It’s amazing to me that the deposition of precious metals on the earth’s surface has been a long-running mystery, and that our most accepted theory is that we were peppered with them from space by a series of asteroids. A continent was crossed, towns rose and fell, rails were laid and prostitutes were lavishly decorated by our steadfast obsession with some gleaming sky gravel. It’s said that the total amount of gold mined worldwide would measure 20 meters square, and our entire system of buying and selling things – food, clothing, shelter, more shiny rocks, our limited time on earth – has been consensually based on this one cube the size of a backyard until just before my lifetime.