There's only one planet Earth, finite in size - and therefore a finite amount of natural resources exist within it. Once we've split all the uranium and washed all the phosphorus into the ocean, that's it - you can't think up more Zinc, Rubidium or Lithium - once it's gone, it's gone.
I'm sure we could do vastly more recycling, use alternatives for some things, improve efficiency, develop magical new technologies, etc, etc... but almost no-one I've spoken to about this appreciates just how terrifyingly rapidly we're approaching these limits. If we run out of available mine-able Zinc & Copper in 30 years - which is quite possible - what then? Do we have enough time to switch to coping strategies? Will that be a smooth ride? It seems to me that the front of the train has already hit the buffers, but we've still got our foot on the gas pedal, back here in the cab.
Most of the useful mineral resources on Earth are only available in vanishingly tiny quantities elsewhere in the solar system. We currently do almost no recycling of anything, compared to our consumption. The human population is huge, growing in number, affluence and resource usage per capita. We're on course to run out of the minerals required to run our economy & infrastructure within most of our lifetimes.
We are sitting on a huge ball of matter. And with enough energy--which we can get from the sun for another 5 billion years or so--we can recycle almost anything.
Of course coping may not be easy in the first place.
It's not really the long term future that I find alarming, it's the near-term transitions. It seems like globally we're finally bumping up against a load of fixed environmental, resource and population buffers almost all at once. Bumpy road ahead, possibly.
The problem is obtaining enough energy per cubic metre-second, so to speak--over the next 5 billion years, the sun will provide the earth with enough power to do just about anything we'd like to do today. But the reason we don't recycle rare earth metals is because it takes a lot of concentrated energy that we'd rather use for other things.
This problem will only become worse as concentrated energy sources are used up, and we move on to more diffuse sources with lower EROEIs, but expect to have the same surplusses we had in the 1990s.
According to "Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air" Thorium will last a while. A few hundred years should be possible. That should be plenty of time to develop nuclear fusion.
Hmmm. Fusion. Even if sustainable ignition is made to work, and a perfectly functioning fusion reactor can be built - it's still completely unknown if it can be used as a useful power station:
Anyone interested in fusion power really ought to read that article. The main thrust of the article is: a) even if you build the reactor, how do you capture the energy - which is mostly emitted in the form of neutrons - and b) where are you going to get the tritium from. Currently the answer to both questions is 'don't know'.
I'm sure we could do vastly more recycling, use alternatives for some things, improve efficiency, develop magical new technologies, etc, etc... but almost no-one I've spoken to about this appreciates just how terrifyingly rapidly we're approaching these limits. If we run out of available mine-able Zinc & Copper in 30 years - which is quite possible - what then? Do we have enough time to switch to coping strategies? Will that be a smooth ride? It seems to me that the front of the train has already hit the buffers, but we've still got our foot on the gas pedal, back here in the cab.
Most of the useful mineral resources on Earth are only available in vanishingly tiny quantities elsewhere in the solar system. We currently do almost no recycling of anything, compared to our consumption. The human population is huge, growing in number, affluence and resource usage per capita. We're on course to run out of the minerals required to run our economy & infrastructure within most of our lifetimes.
Nice infographic with some estimated timescales for various resources: http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2605/2605120...
The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race is our inability to understand the exponential function: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
I'm not being alarmist - sometimes things are actually alarming.