Gold did not start rare. It arrived in excess. Across primitive skies, metal rich meteorite showers rained into a young, cooling crust, spreading small pockets of nearly pure gold over wide regions of exposed rock.
The bold claim is simple. Early space debris gave Earth more reachable gold than modern mining will ever touch. Planet formation stripped heavy elements into the molten core through gravitational differentiation and metal silicate segregation, leaving the outer layers poor in native gold. Only after the surface solidified did late accretion add a new layer of metal, including gold, directly into the crust and upper mantle, where it sat in fractures, impact melt veins, and weathered soils that required no deep shafts or complex ore processing.
What now looks like scarcity is really the tail end of a long clean up. Plate tectonics recycled much of that meteoritic gold, dragging early crust downward through subduction and burying impact signatures under younger rock. Hydrothermal circulation then swept the remaining metal into concentrated veins, but also locked it inside quartz and sulfide minerals. Modern miners chase grams per ton. Those ancient surfaces often held nuggets on or just below the ground, scattered like fallout from the sky, a brief geological moment when gold was almost casual underfoot.
