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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

stuff like this really makes it seem like simulation theory might be real, there have been people warning about phosphate shortages leading to food crisis for years and even as recently as a few months ago, then Norway finds this massive supply

https://phys.org/news/2023-02-phosphorus-shortage-affect-wor...

https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-farms-are-hooked-on-p...

Norway also seems to be the luckiest/most blessed nation on earth, now they struck another gold mine to go along with all their oil

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The world is very large and we have a detailed accounting of what, maybe a fraction of one percent of it? It would be FAR weirder if we stopped discovering new things in a mostly unexplored planet.

You are exaggerating. but there is definitely more to find. some of the largest mines are just like the first place they started digging without any modern exploration techniques. Mostly doesn't matter. humans will run out at some point of critical materials.

Deepest human-made hole is about 40,000 feet and the Earth's crust is about 160,000 feet. We've barely scratched the surface, literally.

How do you intend to reach 100,000 feet, much less conduct large scale mining?

How did people 200 years ago expect to reach 40,000 feet? Have a little perspective.

We don't have 200 years to figure it out. I'm not the one that lacks perspective here. Hard problems also often take over 200 years to solve, we can't rely on the dogmatic belief that we will somehow figure it out.

A failure to plan is a plan to fail.

Good luck getting deeper, temperatures rise, everything becomes much harder, thus costly. You can't do any serious extraction of solid minerals, only gasses and liquids (oil) are possible in certain situations

You could craft that same type of argument about literally thousands of technical challenges from 200 years ago that are now thoroughly solved. Is this one super extra special?

This is simply not true as materials don't disappear.

People are investing money to find solutions to the problems we face. Seems reasonable that with money comes results

This, and also: all the discoveries that don't immediately help solve our problems rarely make the news, or if they do we gloss over them and forget them immediately.

Vital demand for a resource caused people to go looking for the resource. Attributing this discovery to 'the simulation' or benevolent gods seems silly to me.

Can't wait for the redditors to say 'we need to be more like Norway'.

I would definitely say the Arabs are more blessed. They have massive oil reserves, favorable warm weather and a central location in the world to sell that oil. Norway is a frozen wasteland in the north.

> favorable warm weather

I don't know about that.

50°C in the shade is not 'favourable warm weather'.

And Norway is not a frozen wasteland. Where I live in Norway is currently rather warmer than where I am visiting family in southern England. And the average annual temperature is 13°C, hardly a frozen wasteland.

There's too much sand there. It's coarse and gets everywhere.

I’ll take clean, sterile sand over disgustingly cold snow and clouds of biting insects any day.

There's loads of untapped resources still, but it costs money to find & extract it; it's a cost / benefit tradeoff, or an investment / risk tradeoff. Nothing weird about it.

Doesn't that seem that perhaps the people warning about crises are the ones who are wrong?

Seems like this is warnings about crises working exactly as intended. If someone hears a fire engine siren and as a result doesn't pull into a road and get hit by a fire engine, what you're saying is that sirens are pointless because nobody was hurt?

I don't think the causative direction is like that. I think the market responded as it did. People didn't find new oil fields because experts said there will be Peak Oil.

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