h a l f b a k e r yI think this would be a great thing to not do.
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Sonic Displacement
Urika! Hey. How come hitting enter twice while in the Summary bar to create a page break posts the idea? | |
So, we create wave powered electrical generators to power undersea sonic emitters.
The sonic emitters are arrayed to create Cymatic patterns from the salt water particulates.
Gold, being one of the heavier suspended particles will, over time, be held in suspension at the standing wave nodes of
the cymatic pattern allowing for extraction of the immense amount of gold in the worlds oceans in a profitable manner.
What is the state of gold in seawater, since it's known to be present, but is not soluble?
https://www.quora.c...-but-is-not-soluble
I recommend you don't rely any of the answers without further research. [Loris, Jun 20 2025]
Failed attempts
https://www.youtube...=j5eomDz4Z0E&t=335s
[2 fries shy of a happy meal, Jun 20 2025]
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This feels like something that could easily be tested small-scale.
To the lab!
Wait... I don't have a lab :(
Also, whales & dolphins etc won't like (even more) noise being pumped into their environment; although you could probably do the sound in a reasonably directional manner to keep it local. |
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You'd almost need to do it in a confined space to ensure the geometry and resonance of the sound waves. |
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You'd create a current to channel vast amounts of salt water through enormous Cymatic filter chambers not harming a single critter riding the current. |
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If you are worried about species displacement then just make each current a loop returning fauna right where they got accidentally drawn into the loop. |
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//power undersea sonic emitters.// |
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Honestly, we already owe the whales an enormous apology regarding hunting them to near extinction, taking all their food and cruising around with ships with noise generators so powerful they prefer to die than continue to share the water. I suspect that apology isn't imminently forthcoming, however. |
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Using sound on an oceanic scale to mine metals for trinkets is much more on-brand for humans. |
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The gold in seawater is dissolved, not suspended. |
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'Sonic displacement' sounds like some old-timey mental condition |
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Gold in salt water is both suspended and dissolved, this should collect both. |
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I'm pretty sure we could cancel any external sound if we didn't want to cause any more noise pollution for the sea critters. |
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Will I get credit for this? |
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...maybe in your history books, but not likely.
You're welcome anyway.
I'm just glad to have it out there instead of festering beneath my skull like a zit I can't pop. |
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"So, we create wave powered electrical generators to power undersea sonic emitters." Won't this interfere with whales and dolfin's ability to communicate? |
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I'm not sure how it would work efficiently. |
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I mean, there's lots of gold there, sure. But it's very dilute, and not economically feasible to extract.
Here, you're putting a lot of energy in, to concentrate it... how much? Probably not much. |
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It wasn't economically feasible to extract gold from sea water in the past. Now it will be.
The cymatic filter will only collect the heaviest elements, and since it will need to be contained we can use noise cancelling tech to eliminate any external ruckus. |
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//The cymatic filter will only collect the heaviest elements, and since it will need to be contained we can use noise cancelling tech to eliminate any external ruckus.// |
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Go ahead and show me the calculations you've done to demonstrate that, and I'll believe it.
Your starting point should be the concentration of gold in sea-water. |
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According to das internet:
::One study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that there is about 1 gram of gold in the ocean for every 100 million cubic meters of water.:: |
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Let's suppose your cymatic filter concentrates all the gold in... let us say one hundredth of the volume (I would say this is extremely optimistic).
How are you going to extract the 1 gram of gold from a million cubic metres of water? That's a block of water 100 meters to a side.
Let's pretend we don't need to worry about the water. For comparison purposes, that only leaves the 35 tons of salts... plus any other crap that was swimming in it. |
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According to the internet again:
::5 grams gold/tonne is usually economically viable.:: |
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I am sorry but I can offer you no calculations, only what I see in my head. |
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I think you are calculating under the assumption that the container is closed and that once the gold had been extracted from a certain volume of water it will not replenish itself but, in the same way every human alive has breathed in at least one molecule of air that passed through the lungs of Jesus, eventually every drop of ocean water will pass through the cymatic filters. |
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Since they would run 24/7, and since the electrical generation costs only the creation of the original infrastructure, it would become cost effective rather quickly and theft would be your main concern. |
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I see the suspended gold particles binding together from the friction of the sound waves and forming gossamer filaments along the wave nodes trapping the dissolved gold between themselves until they become too heavy to be held suspended any longer and sink languidly into the collection chamber as the next scintillating golden shape emerges. |
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It was a pretty cool visual to have just pop into my head. |
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Whether it works or not...
