Can nanotechnology be used to extract gold from sea water?
There are about 10 micrograms of gold per ton of sea water. At current prices (rough estimate) 10,000 tons of water contains a dollar’s worth of gold. At the prices I pay, a dollar’s worth of electricity is not enough to pump that much water more than a couple of inches (with pumps a lot more efficient than the one I’ve got now). The magnesium in a given volume of sea water is worth a lot more than the gold in the same volume. So is the salt. In the future, it may also become worthwhile to recover the deuterium.