Harambe was just the first casualty. The root cause was the weasel in the Large Hadron Collider shortly before that event, which shifted us into the bad timeline.

Very true. Unfortunately, this process just pulls gold from dilute sources and gathers it into nuggets, from small ones to very very large. No gold is being made new though, that would be great.

Well, that is the amount gold that is mined or recycled every year that is used in electronics. The thing is though, a lot of the gold used in electronics is never recovered. So a considerable amount of the gold used in electronics is removed from from circulation in a way the gold in jewelry or bullion or coins isn’t. It isn’t the primary driver of gold’s price increase, but it is a significant factor.

Gold prices have risen steadily for a long time, partly because of its use in electronics. Over $2500/ounce now. But another quirk of gold is the ease with which we can make very thin coatings of it over other materials, sometimes only a few atoms thick. So it is commonly used, but in very very small amounts per device.

Growing crops to make ethanol is not particulatly green. In fact, in most existing production loops we would be better off environmentally to just burn pure gasoline than produce the ethanol to mix into it, unfortunately. Too much water, too many tractors and trucks, and way too much electricity into ethanol production to be worth what we get out of it. And the bit of carbon the crops sequester doesn’t overcome it. Electric vehicles are by far the greenest option right now.

It won’t have started getting closer again before the Milky Way collides with the Adromeda galaxy in 5 Billion years, so it and anything we send on a similar path isn’t coming back.