<shrugs>
It works in my head.
Most things that work in there work out here when I make them |
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// I think you are calculating under the assumption that the container is closed and that once the gold had been extracted from a certain volume of water it will not replenish itself// |
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Not at all. Once you've processed 100,000,000 cubic metres of sea-water, you'll have your gram of gold and will be able to tip the bucket out and collect another 100,000,000. |
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//Most things that work in there work out here when I make them// |
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In that case I look forward to seeing your construction.
Even a tiny percentage of the gold available in all the worlds oceans will make you very wealthy, when you can extract it cheaply. |
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//Once you've processed 100,000,000 cubic metres of sea-water,// |
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Shirley the place to look in sea water minus some/all of water, i.e. the left overs from desalination plants. |
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//I look forward to seeing your construction.// |
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I am not going to live long enough to build a fraction of the things I know will work, and many of the things I know will work will get me shot if I make them... just like every other poor inventive schmuck that couldn't see just how corrupt the playing field is and how many companies they would bankrupt with their brain-farts. |
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//the left overs from desalination plants// |
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hmmm, not bad. I'd figured more along the lines of anchoring just within the eastern Australia current to maximize the amount of seawater exposed to the filter. |
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Give me enough time and I will build the prototype. ...or maybe instead fund your own research and beat me to the punch given that I've disclosed how it works. |
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Hey. how about Instead of me proving myself right... how about those with the capability start proving me wrong... |
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...you lazy fucking bastards. |
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//Hey. how about Instead of me proving myself right... how about those with the capability start proving me wrong...// |
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Are you looking for someone to actually build it? I imagine most people have better things to do with their resources. |
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One of the first things to ask is - what form is the gold in seawater actually in?
I found a Quora page where various different possibilities are mentioned (link). |
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Am I having a brain fart or was there an entirely undefined previous post entitled Sonic Displacement that was looking for an actual idea, and was NOT this post? |
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Ghost post? I annotated that (imaginary) post and that also is gone. |
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I think the confused midnight note post I annotated was more interesting that this gold discussion. But that’s just me… |
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//Am I having a brain fart or was there an entirely undefined previous post entitled Sonic Displacement that was looking for an actual idea, and was NOT this post?// |
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You're thinking of 2fries' previous idea "You got me guys." over in other:[general], on which you commented on the 1st June. That refers to a note saying "sonic displacement". |
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Yeah. Sorry about that. I had this idea and then lost what is was before I finished writing the title down. |
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Thanks for the link. Very informative and led me to find a fairly cool little video on the history of folks trying to get gold from sea water.
Lots of scams out there. |
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Alright, let me take a shot at this math stuff.
I million gallons of seawater contains one gram of gold.
One thousand gallon tanks currently cost $2202.20.
With wave powered buoys and sonic emitters plus collection tank and pump, we're probably looking at about five grand to make a single cymatic filter from scratch.
If we pass a thousand gallons through the filter a thousand times daily we will have processed 1,000,000 gallons.
The price of gold today is 108 dollars a gram so it would take 47 days to pay off the contraption and you'd make 108 dollars a day after that for every filter you install... if, (big IF), I'm right about using sound to extract gold. |
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Do those numbers make any sense? I'm new at this. |
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I think a major problem with your calculation is that you've using a very high value for the concentration of gold in seawater. |
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//I million gallons of seawater contains one gram of gold.// |
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Incidentally, what sort of gallon is that?
1 imperial gallon is ~4.6 litres
1 US liquid gallon is ~3.8 litres
Either way, let's say that's around 4 litres as an approximation.
Therefore your concentration is around 1 gram per 4,000,000 litres
Which is would be 1 gram per 4000 cubic metres.
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Here are some estimates from the linked page, I've converted them to the same units.
::The quoted figure for gold in seawater is between 10g and 30g per cubic kilometre.:: (Chris Spencer)
1 gram per 33,000,000 to 100,000,000 cubic metres |
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::One liter of seawater contains 13 billionths of a gram of gold.:: (C Stuart Hardwick)
1 gram per 77,000 cubic metres
(this is actually only about double the volume from your value, but it's strangely precise for a flat assertion) |
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::one gram of gold for every 100 million metric tons of ocean water in the Atlantic and north Pacific:: Roger Bliss
1 gram per 100,000,000 cubic metres |
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The difference between 77,000 and 100,000,000 is a little over 3 orders of magnitude. Searching online finds other statements, generally on the lower concentration. One, though, covered 4 orders of magnitude all by itself:
::Sea water contains from 0.001 to 44 ppb (parts per billion) gold.:: |
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I did see a mention somewhere that gold can relatively concentrated in water coming from geothermal vents. |
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...
