15 ms·
Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math a
by retrac 4y ago
Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed.
Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So production has increased about thirty-fold in one century. That wasn't so shocking to me, at first. But 1910 was not the beginning of the industrial era; things had been under way for more than a century then. Railroads. Ocean liners. Factories. Knives and rivets for fabric owned by hundreds of millions of people. Dozens of skyscrapers in New York by then; the Brooklyn Bridge hung on thousands of tonnes of cable. All made out of steel.
Then it struck me. A few million tonnes a year in 1850. 70 million tonnes in 1910. All of it adds up to less than 1900 million tonnes. Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production.
- slashdev 4y agoWow! Probably similar numbers for concrete. It's exponential growth. The thing about exponential growth is it can't continue for too long. As observers of Moore's Law will understand, eventually you run out of resources or into other physical limits. However, I'm quite confident that we can keep innovating and growth will continue in one form or another. I don't think Elon Musk is correct that human population will collapse. All it takes is one subgroup to keep reproducing above the replacement rate, and after enough generations they will come to dominate and overall growth will continue. It's pretty much the law of life - expand to consume all available resources, be that food, space, energy, oxygen, whatever. You see it in bacteria, in fish, in mammals large and small, and of course in humans. There will be lot's of challenges there, and lots of need for innovation so we can handle growth without destroying our remaining wild spaces and ecosystems on which we depend. Humans haven't figured out how to grow sustainably yet.
- istjohn 4y ago> All it takes is one subgroup to keep reproducing above the replacement rate, and after enough generations they will come to dominate and overall growth will continue. Consequently, religion is going to thrive. Everyone else stops reproducing once they reach a certain standard of living.
- eloff 4y agoPerhaps that's the point. Religion is universal across human cultures, it must serve some, as yet unknown, evolutionary purpose to be so universally widespread. I doubt that historical purpose was higher birth rates, but it certainly is now. Since it seems to grant such a huge advantage to evolutionary fitness, it will thrive, even dominate.
- jvm___ 4y agoThis is from a 2014 Forbes article. "According to his blog, between 2011 and 2013, China consumed 6.6 gigatons of concrete – that’s more than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century. Look at what the U.S. built between 1901 and 2000: all those skyscrapers, the Interstate, the Hoover Dam, the list goes on and on but all that concrete only amounted to 4.5 gigatons."
- worldsayshi 4y ago>the law of life A pet tinfoil hat theory of mine is that most organisms ought to have some built in fail safe mechanism that causes populations to regulate themselves before a catastrophic overpopulation collapse. Because if it didn't have it it would be more likely to die out, so there should be a strong evolutionary pressure towards getting it. So maybe the population growth stagnation we're seeing is due to us seeing the writing on the wall and pacing ourselves, more or less voluntary/consciously. Also, for it to make sense in a game theory sense everyone that shares the niche needs to switch it on more or less simultaneously and it has to be embedded in the genome in a way that makes it very hard to remove by random mutation.
- friend_and_foe 4y ago
- ROTMetro 4y agoIs your number all New Metal (not to be confused with the equally important to the world's economy Nu Metal production) or is part of the 1.9 billion recycled/reclaimed? It appears this number includes 450-500 million tons of reclaimed steel?
- rcarr 4y agoIn my opinion there hasn’t been enough nu metal production since early 00s, I think we should manufacture more black bowling shirts with flames on them to incentivise uptake.
- konfusinomicon 4y agothe Korn market has been in steady downtrend for years, but with such a decline in quality it's no surprise
- giantg2 4y ago"Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production." The real questions are: Does that include recycling? If not, how do we see this being sustainable?
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoTwo reasons: the earth is made of iron, for all intents and purposes asteroids are often made of iron
- canadianfella 4y ago
- himinlomax 4y agoIt can be sustainable with electrolytic furnaces powered by carbon-free energy.
- keithnz 4y agoI was looking at what the future of steel might look like recently, I think this is quite interesting https://www.hybritdevelopment.se/en/ https://www.hybritdevelopment.se/en/
- throwaway2037 4y agoLuxembourgh has a huge steel industry, relative to the size of its GDP. As I understand, they switched to electric arc furnaces. Yes, it seems possible, but difficult. Also, I don't know if there are limitations on these furnaces. Example: Can you only recycle scrap metal or produce certain types of (lower grade) steel? Unsure.
