Gold has always held a special allure and fascination in peoples minds. Perhaps it is the color, weight, or the fact that over time it has come to symbolize an elemental resource for value and wealth. Whatever the reason, I wanted to see if there were any estimates as to the total amount of gold we humans have laid out hands on.

After a small bit of research on the World Gold Council website, I saw an estimate which pegged the total amount of mined gold from ancient times to the present, calculated at 158,000 tonnes.

A big number but one that is a bit hard to get your mind around. What does on tonne of gold look like. Lets do a little math.

If the estimates are correct and there has  been 158,000 tones of gold recovered from “Mother Earth” (assuming 24 K purity) then that would translate into 5,079,817,925 troy oz. of the precious metal. However unless you are Bill Gates or one of the other billionaires on the planet, I still have a hard time grasping what over 5 billion ounces of gold would look like. Back to the calculator.

If a cubic centimeter of 24K gold equals 19.3 grams, then a cubic meter of gold would weight 19.3 tonnes. Likewise all the gold ever mined would amount to 8,187 cubic meters. That still doesn’t mean anything to me.

I have to put that into perspective and visualize what that much gold would look like. So , if all the gold in the world would fit into a 20.15 meter cube, or 66 feet 1.3 inches square,  that would kind of  be the size of a small office building.  Now that I can understand.