Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> The usage of earths resources is now roughly double of what the planet could sustain long term

Based on what data exactly? Mankind has only ever scratched the Earth's surface for resources, and still only on land. If you imagine the Earth is a perfect sphere, we have far from used much resources at all.

View on HN

We have been using the resources we need. A bunch of rock and magma isn't really useful to us. It's things like soil which only exists on the surface, or oil, which has been getting harder and harder to extract.

The day we need more resources, you can be sure we will go and get them where they are. We have not have had the need to dig deep or explore the oceans so far (because other resources were readily available), but there is no telling we will never do so.

> or oil, which has been getting harder and harder to extract.

Harder to extract but still in much larger abundance than what was predicted by mostly everyone back in the 70-80s. I don't know if you were around then, but you may have heard of "peak oil". It never happened (as in, not yet, and that was already a long time ago).

I don't think the Earth is going to literally run out of anything, sure. We can always dig deeper, or prospect for more resources out in Siberia, or whatever. But there's something to be said for being concerned about being responsible with this golden age we find ourselves in, when resources are so extraordinarily cheap and abundant. It's not a given that it will be like this forever. Imagine lithium being as rare as gold, and think about whether something like the phenomenon of ubiquitous smartphones would even have been possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com