Fine maybe another 100 years we’re good. But what about 200, what about 1000. Copper is not water, there is no natural process that renews it. The question is, is it as ubiquitous as silicon that we will never run out of it compared to our demands or is it not.<p>If it is not, then we have a serious problem if we want human civilization to thrive and continue. The only solutions I can think of are, reaching a very high recycle rate, but we know from thermodynamics that chemical reactions are not reversible, but maybe we can build enough tech that we recycle everything very well and not just dump them in landfills.<p>Or we develop enough tech to be able to mine the asteroids, which can give us access to some minerals at amounts that would last us another 1000+ years. But not all minerals are found at asteroids, and it’s not clear if we can actually do this very hard task.<p>The final solution which seems to have fallen out of vogue but I’m in favor of is limiting human population. If everyone has 1 kid, human population halves in 1 generation. If we do this for 3-4 generations, we can reach a really good sustainable population, and then have 2 kids to maintain it.<p>I don't understand this insane to me belief that we want to constantly grow human population. It seems to come from the belief that each human is an innovation robot, and that with more innovation robots we get more innovation. A cursory glance at humanity shows this to be obviously false. Humans need to be trained, taught, led to be able to produce something new. We have 10x more researchers now and scientific progress has still slowed compared to 1900s. Throwing more researchers into the mix will not fix it. People who run companies intuitively know this. If Google could invent AGI, by hiring 100,000 more AI engineers, they would do it in a heartbeat. Instead you find that talent density is extremely important for innovation. Small groups of exceptional talent, outperform large groups of mediocre talent always. There is a cost to cultivating talent in human beings and obviously with more humans it becomes more competitive and harder to cultivate talent in every human. There is a cost to coordinating between different humans and sifting through to find talent, that again increases the more humans are thrown into the mix.<p>This whole more humans are undeniably good always, is insane enough that only academics and those with no experience in the real world can convince themselves of it. There is obviously an optimal number of humans, you may disagree that it is higher or lower than the current number, but the number must exist! I suspect we are way more than optimal, ymmv.