3 ms·

What's the most profitable use for an elemental transmuter?

• Causality1 7y ago
  Corner the market on rare earths. Alternatively, hold a nation hostage by threatening to transmute one of their mountain ranges into something unpleasant like astatine.
  • simonblack 7y ago
    The rare earths are expensive because they are rare or hard to extract. Make them the same price as (say) water and they become very, very cheap. The same thing applies to gold, or uranium, or platinum. What we require as an end product is something that the world requires millions of tons of but is still quite expensive today. I nominate copper as our most profitable end-product.
    • Causality1 7y ago
      I'd love a writeup on this topic by an economist, or maybe a What If? article from Randall Munroe. If you can use it to transform and create complex molecules I imagine the market for refined petroleum products dwarfs that for metals. But suppose you can only transform one element to another. You'd have to take into account the expense of obtaining a large supply of a pure element. By mass I would guess pure carbon is the cheapest element.