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And it's not just oil. It's all the minerals we've been mining since the dawn of civilization - take copper: before copper age one could find nuggets of pure co

by Faint 11y ago

And it's not just oil. It's all the minerals we've been mining since the dawn of civilization - take copper: before copper age one could find nuggets of pure copper metal [1], in ancient Egypt it was produced from ores with 10-12% copper [2]. 21st century copper ore has an average of 0.6% copper in it [3]. I doubt that ancient Egyptians could have done much anything with 0.6% ores. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_during_the_Copper_Age_in_Europe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_during_the_Copper_Ag... [2] http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/mining.htm http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/mining.... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_extraction_techniques http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_extraction_techniques

timmaxw 11y ago
But that copper hasn't been destroyed; it's just tied up in the form of pipes, power lines, etc. If civilization collapsed, our successors could "mine" pure copper from the ruins of our cities. If anything, pure copper would be more easily accessible post-collapse than in the Copper Age, because industrial civilization has already done the hard work of converting it from 0.6% ores to pure copper.