From NPR comes the fascinating story of why humanity chose gold as one of its most valuable metals:
You want the thing you pick to be rare…At the same time, you don’t want to pick an element that’s too rare. So osmium — which apparently comes to earth via meteorites — gets the axe. That leaves us with just five elements: rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum and gold. And all of them, as it happens, are considered precious metals.
And to think, platinum, it could’ve been you if your melting point was just a wee bit lower…