Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

> India is offering more than $1 billion in cash to each semiconductor company that sets up manufacturing units in the country as it seeks to build on its smartphone assembly industry and strengthen its electronics supply chain, two officials said.

Semiconductors are the new food. Everyone wants to make them themselves. No one wants to depend on foreign fabs anymore.

But I'm afraid that at some point we will run out of raw metals to mine, including rare earths. There is already a shortage of lithium because of electric vehicles. Could the mass manufacturing of semiconductors squeeze global metal supplies even more? Iron, gold, cadmium, silver, platinum, titanium, these resources are finite and not renewable. Even if we run out in 10,000 years, what happens then? We need to recycle more of our old electronics, including computer chips and processors. A brilliant mind should come up with an industrial process that takes a few thousand chips and breaks them down into separate components. Turning manufactured electronics back into raw metals (except plastics, paint, and glue, which should be discarded).

In 10,000 years will it be technologically and/or economically viable to mine landfills for these materials? The elements are still there, potentially in greater concentrations than the ores from which they were originally mined.

I've been wondering this for years

Pretty sure this future is already occurring, just not evenly distributed. Not 10,000 years away.

Well before 10,000 years from now we will be mining asteroids.

I would hope that in 1000 years we will be herding asteroids filled with these materials from the far reaches of our Solar System into an orbit around our earth or moon for mining.

How much volume is actually available inside of asteroids that populate our solar system?

https://xkcd.com/1389/

This xkcd talks instead about surface area, but suggests that the Earth holds a good chunk of the mine-able volume that can fuel industry.

Now, if we could siphon off hydrogen from the gas giants and fuse them into heavier elements, we could have orders of magnitude more material to work with.

It isn't just surface area, but also the elemental composition. When the earth was molten, every siderophilic[0] element sank into the earth's core, leaving the crust with relatively low concentrations of precious metals[1]. All the precious metals we can mine are from later asteroid impacts, not the initial material that formed the earth. Mining asteroids would potentially give us more access to those precious metals.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldschmidt_classification#Sid...

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110907132044.h...

Not sure about volume but mass wise it’s a drop in the bucket. About 4% of the moons mass according to Wikipedia.

I was surprised to learn that the earth is about as massive as Mercury, Venus, Mars, the moon and a few more moons combined.

The Earth is too massive - almost all of the earths mass is below the crust and inaccessible due to extreme temperatures and pressure, bad sci-fi movies not withstanding.

Most asteroids have so little gravity that mining them out would be quite feasible.

That's a good point indeed

Rare earths aren't actually that rare, and they're pretty well distributed throughout the planet, it's just that China is willing to screw their environment and undercut costs enough that other countries have been more than willing to outsource their production to China.

But when these resources are "used up" it's not like they disappear (as opposed to, say, helium), and at some point in the future it will be economic to recycle them and mine them from landfills.

What types of social safety nets exist to facilitate a brilliant mind risking everything on such an industrial process, which has social utility but would probably not be profitable for a long time if ever? It's a noble goal for sure, but I'm afraid we're rapidly advancing towards a future where only the biggest corporations can even begin to experiment with creating that type of process. :(

Hopefully space mining is a thing in 10,000 years?

Hopefully.

Are asteroids known to contain rare earths?

https://space.mines.edu/

Hopefully in 10,000 years space mining will be a relic of the distant past, like the black and white photos of Appalachian coal miners in history books, and we will have moved on to creating the materials we need by adding or removing electrons and protons from other more common materials.

Maybe we can look at switching to optical circuits to cut down on the amount of metals we need?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com