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Supplies of Rare Earth Elements Exhausted By 2017
tomhudson writes "While we bemoan the current oil crisis, I ran across an editorial that led me to research a more immediate threat. Ramped-up production of flat-panel displays means the material to make them will be 'extinct' by 2017. This goes for other electronics as well. Quoting: 'The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany's University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.' More links at the journal entry."
We're a bit stuffed then, whilst zinc is a nice-to-have with electronic stuff, its reasonably important for the well being of humans. Is the story scaremongering, or are we all doomed?
How many of this stuff can be recovered by recycling? In the EU, companies now have to recycle old electronic equipment, which will surely extend the availability of these materials.
is by far the most serious in the above list. Ok, so flat panel manufacturers and researchers would have to pay top dollar, no biggie. But copper is going to get more and more crucial as the combined crunch of oil shortage and increased electrical demands are going to combine.
MP3 Search Engine
This is completely wrong things recycle their selves over time. Thats how are Earth seems to work. Im just clearing this up but didnt they also say the world would end by 2012 any way =p
When an LCD display breaksdown, they won't be able to crush them into tiny bits, smelt them and recover the material? All it means is your 50" LCD monitor will have some significant residual value and you will sell the dead monitor for some money instead of throwing it in the dumpster.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It would be mighty surprising if this chicken-little themed story was correct.
Most things when in short supply, their price goes up. People notice this and they either cut back on their use of the stuff, find a substitute, or go out digging for it.
We do have a terrible shortage of celluloid shirt collars, ivory piano keys, whale oil and pyramid shims. Who cares?
We're doomed...
Guess what, humans are using up precious resources in their inventive quest for more tools/toys/and other environmental "improvements". No sh*t we are going to run out of some of the more unique elements. But as usual, when something gets scarce, it gets expensive and we find other materials as a substitute.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
We still haven't even begun to use our Upsidasium supply.
Surely it will last us forever.
I just pooped your party.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling
*Tries to shoot self but fails due to gun not functioning without Zinc*
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Had the transistor not come along, doubtless by now the computer industry would have run out of the molybdenum for vacuum tubes.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Though the point of the article is well taken, I think worrying about copper is unnecessary. As we replace copper wire with glass fiber, that will free up lots of the stuff.
NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! Come back, zinc, come back!
*Whew*, it was just a dream. Thank goodness I still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns [*bang*!] and many things made of zinc.
Apparently Gallium isn't a Rare Earth Element.
Actually, neither is Hafnium, Indium, Zinc or Copper. Does the article have any connection to the rare earth elements at all?
The sun will forge some more and send it off through the void... Oh, wait, we're impatient and hardly recycle what we've already used.
Looks like asteroid mining is about to take off.
Of course someone is about to shoot me down for this as I don't know the concentrations of gallium, Indium and other metals in the average asteroid.
The article states Indium is used in LCD displays, but would it also be used in LED displays?
Something tells me that "the world's supply" of these elements isn't actually going down. Unless Ye Olde Alchemical Procefes (sorry, Mr. Stephenson) are actually transmuting, say, indium, into gold... it's just a question of where the elements are. Which is to say that I'm sure there's lots of it sitting right there in landfills, probably easier to get to than it is when bound up in 100 tons of rock and dirt in a mine. I mean, we didn't ship THAT much of the stuff to Mars yet, did we?
Or, if the point is that all of these elements are bound up in in-use devices, and always will be, then that's another matter. But I'd be a bit surprised to find that we've actually touched even close to all of the deposits available. Just the cheap ones. And recycling will probably be cheaper than, say, mining it on the moon or the ocean floor.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
First of all, the "rare earths" are not all thst rare.
Secondly, none of the elements mentioned in the sd story are in any way even near to being a rare earth, i.e. an element in that row of the periodic table.
And of course it's unlikely we will "run out" of anything, or that it will matter. Things seem to turn up when the price goes up, or we find substitutes.
Otherwise, the story was okay.
mining our landfills will begin...
;)
It was going to have to happen eventually. One thing i've always thought to myself is, that if the earth is here 50,000 years from now and some cognitive being starts exploring, everything will be told in our landfills... They may not be able to know what we did at this time, but they will know the materials we used - at least Styrofoam
How exactly are these elements "used up"? Yes, they might be more expensive to recover, but it's not like they're exhausted by their use. Unless we're shooting them into space, or changing them via nuclear fusion/fission, the elements aren't gone. You know, matter cannot be created or destroyed and all that? I'm no chemist, but as far as I learned chem in high school and college, we still haven't found a chemical way to transform one element into another element (alchemy?).
So basically what is really going to happen is these rare elements are going to get much more expensive because they will have to be recovered from what we're using them for. That's not great, but it's not "element extinction".
Buried as inaccurate.. oh wait Slashdot.
Every few weeks we have to endure this kind of drivel. Doom and gloom to sell news, get grant dollars, whatever. Last week's scare mongering wearing thing? Just trot out the latest manbearpig. In cases such as this, past performance IS a pretty good indicator of the future. We, mankind, make improvements, overcome shortfalls, etc. OLEDs will surpass LCDs in price/performance. Then the next. And the next. And so on. I'm damn sick of the media (ALL of the media be it online, print, radio, conservative, liberal, "Fair and Balanced", whatever) basing 95% of their reporting on sensationalism to pump up non-news.
At some point and it seems that point is soon, we are going to have to crack open all those old landfills. Think of how much has been tossed in there before we really started to pay attention to reuse.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Sounds like it's about time to invest more money into molecular nanotechnology. It's still decades off, but most resources on this planet won't last forever. It's never too early to start planning for the future.
One has to wonder how many of the world's problems could be solved if we'd just invest the money for the Iraq war into R&D instead. The research will still take time, but at least it'll get done.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Everyone relax, we can mine the stuff from our own landfills.
stuff |
All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc.
We are of course not shooting our rare Earth elements into space, they won't be gone, they will be sitting in waste dumps in China and elsewhere.
Maybe the headline should have been "We will be mining landfills by 2017 for Rare Earths."
A frew decades ago the supply of copper seemed to run out. This resulted in a large hike in copper prices that made the copper in AT&T's wires in the US more valueble than the stocks of the entire company. Then a bunch of people opened new copper mines that extracted copper ore that was not profitable to extract at the earlier lower price.
Then the price fell again, but to a higher level than it was before.
This is what happens with all kinds of raw materials. The price goes up, but the supply doesn't try out.
Oil has the same tendency, the oil that they have started digging now is much more expensive to get out of the ground than the 20$ a barrel they used to dig out a few years ago. (Ofcause the oil fields that were profitable at 20$ a barrel are now astronomically profitable at 130$ a barrel!)
The elements are not "destroyed" by being put into electronics — or anything else, that does not leave the planet. They don't disappear from Earth.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This sounds like a sensationalist story. There's a difference between "uneconomical" and "unavailable". Didn't people think we were going to run out of oil by now? The difference is that you can't go dig a well with your pickax and shovel in your backyard anymore. You have to do deep water offshore drilling or extract it from oil sands. There is even coal liquefaction technology.
The shortage of metals is something that we will deal with in one way or another. Fiber optics replace copper for telecommunications, composites can replace metals in certain applications, and so forth. What we need to look at is when it is economically viable to make the switch. The free market is much more efficient than people give it credit for. It will do its job one way or another.
apparently the metal dealers, the guys whose livelyhood depends on knowing what's up with metals, they don't know that these elements are kaput.
a little googling shows that Hafnium you can buy on the internet, no sweat, at about $12 a gram. Many times cheaper than HP printer ink.
and without more Illudium how will we make moreQ-36 Explosive Space Modulators
Hey, great idea, let's get off this planet before we die of overpopulation, the moon is ripe to be mined, mars will do fine after some teraforming. Once April 2063 has passed, then we will have faster than light travel and we can colonize planets outside the solar system.
Hint: Most smelting processes are not perfect at extracting their goal and they leave behind "tailings". Some simple math will show when it's profitable to run the tailings again through the process. It's happened before and will likely happen again. No sweat, and no running out. Just higher prices for miniscule amounts of certain elements.
time to get off this rock, then you've been:
1) Under one
2) Drinking the wrong kind of Kool-Aid®
3) Convinced of your "Devine Right" of supremacy
4) Distracted by {pick one} American Gladiators / Britney / Lindsay / Paris / America's Got Talent
5) All of the above
Personally, I blame the politicians for squandering the lead we had in space, starting in the 1970's.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
You should be modded redundant because this is now the third time in this discussion I've had to tear down this ideological pop-economic BULLSHIT.
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand. The universe is indifferent to your over-applied, unfalsifiable theories. Applying your (almost certainly feeble) understanding of economics implies the universe responds like a rational actor, an idiotic notion that underpins most religion and superstition.
Sometimes 'cheaper alternatives' just don't exist. This is why your precious markets have never got to grips with spaceflight. The markets reaction has always been "Wait till it is cheaper" on the assumption that all technology gets cheaper - ignoring the fact that there is a physical constraint on what you must do to get into orbit. The required delta-V isn't going to change just because it would be financially efficient for it to do so.
If you are a true economist, then fuck off and play with your stock markets and leave actual science to actual scientists.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
What idiot editor let this subject get posted? Hasn't anyone taken an economics class:
Indium becomes scarce - price of indium rises - people recycle indium; people seek substitutes for indium - technological breakthrough allows substitution of dirt (well, ok, silicon) for indium - indium prices plummet; dirt prices rise - indium hoarders bemoan price drop, cannot give away their supplies.
Sheesh!
Do you want to lose your readers or what?
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Element 115 to the rescue!
Its been said you could pile up gold bricks on the moon and it would still be a huge loss bringing them back. This isn't going to change, unless you somehow think that the required delta-V is going to respond to market forces, and I've already had to tear some fool a new one for that.
Space will never be profitable, so to look to space we need to look beyond profit.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
It's not like these materials are gone. They just need to be extracted from the cell phones, laptops, etc that are being sent to landfill sites. As for copper, there's tons of in the old wiring of buildings. For example, the company I work for recently moved our servers and ran a bunch of new network cables. All the old ones are no longer being used, but they're still all there.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
...welcome our alchemist / mineral-importing-alien overlords.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Both sides should get a grip! While it is clear that economy does not magically conjure materials in demand it is merely a human made factor that creates incentives for use of not so easy to extract sources of the materials as well as research into possible alternative. TRue it is a human invention but so what, it works.
there's work underway to replace the light emitting components of flat panel displays with carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are much better conductors of electricity than copper. Graphene (flat carbon) could potentially replace silicon. the nanotubes are also incredibly strong, potentially replacing steel and concrete as a building material. Seeing as carbon is so good for making tubes, it could replace the entire internet AS WELL!!!!!!
prepare the survey weasels.
*mines veldspar*
So that's it then: we HAVE to go discover Rare Moon elements, Rare Mars elements, Rare Ganymede elements, ad infinitum...
