Wesley Stevenson
speaker
1,470 appearances
54 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard May 2015
Wesley Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But to some extent, this number crunching is beside the point for John Allen, author of The Global War on Christians.
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We asked him if it matters whether the number of Christian martyrs is in the order of 10,000 or 100,000.
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If there are any numbers you'd like us to investigate or explain, then do please email us.
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Our address is moreorless at bbc.co.uk.
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I'm Wesley Stevenson.
Now imagine if you were an international supervillain who'd acquired all the gold in the world and you decided to melt it down and make a cube.
You couldn't.
Why not?
James Bond would stop you.
Look, Charlotte, you're kind of spoiling my intro here.
Sorry, but he would.
OK, well look, let's pretend Bond's busy, he's on the other side of the world and is completely oblivious to the gold-melting exploits of our supervillain.
One of our listeners, Julia, says she's heard the cube would only be 60 feet along each side, or about 18 metres.
But that seems tiny.
Perhaps, but it may not be far off.
According to Thomson Reuters Goldfield Mineral Studies, or GFMS, which is generally thought to be the authority on this matter, there's around 170,000 metric tonnes of gold above the ground, and if you melted it all down into a cube, it would have sides of around 68 feet or 20 metres.
And to put that into context, if you melted it all down and covered the pitch at Wembley Stadium, it would stand about only one metre high.
So all estimates are based on some serious assumption-making and extrapolating.
One man who isn't convinced by this guess is James Turk from Investors Gold Money, so he did his own calculations.
What he did was to look at each of the eras before 1492 and work out how much gold per head there would be for each era.
Showing 441–460 of 1,470 · page 23 of 74
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