So, nuclear energy? If you don't believe me, the IEA paper I think I linked to is a legit scientific source. Even at 1999 nuclear energy consumption and advanced thorium reactors fuel runs out in 40,000 years.
Really the only viable renewable that doesn't lean on depleting resources is concentrated solar power, which is the scaled up equivalent of reflecting a bunch of light onto a kettle and making it boil to make tea.
I'm thinking of just going full peak copper and ignore their babbling.
http://www.riotinto.com/documents/CESCO_Presentation_A_Harding_170412.pdf
http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/G01035.pdf
Depletion and the Long-run
Availability of Mineral
Commodities
John E. Tilton
Colorado School of Mines
Copper concentration is falling at 2% a year, and energy cost increases in proportion to falling concentration. Depletion will, if anything, hasten as electric vehicles/renewables replace fossil fuel infrastructure and require wiring. By 2400 concentration will be less than 1E-04 and half of global electricity production (1E16 Wh) will be necessary just to keep mining.
http://www.unep.org/resourcepanel/Portals/24102/PDFs/Metals_Recycling_Rates_110412-1.pdf
Given 40% recycling then it's still out by 2700, and that doesn't count the extra energy cost of smelting recyclables.
If we were to account for the mineralogical barrier that becomes a factor around 2130 depletion occurs much sooner.
Edited by Lucille ()
http://www.rff.org/rff/Documents/RFF-Event-April01-keynote.pdf
“EXPLORING THE RESOURCE BASE”
by Brian J. Skinner
Department of Geology and Geophysics
Yale University
Once the remaining elements surpass the minerological barrier they will become equally difficult to acquire. The barrier causes a jump in 2-3 orders of magnitude in energy requirements once high grade ore reserves are depleted. This means all elements two orders of magnitude higher in copper at crustal abundnace will become inaccessible as well, or all lower in crustal abundance than potassium.
Continued economic growth exacerbates mineral shortages by increasing consumption and depletion of available resources; this is not even taken into account.
Edited by Lucille ()
I will continue to bombard random people on the internet with overly personal and sociopathic questions and insults either way.
Panopticon posted:why can't steel be recycled
If it did it might hold us out a bit longer. Few materials are recycled at better than 40% in practice though.
I'm skeptical of any epoxies/biofiber whatever because I don't think they can have the strength and thermal properties of steel for things like turbine blades and engine components. Structural steel? Who cares, that's the least of our problems.
Coal is a direct input in steel, the other is iron. That's why you need coal.
now maybe this is totally wrong but it seems to me the earth itself will cool down as the sun ages, meaning mining at absurd depths will become easier and we should be able to delve deeper and deeper to extract metals over the course of hundreds of millions of years. so metals shouldn't really be an issue, right?
You're forgetting that the earth has four sides, so multiply all resource reserves by a quadratic function.
By the way I'm just a troll, don't take my warnings seriously.
Panopticon posted:Conserve Natural Resources: Every ton of steel recycled saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,400 pounds of coal, and 120 pounds of limestone. 1
It seems you could in theory support infinite exponential growth through recycling alone.
In order to make charcoal you have to burn the wood which means you loose material, I don't know how much. That 50 billion figure I gave might be more like 50 million tons per year in reality, which could support about a thousandth of what we consume now. That's quite low. Once your civilization gets below a few million people I'd imagine that specialization would become a problem.
Really though any post collapse society would have to budget its resources a lot more carefully than now. You could probably build a few airplanes and stuff with sufficient centralization of resources, but its possible that you could not maintain 20th century standards of living for everyone.
By the way, on second thought recycling would boost your available steel immensely. So if you could recycle 99% of your steel you could actually support a very high living standard I bet.
roseweird posted:Panopticon posted:the only time i played it was when the multiplayer game in D&D was organised like 2 years ago. i still dont understand why that happened but i liked it
how did you do
i don't remember which faction i was, but i was with a team mate and i recall that we ran into several problems in the first couple of turns which meant that our immediate neighbour was able to conquer our other city and at that point i gave up and played it singleplayer for a while. when the game ended it turned out my team mate had surrendered to the attacker in exchange for being allowed to exist as a sort of puppet state, and with 2 factions working together they won the game, which all the other players said was cheating