It's all a cunning plan by NASA to stay employed!
(do I really NEED to put a '/sarc' after this?)
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
The real question isn't when we'll run out of oil (or other non-replenishable goods), but if we'll be forced to use horses and carts before we reach the point where the alternatives are preferable over oil.
Lets face it, we're just going to have to wait for us to be in some serious shit before anything significantly changes. Necessity might be the mother of invention, but despiration is the mother of success.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Inventiveness cannot conjure atoms from nothingness. Economics does not override physics, get used to that.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Assuming we have enough resources to create the solution when the market gets 'desperate' enough to register a serious problem at all.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I've been saying this for years. We'll be exploring landfills soon after they're no longer viable for producing methane gas. Meanwhile, states that refused to bury, and opted to dump their garbage elsewhere will be kicking themselves - hard.
Such "exhausted" landfills will be packed with little more than inorganic waste, like easily harvested metals. Point at anything on the periodic table and it'll exist in a landfill at concentrations far higher than what exists in ore deposits we're mining today; so this will be ridiculously profitable. Add to that the fact that they're all close to home, and you have yourself an industry that does a brisk business in mining landfills. And since all the stinky stuff has long since decomposed, you only have heavy-metals and toxic runoff to worry about (read: just like a normal mine).
After that, companies will look to cut out the middle man and buy back everyone's e-waste after the recycling plant has sorted it out. So the landfill will dissapear, leaving a closed loop from the recovery of raw materials all the way to the consumer and back again.
"SQL Error", you have the board. Pick a category.
Copper prices are now high enough that it's worth trying to steal. Here in Boston, at least once a month there's a story about someone killed trying to steal copper from power lines that turn out to be, y'know, active.
Construction sites now have to be locked up tightly. It's not just the tools that get stolen; it's the pipes and the wire spools.
I assume this will get worse as copper gets scarcer and, thus, more expensive.
The OP mentions plumbing, but I'm not sure that plastic is a viable alternative yet. I've built a few houses, and always used copper, at least for the main plumbing. I remember in the 1990s, the industry tried using PVC, but had problems of some kind, and went back to copper. Today, you can use PEX or Hep2O flexible tubing for heating, but I don't know if it's approved for drinking yet - and we probably don't know its long term stability. Copper is still the gold standard (sorry!) for plumbing.
(Side rant: When copper pipes freeze, you can use an arc welder to heat them back up. You can't do that with PEX, since it's plastic, not metal. So if it gets too cold, your heat stops working... which means the air can't warm up enough to melt the ice... shampoo, rinse, repeat. Make sure your PEX is in a well-insulated wall.)
Food is becoming extinct as well. We're starting to burn everything we grow.
Most of the stuff on
Maybe there are other sources for these materials, maybe not. But you can't just call "bullshit" on the idea that higher prices often result in greater availability.
No company is going to mine gallium at a loss, so as long as gallium prices are low enough to make mining from more difficult sources unprofitable, that gallium is essentially unavailable. Let the market raise the price as current gallium supplies deplete, and this new gallium source suddenly becomes worthwhile.
For all we know, there's 10,000 years' worth of gallium hidden a few miles deeper than our deepest mines, and the only reason we haven't started mining it is because it's currently too expensive to find it. Of course, maybe there's not, but we won't know until prices go up and speculators start looking for it.
I never implied that. However, economy can provide incentives for research into more efficient use, recycling and down the line substitute materials and technologies.
It's called the myth of sufficient plenty.
The thought that we can just keep on using more and more of something at an increasing rate and other countries can increase their rate of consumption without any problems because we can always dig up and refine more oil/copper/zinc/or whatever. Don't worry, there will always be gas in your pump, someone will find a new oil field.
People need to change. Consumers should be demanding 100+mpg cars, fully recycled products, whole life cycle design. Engineers and scientists need to step up and provide these solutions.
The glass is either half empty and we are all doomed or half full and we are just waiting for these great strides.
Ok, just getting your blood pressure going again:)
We'll simply invoke apt-get install Cu, Zn...
science, not ideology ;)
the world's supply of Illudium Phosdex holds out.
You know what they say about opinions. They're all fabulous!
First, gallium and indium are not rare earth elements. I don't know what the heck these guys are talking about. Second, there is plenty of gallium around-- it's found anywhere you can refine aluminum from. It's not usually recovered because it isn't economical to, but if it were in fact running out, it could be easily produced as a byproduct of aluminum production.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
From the wiki on Indium "...In 2002, the price was US$94 per kilogram. The recent changes in demand and supply have resulted in high and fluctuating prices of indium, which from 2005 to 2007 ranged from US$700/kg to US$1,000/kg...". It seems that the retirement fund has not increased by ten fold. So it is reasonable to stock some indium, galium or whatever resource. It is even a better investment than investing in gold.
There is no short supply of the atoms themselves. They are just diluted, too deep down, or stuck in existing stuff. Stuff that's slowly getting useless and would certainly be sold and mined if the process to do it was economical. Even asteroid mining becomes an economical issue -- if there really is no substitute, and all the methods I just described still do not work out, asteroid mining will take place.
Oceans cover 70 percent of Earth's surface. We have barely begun to tap the resources that lie on the bottom of the sea. The ocean beds are rich in countless minerals. About 20% is thought to be covered by manganese nodules, which can contain as much as 2.5% copper, 2% nickel, 0.2% cobalt and 35% manganese, as well as titanium, aluminium, potassium, molybdenum, lead, strontium and other substances. The greatest unexploited mineral resources on earth are on the deep-sea floor, including manganese nodules; cobalt-rich manganese crusts that contain nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese; and hydrothermal deposits that contain copper, lead, zinc, gold and silver. Deep-sea mineral resources are found in specific areas. Manganese nodules are half-buried in comparatively flat deep-sea sediment at a depth of 4,000-6,000 meters. Cobalt-rich manganese crusts cover the slope or top of seamounts like asphalt at a depth of 800-2,400 meters.
I believe that in the future we will routinely mine the ocean and it will become a huge industry. We will have great machines that will work around the clock mining the sea floor.
Well, I was a little concerned until I learned that this is the latest story by Robert Silveberg!
Duke Nukem Forever on Pascaline anyone?
This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
Why will space "never be profitable"?
Certainly with current technology it's not going to be profitable, but who knows what equipment we're going to have in the next twenty or thirty years?
Humanity will be reduced to roving tribes of barbarians!! Everyone MUST act now to reduce their Miley footprint!!11One!
We're a bit stuffed then, whilst zinc is a nice-to-have with electronic stuff, its reasonably important for the well being of humans. Is the story scaremongering, or are we all doomed?
You could, you know, RECYCLE zinc instead of burying it again with all your other trash.
You can't take the sky from me...
What are you banking on, fucking warp drive?
There is a cost associated with traveling between each point in the solar system. It isn't an economists sort of cost because it NEVER changes.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Once the prawn industry realizes that without the rare earth elements they won't be able to push Brazilian flatulence prawn on the 22" flat screen monitors it'll only take them a few minutes to come up with a solution. For that matter, tell them they can't take ANY more pictures of Japanese naked squid sumo girls until they find a way to produce cheap gas (not the B.F.P. kind) and the problem will be solved.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
ad infinitum
It's a good thing we have plenty of infinitum.
It looks like we will have enough to get through Dec 21, 2012. That's all we need.
In the realms of engineering there is often more than one way to do something so the economists get to believe in magic most of the time - but occassionally there is a problem and reality steps in to slap them in the face. Peak oil is a terrible example in this case because the entire point of oil is that it is a really cheap source of energy so when it gets a lot more expensive to produce economists will find they can no longer believe in the magic of another cheap energy source coming into being from nowhere.
You know cornflakes were originally designed to stop you wanking, don't you?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I guess we take all our minerals for granite.
It's about like running out of oil. It will never happen. However, supplies of easily accessible _______ estimated to run out in 2___. Fill in the blanks.
Market forces will force exploitation of near earth asteroids or recycling/landfill mining or exploring for new deposits.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
By the logic in this story, we've already run out of copper.
To oversimplify, today's copper mines are simply large industrial plants that take what is essentially ordinary earth and turn it into a small amount of copper and a large amount of ordinary earth.
Of course, these mines use earth that has more copper than ordinary earth: it is .06 percent copper rather than ordinary earth's .006 percent. Not a big difference! As the price goes up, the amount of copper that's profitable to extract also goes up. .006 percent isn't a lot. .006 percent * 6 * 10^24 kg is a lot. We're never going to run out of copper. Anybody who tries to tell you differently is a scare-mongerer.
The same story applies to pretty much any other mineral (zinc, for example), and probably applies to the trace minerals as well.
The same argument does not apply to oil, if it was produced by organic processes, as many believe.
This is a science story on a supposedly science aware discussion forum and yet a comment making a scientific (and bleedin' obvious) response to why economics doesn't govern the laws of physics gets modded flamebait.
I hope there are at least some moderators with basic knowledge who can remedy this.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Soylent Green is made of People!!!! They said they were going to change it, but they didn't! It's still people!!
It's embarrassing to have to throw the things in the trash because they're completely useless and (by law) can't be recycled. Usually, I just refuse them when I get them. But on the rare occasions when I end up with them, I would rather throw them in a recycle bin than the trash.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Maybe the headline should have been "We will be mining landfills by 2017 for Rare Earths."
I don't like my Earth Rare, I prefer it Well done. Tim S
There is an amount of energy required to travel between points in the solar system.
That isn't the same as the cost of that energy. I'm not expecting warp drive, but there is potential for massively cheaper energy production. Fusion still stands a (slim) chance of working, and solar power could make a lot of sense if panels that can produce enough energy can be created.
I'm willing to accept that going to space isn't going to be as cheap as sticking around on Earth, but at some point it may become cheaper then the alternatives available.
I'm not a rocket scientist, so I don't know enough about the technology to give you a roadmap as to how we'll get there, but I'm not going to sit back and say "we can't do it now, so we'll never be able to do it".
If everyone took that approach to things, we'd still be stuck in the stone age talking about how it's impossible to create heat with some sticks and dry leaves.
None of these elements are being destroyed, just shuffled about. Someday there may be quite a market for mining old landfills, or services that mine copper piping from houses and replace it with (bio-based) polymer piping. While an interesting article, I'm not too worried.
Actually.... we did.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The Belgian company Umicore specialises in this. They extract all the rare stuff. For some of it there is only one cubic meter available on the entire earth!
linky: link
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Did we run out? No. Did the price go up? Yes. And when it did increase, more people decided to go prospecting for more sources of the metal. The industry also developed alternatives to the small, red components - which is why they're less common on circuit boards today than on those from 20 years ago.
When someone says "we're running out of X", what they're really saying is "we're running out of cheap X". With the possible exception of Helium, there are and always will be millions to billions of tonnes of even the rarest commercial elements in the planet. The only thing that prevents their use is the price of extraction and/or processing.
