Are we running out of resources?

There were a lot of words here to simply fall back on the argument that innovation will solve every problem and do so before there is significant suffering. I agree that life will always go on, but this idea that consumption and quality of life can do nothing but rise when it is so dependent on the limited cheap energy and resources that we only learned to exploit a century ago is insanity to me.<p>Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked. It won&#x27;t be the end of the world, but we will all be poorer and there will be suffering while we adjust. I too hope for some near free energy and material source to appear somehow and prevent this, but I struggle to see how you could blindly expect this to occur, not even entertaining the thought that even if such an innovation exists, we might not be able to discover it before the consequences of our current behavior sets in.

&gt; <i>Everyone should be living much more like the most wealthy people in the most wealthy nations are living now. It should be considered a moral abomination that billions of people are not living in multiple story homes with robotic assistants to control their lights, security, doors, air-conditioning and the temperature of their pools.</i><p>As with the rest of the article, I&#x27;m really not sure if this is irony or hubris? If everybody had these conditions of living, we would either need a larger planet or a lot less people on it.

I had to check if this submarine advertisement for fossil fuels was written in the 90s (century optional).<p>&gt; But only because no resource has yet been discovered that is objectively better at producing electricity more cheaply.<p>Um, no. Only if you hide most of the deaths it causes off the balance sheet and pretend they don&#x27;t exist.

&quot;Should any particular resource begin to run short, our creativity will bring into being the knowledge of how to replace that resource from either some other source or by using some other means to accomplish what that resource did.&quot;<p>The track record on this appears to be 100%. Are there any examples of a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?

I don&#x27;t think we should strive to remake the galaxy for human comfort and desires, but instead strive to remake ourselves, to be better suited to the environments we inhabit.

It was nice to read something optimistic again. Feels so rare these days. Seems like whenever optimism pokes its head out, everyone rushes to smash it back into its hole. There’s no room for your optimism in my reality! And so on.<p>edit: Hmm. I get a negative score for celebrating some optimism. How dare I step out of line.

This is something I learned about iron recently. We&#x27;re not running out of it, thankfully. The planet is mostly iron, after all. But it perhaps helps drive home the sheer scale of modern industrial civilization.<p>More steel was manufactured per year [1] in the 2010s, than humanity produced in its entire history up to World War I. The whole century of the industrial revolution -- from the Eiffel Tower, to the steam ships, railways -- is but a drop in the ocean of material production by today&#x27;s standards.<p>Most basic resources have a similar looking chart. And not everything is as abundant as iron.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;VBIN1RF.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;VBIN1RF.png</a>

Pet peeve: James Watt was the Bill Gates of his day, he held natural industrial progress made by thousands of talented individuals back with patents and connections to the wealthy, please stop crediting him personally with the steam engine.

Few notes:<p>- today &quot;needed resources&quot; might be different, at least partially, than tomorrow ones, as they are partially different than yesterday, but such differences are very hard to estimate since we know the past, but we can&#x27;t really know the future, planning cover development with already or almost already known things, future scientific discovering are not predictable;<p>- resource estimate is done and sold as a &quot;tangible number&quot; however I&#x27;m not sure how approximate it can be. So saying on earth we can source X gazillion tons of a certain mineral for me is &quot;probably near truth but until extracted we can&#x27;t really know&quot; and that&#x27;s similar for agriculture production vs climate change;<p>- another issue is the meaning of &quot;renewable&quot; and &quot;circular&quot;, wood is renewable at a certain rate of usage, recyclable one ore two time for different usage in a more or less significant percentage, Al is formally 100% renewable ad infinitum, glass the same, but the scale and the cost of such supply chains are not immediately measurable on scale etc.<p>Long story short my own personal opinion is: for actual technology, actual number of people, actual human development, we probably have significant resource issues witch does not means &quot;we run out&quot; in the broad sense, but we still are in a very bad situation. Planning moves to evolve is mandatory, but must be done at both scientific and social level, certainly not at economical level as is done today.

&gt;&gt;We can make all of the Earth rather like the best parts of New York, or Paris or Sydney: picturesque, clean and comfortable. We can then set about to make the rest of the solar system rather like the Earth.<p>If we make even 10% of the entire earth&#x27;s surface at that density, it will be an environmental catastrophe that would likely collapse the food web.<p>Over half the world&#x27;s population lives on less than 1% of the land [0]. Only 14% of the land has been modified in any way.<p>Long before we turn the whole thing into a cityscape, the natural world on which we depend, from the soil biology, to the pollinators, to the apex predators, will all collapse.<p>Sure the author has a point about the transformative ability of knowledge, but he&#x27;s also basically an idiot about system dynamics.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymail.co.uk&#x2F;sciencetech&#x2F;article-3389041&#x2F;Where-world-lives-Map-shows-half-planet-s-population-lives-just-1-land.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymail.co.uk&#x2F;sciencetech&#x2F;article-3389041&#x2F;Wher...</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.weforum.org&#x2F;agenda&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;human-impact-earth-planet-change-development&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.weforum.org&#x2F;agenda&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;human-impact-earth-pl...</a>

The 19th &amp; 20th centuries have taught us how transformative knowledge is. Prior to these centuries humanity more or less haphazardly acquired new knowledge. Now we&#x27;re much more principled in our acquisition and management of knowledge - in fact we&#x27;ve come to see that knowledge itself is a resource. What do we know about knowledge resources? For starters we know they&#x27;re finite. There&#x27;s only so much knowledge available to any computing node (or person). Then there&#x27;s the issue of it takes energy to store, transfer, and synthesize that knowledge and those energy costs are skyrocketing. Finally, there&#x27;s the very real fact that knowledge synthesis is asymptotic - there&#x27;s a finite amount of knowledge to be had in total, and while quick strides can be made in getting close to that totality to close the remaining knowledge gap will require increasing amounts of energy.<p>We closed a remarkable bit of that gap in the 19th and 20th centuries - the gaps remaining are getting <i>really difficult</i> to fill. This is the counterargument to innovation will solve all our problems.

There will always be enough until one day there isn&#x27;t...

I would say no, we just need to change what we focus on. If you&#x27;re worried about lithium-ion batteries running out, check out Aluminum ion batteries (AL is the mos t abundant metal in the Earth&#x27;s crust).<p>Worried about farmland? Check out advances in vertical farming.<p>Worried about space to live? Just wait for a housing price correction.<p>Worried about energy? Check out the advances in Solar, Small modular reactors, and grid storage possibilities.<p>The better question isn&#x27;t &quot;are we running out of resources?&quot; it&#x27;s &quot;should we be using different resources or the same resources differently?&quot; to which the answer is yes and being explored by scientists and engineers

I think we know now that issue is not about lack of resources[1], it is more about the destruction of the environment[2]. If we want to keep coexisting with other forms of living.<p>[1] Once generation IV nuclear powered is mastered, that is.<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;2022&#x2F;apr&#x2F;04&#x2F;ipcc-report-now-or-never-if-world-stave-off-climate-disaster" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;2022&#x2F;apr&#x2F;04&#x2F;ipcc-rep...</a>

The finite resource is places to put the byproducts.

At the start a sigmoid does look like an exponential doesn’t it?

I don&#x27;t think we are running out of resources.<p>I think we are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment - in a good way!<p>But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured. In the name of protecting us and the environment, the governance structure creates artificial rules on behalf of their stakeholders (corporations) that stops innovation and pushes the costs and risks on to the population at large.

Is it just me or is it annoying that some articles take SEVERAL paragraphs to get to the point?

What&#x27;s with the weird url?

No we are not running out of resources<p>Are we wasting resources? yes