Alternatives to Gold?

Image taken from Wikipedia article about Maslow's hierarchy of needs

The phrase "gold bubble" returns over 41 million hits on Google. There are websites, blogs, articles, analyses, videos and whatever devoted to covering the big question whether Gold is in a bubble or not. If it is, when will this bubble pop, and if it is not then how high can its price possibly go? Clearly it is a topic of great importance to very many people and not what I'd like to write about here. This post is about the role Gold is playing and why do we really need it, or do we really need it?
Looking at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, arranged as a pyramid (above), it is obvious that Gold plays no role in satisfying any of our fundamental needs, whether the most basic ones or the higher aims. We can not breathe Gold, we can not eat it, and we can not drink it. Despite being perceived as sexy, Gold can not satisfy us sexually. It can not keep us warm, and it can not aid us in excretion. Nor can it provide us with any of the higher levels of needs such as Safety, Love and belonging, Esteem, or Self-actualization. All we can conclude from this is that Gold is completely useless in the context of satisfying our needs.
Or is it?
It's also clear that Gold, obviously behaving as medium of exchange and storage of wealth as of late again, gives us the opportunity to purchase any of these items; we can use Gold to satisfy our needs indirectly. When the world changes as it always does, Gold is supposed to maintain its value, enabling us to sustain ourselves in the future.
When changes around us are caused by scarcity of resources (Peak Oil, rare earths), weather patterns (Global Warming), or economy (credit bubble, unemployment), Gold, by maintaining its value, will help us overcome the difficult times.
But, again, what we really need is not Gold but the meeting of our needs as defined by Maslow's pyramid above. If there were other a ways to secure the resources to meeting our needs, Gold would have no particular value.
The alternatives to Gold, as can be concluded from this logic, are housing structures located away from harm's way such as flooding, and constructed to withstand adverse weather such as tornadoes. One of Gold's alternatives is also domestic, localized food production that would not rely on external factors such as fuel for transportation or cheap labor from Mexico. Another alternative to Gold would be durable clothing that does not wear quickly or shoes that last many years of usage.
There are many alternatives to Gold if we stop viewing it as a speculative commodity and start viewing it as a storage of wealth and medium of exchange. And when we start doing that we realize that the real alternatives to Gold are embedded into lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.