3 ms·
Why would we run out of Ga?
by AndrewDucker 7mo ago
Why would we run out of Ga?
- mikkupikku 7mo agoThere's a component of modern culture that trains and expects people to be extremely pessimistic about long term human development. It results in situations above, where without any further information people just assume by default that were going to run out of a thing and are on some collision course with not just a disaster, but every single conceivable one. (Gallium is a byproduct of aluminum production. We aren't going to run out.)
- ta9000 7mo ago[flagged]
- jcattle 7mo agoFrom your earlier comment, your curiosity was more about what happens after we run out. In your question you stated the running out as a given fact ("When" we run out, not "if"). If that was what you wanted to say I can't tell you, but that's definitely how it was received and thus you also got the harsh response. Since it reads a lot like doomsday thinking. (Example: Does that mean when we run out of oxygen there are no more humans? Why would we run out?)
- pixl97 7mo ago?Why would we run out?) Of oxygen, because of rising temperatures interacting with rock weathering binding all the oxygen. Now, that's more of something to worry about at geological time scales, but Earth in fact, is not infinite.
- ta9000 7mo agoI love that you countered pedantry with pedantry. <3
- ta9000 7mo agoYes, my curiosity was about when we run out, because I didn’t know if we would run out. That was the whole point of the question. Have some leniency, we’re not all experts about everything.
- margalabargala 7mo ago> my curiosity was about when we run out, because I didn’t know if we would run out You still seem to be missing the point. If you talk about "when we run out", you are presenting yourself as an expert stating "we will run out" and asking about the aftermath. It would be appropriate, and better received with more leniency, for you to ask whether we would run out.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ta9000 7mo agoThat’s not rational. Why would I be asking such a simple question if I were an expert?
- margalabargala 7mo agoExactly, that self-contradiction is part of why you were downvoted so heavily. Because you presented yourself to the world as irrational.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- threetonesun 7mo agoMy understanding of most elements is if we want more it’s either pretty easy to make from something else we have a lot of, or we need to redo the Big Bang, the latter being, in my opinion, a bit of a disaster scenario.
- nkrisc 7mo agoEven synthesizing helium is prohibitively expensive. Unless you want whatever heavy decay products we have from nuclear waste, synthesizing elements at industrial scale probably isn’t happening. Unless by “make from something” else you mean extract the element from existing chemical compounds found in Earth, in which case we’re still just using existing deposits on Earth.
- bananaflag 7mo agoOn the other hand, it is possible to run out of a metal when all of it is either somewhere in some device or scattered among landfills (i.e. not concentrated in a place like a mine).
- nkrisc 7mo agoThat’s still not running out. It’s still there, just more effort to get.
- card_zero 7mo ago"At 10 parts per quadrillion, the Earth's oceans would hold 15,000 tonnes of gold", says the Wikipedia page on gold. I'm inclined to think we've lost that gold.
- nkrisc 7mo agoPractically speaking, sure. It's obviously not cost-effective to extract it. But it's there if someone can get it. I don't expect anyone to be extracting gold from ocean water, but there are other source of other elements that may not be cost-effective now but could be in the future or may simply become necessary despite the cost.
- PowerElectronix 7mo agoEffort high enough to consider that material lost to any practical purpose like a tv.
- swiftcoder 7mo agoCost scales with refinement effort, so it just results in more expensive TVs. That said, pretty sure we'll have drowned the planet in landfilled TVs long before this becomes a serious issue
- nkrisc 7mo agoIf prices of certain metals were high enough I bet people would stop throwing out TVs and dig up old ones from the dump.