Gold Mining in the Year 2050

During the great depression of 2025 the State of California tried in vain to find the mother-lode gold in an effort to restart the economy and finally balance the budget at the same time. They used all the latest technology and mapped out the likely spots but every test came back negative and in the end they admitted they were still no better off than searching for a “needle in a haystack”.

25 years later we are ready to try again and this time the chief engineer on the project promises it will be more like finding a “trombone in a haystack”. My job was to setup super microwave signal sources on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada between Reno and Las Vegas so that we could pick up those signals on the other side of the mountains in the foothills between Sacramento and Fresno. Instead of searching for Gold we soon found ourselves searching for granite outcroppings, underground water and any other source that might act as a good receiver.

Eventually we were able get detailed images at some depth it was never in the places we wanted. Every time we tried to zoom in on our favorite spots we had trouble finding solid rock to bounce our signals off and ended up testing in smaller distances at shallow depth just to get any readings. We were trying every frequency of every spectrum and poking around with every conceivable detection method.

One hot summer day I wiped the sweat from my forehead and then leaned up against a tree and to my surprise I started hearing the sweet music of a positive hit in my headset after nothing for days. Then the signal disappeared when I let go of the tree and even though I could get the signal back by touching the tree again my brain refused to accept to conclusion that a tree could carry my signal better than the ground. Luckily I had a co-worker who specialized in biology and he could explain how the root system was like an upside down antennae positioned perfectly in my ground loop and capable of picking up signals in materials which had been silent for all our attempts.

This was the first real breakthrough and after that we were able to create maps that consistently returned impressive images from %90 of our deep viewing. That was when we started getting a picture of things much deeper than the 1 to 10 miles we had been viewing, now we were seeing down to 100 miles and got the first glimpse if the deep drop-off and the heavy pull on the plates directly below Yosemite valley.

By using the latest Global Positioning Sonar Enhanced Lasers guided by Google Universe Interplanetary Triangulations we were able to pinpoint the mother lode once and for all. That was when we started getting some interesting results from the probes. And that is the next chapter in this series: Gold mining 2050: Chapter Two – Deep Pocket Drones.