I stand by my original points and do not think your abusive coments are helpful or credible.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Jimmy: Hey, what gives?
Jimmy's Dad: You said you wanted to live in a world without zinc, Jimmy. Well now your car has no battery.
Jimmy: But I promised Betty I'd pick her up by 6:00. I better give her a call.
Jimmy's Dad: Sorry Jimmy. Without zinc for the rotary mechanism, there are no telephones.
Jimmy: Dear God! What have I done?
(Jimmy pulls out a gun, points it to his head and fires)
Jimmy's Dad: Think again Jimmy. You see the firing pin in your gun was made out of, yep, zinc.
Jimmy: Come back zinc! Come Back!
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
so you HAVE had my wife's cooking!
Some people are like slinkys. They're useless, but it puts a smile on your face to push them down the stairs.
it's happening after 2012.
Balthorium, Thiotimoline, I hear those are in short supply too !
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity
Best to get info from people who get paid to generate it :-)
dave
We just ran out of the unobtainium for the space elevator.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
transition metals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_metal
I guess the post would not have been as exciting with the title "Supplies of Transition Metals Exhausted by 2017"
... it's becoming harder to mine. We actually send very little of this stuff off-world or use it in applications where it's bombarded with enough energy to make it fission. So, we've got lost of the stuff locked up in land-fills and on desktops -- but it's not gone. Sure, digging it up is getting substantially more expensive, but the reason that it's used is because it's economically feasible to do so. If that ceases to be the case, costs will go up and demand will decrease. We'll mine our garbage, etc. I'm not saying it'll be cheap, fun, or even ecologically sound... but the actually amount of the element available isn't changing (much) over time. It's just being moved about.
since it started to be known as x.org...
sorry.
I presume that a plastic (or other synthetic material) is right out because...?
Sounds like we could stop the zinc aspect of this right away, by just doing a more permanent coating over the ships.
We desperately need good manufacturing techniques for carbon fibre. With good techniques, just about everything we move around could be made with it, and energy costs would go down.
This ought to be as X-prize-worthy a topic as good solar or good batteries.
But how does it hold up to seawater? Will we need to coat the boats every year with something in short supply?
Obviously you don't have an iPhone, yet.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
What we burn is light oil.
Some more complexe plastics and compounds are made from heavy oils which will not be as easy to replace by biofuel than we may think.
When will half of the hafnium be gone? And what is the half-life of hafnium?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Although eventually we'll just need to build more ad infinitum siphons, too.
What's this? Another weblog? On transit?
The Atlantic can be traversed by a single person in a rowing boat, it's been done. Space isn't even comparable.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
We can just invade Cornwall!
I drank what? -- Socrates
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand. The universe is indifferent to your over-applied, unfalsifiable theories. Applying your (almost certainly feeble) understanding of economics implies the universe responds like a rational actor, an idiotic notion that underpins most religion and superstition.
Who the hell said it was? Economics governs the amounts of material and energy humans are able to utilize. Who gives a shit if we have 500 kilotons of iron ore sitting under a mountain. Much better that it is used. If our current life style and technical level isn't supported by the materials available on the earth we will scale back due to supply and demand. What is your alternative? The western world makes itself poor through government force and the developing countries are forced to stop developing just so we can have minerals sitting in the ground?
How will asteroid mining become economically viable when basic orbital spaceflight hasn't?
"Insufficient Vespane gas". Darn.
The coming global depletion of supplies of Illudium Phosdex, the shaving cream atom, makes me angry, very angry. Without it, we cannot manufacture the Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator and civilization will crash. Damn you, Al Gore.
Brazil has used methanol as fuel for about 20yrs now, and there is NO food shortage here. Actually, there is so much food here that we export it to USA, Europe, China... And this having the greatest number of cars using biofuel in the world.
Brazil has a rainforest shortage - the Amazon is on the verge of collapse.
This is allegedly done for grazing cattle, not for sugar. I don't believe it. I remember reading that Brazilian ethanol imports were increasing; where's it coming from?
Topsoil-based fuels are basically wrongheaded because as your energy consumption rises you need more acres of land which you would rather use for something else. "Green Revolution" architecture is horribly destructive to the land and the soil.
And what are they fertilizing with?
Anyway, you have an incredibly simplistic view of the situation. Although there is no "food shortage" in the US (you can walk into any supermarket and buy the necessities) we have shortages of corn and barley right now because we are making ethanol from them. The former has seriously harmed the average Mexican and the latter has driven up the price of beer. (Especially on top of the hops shortage.) Clearly you don't understand the concept of shortages. Incidentally, though, world food supplies are in trouble. Meat is doing pretty well, but plants are having problems all over. This last season's weather was troublesome all over the world. Year before last the grape vines on the front porch were just covered in grapes; this year it got warm early and the grapes leafed out and prepared to put on a big fruit set, then got frozen hard. This happened over much of the world, and it happened to the grape and nut crops this year in particular. Most vineyards around my area - did I mention that the next county to the south is Napa, and Mendocino is to the West? - aren't even going to bother to harvest anything this year. It's not worth the trouble.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The mix you will obtain from a LCD may means that it is not possible to mix hundredth of LCD together to automatically extract the rare metals by melting it while it is possible to do it with the ore found in some mines.
Also a ton of LCDs may contain much less of the valuable stuff than a ton of ore.
The reality of it is that as we run low on various elements, the price will go up due to factors of supply and demand. This will help drive efforts to find alternatives, reduce the amount needed, and where feasible, recover/recycle those elements. We will never actually run out, but it may simply become too expensive to build TV's out of. Then we'll have to find another way to do it. If there's enough need and the price is worth it, we might end up prospecting asteroids to get the minerals we need.
As for peak oil, we don't know if we've hit it yet because there's historically been an incentive for many oil producers to keep their reserve numbers a secret. We don't know if they've artificially inflated or deflated their numbers for a variety of reasons. Being at peak oil does not mean we aren't going to discover more oil. What it means is that in the future, the oil we discover will be harder to get to, harder to produce, and will not sufficiently replace all the easy to drill oil we have had in the past. It will become impossible to increase oil production and we'll see a decline that will lead to drastic price increases, a switch to alternatives, and overall a decline in demand for it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I have given this a lot of thought to this very issue over the last year.
I have recycled since 1967(boy scouts). Seem like the right thing. But China is now running around buying up mines of just about everything that they can ESP. the items that they have say 20-40% of world-wide reserves. After thinking about this, I think that we are making a number of mistakes.
1) We should not be sending items like disposed-of electronics to other nations. Instead, bury it in specially prepared dumps. Literally. Let nature work on getting rid of the carbon in there. This means that once an element is scarce, then we have readily available stockpiles of it.
2) Take an accounting of exactly what is trying to be cornered by any country. In particular, note when a country is attempting to buy old mines that no longer appear to have large seams in it. Good chance that they know something about the mineral AND is looking to control something in the future.
3) spend some money on recycling tech. It is what we will need to cheaply and efficiently go back to our old dumps and pull out elements from them. 4) Consider turning our recent dumps (esp. from the 70's, 80's, and 90s), from an EPA site, to a national reserve.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Honestly, Couple other posters have it right, it isn't that these elements are going away, its that the current mines will be played out. That doesn't mean that these are the only mines though. There are lots of untapped areas of the world where these stocks exist. During the 19th century, there were lots of mineral mines within 100 miles of my home. One small town was famous as a copper mining town. So famous they named the town for it, Cuprum. If you visit the area there is still lots of copper ore around. There were also Zinc, Gold, Silver, and Mercury mines in the area. With modern technology, most of these mines are not played out. When prices go up high enough, mining companies will move back to these areas. Guaranteed. Locals will tell you that periodically the mining companies will send assay teams into these areas frequently enough to keep their claims alive.
So...
Demand just creates supply then doesn't it. It's just like selling smarties - we'll have ever more copper forever!
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It should be noted that in 10 years, cities and towns with old landfills will be sitting on some of the most resource rich pieces of land. The "mining rights" should be worth a fortune.
Gold, silver, copper, zinc, iron, hydrocarbon plastic, etc. all in abundance. Scoop it up, melt it down. Once the biological components that produce methane are depleted, then you mine for the elements.
W. has been killing our dollar in the international world. Now, all of our coins are worth more as metal, than as money. Sad.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
CU is in trouble. Economists, not scientists, keep saying that within a decade, all KNOWN supplies of major copper reserves will be used. In part, it is because we are about to move to huge electrical system throughout BRIC and they want similar amenities to the west. Add in changing ICE to electrical (it will be happening over the next 5 years), and yes, you are looking at MAJOR reserves being gone.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
They probably have lots of rare substanes, but to to expensive to recycle instead of mine. "future" could be less than century.
Come back Zinc! Come back!
If we run out of Rare Earth elements, how about mining asteroids? We would have to, and this would act as a huge stimulus to space exploration and technology. Mining Mars, which had many of the same hydrological processes that created ore deposits, would also be possible. We could build a space elevator on Mars much more easily than on Earth. This would make the export of materials from Mars to Earth very inexpensive. If we made the space elevator longer than Mars synchronous orbit, no rocket launch is needed at all, only a small correction burn. We could simply fling it off the end.
http://www.affordablespaceflight.com/spaceelevator.html - search for "Mars Space Elevator"
We are not about to run out of anything. That isn't how mining works. Useful elements are found in deposits of varying quality and accessibility. Only those which it would be profitable to mine are counted as ore. As we exhaust the highest quality and most accessible ones the price of the material rises and it becomes profitible to mine lower quality deposits that did not qualify as ore at lower prices. Thus total reserves of an ore are not fixed but instead vary with price. Given high enough prices you can profitably recover any element from sea water.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Rhodium already went from $200 to $10,000 an ounce. Same thing might be happening there.
Much as I like the prospects of biofuels I am afraid to say that using Brazil as an example is not particularly relevant. The fuel consumption of Brazil does not compare to that consumed by the US or Europe. You have enough resources for food and fuel now, you may do so for the rest of eternity, that doesn't mean that it is a viable proposition anywhere else. I can't remember where I read it, but the fuel consumption per capita in Brazil is about 11% of that in the US. source: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con_percap-energy-oil-consumption-per-capita So essentially if you have 10x as much food as you need then maybe you are onto something, otherwise the problem still stands.
It is not at all reasonable or economically feasible to try to mine metals of the moon or other bodies. I mean, come on, this is a desperate delusion. We can barely get a shuttle off the ground at enormous expense. Rockets are outrageously expensive. And with the coming shortages of all metals and oil, and energy, where are the massive resources that you would need to launch all of these space craft going to come from.
1. Buy cheap land.
2. Create a landfill and make people pay you for dumping their waste there.
3. Profit (for the first time)!
4. Wait until it's profitable to mine your landfill for rare elements.
5. Open a mining operation and have people pay you for things you extract from their waste.
6. Profit (for the second time)!
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Oh yeah? Well then how do you explain wholenium getting renamed to three-quartersium, then two-thirdsium, and now hafnium?
