$1.16 billion – that's how much NASA invested in about 255 grams of dust from the Bennu asteroid, as we reported earlier. That's about $132 million per ounce, or $4.7 million per gram of dust — 70,000 times the price of gold in recent years. Still, it's not the only material in the world for which someone has paid a seemingly exorbitant price—or even the highest price. Once again, we used ChatGPT to learn about the world's most expensive materials.
Simple elements from the periodic table come at relatively low prices, with carbon costing one-third of a cent an ounce and iron costing about one cent an ounce. Gold, often considered one of the most precious metals, costs $60 to $70 per gram, or $1,800 to $2,000 an ounce.
Gemstones can be even more expensive. High-quality emeralds, for example, cost ten times more than gold, while white diamonds, famous for their brilliance, are a hundred times more expensive than gold.
The Apollo program, which ran from 1969 to 1972, returned 382 kg of lunar samples at a cost of $19 million per ounce, or $674,000 per gram respectively for inflation (i.e., 1,000 times more than gold).
Some diamonds with distinctive characteristics, such as a strong blue hue, are so rare that their price exceeds that of NASA's asteroid sample, competing with the expected costs of samples from Mars: while NASA estimates the cost of the Mars sample return mission, which will take place only next decade, at $11 billion per 450 grams, or $690 million per ounce or $24 million per gram, These rare blue diamonds can cost $550 million an ounce.
When it comes to synthetic materials, one stands out for its incredible price. A tiny spherical "cage" of carbon with an imprisoned nitrogen atom inside it, called an endodehedral fullerene, is not only extremely stable, but also incredibly expensive. These fullerenes, which can be used for precise time determination, carry a price tag of $141 million per gram, making them one of the most expensive synthetic materials known to mankind.
But some "natural" materials are even more expensive: seven radioactive elements stand out for their extreme rarity, and their prices are higher than those of materials from space. Polonium-209, the most expensive, costs $49 billion per gram, making it one of the most expensive materials on the planet.
And finally, we got to the most precious material of all: antimatter. Although it exists in nature, at least according to current scientific theories, the fact that it is biodegradable on contact with a substance and the difficulty of obtaining and studying it make it a particularly expensive material to produce. The particle accelerator at CERN, capable of producing 10 million antiprotons per minute, would take billions of years and a billion billion dollars (10^18) dollars (3^5) to create a single ounce of antimatter, or 10.16 by <>^<> dollars per gram. There is not enough money in the world today to finance this amount.
However, in all cases, the prices of expensive materials vary and are determined by various criteria, such as rarity, beauty or purpose. Whether it's to create jewelry, weapons, or engines to take us to other galaxies, each of these costs is justified in the eyes of people willing to go to great lengths to get their hands on these materials.
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