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Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world

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  • If you have the tech to do that, just capture the asteroid in orbit and mine it in space.

    I'm envisioning extracting more copper and other metals that would be utilized in space, so - yeah, if you can develop smelting and refinement capabilities on-orbit there's some attractiveness there, but down on the mud-ball we're going to use over a million times as much material as we are currently utilizing on orbit and beyond, so getting that material down is going to be a whole lot cheaper and more efficient as a "natural skyfall" than any kind of controlled re-entry.

  • Copper doesn't get used up. The blue rocks in the picture are basically copper rust. We just need to use it in smart ways...no copper pots or door handles. Or at Least identify and recycle it more efficiently by returning used electronics to the stores we purchased them from. Those places should have a plan on how to dismantle the used electronics and how to reuse the materials.

    We just need to use it in smart ways

    We're more likely to get copper from asteroids first or die trying

  • Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It's pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.

    Markets do not equal capitalism. You can have the efficiencies of free markets (worker owned co-ops which are market socialist) without the all consuming greed of capitalism.

    I don't disagree, but I don't see the relevance of these particular flaws of unrestrained capitalism to this specific stated problem: that there might not be enough copper to be able to continue to use it as we always have.

    There are lots of flaws to capitalism. Running out of useful copper, while copper is being used in wasteful ways, doesn't really implicate the main weaknesses of capitalism systems.

  • Ever since the crisis of over production, MAJOR, unceasing psycho-social campaign have been continuously been running not just to foster demand but to ensure it exceeds the planned supply and ensure the price margin always remains on the right side of the curve.

    This is the central reason why nearly everyone works ceaselessly to buy things they don't need and dont have the time nor energy to use.

    What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I'm not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.

    I don't think you're wrong, I just don't think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.

  • We just need to use it in smart ways

    We're more likely to get copper from asteroids first or die trying

    Didn't China just punt off a ticket to some asteroids? Viability tests maybe?

  • What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I'm not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.

    I don't think you're wrong, I just don't think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.

    We are all literally being tricked into bringing home more copper.

    I bought a whole ass Samsung S25 In February, only to discover in March that a $6 part and $20 bucks of labor made my S22 perfectly serviceable (needed new USB charging port)

    But like a dumbass I bought a phone after 3 years of waiting, and was giddy about it and I'm literally typing on the older phone now.

    I have been trying to trick myself into letting devices grow into a more full obsolescence before replacing them, and have had very poor luck in doing so.

    Plenty of this is my own impulse control, but plenty of this is by design and marketing, and if enough people are satisfied with their three years old cell phones bad things happen to your 401k and to my friends employed in South Korea.

    I realize that this is an infinitesimally smaller amount of copper, Even all-in with accessories, and the institutional and industrial requirements for copper.

    But if we don't start to figure out some sort of degrowth, we're going to hit that wall as others have mentioned, and it all seems to start with the marketing demand and design.

  • There's a lot of copper pairs left underground. Many hundreds of thousands of kilometres of it. Use it as a pull-through for fibre-optic bundles, and everyone can have gigabit internet.

    Seriously though, there'll come a time when that underground obsolete copper will become economic to retrieve.

    One of my family members had that job for a good while. What's interesting is the phone companies did not keep great records of what's copper and where it is, so a lot of it is likely to remain in place for a long time. Something else he has seen is thieves cutting fiber, thinking it is copper, and causing outages, although that is less frequent than it was years ago.

  • What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I'm not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.

    I don't think you're wrong, I just don't think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.

    I think this kind of artificial demand creation is the main driver for all resource consumption

  • We are all literally being tricked into bringing home more copper.

    I bought a whole ass Samsung S25 In February, only to discover in March that a $6 part and $20 bucks of labor made my S22 perfectly serviceable (needed new USB charging port)

    But like a dumbass I bought a phone after 3 years of waiting, and was giddy about it and I'm literally typing on the older phone now.

    I have been trying to trick myself into letting devices grow into a more full obsolescence before replacing them, and have had very poor luck in doing so.

    Plenty of this is my own impulse control, but plenty of this is by design and marketing, and if enough people are satisfied with their three years old cell phones bad things happen to your 401k and to my friends employed in South Korea.