It's running out, I tells ya! Run for the hills!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I'm offended by the idea of paying extra for the privilege of doing extra work to sort my trash. If it's not cost effective to recycle, there's not much point in it. Better to just pile everything up and mine the pile later when it IS cost effective.
I am however, perfectly willing to segregate my trash. Just don't make it difficult, or charge me more for it. And don't ask me to drive halfway across a state to dispose of household hazardous waste like CFLs.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
We're talking about depletion of elements here. Elements don't go away short of nuclear reactions and radioactive decay. Just about* all of the Zinc we've ever mined is still on the planet. And I'll bet a LOT of all the rare earth elements ever pulled out of the ground are sitting in landfills. Mine those. Recover the useful elements, continue. Just delayed recycling, really. It may not be cost effective to do so now, but it will be once the easier ways of acquiring needed materials dry up.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
You should be modded redundant because this is now the third time in this discussion I've had to tear down this ideological pop-economic BULLSHIT.
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand.
Wow. Not only were you immature and obnoxious about it, but you also argued against something he didn't say. (He said the increasing costs would increase access to materials that already exist, not that increased demand would magically make more materials.)
Even if you're right about no additional materials becoming available, you still came off as a total jerk. Not to mention that saying things like "almost certainly feeble", and baseless things like "implies the universe responds like a rational actor," implies (in the former case), and proves (in the latter case, since you're putting words into the parent's post to bridge your logical chasm) that you're a complete idiot.
While the landfills and muni waste streams contain copious raw materials, the processors aren't geared to use that stream as an input. They've invested billions into the current infrastructure - mined ore, crude oil, raw lumber, etc. Changing to a different feedstock, regardless of how "better" or "more efficient" it may be, requires a huge expenditure of cash. The economists call that "front loading," in that all your expenses are paid up front, as opposed to sticking with the current infrastructure, which is much more profitable in the short term.
Everyone these days is playing the short-term strategy, so you get short-sighted responses. Shouldn't be much of a surprise. One of the functions of a government is to force a policy that a free-market won't readily adopt. I'd love to see the poultry farmers on Maryland's Eastern Shore be required to supply their excess of liqui-poo to a municipal thermal depolymerization plant, instead of polluting the Chesapeake Bay with the runoff. It ain't happening without a shove, in spite of the feedstock being a high-energy-density, easily processed material.
Funny and stupid. All of these elements could be extracted from e-waste if anyone ever thought about it. Soon we'll be mining the landfills. Mark my words. http://www.tv.com/the-simpsons/bart-the-lover/episode/1336/summary.html
ETHANOL..Alcol is made from sugar cane which Brazil has plenty of due to climate. Ethanol from Sugar Cane is much cheaper to produce than the corn-based version made in the USA. The only reason Ethanol is "popular" in the USA is the farming lobby and the enviro-radicals. Using corn for ethaonol production is driving the price of food for animals higher thus driving food prices higher. By the time you calculate the energy needed to grow the corn (which needs high nitrogen fertlizer, fungicides and pesticides made from petrochemicals) and refine it into ethanol is is enegy NEGATIVE. We'd be wiser to import it from Brazil. Also, due to demand for corn for Ethanol animal growers have switched to other grains driving those prices up and the surplus which we used to export or give away to starving countries has dissapeared. It's a very bad cycle to be in but unless we get smart and start producing more oil domestically, or start burning coal in our cars we are heading for a crash and burn energy wise in 20 yrs.
Another article designed to spread fear and paranoia. Someone must own stock in big pharma.
PEX has been used outside the USA for decades before the USA developed wide spread acceptance for radiant heating (which also was around for decades before the USA woke up to it.)
Its made from one of the few plastics left nobody has found problems (polyethylene) which has been around a long time.
PEX doesn't get messed up by freezing like copper does-- you shouldn't be freezing any pipes; if you need to be able to heat frozen pipes then something is wrong with the design.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It is not at all reasonable or economically feasible to try to mine metals of the moon or other bodies. I mean, come on, this is a desperate delusion. We can barely get a shuttle off the ground at enormous expense.
Wouldn't it be more fair to say that it's not reasonable or economically feasible to mine metals off the moon today? It seems pretty pessimistic to assume that we won't be able to do it tomorrow, necessity being the mother of invention and all that....
As an off-topic aside, bravo on your signature. That's a hard cause to fight for given the amount of misinformed people out there. I admire you for taking up that effort.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Well then you should get rid of the WMDs that our sources say you're building. We can't have the proof that you're building them be a mushroom cloud, so we'll be right over to check things out.
*speaking to the troops* Guard the mines boys, while our weapons inspector, led by Mark Fuhrman, plant^Wsearch for "inappropriate" materials.
It's not looking good here in the Midwest, either. About 80% of the counties here in Iowa have been declared disaster areas due to the floods. Driving around the state, I can tell you firsthand that the damage to this years corn and soybean crops has been absolutely devastating. I've seen many, many acres of land that are still under water, and it's now too late in the year to plant.
On top of that, the heavy rains this spring that caused the flooding kept farmers out of the fields, so a large portion of the crops that did get planted, got planted late and won't yield nearly the bushels/acre that they normally do.
Then you have the fuel prices for running the farm machinery and trucks to transport the crops....
Let's just say that this is going to be a very, very bad year for anyone who depends on cheap corn.
Probably.
I thought the idea of the industrial revolution was to free us from the daily grind, and let us lead lives of relaxation and plenty. Yet every day, millions of computer owning people get in a car, by themselves, drive for an hour or 2, then sit in front of a different computer for 8 hours before going back home.
Er hello ? WTF is the internet for ? But you dare to remove peoples *right* to be fucking stupid about something (cars) and see what happens to you. Food, raw materials and finished products have to travel by road to get anywhere and without those, it makes all what YOU do, pretty pointless.
Yet the childish obsession with cars is getting in the way of running an efficient economy. And the amount of new sections of crash barrier I get to see in a week is ridiculous. Which is all payed for by everybody else, overtime, night shifts, 30 or 40 men and 5 vehicles, all for a 6 foot piece of steel that was surely big enough to see.
</rant>
Jimmy: Hey, what gives?
Jimmy's Dad: You said you wanted to live in a world without zinc Jimmy. Well now your car has no battery.
Jimmy: But I promised Betty I'd pick her up by 6:00. I better give her a call.
Jimmy's Dad: Sorry Jimmy. Without zinc for the rotary mechanism, there are no telephones.
Jimmy: Dear God! What have I done? (Jimmy pulls out a gun and points it to his head and fires)
Jimmy's Dad: Think again Jimmy. You see the firing pin in your gun was made out of, yep, zinc.
Jimmy: Come back zinc, come back!!
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
You might find this interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLRuGUPkyh4
it's the third time, because it's often proven to be true. It is true that the universe is finite. It is true that our technological ability to get at resources is also limited. The difference here is that the argument is that we are not at the limit yet. There have been many people in the last 100 years that have said we have X years left of this or that resource, and they have been proven wrong.
We don't know the quantity, distribution, and location of every mineral on this planet. In light of that, it stands to reason to have hope that we may find new sources of ones we need.
After reading several of your comments today on this subject, it sounds like your biggest problem is a negative attitude and an ignorance of history. Trees were running out for fuel, so people started using more coal. Whale oil became scarce, and people found petroleum. Generally, people do tend to find alternatives or new replacements. It's not new pop-economic garbage, but fact. It is also true that we do run out of stuff, but then we do without and adapt. Humans are wonderfully able to do that. Ultimately, though, you need to remember that an angry attack will never convince anyone of your opinion. You'll only convince them to attack you back; something I'm sure you'll want to do to me now.
- Mike
Once you've lost your temper, you've lost the argument - Me
Personally, I blame the politicians for squandering the lead we had in space, starting in the 1970's.
Why ? how much lead did they send up ? Is it still in orbit ?
This is allegedly done for grazing cattle, not for sugar. I don't believe it. I remember reading that Brazilian ethanol imports were increasing; where's it coming from?
Although I generally agree with your points, let's just clarify there's no relation between sugar cane plantation (ethanol production) and amazon deforestation in Brazil.
Simply because there was other tropical forest ("Mata Atlantica", in portuguese) where sugar cane is grow now. This forest has been decimated a long long time ago (there's small drops of it, at a place or two, but it's mostly gone). That's not good, but mostly happened at colonial times (1500/1600) when people were looking for Brazil Wood - hence the country name.
Sugar is grown in Southwestern and Northwestern states, none in the Amazon ecosystem.
Brazil is just a big place.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Theoretically, the energy to get to the Moon is a one-time energy expense, assuming it is possible to set up a self-sustaining colony there. That would mean that the extra energy cost to mine metals there would be the energy required to escape from the Moon's gravity well, which is a lot smaller than that of escaping from the Earth. In addition, since the Moon lacks atmosphere, you don't have to be in a big hurry to generate all that energy all at once. It might be sufficient to use energy collected from the Sun over a relatively long period of time.
I do not mean to say that you aren't right that this will not be a reality for quite a while, if ever. It would require a self-sustaining Moon colony with advanced manufacturing capabilities.
spend some money on recycling tech.
I think you've just hit the very reason wy it hasn't been done: Too few people want to make the effort, and no one wants to foot the bill.
As you say, separating kinds of trash before burying it would be a great investment for the future, but making an effort or spending money now for something that will be beneficial in the future doesn't get anyone elected. Promises to give you tax refunds checks NOW gets votes.
You can't take the sky from me...
OMG the sky is falling...
What were we doing for the first 10,000 years of prehistory before the invention of the steel-hulled boat?
Recycling is just part of the radical agenda to destroy America by making us drive smaller cars, which means smaller families which mean birth control which means the End of Christianity. I saw it on Fox News
What about near-earth asteroids? If I found a large, metallic asteroid made of, say, 50% nickel, I would just have to steer it into Greenland or some other uninhabited place. Sure, it's packing a few megatons of kinetic energy, but metallic asteroids often survive reentry. With a couple billion pounds of nickel at my disposal (and with nickel at over $10 a pound), I could probably recoup my costs if I was smart enough in designing the craft and was good enough with orbital mechanics to only need a small amount of fuel. And that's with today's level of technology.
Obviously this would be a lot easier if you were to find a (smaller) asteroid made up of platinum, gold, or something else.
There is a rampant misunderstanding of the free market and its ability to use substitutes and alternatives as prices rise. Even here on slashdot, where people should know better.
Gallium is a by-product of bauxite refining, so there's no fundamental shortage. But only a small percentage of the world's bauxite production is run through a process for gallium extraction.
A very real problem is that the extraction of many of the rarer minerals is energy-intensive. Huge amounts of raw materials have to be processed to get small amounts of gallium, indium, or zirconium. With low energy prices, this isn't so bad, but as energy prices go up, so do the prices of the harder-to-extract raw materials.
