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Closer to Deducing the Origin of the Moon
eldavojohn writes "A giant explosion on the sun in January of 2005 allowed SMART-1 (a European spacecraft orbiting the moon) to detect what elements the moon is made up of based on the X-rays from the sun's explosion. This allows scientists to speculate on the moon's origins while seeing data from all over the moon as opposed to the core samples we have collected and returned in the past. From the article: 'Scientists responsible for the D-CIXS instrument on SMART-1 are also announcing that they have detected aluminium, magnesium and silicon. "We have good maps of iron across the lunar surface. Now we can look forward to making maps of the other elements." said SMART-1's Principal Investigator.'"
Gold is intrinsically valuable. People (especially women) are genetically predisposed to like shiny things. Also gold is (as far as I know) the best room-temperature conductor that we have today. Thus there will always be a demand for gold for use in jewelry and electronics.
Companies still have gold-mining operations today. They may rely on various chemical pools to get relatively small amounts of gold out, but it's still adding some to the supply, and people are still buying jewelry and electronics which takes away from the supply. Now, I don't really understand how world gold markets work, but I bet you that if the price of gold got high enough some of the gold being traded on paper would get sold off in reality also.
Anyway, as a species it's really in our best interest to have difficult to access but valuable supplies gathered together (in a readily usable form) instead of dispersed, just in case we need it for something important - such as a giant super computer to calculate the answer to life, the universe, and everything, or we might have to bribe some alien race with a giant, golden statue of female squiddy, crowned and bearing a torch and a book, to prevent them from invading us. Think about it.