    I realize that this is an infinitesimally smaller amount of copper, Even all-in with accessories, and the institutional and industrial requirements for copper.

    But if we don't start to figure out some sort of degrowth, we're going to hit that wall as others have mentioned, and it all seems to start with the marketing demand and design.

    Copper is a material that is used in many more orders of magnitude for infrastructure and basic development. It's technically "consumption" to eat food everyday and have running water and electricity in your home, but the type of materialist luxury consumption you're talking about doesn't factor into global copper demand. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in use, and about 14g of copper in each one. That's about 100,000 metric tons of copper, when the article talks about 110 million as a baseline (11,000 times as much), and above 200 million (20,000 times as much). So no, consumer electronics aren't going to move the needle on this scale of a problem.

    If you're going to tell the developing countries that they need to stop developing, that's morally suspect. And frankly, environmentally suspect, as the article itself is about moving off of fossil fuels and electrifying a lot of our energy needs in both the developed and developing nations, whether we're talking relatively clean energy source like natural gas or dirtier sources like coal, or even dirtier sources like wood or animal dung.

  • Copper doesn't get used up. The blue rocks in the picture are basically copper rust. We just need to use it in smart ways...no copper pots or door handles. Or at Least identify and recycle it more efficiently by returning used electronics to the stores we purchased them from. Those places should have a plan on how to dismantle the used electronics and how to reuse the materials.

    Copper pots and door handles are very smart products as copper has killing bacterias properties, it is self cleaning, in some way.

  • Copper pots and door handles are very smart products as copper has killing bacterias properties, it is self cleaning, in some way.

    Its possible to just coat the surface if that's the effect needed. I was so happy a year ago that I had found copper Ethernet wire. However upon inspection recently the wire is basically aluminum coated in copper. Usually, platers will first clean the surface and then electro less coat nickel on aluminum. Then you can coat other things like copper. Aluminum forms an oxide almost instantly in normal atmosphere so its difficult to coat with anything. But electroless nickel works very well after an HCl bath or a nitric bath.

  • Copper is a material that is used in many more orders of magnitude for infrastructure and basic development. It's technically "consumption" to eat food everyday and have running water and electricity in your home, but the type of materialist luxury consumption you're talking about doesn't factor into global copper demand. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in use, and about 14g of copper in each one. That's about 100,000 metric tons of copper, when the article talks about 110 million as a baseline (11,000 times as much), and above 200 million (20,000 times as much). So no, consumer electronics aren't going to move the needle on this scale of a problem.

    If you're going to tell the developing countries that they need to stop developing, that's morally suspect. And frankly, environmentally suspect, as the article itself is about moving off of fossil fuels and electrifying a lot of our energy needs in both the developed and developing nations, whether we're talking relatively clean energy source like natural gas or dirtier sources like coal, or even dirtier sources like wood or animal dung.

    First of all, thank you.
    I don't want to be telling developing nations to halt their progress. You underscore where my mindset could be prescriptive and harmful.

    Second, my point is that we seem to only get infrastructure or 'progress' when it can be weaponized under capitalism to make someone money, the same way we can't have meaningful recycling systems because it will never be profitable over virgin plastics and other single-use materials.

    My attitude has been morphing into "nobody gets second until everybody gets first plates" but for housing, accessories, tools, etc -- that plays directly into the kinds of capital equipment, network buildouts, and supply chains that deliver iPhones to us for $1,000 when the actual material, energy and human cost could be easily 30x that.

    I'm saying the paths and lanes that deliver consumer goods and experiences are obscuring the waste therein, and that they drive copper crisis just like every other scarcity crisis.

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    It’s ok just 3D print it 🙂

  • Well, I suspect we've got enough copper for the next 50 years, so... good timing.

    And, you don't start with a Manhattan sized rock, you practice with little ones just big enough to survive re-entry and work your way up. The key is learning to operate long term with "rock moving tech" in solar orbit. We're not there, which is why we should have started 50 years ago...