Human civilization is about 5000 years old. Industrial civilization is only about 200 years old. Most of the easy to extract ores were mined out decades ago. There aren't enough extractable minerals to keep it going another 200 years.
We haven't had a new, big energy source in 50 years now. It's been 50 years since the first commercial power reactor sold its first kilowatt hour. There's nothing promising on the horizon, either. Expecting energy-intensive extraction methods to solve the minerals problem isn't a promising direction.
COST IS THE #1 PROBLEM.
The economy of the world is built around low costs from exploiting natural conditions not the future man-made situation.
Metals are not used in pure form that often!!
Take an easy element like COPPER:
1) Collect and clean (Copper pipe,etc)
2) Embedded removal (wire or circuit boards,etc) + step 1
3) Copper plating (pennies,etc) + #1 + #2
4) Metal alloys (brass,etc) + #1 + #2
5) Chemicals + #1 + #2
(hundreds of chemicals) X (hundreds of collection situations)
-
The "market" is not going to produce perpetual motion.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You have that worded wrong. Allow me to assist you;
"One of the misuses of government is to try and enforce policies that the free market won't readily adopt due to lack of profitability or practicality. See: Ethanol mandates."
There. That's better.
You see, all Government manages to do when it gets involved in things like this is muck things up, slow things down, and prevent people from actually fixing the issues in question. Government is a big, slow, stupid behemoth that stomps on all the people it is supposedly trying to help. Getting the government involved is a recipe for failure. Government is NEVER the answer.
The Market, on the other hand, is quick, nimble, and a genius. It fixed problems quickly and profitably, and is able to sustain mankind down the road. Letting market forces loose on any problem ASSURES that it will be fixed, often in much less time and at much higher quality than originally expected. The Market is ALWAYS the answer.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Shame about Unobtainium, I can't seem to get it anywhere.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Just like most universal statements, its implied the audience gets the point without taking it literally. It comes down to intent of the author really... and the level of false reasoning of the audience.
MOST people should realize that using up ZINC means that you are using up the ready supply of the stuff. I take this stuff assuming the obvious premises and view your objection as being argumentative. I thought the old "matter can not be created or destroyed" was common knowledge?
Yes, I probably give sheeple too much credit.
Cheap sources will be extinct; eventually all alternatives will be as well. The world will have to adapt to sustainable economic models eventually as raw materials go extinct.
Turning Pb into Au is cost prohibitive.
-
The "market" is not going to produce perpetual motion.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Before accepting the argument that we are imminently running out of a whole slew of elements, it would be nice to see a reasonably solid case presented for even one of them.
Looking around for a source that actually makes a case for running out of any of these elements what I came up with are references to New Scientist articles that do nothing of the sort: http://www.idtechex.com/products/en/articles/00000591.asp
and
http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/027ns_005.htm
To the extent that this is even addressed, the articles make appeals to uncertainty - production figures are lacking and good estimates of reserves don't exist - then offer specific dates for running out, alluding to the USGS as providing the data used to make these claims. No explanation of how any of the calculations were done, nor an enumeration of the assumptions regarding supply on which they were based.
So lets pick one of the elements deemed most at risk, gallium say, nearly all of which is used in GaAs electronics.
Actually reading the relevant USGA report: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/gallium/mcs-2008-galli.pdf and also consulting this industry paper (gallium is discussed near the end): http://www.indium.com/_dynamo/download.php?docid=552
we learn the following.
So: if extraction rates can rise to 10% then the world supply is really 100,000 tons. About a 1000 year supply at current usage rates. If we suppose that higher prices and more advanced technology can increase the extraction efficiency beyond this, then the supply is correspondingly increased.
Now there might be an impending imbalance in supply and demand if the total extraction rate by the aluminum industry is too low to match demand in the future. But this is quite different from "running out". Better extraction and more efficient use of gallium could redress it (both natural results of higher prices), and new technologies might largely supplant GaAs with superior products (quantum dot lasers, organic solar cells, anyone?). At some point recycling might take over as the principal supply (one of the reasons that iron production has flattened).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
You know cornflakes were originally designed to stop you wanking, don't you?
Doesn't work -- I want my money back!
Most biofuel proponents are agricultural giants trying to increase demand for their product. They tend to sweettalk a lot of 'greens' though, which is clever of them.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Wouldn't it be more fair to say that it's not reasonable or economically feasible to mine metals off the moon today? It seems pretty pessimistic to assume that we won't be able to do it tomorrow, necessity being the mother of invention and all that...
It's pretty safe to assume it won't be feasible tomorrow either, with the approaching holiday and all that. Check back next week.
Did you just use the costs of getting something up off the ground to claim that dropping something down to the ground would be too expensive? Semms to me that launch costs would be needed upfront to establish space-based industry, true. But once done, launch costs would have to little to do with the per ton cost of extracting and returning rare and valuable metals.
It's like saying that because it costs a fortune upfront to dig a diamond mine, the diamonds will be too expensive, irregardless of how many there are or how cheap it is to get them back to the world. Quite wrong, because those other two things really do affect the bottom line.
Dyolf Knip
Although eventually we'll just need to build more ad infinitum siphons, too.
As long as we can make them out of infinitum, we should be in good shape...
But you can't just call "bullshit" on the idea that higher prices often result in greater availability.
But we can call bullshit on the idea that higher prices always result in greater availability.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Agriculture is not feasible on the Amazon soil, period. It's just too shallow and to poor of nutrients.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Google "Julian Simon wager". Very on topic.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
And you should be moidded redundant because this is the third time you've made the same fallacy in your responses.
The supply of a good means that which is available. You know, available for use. Which is what is of concern to those who use that good as a raw material.
Economics determines how much of a commodity is produced. Economics therefore determines the supply of these commodities. Yes, there may be absolute limits based upon how much of a rare element is accessible to us... but the cost of extraction and the demand for the element will determine how much is produced. Which determines what the market supply of that element is.
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. Go ahead and choose to remain ignorant of economics, and then you can come crying when you can't get commodity goods (such as rare elements) for your "actual science". Go ahead and ignore the implications when you can't get funding for your "actual science" because costs have gone up, because no one invested in refining infrastructure because no one paid attention to the economists who predicted demand growth and supply stagnation.
So you know what, maybe I will go play with stock markets and trade in some commodities. And when you have no $RAREELEMENT, you can pay out the nose because you chose to ignore the actual science of economics.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I was right all along! You owe me 5 bucks, John Locke!
Sincerely,
Thomas Malthus
Indeed. Also, getting stuff TO the moon is a lot harder than getting stuff back, once the infrastructure is in place. Unfortunately, that infrastructure represents a HUGE capital cost, and there is some question over whether it could ever be paid back.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
FYI, the "enviro-radicals" tend to hate corn ethanol. It's mainly the farmers who love the stuff.
"That's Nietzsche. He killed my father." -- Jesus, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
raise the price and dig deeper.
We just need more powerful digging technology.
Also, there are probably economically viable concentrations of these metals in our garbage dumps.
1% copper is economically recoverable from rock. I wonder what the concentration is in a land-fill...
I'm still waiting for the oil to run out like my third grade teacher in 1975 promised would happen by the year 1990.
...we could bring those materials from asteroids, or other planets!
Now can all the space program deniers admit that space is very important and that we should go there?
I hope there's sarcasm in there ...
..." i.e. "that's what it's supposed to do." Implementation is somewhat less ... exact.
The Market dictates that you always adopt the lowest-cost model of operation. Dumping your toxic manufacturing byproduct into the local water supply is much cheaper than processing it (ref: Love Canal.) We have common property - water, air, etc. Strict market adherence leads to the Tragedy of the Commons. Government forces are intended to provide a counterpressure where The Market leads us to very undesirable places.
The Ethanol Mandate is pandering to the corn lobby, and results from corruption in the government. Not a good example. Note also that I said "One of the functions of a government
Wrong - to a degree:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
(no one knows how to make it)
Terra preta soils are of pre-Columbian nature and were created by man between 7000 BP[3] and 500 BP ("Before Present"). The soil's depth can reach 2 metres (6 feet). Thousands of years after its creation it is reputedly known as self-regenerating at the rate of 1 centimetre per year[4] by the local farmers and caboclos in Brazil's Amazonian basin, and they seek it out for use and for sale as valuable compost (see Pedology).
meh
True. Not even the Fast Money crowd, notorious for not caring what they invest in so long as it makes money, hates the whole idea of corn ethanol.
Stop treating economics like its a theory of everything. Stop treating it like it is theory at all in fact, because it has as much in common with real science as reading tea leaves does.
That's really inaccurate. While there are lots of people who call various human sociological/political theories "economics", that doesn't invalidate the economic principles based on science and math.
In particular, this story is about one of the most solid economic principles of all: Supply and demand. As demand increases relative to supply, price goes up. That is basically built directly on top the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy, AKA the First Law of Thermodynamics. Matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Or, to use the colloguial version, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." It's probably the most fundamental principle in the physical sciences, and it leads directly to the dynamics of supply and demand. So comparing it to "reading tea leaves" is like... well, it's like calling sociological theories "economics".
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
You should be modded redundant because this is now the third time in this discussion I've had to tear down this ideological pop-economic BULLSHIT.
Wow. You know, I wish I could just say the same to someone like yourself who appears (perhaps you only appear but don't actually) to hold a view that the world is coming to an end. THAT view is irrational. You don't see the Chinese or the Indians sitting around wringing their hands over these issues...But Westerners have wasted a lot of time and energy doing just that.
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand. The universe is indifferent to your over-applied, unfalsifiable theories. Applying your (almost certainly feeble) understanding of economics implies the universe responds like a rational actor, an idiotic notion that underpins most religion and superstition.
You are correct, sir, when you say that the market doesn't govern the physical universe. The markets do, however, affect human behavior and psychology. Which, if you treat a market as a tool, is it's purpose -- it highlights when a given resource is short and manages demand for it. (Not the supply of it.) That's not suggesting that the universe is a rational actor. It's suggesting that institutions that manage billions of dollars (or pounds or yuan) behave, over time, in a rational manner.
Sometimes 'cheaper alternatives' just don't exist. This is why your precious markets have never got to grips with spaceflight. The markets reaction has always been "Wait till it is cheaper" on the assumption that all technology gets cheaper - ignoring the fact that there is a physical constraint on what you must do to get into orbit. The required delta-V isn't going to change just because it would be financially efficient for it to do so.
Actually, we're waiting for a return on any such investment (in space travel) to be viable. If, for example, (let's indulge in a fantasy for the sake of the conversation) it was discovered that there was a large enough supply of gold on the moon and all you had to do was scoop it up, there would be a concerted effort (at current gold prices) to get up there and scrape it off. Again, the market is a means or tool, if you prefer, to force irrational actors (humans) to behave in a rational matter (through the enforcement and broadcast of scarcity).
At the moment, it's just now become viable (i.e. there are people who can afford it) to have space tourism. Two things have happened to make that possible -- the cost of a space flight has, in fact, dropped from 1970 levels and the number of people who want to pay that and can afford to pay it has increased.
