At those timescales, mining the moon or Jupiter for helium might be realistic, so the limits of earth are no longer upper bounds.
At those timescales, mining the moon or Jupiter for helium might be realistic, so the limits of earth are no longer upper bounds.
Rubber has been replaced with oil.
Fertilizer has been replaced with Natural Gas that comes from the same place as oil.
Coal usage has been replaced/displaced primarily by natural gas, see above.
Wood, or deforestation, was a real problem in the 1920's, but many uses were replaced by plastics (oil) and natural gas. Sustainable forestry helped a ton here too once it hit the paper industry's bottom line.
Oil is certainly not solved, so we solved 4 out of 5 with the 5th.
Since we’re dealing in magical hypotheticals, what if this new economical way to split nitrogen generated so much pollution that it poisoned natural water supplies? Also the “economic way” is misleading. If prices shoot up enough, then crazy things become economical like missions to other planets to retrieve it. But that’s an insane cost that has to be borne out by all humanity. Historically that worked because you increased how many people were on earth so it spread the cost out. However, it’s pretty clear the Earth is at carrying capacity for humans with our current technology which is why the population growth has slowed drastically. So increasing costs threaten to become a weight the next generation can’t lift resulting in societal collapse.
This is nonsense, from the physics point of view.
The reason why rubber/fertilizer were replaced by oil/gas products is that oil/gas has the energy needed for the (relatively simple) chemical transformations needed to obtain rubber/fertilizer from the feedstocks.
Splitting nitrogen into helium is a nuclear reaction that requires copious amounts of energy.
At least using fusion or collecting helium from Moon/Jupiter are physically sane, if economically insane.