Life is mostly suffering—no matter how well you treat others and yourself, and no matter how much gratitude you claim to feel—because, at bottom, people are full of shit. But, it turns out, their shit is full of gold! So that's all right.

On Monday, Kathleen Smith of the US Geological Survey presented a study at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society in Denver demonstrating that the human feces running though the sewage beneath several Rocky mountain towns showed levels of precious metals comparable to those found in commercial mines, The Guardian reports.

"The gold we found was at the level of a minimal mineral deposit," Smith said. This confirms the findings of an earlier study that found that the sewage produced annually by a million-person city contained $13 million of precious metals.

According to Agence France-Presse, extracting such metals could potentially reduce both the need for mining and the release of harmful materials into the environment.

"If you can get rid of some of the nuisance metals that currently limit how much of these biosolids we can use on fields and forests, and at the same time recover valuable metals and other elements, that's a win-win," Smith said.

So c'mon, sparklebottoms! Let's go panning for nuggets.

Image via Shutterstock. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.