    We have enough copper for a lot more than that, depending on how far and deep we want to go

  • We have enough copper for a lot more than that, depending on how far and deep we want to go

    Well, that's a big component: how efficient / environmentally destructive is the mining?

    Also, as electricity consumption in areas like China, India, Africa increases, they're going to start needing big multiples of the amount of copper used in the US/Europe/ANZ to-date.

  • What was Radiant AI, anyway?

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    In fact Daggerfall was almost nothing but quests and other content like that.
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    If you are taking business advice from ChatGPT that includes purchasing a ChatGPT subscription or can’t be bothered to look up how it works beforehand then your business is probably going to fail.
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    It dissolves into salt water. Except it doesn't dissolve, this is not the term they should be using, you can't just dry out the water and get the plastic back. It breaks down into other things. I'm pretty sure an ocean full of dissolved plastic would be a way worse ecological disaster than the current microplastic problem... I've seen like 3-4 articles about this now and they all use the term dissolve and it's pissing me off.
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    My 2 cents is that it would have flourished a lot longer if eclipse wasn't stretched so thin like using a very thick amorphous log that is somehow still brittle? And ugly? As a bookmark.
  • Why doesn't Nvidia have more competition?

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    It’s funny how the article asks the question, but completely fails to answer it. About 15 years ago, Nvidia discovered there was a demand for compute in datacenters that could be met with powerful GPU’s, and they were quick to respond to it, and they had the resources to focus on it strongly, because of their huge success and high profitability in the GPU market. AMD also saw the market, and wanted to pursue it, but just over a decade ago where it began to clearly show the high potential for profitability, AMD was near bankrupt, and was very hard pressed to finance developments on GPU and compute in datacenters. AMD really tried the best they could, and was moderately successful from a technology perspective, but Nvidia already had a head start, and the proprietary development system CUDA was already an established standard that was very hard to penetrate. Intel simply fumbled the ball from start to finish. After a decade of trying to push ARM down from having the mobile crown by far, investing billions or actually the equivalent of ARM’s total revenue. They never managed to catch up to ARM despite they had the better production process at the time. This was the main focus of Intel, and Intel believed that GPU would never be more than a niche product. So when intel tried to compete on compute for datacenters, they tried to do it with X86 chips, One of their most bold efforts was to build a monstrosity of a cluster of Celeron chips, which of course performed laughably bad compared to Nvidia! Because as it turns out, the way forward at least for now, is indeed the massively parralel compute capability of a GPU, which Nvidia has refined for decades, only with (inferior) competition from AMD. But despite the lack of competition, Nvidia did not slow down, in fact with increased profits, they only grew bolder in their efforts. Making it even harder to catch up. Now AMD has had more money to compete for a while, and they do have some decent compute units, but Nvidia remains ahead and the CUDA problem is still there, so for AMD to really compete with Nvidia, they have to be better to attract customers. That’s a very tall order against Nvidia that simply seems to never stop progressing. So the only other option for AMD is to sell a bit cheaper. Which I suppose they have to. AMD and Intel were the obvious competitors, everybody else is coming from even further behind. But if I had to make a bet, it would be on Huawei. Huawei has some crazy good developers, and Trump is basically forcing them to figure it out themselves, because he is blocking Huawei and China in general from using both AMD and Nvidia AI chips. And the chips will probably be made by Chinese SMIC, because they are also prevented from using advanced production in the west, most notably TSMC. China will prevail, because it’s become a national project, of both prestige and necessity, and they have a massive talent mass and resources, so nothing can stop it now. IMO USA would clearly have been better off allowing China to use American chips. Now China will soon compete directly on both production and design too.
  • Telegram partners with xAI to bring Grok to over a billion users

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    So you pay taxes to Putin. Good to know who actually helps funding the regime. I suggest you go someplace else. I won't take this from a jerk from likely one of the countries buying fossil fuels from said regime, that have also supported it after a few falsified elections starting in 1996, which is also the year I was born. And of course "paying taxes to Putin" can't be even compared to what TG is doing, so just shut up and go do something you know how to do, like I dunno what.
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    Of course they don't click anything. Google search has just become a front-end for Gemini, the answer is "served" up right at the top and most people will just take that for Gospel.
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