I didn't want to link the NYT article to this photo which I had stolen and posted yesterday because as a tree hugging commie I get pretty riled up about asswipe conglomerates which do their darnest to destroy Mother Nature. Anyway without getting too polidickal, the article related to this Canadian mining Co winning their decades long battles to mine gold in one of Alaska's most pristine locations with huge potential damage to the environment, spawning traveling sockeye salmon and the population/existence of brown bears thereof...
Then quite coincidentally while watching some YT videos of professor Brian Cox who is a famed British astrophysicist (unrelated to the above statement, the mining Co, bears, salmon, Alaska, yada yada!) last night, he said something which completely blew my mind, it really did! He said that the reason gold is such a precious metal is how the element Au (gold) is created and made. According to astrophysicists, some of the much heavier elements such as Au are made under unimaginable pressure and heat which is only possible when huge stars (like 1000 x the mass of our Sun to more) go supernova (not all stars do so as they die) and then Au is made for just under 1 minute under such circumstances in these occurrences which are statistically like one per galaxy per century! Then all that "gold dust" element will have to coalesce as matter in what which becomes a rocky planet with greedy and pricky intelligent life forming on it like 4 billion years or so later <<< These are my words, not his!
In conclusion: yo bears & salmon, yer sooo fudged!