171 comments on The Fifth Problem: Peak Capital
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171 comments on The Fifth Problem: Peak Capital
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This planet, unfortunately, has a fixed radius...
Anywhere from 50 to 100,000 tons of mass is added to the earth each year. Though this does not appreciably increase the size of earth, it does increase the radius. There is no fixed earth. I thought fixed earth ideas went away with Aristotle's death over 2000 years ago?
As far as resource limits, our technology is relatively primitive and we are unable to penetrate more than 10 miles into the surface. We have no idea what resources the planet contains.
The scientific community has dismissed the "Expanding Earth Theory". The following details are from the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_earth_theory
"Modern measurements have established very stringent upper bound limits for the expansion rate, which very much reduces the possibility of an expanding Earth. For example, paleomagnetic data has been used to calculate that the radius of the Earth 400 million years ago was 102 ± 2.8% of today's radius.[6] Furthermore, examinations of earth's moment of inertia suggest that no significant change of earth's radius in the last 620 million years could have taken place and therefore earth expansion is untenable.[7]
The primary objections to an expanding Earth have centered around the lack of an accepted process by which the Earth's radius could increase and on the inability to find an actual increase of earth's radius by modern measurements. This issue, along with the evidence for the process of subduction, caused the scientific community to dismiss the theory of an expanding Earth."
You're rebutting something completely different from the original assertion.
Oh, boy.... so often I find myself confronting this unbelievably naive argument: "we'll just dig deeper". Do you realize how expensive it is to dig holes miles long? Besides; go back to your geology books. "Ores" are the result of the combination of geological and biological factors and these interactions take place at or near the surface of the planet. Even if you could dig a 50 miles deep hole, you won't find anything interesting in there.
Removing overburden is expensive, but we aren't exactly penetrating down to the mantle and exhausting all the lithophilic ores anytime soon.
Lithophilic ores are a small subset of useful metals. In any case, by definition ore is only "ore" if it can be mined at a profit (positive ROI); you appear to be talking about mining metals at a loss, irregardless of cost. Running out is generally irrelevant for metals; affording to be able to mine or recycle them is relevant, and peak capital (affordability) is the subject of this thread.
You appear to be constructing strawmen. Stop.