- himinlomax 4y agoThose furnaces are for removing the oxygen from the iron oxide, so they're not needed for scrap metal. The CO2 emissions from smelting iron is due in large part to that reduction process, not just the heating.
- grecy 4y agoYup, I was Justin the town that has the worlds largest shipping port by tonnage, all of it iron ore. I bet you’ll never guess - you’ve never heard of it. The city and surrounds makes Mordor look nice.
- taneq 4y agoPort Hedland? Edit: Wow, Hedland is half of that, I was mainly thinking of the Mordor bit.
- throwaway2037 4y agoBrazil? Australia? Where?
- taneq 4y agoLMGTFY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_ports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port... Surprise, it's Shanghai.
- goatsi 4y agoThey mentioned by tonnage, not by containers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_ports_by_cargo_tonnage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_ports_by_cargo...
- throwaway2037 4y agoYes, I was thinking the same. The tip about "iron ore" made me think about Brazil and Australia. But maybe Ningbo because of Bao Steel.
- whiddershins 4y agoI think Ray Kurzweil talking about future shock in the late 90s provides a descriptive, if not satisfying, explanation.
- patrec 4y agoSo modern civilization currently requires the average human to consume roughly 3-4 times his body weight in steel per year. And given that steel production has roughly doubled in the last 20 years, this will probably still go up a fair deal.
- epicureanideal 4y agoIf population levels off I would imagine the need for steel would mostly level off also? I assume the main use is in construction?
- joebob42 4y agoPer gp, it's consumption. Perhaps you haven't been eating enough steel to appreciate the demand.
- BurningFrog 4y agoWe don't really "consume" the steel. It doesn't disappear.
- sidewndr46 4y agoIron actually is a consumable in some processes. For example, it burns pretty well. So it gets used in thermic lances. I'm not sure if anyone bothers trying to collect the resulting iron oxides and recycle those.
- BurningFrog 4y agoOK, I'll count burnt rusted iron as consumed. But we were talking about steel.
- nly 4y ago"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is man’s inability to understand the exponential function."
- lolbert2 4y ago
- SCUSKU 4y agoI made a website to help visualize American meat consumption in terms of animals slaughtered per second. It’s pretty insane and I think does something to help communicate just how large such industrial operations truly are. https://zach.ws/meat/ https://zach.ws/meat/
- creata 4y agoHey, don't let me tell you how to run your website, but it took me a while to realize that I should scroll. You could add a little "scroll down ↓" indicator that fades in after a bit.
- nemo44x 4y agoHa that’s great! Hopefully we continue to see these numbers as increase as a leading indicator of a wealthy and well fed society.
- vkou 4y agoNo, hopefully we can see these numbers stabilize at some long-term sustainable level, whatever that is. They aren't at that level at the moment, with large parts of modern agriculture more similar to a kind of mining - resources are extracted, with insufficient replenishment. The thing with mines is that they are eventually exhausted, and stop producing.
- BurningFrog 4y agoA good way to grasp huge numbers on a national or global level is to see what they are per person. In this case, 1.9 billion tonnes per 7 billion people is about 270kg (600 lb) per human
- edflsafoiewq 4y agoUnfortunately I can't grasp the number of humans either.
- DFHippie 4y agoYou can grasp 270kg/600lb, though, right?
- sokoloff 4y agoThink of it as “a car every four years for every person”.
- pencilguin 4y agoOr the same weight of "tin" cans.
- BurningFrog 4y agoThe cool part is that the ungraspable numbers cancel each other out, and you're left with a human scale number.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- appletrotter 4y agoI think you could understand that that value is only useful in some contexts. It’s like comparing apples and oranges.
- hnuser847 4y ago
- dirtyid 4y agoI like those comparisons of how much meter cube of XYZ next to a skyscraper. The one where all humans can be compressed in a relatively small 100s meter^3 cube was eye openning.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production. That is the nature of exponential growth. The nth term in a geometric sequence is always related to the sum of all previous terms.
- esja 4y agoWe also use 100 million barrels of oil every day. Each barrel carries equivalent energy to ten years of human labour. Let's forget for a moment about other energy sources, and also pretend we use all that oil just for energy. That would mean that every day, the 8 billion humans on Earth are using the same energy that it would take 365 billion humans to provide by hand.