And before you say "stupid markets!" consider that the other alternative that has been widely employed was war with a lot of killing and enslavement. Personally, I prefer the exchange of currency to bullets (or ICBMs). Your position on that appears to be unclear, however...
If you are a true economist, then fuck off and play with your stock markets and leave actual science to actual scientists.
Wow. Again, I marvel at your intellectual prowess. "Silly troll, forums are for adults!"
Actually, since fusion itself is an endothermic nuclear reaction
Errr...ever heard of the sun? That is powered by fusion and looks pretty exothermic to me.
People keep on forgetting that profit was the prime motive in people colonized and crossed the world.
As these products become more and more rarefied, the more and more it will become lucrative to get ships out in space to mine asteroids, and hell, even MARS for Indium, Zinc, Platinum, Gallium, Hafnium, you name it. If one thing this solar system is chalk full of, and that is places to mine.
I do believe in human ingenuity and if we run out of these things on Earth, we're going to look for it in the nearest other places to find it, and WILL find it, with enough time and effort.
In the meantime, though, prices will rise and recycling firms will be probably a good investment, at least in the near-term future.
Holy fucking shit!!! ARRARHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
*Runs screaming while flailing hands*
Automated Self-replicating Moon Mining.
Take that mineral that only exists in 1 cubic meter of the earth's crust. You could mine the moon and send back a 1m^3 block of it in an Apollo type capsule and it would be worth like 1 trillion dollars and pay off any initial setup cost for setting up the initial seed factories that are needed on the moon.
All you need is robotic factories that build factories that build bigger factories that build more mining equipment that build more factories that build more specialized factories that build better mining equipment than can strip mine the whole damned moon and cover it with solar cells that can turn the moon into a giant disco ball in the sky that provides us with all the rare earth elements we need without having to tear up all of the earth's crust.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I still remember an old cartoon in National Lampoon with some guy leaning out of a helicopter drawing a bead on an Innu (their real name,) and laughing like hell.
It was totally tasteless then and politically incorrect as hell.
But the artist had drawn it so well, (the hunters obviously seemed to be having such a good time, [probably because he'd managed to combine 3 things, alcohol, tobacco and fire arms, into a single picture,]) that you just had to laugh.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
That why there were 'old Francs' and 'new Francs'.
And the rate was that about 100 old Francs would buy you 1 new Franc. (Or was it 1000 to 1 :-)
That avoids the problem of having your currency being essentially worthless (like the Zimbabwean dollar is right now.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Please, please research a bit before mindlessly spreading FUD like this. Brazil has enough non-forest land to multiply the current cane production several times with no impact to native ecosystems. Contrariwise to what Americans apparently think, it's not like our whole country is a forest. It's not like it's even practical to plant cane in the forest in the first place. I mean, geez.
Amazon is being badly destroyed for cattle, yes. Want to stop it? Boycott the meat industry, not ethanol.
See also: wpedia on deforestation, ethanol.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
The only thing that can affect the amount of Gallium available on Earth is nucleosynthesis or a fairly sturdy asteroid impact.
Exactly. The issue is not that gallium is getting "used up," the issue is that it's getting redistributed from ground ore into landfills. The process of that distribution is a human endeavor, thus it is subject to study by economics.
Gallium is currently more expensive to get out of landfills than it is to get out of the ground. That's fine, at one point it was too expensive to get out of the ground too. When it became economically advantageous to do so, people did it. Same with recovering from electronics.
The REAL physical limitation is not gallium, it is energy. As long as we have energy to spend, we can reuse and recycle gallium forever. If we run out of energy, it doesn't matter where the gallium is, we won't be able to use it.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Yeah... We might have to live with our current, crappy 720p/1080i HDTV and not upgrade to "full HD" of 1080p which oops actually now you need 1440p cause anything less sucks and is like living in the dark ages.
I say let consumer goods skyrocket in price and maybe people will learn that they can still enjoy life after they step off the never ending upgrade treadmill.
Think oil.. there is only a finite amount. It costs $143 a barrel. It's used in everything from gas, to plastic (petroleum products). Elements, gone... you name it. Copper has gotten so expensive, that thieves are stealing the wiring from churches to sell to recyclers http://www.topix.com/forum/city/sanderson-fl/T55O1AF1U1DOLSDGK .. so when copper is gone, do we have a ready replacement to wire homes, cars, tvs, stereo's... And we throw it all away.
Give it another 20-40 years, and today's Landfills, will be Mining Operations in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
Awesome!
Aren't As-Ga semiconductors supposed to become obsolete by 2020 though?
This was one of the main points (in my opinion) in Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" -- that a huge pile of pure gold that can't be economically brought to market, is worthless. In his case, it was in the middle of a battlefield in the southern Phillipines, as I recall, but it might as well have been on the moon.
Likewise, gallium and indium distributed at very low levels amidst tens of thousands of tons of landfill waste might not be economically feasible to recover. The price of LED's or solar panels using those elements then goes through the roof, and technology -- optical networking gear, solar energy -- based on those components makes no progress.
We were building electric cars 100 years ago. Oil was cheaper and easier, so we've put 100 years and trillions of dollars and manhours of work into optimizing transportation based on oil. Now we can't figure out how to make electricity-based transportation compete with oil-based transportation. If we'd spent that kind of time and money on electricity-based transport along with oil-based transport the transition would be rapid and smooth. Instead, we're getting yanked around by the hysteresis of market economics. The same thing could hold with other stuff that we're driving into scarcity: by the time the market starts adjusting, the whiplash can be brutal.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Actually, January 2008 is the new May 2005.
Indium is derogatory. The accepted term is Native Americium.
"Sometimes 'cheaper alternatives' just don't exist. This is why your precious markets have never got to grips with spaceflight. The markets reaction has always been "Wait till it is cheaper" on the assumption that all technology gets cheaper - ignoring the fact that there is a physical constraint on what you must do to get into orbit. The required delta-V isn't going to change just because it would be financially efficient for it to do so." A space elevator will be a lot cheaper. Cheaper alternatives that don't exist yet are called "inventions". There are always new ways to skin a cat. Especially if there is a good economic incentive. (This is not to argue that economics is a hard science, but, dude, "shut up, shut up, etc." back atcha)
Because the demand for cheap spaceflight would be present industry with a large enough market to encourage investment in the technology. Cryogenic rocket fuel is fairly cheap stuff - like $.50 a pound, same as gasoline - so the cost is in the vehicle and the operations. Boeing spent seven billion dollars developing the 777, and has sold hundreds of them for $120 million a pop. (Granted, due to fuel prices, a lot of them are on the ground). It would require a comparable investment to develop a reusable rocket with good maintainability and high reusability. Besides, once your actually in space, you can use things like solar sails or magnetic sails. Even plain old rockets aren't so bad then because they no longer have to get off of the surface of the Earth, so they can operate at a lower thrust level (lower engine mass) and require less fuel (low delta-V). So, really, the issue is low demand. If more people had a good valuable reason to go into space, the market would provide them with a way. So far, the only way to make money is with telecommunications, and at the low rate of launch, it is more profitable for companies to build a smaller number of expendable launch vehicles that have a higher per unit cost.
OK, listen up:
1) Indium is not found in nature by itself, it is only found in combination with ores of Pb, Zn, Cu, Sn and other base metals. It is extracted from the metal ores.
2) If you don't believe that higher prices increase available supply, read this:
For primarily economic reasons, indium was originally only extracted from zinc and lead concentrates containing at least 500 ppm indium (and coming from ores containing about 50 ppm of indium). Due to improvements in the extraction technology combined with the economics of higher prices Indium is now recovered as a by-product of a wider range of base metals including tin, copper and other polymetallic deposits. Indium is also now being extracted from base metal concentrates containing as little as 100 ppm of indium.
Furthermore:
Base metal consumption has increased over the last few years and mining companies have started making positive financial returns. This profitability, in turn, has prompted new investments in mining. Furthermore, new indium containing ore bodies are being discovered and developed. As examples, note the new Neves Corvo Zinc mine in Portugal, Mitsui Mining's increased mining output in Peru, the Chinese exploration investments in the Guanxi and Yunnan provinces, the Chelyabinsk Zinc purchase of a majority stake in lead and zinc mine Nova Zinc of Kazakhstan, etc. Mining output is increasing, increasing supplies of indium containing feedstock.
3) What has been the price history of Indium? It peaked at $400/kg in 1996, went down to $100 in 2002, peaked again at near $1000 in 2005, and was down to $850 in 2007. As of June 27, Metal Bulletin has it trading at $620-680 per kg.
4) What has been the supply history of Indium? It is up from 250 MT in 1996 to 1,100 MT in 2007. More is being produced every year.
5) What about the future?
A number of smelters have accumulated large amounts of tailings and slags over the years. Many of these are indium containing residues from their production that have very low indium content and/or are particularly difficult to treat. Again due to the higher indium prices and improving recovery process technology, these tailings and slags are now economical to treat. China, as an example, has started treating many of these residues.
The abundance of indium in the earth's crust is estimated to be 0.05 ppm for the continental and 0.072 ppm for the oceanic crust, respectively (Taylor and Mclennan 1985). This concentration is higher than the concentration of silver. Consider that silver is now produced at a rate of 20,000 tons per year...
Here is a Canadian mine re-opening to extract more Tin and Indium
I always thought of landfills as the next cycle of humanities oil reserve or archeological playground.
Guess that won't happen after all.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
Is there really no alternative to the flat-screen technology we use now? What about organic LED screens? And, is there no material other than gallium which would serve? Is copper the only conductive metal?
Copper is used because it's better than any other fairly cheap alternative; but it's certainly not the only possibility. Couldn't we use fiber optic cables for network cables?
Would it be a drastic change in our standard of living to adopt alternatives like fiber optics and OLEDs?
Are people who invoke the free market really saying that? Have you summarized their views correctly?
How do you know they will respond that way? I doubt they would clamor for gov't intervention, because no government intervention would produce more gallium if none remains in the earth's surface.
The market system is not a dumb system, and anyone who knows anything about futures markets etc knows that they're certainly not reactionary. The market is predictive and attempts to use all available information of all discounted future price movements. (If you've never heard anything like that before, then you should read about it first). As a result, the market would start preparing for the exhaustion of zinc or any other elements years before it occurs, by increasing the price gradually and in advance so that the available stocks will go to the best available uses. That is the function of speculation, "futures markets (my emphasis)", and so on.
Let me answer a potential objection. What if there really is no alternative to indium, and we really are about to run out?
In that case, no economic system would produce more of it. The only issue would be how to allocate what we have, which is the function of prices. Suppose the price of indium or some other rare earth element skyrocketed years before its exhaustion (which always causes howls from the left: "SPECULATORS ARE DRIVING UP THE PRICE", but anyway). In that case, would companies really throw away huge sums of money by using now-expensive indium indiscriminately? Would companies use copper wires that are now 40x as expensive as fiber optics?
