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What rare material could a monolith be made from that would almost certainly suggest extraterrestrial origin?
by xwdv 6y ago
What rare material could a monolith be made from that would almost certainly suggest extraterrestrial origin?
- danlugo92 6y agoProbably something that is so scarce in earth that the monolith alone couldn't have been made by anyone other than a government, a billionare or aliens. Solid gold maybe?
- rantwasp 6y agohah. gold is not that rare. even an entry level billionaire could afford a monolith this size
- dkersten 6y agoPrinter ink then ;-) On a more serious note, Rhodium fits the bill: super expensive, hard, durable, silvery and corrosion resistant. Using the 7,700 lbs estimate elsewhere here, and a price of Rhodium I randomly found on the internet of $16,100 per troy oz, the material of this structure, if made from Rhodium, would cost about $1,749,005. Which is actually not bad, for a very rich person. I guess they'd have to build an even larger one. Or make it hollow and fill it with printer ink.
- jml7c5 6y agoI think you calculated that wrong. I get $1.8B at that price.[0] Though that 7700 lb estimate assumed the sculpture was made of aluminum; rhodium is about 4.5X as dense, so it'd be closer to $8.1B. [0]: 7700 lb * 14.5833 troy oz/lb * 16100 $/troy oz = 1,807,891,701
- dkersten 6y agoAh, thanks for the correction. I just quickly googled values and multiplied them but thinking about it, I probably multiplied by "lb/troy oz" instead of "lb/troy oz" or something like that. I'm an idiot :) Your figure does sound a bit more realistic. Still, printer ink...
- nix0n 6y agoKamacite might be one of the classics: "Kamacite is an alloy of iron and nickel, which is found on Earth only in meteorites."[0] As a bonus, it's shiny grey, which means it could even be what this monolith is made of. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamacite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamacite