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Yahoo!As gold prices rise, so does the incentive to acquire more it. Besides the obvious fact that its beauty is universally valued, it happens to be extremely useful stuff, in thousands of other, more industrial applications.
Gold is inert. It doesn't react with its environment or corrode over time. (Think Egyptian tombs.) It is a fantastic conductor of electricity and as such is ubiquitous in the electronics industry. It is maleable, making it easily workable in miniscule to large amounts. It has uses in dentistry, in medicine, as a lubricant in aerospace electronics, for durable media in the audio and computer industries, as a catalyst in pollution control and water purification, etc.
Still, most gold is used for jewelry and as currency, an object of much desire--and destruction. As with other mined resources, much of the more accessible gold has already been found, and so the extraction of it now is even more resource and labor intensive, with environmental tolls that damage the people who mine it and their ecosystems. It’s a pity that something so valuable should require poisons like cyanide and mercury to extract it -- poisons that are often left behind. The people's health, their land and waters suffer, but they need the work; they need the money gold brings to them to live now. Later is another story.
To be continued...
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