Board Thread:Fiction Universe Discussion/@comment-9141454-20150625191138/@comment-47205-20150626120408

This idea could work very well if it's done right; for example, andasium is presumably very difficult to synthesise so it makes sense as something to be mined and traded. Saying that, you may want to ignore technological feasibilities for narrative purposes, but just for the record here's a quick example of how easy it is to synthesise most real-world elements using sci-fi technology.

»»»= Hidden away here so it doesn't take too much space. :P »»»= Consider the sun. It has a total power output of about 3.86x1026 W. Consider gold. It has a nuclear binding energy of a little under 1.6 GeV/atom, and an atomic mass of about 197 g/mol. So as a rough first approximation, a sun-like star provides enough energy to fuse nucleons into more than 4.9x1011 kg/s of gold.

Of course, it's not reasonable to use an entire star's power output to siphon off excess hydrogen and helium and fuse it into gold. Let's assume that only 1% of the star's energy is harvested by orbital installations, and that only 1% of that goes into the gold-making process (although some of SporeWiki's larger polities could easily afford to dedicate entire star clusters to mass-producing a single element if they had a great need for it). Then let's assume that all but 1% of that energy is used elsewhere in the process, and then that due to inefficiencies (unwanted side-products, waste heat etc.) only 1% of that goes into actually binding gold nucleons together.

That reduces our output by a factor of 108: you could still produce 4.9 tonnes of gold every second from a sunlike star. Lifting all that mass to an escape velocity of 617.7 km/s would take about 8.6x1016 W on top, which can be easily slotted into the 99% of 1% of 1% = 3.82x1022 W that I assumed would be used in the gold-making process for non-fusing activities.

In 10 hours you would have produced more gold than that mined in the history of the world.