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Group of Microbes Change Dissolved Gold to Solid
option8 writes " National Geographic, has a an article about a newly discovered strain of bacteria that might be used (though, as the article says, not cost-effectively) to harvest gold and other metals from seawater - a longtime fantasy of science fiction."
The microbes might not be economically viable at extracting gold from seawater, but that doesn't mean that they're useless. A clever engineer could probably figure out a way of using the microbes to cheaply process low grade ore. That's currently done using environmentally dangerous processes like cyanide heap leaching (which is as dangerous as you'd expect a process using large amount of cyanide to be) but a microbe that has an affinity for gold could make that type of work much safer and more environmentally friendly. Yes it would take quite a bit of work, but gold is still valuable enough that people are likely to look into it.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
gold as a mineral isnt rare. for instance in sea water. only problem it is distributed widely in solution in minute quantities per gram. I read some years ago about mine dumps leaching metals, the problem was tackled by using some specialised bacteria. so using bacteria to concentrate metals is not new. seabed nodules are made by bacteria which gollect Nickel. but this takes thousands of years. by pumping sea water over beds of bacteria in factories the concentration of gold could be increased.
A lot of bacteria that are found in exotic environments, such as hydrothermal vents, aren't horribly happy when moved far away from those environments. (After all if they were competitive in other places, you'd expect them to show up more widely in the ocean).
The article doesn't say, but they may require high temperature, high pressure, or unusual mineral solutions in order to grow and do their thing. This naturally leads to higher costs, at the very least causing you to pump water through some tank designed to keep them happy. Some of the bacteria used in environmental cleanup etc, are actually genetically modified versions meant to survive in environments other than where the trait developed. Of course on the other hand we might get lucky and they do like sitting on the beach churning out gold.
If it can be made profitable I'm sure someone will do it.