I'm not saying the market will solve all problems, but allocation of scarce resources is something it does fairly well.
This article is fallacious and incorrect. For anyone to believe that we are "losing elements" due to their usage in disposable consumer goods would require an abnormally low intelligence. Please note the following quote from the article:
"Gallium is thought to make up 0.0015 percent of the Earth's crust and there are no concentrated supplies of it. We get it by extracting it from zinc or aluminum ore or by smelting the dust of furnace flues."
Hrmm, so now it is being used in disposable consumer goods... which will then be disposed... where it could be mined from the city dump. We have already heard of issues with heavy metal leakage from dumps, which turn out to be rich in metals like mercury derived from disposal of things such as thermostats and thermometers. It is obvious that if this particular element is so rare, the concentration of it in the city dump will be high enough to warrant extraction. I mean, look at how much effort is extended to collect it presently! There are still vast quantities of copper in landfills in things like refrigerator coils disposed of prior to the 1990s. These elements aren't "gone forever" they are in the dump. The foolish comparison to the plight of the Dodo is wrong in every way. It is describing extinction as the process of moving things from place to place. By that very argument, the captivity of an animal equates to death and thus zoos do not actually contain animals, those animals are gone forever and can never be seen again, because after all, they are no longer where they were so they must be gone... By the same argument, a laptop is not a computer because when you move it, you eradicate it. The best part is, the earth moves around the sun every year, so it has long since been eradicated by the definition used in this article. Why worry about the eradication of elements on a planet that has long since been eradicated? Arguments for the conservation of base elements are idiotic and fundamentally based on the assumption that elements can be consumed or transformed into an unusable by processes short of a nuclear reaction.
Yeah yeah. Google "Paul Ehrlich" and "Julian Simon" and think back to when the world ran out of copper.
That and a whole lot more, thanks for asking.
Interestingly enough, civilization can also "collapse" due to having "too plentiful" natural resources, namely when it has a militant neighbour which has no qualms of committing genocide in order to forever annex those resources.
Check out the paragraph titled "Minerals & Mining":
"Tibet has a significant share of the world's reserves of uranium, lithium, chromite, copper, borax, and iron. Tibet has proven deposits of 126 minerals" etc etc.
Guess why the Chinese Communist (now Nazional-socialist) Party won't let the wholly non-chinese Tibetan people regain their independence? Besides territorial expansionism being CCP's raison d'etre, the people really enriching themselves from the rape of Tibet are almost exclusively CCP cadres or their family.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Unobtainium is as rare as ever.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I have a little Raritanium kicking around... You're welcome to it. :)
In a food shortage where prices have shot up, it becomes profitable to put into use marginal land for agriculture that wasn't used before. In other words, production increases. So it would help to "cure the shortage". At the same time, wasteful consumption declines, for example, meat-eating in 3rd world countries declines, because producing one calorie of beef requires 9 calories of feedstock grain.
I'm certainly not trying to minimize the terrible hardship food prices have imposed on poor people, but I don't see how economics is to blame.
Of course, maybe the market theory of production increases in response to increased prices, is not correct. However your comment did not even correctly state the theory--instead you attributed a belief to "affluent conservatives" which they don't actually hold. I can see two possible reasons: 1) you are setting up a weak straw man; or 2) you do not know what they think, and you disagree with a mistaken notion of their views.
One more thing. It's worth noting that the food shortage was caused by two things: 1) a government ethanol program which diverted a large fraction of the corn product to auto fuels; and 2) sporadic flooding in various areas of the midwest which happens on occasion and is difficult to predict. One of those causes (the first) was a result of violating the market...
Finally, someone with actual numbers.
Hah! Another reason to tell people to give me their old stuff instead of me having to pay to get new things myself.
Really though, even when I do have lots of money I don't like to go out and buy every piece of crap. Some things make me really angry to see how wasteful they are, like specialty cooking things. Eggwave, cake pans that are shaped like a little house, fondu pots, anything that is meant to make one kind of thing you can buy at Wal Mart and you'll have fun making a whole bunch of onion blossoms or waffles but it'll just be one more thing to collect dust on the shelf and eventually get stuffed into the crawl space.
It's insane that corporations are gobbling up these materials so liberally and making all this garbage from iphones to 16 different crappy cellphones to make this 1 other cell phone sell better. USB missile launchers to poisonous love toys. Microsoft mice you'll just have to replace in a year because it's sure to have something go horribly wrong with it. The next hot new game console of the decade.
It's this bullshit that makes think away from my desire for privacy and free market and human rights to yearning for a unified, almighty world government where every thought and piece of material is debated over and eventually ruled down with an iron fist the size of Nebraska.
When you turn things into an intricate piece of electronics, they're stuck that way. It's just not possible to mass dissect integrated circuits for their raw elements, especially with any purity. We're never, ever going to have Star Trekesque replicators, there's no reason to believe we'll ever have a way to pulverize something neetly into the hundreds of elements that makes it up.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
This will provide a strong incentive for space exploration. So, keep using up those rare earth elements.
No, we've invested it al in finitum.
I heard on the radio today that the demand for gasoline in the USA has dropped by 2% over last year.
It's happening. It took a bit to find how elastic our demand for gasoline is, but we've hit it.
I see gasoline still going to go up for the next few years, mostly because it takes time to rework fleets - Hybrids and small cars are selling like hotcakes, but the average lifespan for a car is 5-10 years. We're about 2-3 years from when hybrids were mostly special purpose, sold for government fleets or for (as coined on another board) the smug factor.
Still, there's going to be substantial upward pressure in the form of China and India industrializing and developing a middle class capable of affording vehicles - like the Tata. The vehicles can sipp fuel like a moped and the sheer fact that there's more than 10X of them will swamp anything Americans, Europeans, Russians can do in the form of near-term conservation.
Darn it, can't anybody invent a battery that stores twice as much power at half the cost with a decent lifespan? ;)
I don't read AC A human right
Because the demand for cheap spaceflight would be present industry with a large enough market to encourage investment in the technology. Cryogenic rocket fuel is fairly cheap stuff - like $.50 a pound same as gasoline -
I've got sources suggesting as low as "under a dollar", but none went that low. Can you cite some sources? And it's worth mentioning that the cost of that fuel can rise as the price of oil rises. The RP-1 is a petroleum product, and as such, the cost can never remain constant nor decrease, it can only become more expensive. If you're hoping for asteroid-mining to become cheap, that alone makes things difficult by the time the space-mining & delivery technology were to be developed. You have to use fuel-cost estimates that consider the future price of oil at the time of mining.
so the cost is in the vehicle and the operations.
Which would be nice, assuming the fuel burns on its own. But it doesn't, since it still requires the LOX to be useful. The cost of producing & storing liquid-oxygen isn't negligible.
Besides, once your actually in space, you can use things like solar sails or magnetic sails.
For probes and small crews. Not for mining operations. While your statement read by itself is innocent enough, in-context, I'm gonna go with a big "heck no". Mining inherently involves huge amounts of mass. The equipment & containers alone aren't going be driven by sails (not to mention ore/metals).
Non-small masses are exactly the achilles heel of solar/magnetic sails.
Even plain old rockets aren't so bad then because they no longer have to get off of the surface of the Earth, so they can operate at a lower thrust level (lower engine mass) and require less fuel (low delta-V).
I get the feeling all you did here was look up a table on the various delta-V's between each place. I'm skeptical that equating cost to delta-V gives a feasible estimate of the actual costs.
Mining in space requires delivery of the ore to Earth in a way that doesn't destroy it. That requires ships or at least containers capable of withstanding reentry. They would need to be brought back into space. Thus, right off the bat, whatever protects your ore from re-entry will add an Earth-to-LEO delta-V cost. That sucks.
Now add the cost of "exploration". I'd suggest asking someone in the oil industry how much exploration costs them. In 1983, BP spent $120 million on what the geologists/reservoir-engineers considered a great prospect called Mukluk in Alaska, which turned out to not have any oil (just water). And that was on Earth where stuff is easy! In space, you'd have to do similar exploratory digging to know exactly what metal is there (if it's valuable). That's a damn scary thing to spend money on, because mistakes do happen. How terribly bad will the economy have to be for investors to be desperate enough to invest in exploratory space mining, when they can always invest in safer things?
So, really, the issue is low demand. If more people had a good valuable reason to go into space, the market would provide them with a way. So far, the only way to make money is with telecommunications, and at the low rate of launch, it is more profitable for companies to build a smaller number of expendable launch vehicles that have a higher per unit cost.
What if the demand required to get to the break-even-cost were such a great cost that it was still unattainable? Just because there is a break-even point for all market costs doesn't mean that there will ever be anyone with enough money to pay for it. I could have a vending machine that gives me platinum bars for a $5.00 each, but if I don't have the 5 bucks, I'm still not getting jack from that machine.
Knowing a theoretical break-even point exists isn't enough.
You also have to prove it's something that someone, anyone in the practical world, would be able to write the check for.
The assumption that this would be the case hasn't been demonstrated to be true for something this astronomically expensive (in terms of dollars & raw joules of energy).
nope, we'll just switch to OLED and other organic semiconductors
Probably won't happen to modern tailings anytime soon. The efficiency of most modern concentration and extraction methods is over 80%. That means that for a Cu mine with a mine grade at 0.5%, you're left with less than 0.1% in your tailings. Minable grade is going down, but it's still at about 0.4%, higher if you only have unoxidized ore. The cost of mining tailing is reduced somewhat by the fact that it's already crushed, etc. but I think we're a ways away from mining modern tailings (in the last 25-30 years, or so). Historical tailings, sure, but not modern ones.
Another natural resource in danger. We should all take the day off to collect twinkies and cockroaches and duct tape the lot together for safe keeping. We will exhaust resources, that's what we do. But, we'll work to find other resources, because we do that too. One way or another, we'll go on. Because that's just what . we . do. (Until we run out of twinkies and roaches. Then we're just screwed).
You have to understand that we have these doomsday cultists who have been let down by Peak Oil, though they're still rooting for it, who have moved on to Peak Natural Gas, Peak Phosphorous, Peak Iridium, Peak Zinc, Peak Copper, even Peak Arable Land, and so on. All of it easily debunked, but it doesn't stop them from ranting and raving.
I think the strategy at this point is to just keep spreading FUD to the point that there will be such widespread panic that 95% of the population will die even if there's no good reason for it.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Yes, economics doesn't change physical reality. But in this case, you haven't proven that physical reality is threatening.
As others have noted, elements don't disappear. Instead their locations are shifted and the price of their extraction changes. Will that change in price be catastrophic? It's possible, but history strongly implies that it won't be. Instead, there are generally marginal sources to which we can turn out attention. It just costs energy (and therefore money). The process that created the earth did not, generally speaking, concentrate elements in incredibly concentrated pockets, Star Control 2 notwithstanding.
