Hello all! I’m Ricky, Ephemeral Sports FanTM. Seeing as how this is my first post on CWAMB, I’m definitely living up to the name.
After reading CJ’s post below about Mr. Jonathan Riches filing against Ron “Ookie” Mexico, I couldn’t resist playing around with the numbers a bit. 63 quintillion dollars(that’s 63 followed by 18 zeros) is quite a sum. To top off the ridiculousness, Riches wants the money, “backed by gold and silver”, delivered by UPS , to the front gates of his current domicile, the Federal Corrections Institution in Williamsburg, VA.
If it was possible to some how come up with 63 quintillion dollars in U.S. currency, that would equal 630 quadrillion(15 zeros this time) 100 dollar bills. Using the figures found here, the standard unit of measurement of one football field(American of course) covered in 100 dollar bills would be worth about $521,000. So were talking about a stack of money the size of a football field standing just under 132 million meters tall. Put away the calculators. That’s about 82,ooo miles high. That’s about one third of the way to the Moon, by the way.
Unfortunately for Riches, the U.S. dollar isn’t backed by the gold standard anymore. But even if it was, we have a bit of a problem. According to this article Google supplied me,
“There’s enough gold buried deep within the Earth’s core to cover the entire land surface of the planet to a depth of half a metre…”
That comes out to a bit more than 74 million cubic meters of gold. At the current market price, that’s just shy of $31 quadrillion. We would have to find and melt down over 2,000 Earths to to come up with enough gold for the sum Riches is asking for.
For shits and giggles, let’s say we somehow extracted all that gold at the center of the earth. What would 74 million cubic meters of gold look like? Again using the measurement of one football field, we would get a tower of gold standing at 13,757 meters, or 8.5 miles tall. Our hypothetical tower of gold weighs in at over 3 quadrillion pounds. For a bit of reference, a standard bar of gold weighs 27.5 pounds. So that would be over 112 billion gold bars.