I am having trouble keeping a straight face ... but here goes.
The logical problem - almost insurmountable, is the hypothesis that
silver - Ag, element 47 - which yes, is definitely toxic to most
biological life, is being transmuted all the way to gold - Au element
79- in order to detoxify it, essentially.
Gold itself is not vital to life, nor even helpful, whereas other rare
(and common) elements are necessary.
Chickens, for instance, which have evolved from dinosaurs supposedly so
they could have learned a few tricks in the past 300 million years, have
been shown to somehow end up with calcium when there is none around to
eat. IOW - Hens denied calcium but not potassium, lay perfectly normal
eggs. Hens denied both potassium and calcium will lay soft-shelled eggs
and the chicks can't survive. If these Hens are allowed to peck mica
(contains K) - which they will frantically do - everything returns to
normal again.
The step from Ag to Au is OTOH is as absurd as the sky falling-in,
especially given that silver oxidizes and combines chemically without a
need for such a drastic measure; therefore it could be removed from the
food chain through chemical means; and since there is zero need for the
gold anyway, why do it the hard way? Nature seldom does anything the
hard way.
... but even if bacteria could effect nuclear transmutation, as in the
Kervran claim, then guess how they would most likely deal with the
silver problem ... ;-)
If you guessed transmute it to palladium which is nontoxic, then you win
the Chicken-little sweepstakes... and get an all-expenses paid
bird-hunting Holiday to rural Texas to quail-hunt with our esteemed
Vice-President, and his assorted chicks ... err ... Courtiers.
Joe Champion may be invited to collect the brass. Never mind that your
ticket will say "one-way" as that little detail is just a technicality
of the new and improved White House Travel agency... where Hillary still
gets the blame for all chick-snafus.
Hey kids ... this smile (or was that simile) was brought to you by the
letter "A", making this a red letter day, eh Nat?
Jed Rothwell wrote:
Rick Monteverde wrote:
Natural gold "reefs" (prospectors dream of them in vivid living color)
are
generally thought to occur as a result of bacteria colonies that at
the very
least concentrated the element from solution in flowing water. Maybe they
mutated the Au out of other elements, who knows.
That is the first thing that occurred to me when Joe called! I mentioned
to him that many coral species and others can extract minute amounts of
some elements from seawater, such as iodine.
Arthur Clarke wrote about an imaginary species of coral bioengineered to
extract gold from seawater, in "Imperial Earth."
- Jed
