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Asked by anon-258309 on 8 Jul 2020.
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Andrew McDowall answered on 8 Jul 2020:
It’s an unusual question, certainly one to get you thinking, but one that has been asked before.
Two analyses, performed in 2011 and 2016 came up with slightly different answers – the 2011 valued the elements in an average adult at $160, the 2016 value was better at $585. We’re mostly made of very ordinary stuff, even golden girls and diamond geezers.
Both studies appear to be American, and average weights vary across the world, but using the information we have – the weight of an average adult in the 2016 report was set at 80kg. Assuming the average age within your pack is 9, the average weight of a US 9 year old is 28.4kg, giving a value-per-Cub (vpC) of $207.31, or a scrap value of ~$5800 for the pack as a whole. Today’s exchange rate is £0.80/$. giving a Sterling value of ~£4640.
This is before processing, extraction and refinement costs, which would probably exceed the value extracted.
Given we’re using US values, it should be noted that the statistical value for a living, breathing human is considered to be ~$10,000,000 in 2020. As living, vital beings, even statistically, their value is almost 50,000x greater than the sum of their parts. Each of your Cubs is $207 of chemicals and $9,999,793 of thought, feeling, idea, sensation, experience, consumption and labour. Given their ages, and the potential they’ve yet to realise, their value to culture, science and society could be incalculably greater still.
Footnotes:
1. there have also been some studies to estimate the value of a human as reconditioned spare parts, values are very country dependent.
2. I’m not aware of any studies of the butchery value, I imagine it depends if your Cubs are organic and free-range or not.
3. If your Cub was made of the roughest diamond, they would be worth ~$42,600 each. As gold ~$1,631,000. So as Cubs they exceed both gold and diamonds.
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Oli Wilson answered on 8 Jul 2020: last edited 9 Jul 2020 2:56 pm
I love questions like this (as long as they’re hypothetical, of course), even if they’re a pain to answer! I had a stab at guesstimating this using Wikipedia, but a whole universe of caveats apply…
Firstly, let’s assume your Cubs weigh about 28kg each on average, so 28 of them would weigh roughly the same as 11 average adults at 70kg each.
A problem with extracting anything useful from the bodies of your Cubs is that almost all the chemicals are bound up with each other. Take calcium: it’s the most abundant metal element in our bodies but it’s all bonded together with phosphorus, oxygen and hydrogen in a chemical called hydroxyapatite that forms your charges’ bones. It’s much easier to calculate prices for elements than minerals, though, so let’s assume you can magic away the chemical bonds (and police inquiries) and sell everything you can get…
So, I made a spreadsheet (!) from Wikipedia’s lists of elements in human bodies (https://bit.ly/31V5h3u) and their prices (https://bit.ly/2WelnBR), and, very very roughly, these sources value the elements in your Cub pack at a little shy of $400, about £320. Almost all of that value comes from 7.5g of rubidium ($116), 77kg of hydrogen ($107), and 473kg of oxygen ($73).
Given a) the cost (and impossibility) of separating out the elements from their chemical compounds, b) the risks of misplacing the minuscule quantity of valuable rubidium and the troubles of trapping 550kg of oxygen and hydrogen, and c) the fact this values the contents of your pack at a measly £11.29 each, I suggest this is not an economically viable plan. I hope this helps inform your decision-making 😉 -
Kim Liu answered on 9 Jul 2020: last edited 9 Jul 2020 8:37 am
This is a fun question, and I love the two answers already given 🙂 I’m going to do a calculation of a different sort and value the cub pack’s mass by its potential energy instead, using E = mc^2. If we could somehow get antimatter versions of your cub pack, we could generate a whopping 2.5 billion GJ of energy, which would approximately power the whole of the UK for around a year, and is worth around £50 billion as calculated by the average cost of electricity. (I quickly searched the appropriate on google: UK consumes 5000 kWh per person, with 70 mill population, 15 p per kWh)
But – it seems highly unlikely to get enough antimatter in this universe for this without putting at least as much of this energy in beforehand. According to this video from an amazing channel minutephysics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-O-Qdh7VvQ&t=82 which inspired this calculation – perhaps the easiest way to get anywhere near this value is drop your cub pack into a rotating black hole, which apparently is able to convert up to 42 % of the theoretical maximum energy (so around £20 billion per child instead). For comparison, incinerating them would only give 5 p worth of energy. So unless you have a black hole handy, it’s probs not worth the effort ~ these kids are worth much more living their lives than the energy you’re likely to get from their mass 🙂
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Sreejita Ghosh answered on 10 Jul 2020:
I agree with the other three scientists that this is a fun but odd question. Since they have provided you with calculation wrt the minerals and metals I thought of a slightly different take on this, while still bearing in mind that the end result should be such that a lot of financial gain is made at minimum investment in the extraction of gems. Now gems can be in terms of the minerals as you pointed out. But organ harvesting for organ transplant is a whole other world of money (and can be equally scary as the extraction of minerals and metals from unsuspecting minds of the respective bodies). Artificial organs are available for only few organs. There’s Dr. Shuvo Roy of UCSF whose team made a coffee-cup sized artificial kidney- the project which inspired me to join Biomedical Engineering in the first place 10 years ago. However it’s still not commercialized. My uncle died last year waiting for a kidney transplant.
Here you can find an estimate of organ transplant wait list for life-saving organs in the UK alone (from Sep 2019) https://www.statista.com/statistics/519812/active-organ-waiting-list-united-kingdom-uk/
So as a Biomedical Engineer and an avid fan of the series Criminal Minds I think if the human bodies are thought of mines of gems, that should be for the organs rather than mineral extraction.
P.S This question reminded me of that Utopia episode of Doctor Who (with Tenth Doctor) and now I am actively looking for ways to live off the grid, thank you very much.
Comments
Oli commented on :
I would like to concede my answer in favour of Andrew’s excellent one – bravo!
anon-258309 commented on :
Thank you both of you, it’s a good job I wasn’t reckoning on this as a get rich quick scheme. I love the suggestion that their value to society etc may outweigh their physical makeup. And who knew our bodies contained rubidium, taheir was me thinking I knew a bit about physiology. Thank you both I really enjoyed your answers