We all know that gold—one of the most pre­cious met­als on Earth—is scare. How­ever, the actual dearth of gold is sur­pris­ing, as Jason Kot­tke points out:

The esti­mated total amount of gold mined by humans would fill a cube that’s only 25 meters [about 82 feet] on a side. Plat­inum is even more rare… all of the mined plat­inum in the world would [fit in a cube that is 6.3 meters (about 20 feet)].

National Geo­graphic (via Seed) looks at the real (human) cost of gold.

No sin­gle ele­ment has tan­ta­lized and tor­mented the human imag­i­na­tion more than the shim­mer­ing metal known by the chem­i­cal sym­bol Au. For thou­sands of years the desire to pos­sess gold has dri­ven peo­ple to extremes, fuel­ing wars and con­quests, gird­ing empires and cur­ren­cies, lev­el­ing moun­tains and forests. Gold is not vital to human exis­tence; it has, in fact, rel­a­tively few prac­ti­cal uses. Yet its chief virtues—its unusual den­sity and mal­leabil­ity along with its imper­ish­able shine—have made it one of the world’s most cov­eted com­modi­ties, a tran­scen­dent sym­bol of beauty, wealth, and immor­tal­ity. […] Nearly every soci­ety through the ages has invested gold with an almost mytho­log­i­cal power.

N.B. In terms of cost, gold is far from the most pre­cious of met­als; that hon­our goes to rhodium.