The world would be a much better place if curiosity was the main driver instead of power.
Fresh water isn't unlimited - in fact much farming today is done unsustainably by pumping ground water faster than it can be replenished. Desalination plants are expensive and not necessarily viable.
Oil is obviously limited, and while there are energy alternatives it's not quite that simple. Not to mention the abundant use of petroleum in every day items we take for granted such as plastic. Sure, we can imagine a world without oil, but right now that world does not exist.
Land is limited. Minerals are limited. Medicine can be limited (I'm fairly certainly whoever develops a vaccine will find it used nationally much more densely than internationally until it is ubiquitous).
Yep, but we have more than enough for the time being.
> ... in fact much farming today is done unsustainably by pumping ground water faster than it can be replenished.
Yes, however a lot of that is done to produce products that are unnecessary (a single almond requires 1.1 gallons of water to produce), a political exercise (40% of all US corn is grown for Ethanol, which produces more carbon emissions than it saves), or otherwise in support of our largesse (49% of all US corn is grown for animal feed).
> Oil is obviously limited, and while there are energy alternatives it's not quite that simple. Not to mention the abundant use of petroleum in every day items we take for granted such as plastic. Sure, we can imagine a world without oil, but right now that world does not exist.
Substantially less oil would be consumed for power, making it available for plastics, etc, if we actually invested in nuclear, wind and solar. The amount consumed for the manufacture of plastics is pretty limited and plant-based alternatives are coming to the fore.
> Land is limited. Minerals are limited.
The density of the US is 94 people per square mile, with more than enough minerals to go around. There's effectively no limit to how far up you can build in a metropolis if the city council chooses to permit it (see: San Francisco vs. Miami, Houston).
> Medicine can be limited (I'm fairly certainly whoever develops a vaccine will find it used nationally much more densely than internationally until it is ubiquitous).
Medicine is always going to be limited, the question is how we choose to ration it -- based on luck (aka free market capitalism, to whomever can afford it) or based on need (via socialized scheme).
> Food...
Consider that America wastes 40% of all the food it produces -- 80 billion pounds of food per year -- enough to feed the entire rest of the planet. [1]
There is enough to go around, we just choose not to let it.
[1] https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/
I think we actually agree on most things except for this. China is hoarding rare Earth minerals, mostly the kind you need to develop batteries to transition away from our dependency on oil.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2019/07/10/china...
So no, we absolutely do not have enough minerals to go around, at least if you want to transition to alternative energy resources.
Yes, China produces a lot right now, and yes they're considering it a strategic issue, but it's not because China is the only place that has it -- far from -- many countries have similar quantities. China only has 1/3 of the world's known rare earth supply. The name is misleading, because they're anything but rare.
The reason China produces so much is because they're willing to pay the environmental cost of extracting them, nothing more. There's plenty of those to go around, too.
> The reason China produces so much is because they're willing to pay the environmental cost of extracting them, nothing more.
They're offloading it onto Africa, so they aren't really paying it themselves.
Africa has relatively little in the way of discovered rare earth deposits. There are 50X as many known rare earth deposits in China as in South Africa, and that's the largest source in Africa. They are very much mining it at home. If they're getting them from abroad they're not "hoarding" them, there's a market, and other countries could just as easily buy.
Lots of articles can back me up here, it's blighted the land. [2, 3, 4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_industry_in_China
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...
[3] https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...
[4] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
While the idea of humanity becoming an interstellar species as depicted in sci-fi seems pretty far off to me, it seems like asteroid mining via drone could be viable in the near future if the incentives were right.
If you have to figure out which product are “necessary” and which are not - you don’t have enough resources “to go around” by definition.
> Yep, but we have more than enough for the time being.
Ehm. Yeah. No. Maybe start by lifting your rich-western-country view and look around a bit. Middle East and Africa have desertification happening at a shocking rate. Wars are being fought over water. The Nile is about to "run dry", it will stop actually having anything left to empty into the Mediterranian Sea. What's left is full of garbage, toxins and wells are pumping up salty water.
But don't worry, it's going to come to the U.S. sooner than you may wish. The Ogallala Aquifer is being relied on by farmers all over and is continuously used for irrigation. Just a matter of time until that runs dry.
Oh, btw, the Colorado River has "run dry" already. If people keep thinking like you, this will just get worse.
It not an unnatural phenomena. Biological cells sometimes do that too.
Even if we gained access to exoplanets the problem would still remain. People can and will continue to demand more. Individuals will stake claim to entire planets for their own.
The problem is that satisfaction comes from relative success, not absolute. Look at folks like Bezos and Musk. The only thing that will slow them down is aging and eventual death.
Which is, of course, not to say that power doesn’t corrupt and that once he hits his goal, he won’t want more, but for now at least, he has a specific aim.