So let's just say you'd have to be a little selective about the location of the site. |
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There's still a couple of issues -
1) you'll have running costs. You need energy to pump water around, plus do the actual sonic displacement thing.
2) you won't extract 100% of the gold. I think I was assuming you'd concentrate it, then extract the gold from that. Obviously if it were just to settle neatly out of solution you'd be in a good place. But although you can imagine it, I'm afraid I'm not entirely convinced. |
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That's fine.
There will be no running costs once a filter is launched. The waves will provide the power. |
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I honestly didn't know that there were different types of gallons.
What Rocket Surgeon thought that up? |
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Yes the filter will collect more than just gold. It will collect all of the heaviest elements, so refining the gold to 100% purity will require additional investment, but metals like platinum, iridium, and osmium, which are denser and heavier than gold, are often more expensive due to their scarcity and use in specialized industrial applications will also be extracted and should offset the cost of refining. |
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The fact that I gave this away here on a public site means that you'll probably see it implemented in a year or two. |
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//I honestly didn't know that there were different types of gallons.// |
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I am genuinely interested to know what sort of gallons you use in Canada. I googled with inconclusive results.
Would you look at a milk bottle or something measured in gallons as well as litres, and let me know what it says? |
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//you'll probably see it implemented in a year or two.// |
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We don't use gallons in Canada. The only reason I used it as a measurement is because that was the measurement listed when I looked up the concentration of gold in sea water. |
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Then I looked up the cost of thousand gallon tanks, and it went from there. |
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Why are there different gallons?
That makes no sense. |
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//anchoring just within the eastern Australia current//
Conveniently, there are several desalination plants on the Aus east coast too. If you 'accidentally' situated your system at their outflow, you get some free power (water flow), pre-concentrated water, & big pipes for containment.
Maybe multiple sequential systems is the way to go?:
Reverse osmosis -> drinking water as saleable byproduct
Multistage cyclones (as per uranium gas centrifuges)
Sonic displacement
Putting that all in one box might be tricky... |
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//Why are there different gallons?// |
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There used to be different everythings, not just gallons. There's a long riff in Umberto Eco, probably somewhere in The Name of the Rose, about the proliferation of subtly incompatible units of measure, with similar names, across late medieval Europe. Chaos was normal. Then an evil conspiracy of globalists ruined it by introducing the metric system. The bastards. How dare they? |
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Ah. Makes sense now. Like the way that cubit and span depended on the size of the person, or how the length of a foot changed with the shoe size of each new ruler...
...hence the name 'ruler' when they finally regulated it to one size. |
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Talking monkeys are fascinating aren't they?
So much blunder to excel by wading through ignorant opposition while exercising so little forethought and yet somehow pushing through anyway. |
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Rock on, you glorious primates!
Although a bit less destructive tendencies might be nice. |
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Y'know... if we ever want to be a part of the rest of the galaxy instead of sequestered on this one planet. |
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//Putting that all in one box might be tricky...// |
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I don't want to affect sea life. I think that gold can be extracted without causing harm since it is so abundant. At some point it might become a tipping point thing where all sea life has relied on a certain concentration of heavy elements for health, so that would need to be monitored, but until then... I just would like to see if the visuals which randomly pop into my head are right. The few innovations which I have been able to test have been proven out. I want to test them all, and they are many. |
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I don't currently have the capability to do such things... but I'm working on it. |
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//a bit less destructive tendencies might be nice.// |
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I'll drink to that, (but don't let the ghost of [8th] hear you). |
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You have no idea how much I wish our HB departed were around to chime in.
I hear them in my head, but it's just my own echos of their voices. |
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Literally... how the fuck can the deaths of people you've never met in real life make you cry? |
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WTF's with that?! That's messed up. |
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I miss them. I miss [let's build a fort] although I don't think I ever even interacted with him... or her even once. |
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They're all still in my head. Talking away. It's hard to contain sometimes. |
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Aw crap, the AI's going to infiltrate that isn't it? |
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