• Question: what is the rarest object on earth right now

    Asked by anon-193461 to Morwenna, Jamal, iainstaniland, Heidi, Emma, Carl on 13 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Emma Crawford

      Emma Crawford answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Oh that’s food for thought! For an object to be rare it should be not found in large numbers and therefore they are normally very expensive and of great interest to most people! Now an object is a material thing that can be seen and touched, that covers a lot of things on earth right now!
      Looking online, you would normally focus your search for something rare in a specific field e.g. rare fossil, rare precious stone, rare collectible etc so I think it would take someone quite a lot of research to compare all the rare objects on earth to find the rarest!
      I found this pretty cool list of rare objects: http://www.emlii.com/5c268a40/24-Rarest-of-Rare-Awesome-Things-Found-on-Earth-Ever I would be curious to try a red banana!

    • Photo: Heidi Gardner

      Heidi Gardner answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Interesting question! The rarest element on Earth is Astatine – a naturally occurring semi-metal that results from the decay of uranium and thorium. It’s estimated that there is only 30 grams of Astatine in the Earth’s crust at any one time because it’s very unstable. When scientists want to use Astatine they have to make it from scratch, but even then only 0.00000005 grams of it has been produced to date!

    • Photo: Carl Heron

      Carl Heron answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      I’m lucky enough to work in at the British Museum. It is full of rare, indeed unique, objects. Take this gold cape dating to the Bronze Age and found in North Wales:

      https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=808751&partId=1

      [Emma – how do you get hyperlinks to work on this page?]

      There is nothing else quite like this on the planet…..it’s remarkable in terms of form and design and it’s nearly 4000 years old.

    • Photo: Iain Staniland

      Iain Staniland answered on 14 Nov 2018:

      Well I will hazzard a guess at one of the Transuranium elements as these are very unstable and decay (by radioactivity) very quickly into other elements

      for example the Mendelevium this zone is named after
      the isotope 256Md has a half-life of only 1.17 hours!

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