how many gold in earth
Answers
Their latest figure for all the gold in the world is 171,300 tonnes - which is almost exactly the same as the amount in our super-villain's imaginary cube. A cube made of 171,300 tonnes would be about 20.7m (68ft) on each side
Part of the reason is that gold has been mined for a very long time - more than 6,000 years, according to gold historian Timothy Green.
The first gold coins were minted in about 550 BC under King Croesus of Lydia - a province in modern-day Turkey - and quickly became accepted payment for merchants and mercenary soldiers around the Mediterranean.
Up until 1492, the year Columbus sailed to America, GFMS estimates that 12,780 tonnes had been extracted.
But one investor who looked at the research done in this area, James Turk, the founder of Gold Money, discovered what he regarded as a series of over-estimates.
He believes that the primitive mining techniques used up to the Middle Ages mean that this figure is much too high, and that a more realistic total is just 297 tonnes.
His figure for the overall amount of gold in the world is 155,244 tonnes - 16,056 tonnes, or 10% less, than the assessment by Thompson Reuters GFMS. A relatively small disparity, perhaps, but one that at today's prices comes to more than $950bn.
His conclusions are accepted by some investors but such is the feeling between rival analysts that one competitor described Turk's figures as an alternative to the GFMS's "in the same way that Jedi is an alternative to Christianity".
But there are others who think both sets of figures are too low.
One of Tutenkhamen's sarcophagi
"In Tutankhamen's tomb alone they found that his coffin was made from 1.5 tonnes of gold, so imagine the gold that was found in the other tombs that were ransacked before records were taken of them," says Jan Skoyles of gold investment firm The Real Asset Company.
While James Turk makes only minor adjustments to the GFMS figure for the amount of gold mined after 1492, Skoyles points out that even today China is "not particularly open" about how much gold it is mining.
And in some countries, such as Colombia, "there's a lot of illegal mining going on", she says.
She doesn't have an exact figure to offer, but one organisation that has tried to do some maths is the Gold Standard Institute.