The one notable exception is helium, which escapes our atmosphere and disappears into space -- once we've exhausted the supplies trapped underground, helium-based applications may be in trouble. Do you have any reason to believe a similar situation exists with respect to indium, gallium or the rest? Or that these elements are being incorporated into compounds from which they could not conceivably be reclaimed? Are they being sent into the atmosphere in such a way that their reclamation will never be more practical than extraction from seawater? Can you seriously maintain any of these things?
I doubt it.
It's also worth noting that the situation with peak oil is not at all analogous. We primarily extract oil for its energy, not its chemical content. People are worried about running out of that energy. They are not as worried about running out of hydrocarbons to turn into things like pharmaceuticals and plastic (although of course they may have to turn to more expensive sources of these source materials).
"And what are they fertilizing with?"
Right now, crops are being fertilized with chemical fertilizers whose components are mined and derived from natural gas. Pretty stupid to waste natural gas that way as a.) natural gas has most definitely peaked (though methane is a renewable resource) and b.) what, we're using something out of the ground to get nitrogen when it just floats about in the air we breathe?
And I realize the Peak Oil doomsday cultists have pinned their current hopes on chemical fertilizers, but those were used mainly because they were cheap, not because they make sense. Indeed, it would be better to build up topsoil. What, when someone told you that topsoil took 1000 years or so to build up an inch of the stuff, you believed it? No...not so much.
How to make topsoil
Bat guano sales are on the rise as well.
I don't know why the doomsday cultists have decided that humanity is out of ideas, but it's gone from scary to damned annoying. I'll agree that it seems humanity has gotten a bit too populous, but some ogranizations outside the U.N. think the human population may be on the decline, not on the rise.
So yeah, doomsday cultists...now that it looks like we might be able to transition from oil to electric, sure, pin your hopes on peak copper and all that other stuff. The world will continue to innovate. If there is to be a mass dieoff, it will likely be a black swan event, not oil, copper, and honest to God, iridium? We can live without iridium.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
What you need to understand is that every single one of those oncoming crises is real, and there are several that you didn't mention, that are also true. It has to do partially with population, and partially with the costs of recycling.
OTOH, it's also true that every single one of them could be solved with sufficiently cheap energy. Solar panels are good, but they won't produce energy cheap enough to solve these crises. Wind power is still more expensive. But power satellites could be cheap enough. They'd need to be essentially maintenance free, but with sufficiently intelligent robots they could cut the cost of electricity to 1/10th (guesstimate!!) of the current cost.
The problem is, they'd be quite expensive to build. Especially the first one. And there might be problems with power transmission. (Don't want to kill the ozone layer while trying to save it.) So frequencies and power densities would need to be chosen carefully. Microwaves of certain frequencies find water transparent (both droplets and vapor) and can be received with better than 95% efficiency. Good enough? Maybe. Might need to improve the efficiency. Definitely need to check of unexpected side effects.
OTOH, there's also talk about cheaper solar cells of adequate efficiency. As long as we don't need too much electricity, that might suffice. We'd need to plate our cities with solar panels, but it would have advantages in temperature control. Might work.
Other work is proceeding on turning city sewage into diesel via algae ponds (and specially cultivated and selected algae). I'm dubious about how much fuel could be produced that way, but it's another source of energy, and if it's cheap enough then it will drive down the costs of other kinds of energy.
As I see it, the basic problem is thermodynamic. Using a material generally causes it to be more difficult to reclaim that it was to get it from the original ore. This means that you need to spend more energy. As the ores remaining get poorer, you need to spend more energy to extract fresh material. OTOH, with enough energy you could extract every element you needed from sea-water. (That's the dream pushing hydrogen fusion researchers.)
So there's lots of hopeful signs and approaches being followed. And they are as real (though less certain) as the crises.
P.S.: Crisis is a slightly inappropriate word here. What happens is that a certain resource becomes increasingly expensive. (Not scarce, really, but expensive to acquire.) It's thermodynamics again. This happens over an extended period of time. Have you noticed that petroleum has become more expensive? It isn't gone, and it probably never will be, but it's becoming more expensive to acquire. That's because the good "ores" have been depleted. (You don't find many oil fields in Pennsylvania any more. They've been depleted.) But even if the last source of drillable-for oil is exhausted, there will still be the oil-shales, and the price is now high enough (or almost high enough) to make extracting those oils worth the cost. But it takes a lot more energy to extract oil from oil shale that it does to just drill for it, even under the sea. So it will be more expensive. That's the kind of thing that will happen with the other resource "shortages".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If it were done forwards, that would be burping, not farting
As I understand things it isn't actually energy negative. Just barely positive. It's still an extremely stupid policy.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The former has seriously harmed the average Mexican ...
Not a problem since, by definition, most Mexicans will fall either side of the definition of an 'average' Mexican, whatever that is.
And besides, the removal of any 'average' Mexicans won't affect the overall average of any one Mexican, so really, I don't see a problem here.
Recycle, Recycle, Recycle.
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my Father! Prepare to die!
This is baloney. I'm still using a CRT on my home computer, and several of my work computers.
People like you and I have better things to spend our money on than the hottest LCD panels. That's too bad, but that's also the way it is, and the way it ALWAYS has been. There's only one thing that makes this seem like more than the luxury it really is: we are used to it.
Gotta go. Late for an appointment. No time to edit.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Maybe not in the classic sense of turning iron to gold, but hear me out.
This actually hit me back in grade school when we first learned about basic chemistry.
1) If all matter is essentially made up of the same stuff--protons, neutrons, and electrons--in different arrangements, couldn't there logically be some way to rearrange the particles into any substance we want?
2) Given the laws of conservation of both matter an energy, the resources we "use up" don't just magically disappear. They are either misplaced or transformed, So shouldn't we be able to some how recover the matter and energy in some way?
These two combined give me the impression that we should some how be able to turn anything into whatever we want, displacing less desirable or more abundant materials into ones of greater use.
I'm not so naive to think that it would be so simplistic. Obviously the actual process, feasibility and practicality is much more complicated, but simple logic seems to say that there must be some, if very advanced, way to create a sustainable resource cycle, much like every other sustainable cycle in nature.
I don't know I'd be quite that pessimistic. While Delta-V can't be gotten around there are a number of ways to skin that cat, everything from building lighter spacecraft to improved propulsion technologies. Even with "conventional" rocketry we really haven't gotten to true economies of scale.
But I doubt space will ever be "cheap". At least until we have orbital elevators and fusion rockets.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
The largest source of Helium is the natural gas wells in North America where helium has been made by radioactive decay of heavier elements over a very long time.
We'll have to wait a long time before we can get any more and recycling it isn't a possibility.
There is a little problem with transforming atoms of one material into another... you need to control fusion.
An approach I find much more realistic is the use of "intelligent materials", or heavy use of nanostructures. I just read at physorg about the fabrication of "artificial 2D atoms". Who knows what more wonders can we do with strategically placed atoms in structures? I'm sure that flat screens will give way to field emission displays that consist of arrays of nanotubes.
Yes, but in order to produce all that corn, a huge amount of rain forest is being decimated.
We must stop this theft at once!
Is some evil power transmuting these elements and turning them into Lead?
Or is is it an alien entity sucking them away from our planet?
Whatever- IT MUST STOP!
Next, they will be stealing our Copper and Iron!
And perhaps even our Carbon and Oxygen atoms!
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- aqk
F U
Why mine the asteroids? Why not just re-direct their path to land safely on earth? Oh wait...
...minerals just sitting around between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
http://about.me/jimm.pratt
In our own solar system, there are probably enough quantities of these elements for millenia. Just don't forget to space travel.
Why do you think the cattle is being grazed in the felled forest?
Because sugar cane is being grown in their former grazing land.
You might want to do some research as well. The rate of deforestation tracks the rate of ethanol use, not the rate of meat consumption. You don't need fancy math to see that.
I should be posting this anonymous, of course.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Well, at least it isn't quite as poisonous as Hg.
Does that mean we can expect countries that depend heavily on seafood to start going senile sooner? With the average life expectancy in Japan, that's not good news.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Anything in the future is speculative, so don't sweat it too heavily. I said "cryogenic" (i.e. hydrogen) rocket fuel, which RP-1 is most definitely not. Even at a dollar a pound, though, it is still miniscule in comparison to the current price to launch a rocket, which was my point in that argument. I am well aware of the fact that oxidizer is needed because I test liquid fueled rockets for a living, thank you. It's true that solar sails cannot move huge amounts of ore or the like, but many of them might be able to move a useful amount of already processed metals at a greatly reduced cost. It's probably not the best way to do it, though. I was making the point that there are other ways to move around in space that are not as expensive as our basic chemical rockets. Still, rocket fuel could be mined from comets and some asteroids in the form of water which can be electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen (inefficient propulsion, probably). Run the hydrogen through a nuclear reactor and one could get much better performance. Solar thermal or electric rocketry isn't out either. Who knows what technology would be used for sure. The point is that without Earth's huge gravity well, it becomes much easier to get around. One wouldn't need to take a re-entry vehicle up to space from Earth, either, because, remember, the raw materials for such vehicles are already in space; it's what you're mining. The re-entry vehicles can also be part of the product, since they're mostly metal just with some ablative carbon lining (most asteroids contain large amounts of carbon) and a parachute. That's just a possible example. I'm not trying to predict the future, just consider some possibilities. Exploration does cost a lot. But when you have ore with 90% iron/nickel (some asteroids) and maybe .1% rare metals, it doesn't take any exploration to find it beyond looking through a telescope and analyzing the light with a spectroscope - much cheaper than drilling underground.
Finally, I don't pretend that any of this will happen at any point in the near future. But, according to the likes of Gerard O'Neil and John C. Lewis, this solar system has the energy and resources to support more than a quadrillion people. The demand for in space mining wouldn't really come until the people who need it already live in space. It would just be a big benefit to those already living here on Earth.
Er, maybe because, like in all rainforests, Amazon soil is completely unsuitable to any kind of agriculture whatsoever?
Grazing land? You mean like the vast oversupply of unused land in the South, Central West and Southeast? Like the ones I was raised in, or the ones I can see from my window right now?
Seriously, people, learn what you're talking about.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
I'm from Europa - attempt no mining here.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The fad these days is Global Warming. With rising gas prices, Oil is another popular one. This article could serve as a reminder that we are coming to the end of a bunch of things: wood, topsoil, clean drinking water, ozone (well, we sort of solved that, at least partially), clean air, open space, people with brains...
Jared Diamond's Collapse is highly recommended reading!
We live in interesting times.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
You are my hero.
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
It's a shame no individuals picked up on your movie reference (I'll leave it to the Enlightened to pick the right one - broad hint: the average of two consecutive prime numbers). :)
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
http://www.webelements.com/periodicity/abundance_seawater/ With solar/wind/wave power and new nanomembranes it will be viable to mine the sea for almost all rare elements.
My heatsink just got its own safe.