| > we'll deplete the finite resources soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus#Later_li... I mean, I get that you're not talking about food, but neither was Malthus per se. I just feel I might point out that the guy died in 1834, at the ripe old age of 68. We have still not run out of even one of the resources he predicted were going to run out "soon". Likewise you could probably make similar predictions about life and nature itself 3.6 billion years ago ... and that too has not yet happened, and most agree (why the prediction is different for humans vs nature I don't understand ... nature replicates exponentially and far faster than humans and uses anything and everything easily available to it just like we accuse ourselves of. But somehow nature can do no wrong. Or perhaps the reasoning is that it will adapt ... and apparently we will not ?) that it's unlikely to happen in the next 9 or so billion years. Ironically, it is now suspected that life on this planet will die from crushing overabundance of energy rather than from a shortage of some critical resource. In fact it seems that Say's law is correct, and this is not a serious point of contention among modern-day economists. It essentially says that one of two things is true: the price mechanism means that either we will simply never run out of a particular resource, or we will replace it, probably with something better and cheaper, and never run out of that. We have in fact run out of plenty of individual resources in the time since Malthus, so there have been plenty of test cases for Say's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say%27s_law Life has carried out Say's law almost to perfection. With only a few rare exceptions the concentration of atoms in cells, and therefore in most plants and animals is an almost perfect reflection of how they occur in the dead matter surrounding them. Why couldn't we do the same, given enough time, with our technology ? I mean, we don't know how at the moment, but we're getting closer all the time. I would even say that plastic is one such innovation: it is far closer in concentration to the natural environment than the mostly steel and various metals it replaced, far more abundant than the wood it replaced, and generally got us (a lot) closer to having our technology made up of the atoms surrounding us. Furthermore, I would like to point out that there is no shortage of asteroids, some with literally mountains of rare earths, that we could either mine in orbit or, if small enough or cut up, crash into the Earth. Finally, as animal bodies illustrate, it is perfectly possible to construct very advanced and well-working pieces of technology with zero access to rare earths. We just don't know how ... yet. We even know perfectly well how to get closer to that goal, it just isn't cheaper at this point in time. |