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"Demand for rare earths and critical minerals is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years" For a limited resource.
by nuz 2y ago
"Demand for rare earths and critical minerals is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years"
For a limited resource.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoThey're essentially unlimited. They make up 68ppm of the Earth's crust. If we used all of that to make stuff, we'd run out of room to put the stuff before we'd run out of rare earths.
- BurningFrog 2y agoAll resources are limited!
- breck 2y ago"We have never run out of a single resource." https://x.com/naval/status/1800363450180522313 https://x.com/naval/status/1800363450180522313
- addaon 2y ago… he said, as he seasoned his stew with silphium.
- riffraff 2y agoa dodo stew!
- coldtea 2y ago>Whenever a resource becomes scarce, incentives drive technology to find better alternatives, we move towards abundance at each iteration. The denial is strong in these ones... "Hey, it worked in the past, when the population was 1/100th to 1/4th (start of 20th century), industrial production and consumption was 1/10000th was it is, demand for most modern necessary resources zero, and so on, so should work in millenia to come. And if not we can always pull a pivot to an alternative resource out of our magic hats, because 'science'".
- UberFly 2y agoWell technically the line you quoted is valid and your response is also mostly valid. I guess the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
- geysersam 2y agoFunny thing about that idea is if it was true our best option would be to ban oil extraction as early as possible and just wait for the unavoidable innovation to take place and bring us to the next level of abundance. But that's not usually their idea...
- Zpalmtree 2y agothis but unironically
- woodruffw 2y agoI can think of several species we've run out of. (We also came very close to running "out of" ozone over a large part of our planet. The idea that a resource is "done" only when it's been utterly depleted isn't how it goes in practice.)