What are the consequences of wishing for 'all' the gold?

A lot of fantasy stories involve someone using magic or technology to solve a problem, only to find out the spell or thing they used to solve their problem was a little too potent.

Let's say a wizard invents an alchemical like spell that creates gold. It's not created from nothing though, it's just transported from somewhere else. The spell turns out to be a little too potent, and the unfortunate person ends up receiving more than he bargained for: all the gold in the solar system.

Note: Assuming the solar system in the story is similar to ours: This is about $2.0 \cdot 10^{21}$ kg of gold¹, or about 2.7% of the mass of our moon.

If the spell summoned the gold as one big cube, it would be about 470 km on each side, comparable to the size of a small country. Assume the cube is initially at rest compared to the wizard's position.

What happens to the world? I'm guessing everyone dies, but just how quickly does that happen?

1: I obtained this figure by using the approximate mass of the sun ($2.0 \cdot 10^{30}$kg) with this resource detailing relative abundances: http://www.periodictable.com/Properties/A/SolarAbundance.html. The contribution from other objects is negligible given the uncertainty we're using.

Details:

I haven't explained in detail enough 'what kind' of thing happens with the stuff that's in the place where something's teleported to. The details can be important with this scale. (e.g. Doctor Who style, or Steins gate style?). You can assume the Doctor Who variant: so you 'swap' the location of the stuff being moved (there's no temporary absolute vacuum). Let's also say that the physics of it prefers a low-energy, high-entropy solution, but we arbitrarily award entropy for putting a particle closer to where the wizard pointed to. So right at the epicenter the stuff is probably embedded into the earth a bit, but mostly towers up into the sky. It's also ordered randomly.

It's also true that the average temperature of the material is something on the order of $5 \cdot 10^6 K$ (as our gold mostly comes out of the center of the sun...). However, if you calculate the amount of thermal energy that equates to about 650 kJ per gram, it's far less than what you'd require for the $\Delta v$ (at least $570\hspace{1mm}\mathrm{kms^{-1}}$, which would take far more energy per gram²), or the kinetic energy because of all the random speeds the particles have. You can assume the magic solves these effects: it uses the thermal and kinetic energy (down to room temperature and being at rest wrt. the wizard) to power a small part of the spell (the other energy comes from unobtanium).

2: Figure obtained by subtracting solar escape velocity at earth's position from that on the sun's surface.

posted almost 6 years ago

aphid‭

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