Skip to content

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

Technology
112 75 4
  • 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.

  • This post did not contain any content.

    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 editor or IDE do you use and why?

    Technology technology
    37
    1
    25 Stimmen
    37 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    T
    KEIL, because I develop embedded systems.
  • 45 Stimmen
    7 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    artocode404@lemmy.dbzer0.comA
    Googlebot sad when disallowed access to 18+ videos
  • 148 Stimmen
    37 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    D
    Self hosted Sunshine and Moonlight is the way to go.
  • 124 Stimmen
    12 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    T
    Premium supported. You get plenty with the free tier, but you get lots more with paid.
  • Big Tech Wants to Become Its Own Bank

    Technology technology
    33
    1
    246 Stimmen
    33 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    B
    I know, I was just being snarky
  • AI could already be conscious. Are we ready for it?

    Technology technology
    64
    1
    16 Stimmen
    64 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    A
    AI isn't math formulas though. AI is a complex dynamic system reacting to external input. There is no fundamental difference here to a human brain in that regard imo. It's just that the processing isn't happening in biological tissue but in silicon. Is it way less complex than a human? Sure. Is there a fundamental qualitative difference? I don't think so. What's the qualitative difference in your opinion?
  • Why Japan's animation industry has embraced AI

    Technology technology
    12
    1
    1 Stimmen
    12 Beiträge
    3 Aufrufe
    R
    The genre itself has become neutered, too. A lot of anime series have the usual "anime elements" and a couple custom ideas. And similar style, too glossy for my taste. OK, what I think is old and boring libertarian stuff, I'll still spell it out. The reason people are having such problems is because groups and businesses are de facto legally enshrined in their fields, it's almost like feudal Europe's system of privileges and treaties. At some point I thought this is good, I hope no evil god decided to fulfill my wish. There's no movement, and a faction (like Disney with Star Wars) that buys a place (a brand) can make any garbage, and people will still try to find the depth in it and justify it (that complaint has been made about Star Wars prequels, but no, they are full of garbage AND have consistent arcs, goals and ideas, which is why they revitalized the Expanded Universe for almost a decade, despite Lucas-<companies> having sort of an internal social collapse in year 2005 right after Revenge of the Sith being premiered ; I love the prequels, despite all the pretense and cringe, but their verbal parts are almost fillers, their cinematographic language and matching music are flawless, the dialogue just disrupts it all while not adding much, - I think Lucas should have been more decisive, a bit like Tartakovsky with the Clone Wars cartoon, just more serious, because non-verbal doesn't equal stupid). OK, my thought wandered away. Why were the legal means they use to keep such positions created? To make the economy nicer to the majority, to writers, to actors, to producers. Do they still fulfill that role? When keeping monopolies, even producing garbage or, lately, AI slop, - no. Do we know a solution? Not yet, because pressing for deregulation means the opponent doing a judo movement and using that energy for deregulating the way everything becomes worse. Is that solution in minimizing and rebuilding the system? I believe still yes, nothing is perfect, so everything should be easy to quickly replace, because errors and mistakes plaguing future generations will inevitably continue to be made. The laws of the 60s were simple enough for that in most countries. The current laws are not. So the general direction to be taken is still libertarian. Is this text useful? Of course not. I just think that in the feudal Europe metaphor I'd want to be a Hussite or a Cossack or at worst a Venetian trader.
  • 0 Stimmen
    1 Beiträge
    1 Aufrufe
    Niemand hat geantwortet