long distance electricity transmission during the dot com bubble, when gold was cheap. And that's only one possible way the gold market might evolve in response to an increased supply. TL;DR - There's no such thing as a free lunch. If someone does start fissioning gold or otherwise tapping as of yet untapped sources of gold, it will cost them a lot of money that will naturally regulate that new source of gold vs. the rest of the market. So there's no need to worry that gold will drop in value! So relax and go have a nice stiff drink.
Just as an FYI: It's financially unviable to try extracting the dissolved precious metals from ocean water. You'd end up paying a little over twice (?) the value of the metal in costs when siphoning it all out, assuming you siphon out the whole lot. You'd make more by salvaging wrecks and their cargo.
Correction: It's finacially unviable now. Which is kind of my point, people don't do it as there's nothing in it. As long as there's nothing in it, people won't do it, as soon as there is something in it, the value of the resource in question will be equal to the cost to harvest it, plus a little more to keep 'em motivated.
Yeah if there's ever a hovercar that gets 2000 miles per gallon but requires 400 pounds of gold for its graviplasma stabilizers, you can expect any source of gold on the planet will be considered.
If/when we ever have cheap energy (for arguments sake, let's say Cold Fusion can actually work), then the world could become a very different sort of place than it is today. One really excellent science fiction novel that hypothesizes a sort of alchemy (using nanotechnology) is "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson (I think it's his best novel). It posits a world in which traditional wealth becomes meaningless because just about anything you can imagine can be manufactured at very little cost right in your own home (kind of like the 3-d printers of today, but on steroids).
Cold Fusion is possible, it's just way too complicated to pull off yet. It's like gravitational manipulation of space/time to create a wormhole to travel in space. It's fusion at around room temperature, not fusion of items at Absolute Zero, the point where almost all motion and energy stops. Gold is annoying to be honest, it's expensive as all hell, but really hard to find. Look at Minecraft, you can carry more gold in your inventory than has ever been mined on the Earth. I wish we could get more gold easier, but even asteroids of solid gold aren't going to be cost effective to mine.
I wish I could risk it all in the dungeons of dredmor and haul out a pile of zorkmids and other stuff (read: strip the dungeon bare of even its decorations.) Sadly, I'll have to settle for a large salary once I get my first real job. It's not the same as piles of gold and platinum ingots and jewelry, but it'll do.
