What is your favorite chemical element?

[Astatine]

As chemistry student I feel obliged to ask.

My list:
1. Carbon: Basics for the whole giant field of organic chemistry, extremely fascinating.
2. Astatine: Extremely short-lived, but interesting because it is on the verge of being either a halogen or a metalloid (it is not clear whether hydrogen astatide - its analogon of hydrogen chloride/hydrochloric acid - does really behave like an acid), but due to its radioactivity, much of it remains a mystery.
3. Bromine: One of two elements that are liquid at room temperature. Did some nice reactions with it in the lab, and it doesn't smell as bad as one would think.
4. Hydrogen. Simply because organics is impossible without it.
5. Tough call, but I'd stick with sulphur. Forms some nice compounds that have interesting properties and are useful for many reaction.

Honorable mentions: oxygen, nitrogen, uranium

Least favorite:
The noble gases are generally boring.
Most of the lanthanides are basically the same element with some very few differences in their properties.
Phosphorus. At age 14, I thought I accidentally poisoned myself with phosphane, and hardly in my life I ever felt as anxious as back then.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Carbon: basis of all known life, potent spiritual symbolism
Germanium: basis of transistors used in gnarly fuzz pedals from the 60s
Francium: comically unstable

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Excuse me, you go by the name of Astatine and you put that element in second place?? I know that carbon is the basis of all known life and everything, but lol.

[John Dule]

I would be remiss if, as a libertarian, I didn't say gold.

[S019]

Carbon and Oxygen simply due to their importance in life


If we want to talk about interesting then anything with valence electrons in the d or f orbitals

[PSOL]

Boron

[Joseph Cao]

Tin has always been my favorite, partly for its historical uses and partly for sentimental reasons.

Carbon, of course, for making organic chemistry possible.

Manganese, for the sheer range of reactions you can get out of it.

Xenon, for being xenon.

Honorable mentions to gallium for its absurdly low melting point and fascinating place in the history of chemistry, and to the tantalum-tungsten-rhenium-osmium-iridium group for their collective properties (particularly density) and uses in heavy industry.

[Nutmeg]

Bromine and Fluorine

[Lourdes]

Neon

[SingingAnalyst]

Helium

[TDAS04]

Platinum

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

Osmium because it's fun to say.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Gold - auriferous.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I would be remiss if, as a libertarian, I didn't say gold.

Why not silver?

While being a libertarian implies that one favors hard currency instead of fiat currency, it doesn't imply that one needs to favor deflation over inflation (in the context of the 1890s U.S. debate over whether to have a gold or silver standard).

[Because the ratio of gold to silver in U.S. coins was out of whack in the 1890s, switching to the free coinage of silver would have been significantly inflationary. The sole economic advantage of a gold standard over a silver standard is that it allows for the higher valued circulating denominations be made out of the standard material instead being something like silver certificates. So it basically boils down to how easily counterfeits can be made or detected. The easier it is to get away with counterfeiting, the more advantageous a gold standard becomes over a silver standard. (Or a platinum standard.  Fun fact, platinum has a similar density to gold, and in the 19th century was cheaper than gold, so some criminals would hollow out gold coins and fill the void with platinum.)

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

As to the original question as a fan of the Traveller RPG, I have to go with Iridium.

[JoeInator]

Unununium because it has the funniest sounding name. I'm absolute garbage at chemistry so please cut me some slack!

[Astatine]

Unununium because it has the funniest sounding name. I'm absolute garbage at chemistry so please cut me some slack!

It was renamed some years ago (now called Roentgenium) - Currently, there are no elements with systematic names.

[JoeInator]

Unununium because it has the funniest sounding name. I'm absolute garbage at chemistry so please cut me some slack!

It was renamed some years ago (now called Roentgenium) - Currently, there are no elements with systematic names.

Oh, OK! I just googled "funniest name of an element" and that's what I found. Again, I'm not good at chemistry.

[Torie]

Hydrogen. KISS.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

My favourite chemical element, in any case, may be gallium for its absurdly low (and very cool, but no pun intended) melting point.

Also I know that carbon and oxygen are the basis of our life, but do we not want to thank sodium and potassium for our neural stimuli?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Unununium because it has the funniest sounding name. I'm absolute garbage at chemistry so please cut me some slack!

It was renamed some years ago (now called Roentgenium) - Currently, there are no discovered elements with systematic names.

FTFY

While all 118 discovered elements have nonsystematic names (from Hydrogen to Oganesson), ununennium (element 119) and beyond still exist at least theoretically, but appear to be undiscoverable with our current technology as their predicted half-lives are all way too short.

[Astatine]

Unununium because it has the funniest sounding name. I'm absolute garbage at chemistry so please cut me some slack!

It was renamed some years ago (now called Roentgenium) - Currently, there are no discovered elements with systematic names.

FTFY

While all 118 discovered elements have nonsystematic names (from Hydrogen to Oganesson), ununennium (element 119) and beyond still exist at least theoretically, but appear to be undiscoverable with our current technology as their predicted half-lives are all way too short.

Thanks, absolutely correct. According to calculations, it seems likely that element 126 (perhaps also 120) could represent the "island of stability", having longer half-lives than one would expect (so perhaps milli- instead of nano-seconds), but as of now, they have not been discovered.

Element 126 would likely destroy the beauty of the current periodic table completely as another larger row for "superactinides" would have to be added (g-electrons and such stuff, but highly hypothetical).

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Oxygen! Extremely reactive and combustible, lots of energy, giver of life, and taking it into your lungs feels good as hell.

[Santander]

I would be remiss if, as a libertarian, I didn't say gold lead.

[Crumpets]

Francium - Alkalai metals are fun and the more dangerous, the more fun.

Roentgenium - I just like to wonder what an element that's below copper, silver, and gold on the periodic table would be like if it could be made in large quantities but was still super radioactive. I can imagine some good parables being written about misers who died because they weren't willing to spend their riches.

Unbihexium - Oh yes, eka-plutonium is happening people.