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> It has an essentially limitless supply of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur available to it. Are you able to provide a rough summary of how the quantities
by andyjdavis 12y ago
> It has an essentially limitless supply of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur available to it.
Are you able to provide a rough summary of how the quantities of these materials compare with the quantities available on earth?
It wasn't that long ago that humans spoke about things like the number of fish in the sea, the ability of the earth's atmosphere to absorb waste gases etc as being effectively infinite until we eventually discovered that this was unfortunately not true. It is just something that pops into my head whenever the word unlimited, infinite or limitless get used when talking about energy, resources and so on.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoAs long as we're talking about one mostly self-contained city, resources available will likely be infinite from practical point of view. The problem with Earth is that there are 7 billions of us living now; our impact thus becomes significant.
- starwaver 12y agobut it did last for thousands of years, pretty sure we'll get a lot more efficient at resource management by then.
- andyjdavis 12y agoIt would be nice to hope so but I'm actually unsure. We are becoming more efficient with resource management because our resources are increasingly constrained. If those constraints are removed, over the course of a few generations, it would be easy to slide back to doing whatever is fastest and cheapest (might be the cleaner way, might not be).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]