Steel Sky High and Copper Running Out

[JadeDragon]

Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency warned this week that there isn't enough copper, lithium and other raw earth minerals available to make global clean energy ambitions a reality. The world risks "running out of copper," Bank of America strategists said in a recent note to clients.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/06/investin ... index.html

[Know Common Cents]

Well, no doubt strategic metals and other commodities are in short supply for a large number of reasons. Let me count the ways:

Mismanagement of resources
Special interest groups
Shipping snarls
Political influence and/or favoritism
The "If I can't have it, you can't either attitude. I'll see to that!"

This is just pathetic. What a poor example to set for our children.

[IdahoCopper]

Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency warned this week that there isn't enough copper, lithium and other raw earth minerals available to make global clean energy ambitions a reality. The world risks "running out of copper," Bank of America strategists said in a recent note to clients.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/06/investin ... index.html

A space-faring civilization won't run out of resources for millennia.

The important question is:

Will we as a civilization build that reality before it is too late?

[68Camaro]

Much of the use of copper could be replaced with aluminum for simple conduction. The failure of the first generation of aluminum wiring was a design issue that didn't correctly compensate for the higher thermal expansion coefficient of AL There is plenty of copper for our needs if we balanced it's use.

That could be done within a generation, versus space colonization (which is many generations away - if it even ever makes sense).

[IdahoCopper]

You can't solve 22nd century problems with 20th century thinking and knowledge.

Of course space resource extraction looks unlikely today.

The uphill technology climb to that goal has barely begun.

Do we eat those seeds today, or plant and tend them?

[68Camaro]

Let's focus most resources on colonizing the most hospitable planet known. Where is that? Oh - that's the earth. The absolute worst places on earth are far more colonizable and hospitable than the kindest extraterrestrial location. Not by a little. By orders of magnitude. I'm not opposed to continuing space travel research in a smart way but arguments of near term colonization of other bodies are just fantasy. It took mankind thousands of years to perfect sea travel well enough that allowed practical expansion to the Western hemisphere - let's give ourselves the same room for something much more challenging.

[IdahoCopper]

Again, 20th century thinking only sees : "colonizing". Asteroids are resources. Some are stainless steel (iron/nickel), some are PGMs, and some are rock (O2, silicon, aluminum, carbon, etc.)

Why not a colony, but a mostly robotic mining camp with a few humans to oversee. In the end, it takes more than foresight, it takes farsight. What will we need 100 to 150 years from now?

The usual focus on the near-term (10-25 years) will doom our descendants to poverty and starvation when Earth's resources are exhausted.

Its not merely understanding, one must overstand.

[Treetop]

Im totally on board with idahos mindset. Probably is far off we could do it affordably though. that said the obvious seems to me to use robotics to mine the oceans. Weve barely touched most of the earths surface because its under the ocean. We do mine the ocean in very limited ways already, but with so much surface area down there it seems like an obvious more accessible step. I guess copper is one of the things people have successfully mined from the oceans.

[68Camaro]

Yeah, if you want to compare the cost of undersea mining to asteroid mining; no comparison. Saying that we are mineral resource limited on earth is ridiculous. A few consumables like silver will get increasingly hard to get and more expensive until undersea sources are developed, but generally we have barely touched what we have here.

[IdahoCopper]

Or the Climate Change Hoax is actually real, Antarctica will melt, exposing vast untapped resources of coal, oil, copper, silver, gold .....

But then, the Sun has recently moved into an area of the galaxy that has more dust than usual. Thus less sunlight is hitting the Earth, thus global cooling, advancing glaciers, and the Hoaxers will say, "Look what we did with our mitigation efforts!"

[Treetop]

Even if warming happened as fast or faster than the most extreme claims the ice will take so long to melt off antarctica that it probably wont matter for this issue, and certainly not for any of us. Talking several thousand years. I forget the number off hand but there are several million cubic miles of ice.