9 ms·
There's probably more metal in the solar system than the volume of Earth.
by Grakel 5y ago
There's probably more metal in the solar system than the volume of Earth.
- yunohn 5y agoI guess this kind of retort would help you in a pub quiz.
- Grakel 5y agoThere's no shortage of metal, that's the point. Open your mind.
- stevenhuang 5y agoThere is an effective shortage of resources since the capacity to mine for them is not infinite, and production cannot meet demands.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoAnd the metal in space doesn't help us with our current technology. Obviously. "We can't have a metal shortage because there's lots of metal in space" is not the most coherent argument I've heard today...
- Grakel 5y agoWhat I originally said was there's no metal shortage, only the price of metal. We'll be mining the solar system long before we run out of metal on earth. For aluminum, for instance, there's an insane amount in the Earth's crust.
- stevenhuang 5y agoSupply and demand informs price. Not the other way around. That's why your argument makes no sense.
- kortex 5y agoAh yes, technical truth, the best kind of truth. There could be asteroids of pure palladium, platinum, gold, and silver, and it wouldn't matter a fig until it was cost competitive with digging rocks out of the ground, sticking them on a slow barge to a massive refinery and processing them with cheap, probably exploitative, labor.