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Does that mean when we run out of Ga there are no more LED TVs?
by ta9000 6mo ago
Does that mean when we run out of Ga there are no more LED TVs?
- AndrewDucker 6mo agoWhy would we run out of Ga?
- mikkupikku 6mo agoThere's a component of modern culture that trains and expects people to be extremely pessimistic about long term human development. It results in situations above, where without any further information people just assume by default that were going to run out of a thing and are on some collision course with not just a disaster, but every single conceivable one. (Gallium is a byproduct of aluminum production. We aren't going to run out.)
- ta9000 6mo ago[flagged]
- jcattle 6mo agoFrom your earlier comment, your curiosity was more about what happens after we run out. In your question you stated the running out as a given fact ("When" we run out, not "if"). If that was what you wanted to say I can't tell you, but that's definitely how it was received and thus you also got the harsh response. Since it reads a lot like doomsday thinking. (Example: Does that mean when we run out of oxygen there are no more humans? Why would we run out?)
- ta9000 6mo agoYes, my curiosity was about when we run out, because I didn’t know if we would run out. That was the whole point of the question. Have some leniency, we’re not all experts about everything.
- margalabargala 6mo ago> my curiosity was about when we run out, because I didn’t know if we would run out You still seem to be missing the point. If you talk about "when we run out", you are presenting yourself as an expert stating "we will run out" and asking about the aftermath. It would be appropriate, and better received with more leniency, for you to ask whether we would run out.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ta9000 6mo agoThat’s not rational. Why would I be asking such a simple question if I were an expert?
- margalabargala 6mo agoExactly, that self-contradiction is part of why you were downvoted so heavily. Because you presented yourself to the world as irrational.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- pixl97 6mo ago?Why would we run out?) Of oxygen, because of rising temperatures interacting with rock weathering binding all the oxygen. Now, that's more of something to worry about at geological time scales, but Earth in fact, is not infinite.
- ta9000 6mo agoI love that you countered pedantry with pedantry. <3
- threetonesun 6mo agoMy understanding of most elements is if we want more it’s either pretty easy to make from something else we have a lot of, or we need to redo the Big Bang, the latter being, in my opinion, a bit of a disaster scenario.
- nkrisc 6mo agoEven synthesizing helium is prohibitively expensive. Unless you want whatever heavy decay products we have from nuclear waste, synthesizing elements at industrial scale probably isn’t happening. Unless by “make from something” else you mean extract the element from existing chemical compounds found in Earth, in which case we’re still just using existing deposits on Earth.
- bananaflag 6mo agoOn the other hand, it is possible to run out of a metal when all of it is either somewhere in some device or scattered among landfills (i.e. not concentrated in a place like a mine).
- pwndByDeath 6mo agoIts concentrated in a place like a landfill that already has access for large vehicles.
- nkrisc 6mo agoThat’s still not running out. It’s still there, just more effort to get.
- card_zero 6mo ago"At 10 parts per quadrillion, the Earth's oceans would hold 15,000 tonnes of gold", says the Wikipedia page on gold. I'm inclined to think we've lost that gold.
- nkrisc 6mo agoPractically speaking, sure. It's obviously not cost-effective to extract it. But it's there if someone can get it. I don't expect anyone to be extracting gold from ocean water, but there are other source of other elements that may not be cost-effective now but could be in the future or may simply become necessary despite the cost.
- PowerElectronix 6mo agoEffort high enough to consider that material lost to any practical purpose like a tv.
- swiftcoder 6mo agoCost scales with refinement effort, so it just results in more expensive TVs. That said, pretty sure we'll have drowned the planet in landfilled TVs long before this becomes a serious issue
- myrmidon 6mo agoSidenote: Whenever someone tells you that (vital) reserves of some ressource are going to run out soonish (implying drastic consequences), you should be extremely skeptical: Such predictions have an abysmal historic track record, because we tend to find workarounds both on the supply side (=> previously undiscovered reserves) as well as flexibility on the demand side (using substitutes). This applies historically for oil, lithium, rare earth metals and basically everything else. edit: I'm not saying we're never gonna run out of anything-- I'm just saying to not expect sudden, cataclysmic shortages in general, but instead steadily rising prices and a somewhat smoothish transition to alternatives.
- mschuster91 6mo ago> Such predictions have an abysmal historic track record, because we tend to find workarounds both on the supply side (=> previously undiscovered reserves) as well as flexibility on the demand side (using substitutes). That's a classic example of the "preparedness paradox" [1]. When no one raises the alarm in time or it is being ignored, resources can go (effectively) exhausted before alternatives can be found, or countries either need to pay extraordinary amounts of money or go to war outright - this has happened in the past with guano [2], which was used for fertilizer and gunpowder production for well over a century until the Haber-Bosch ammonia process was developed at the start of the 20th century. And we're actually seeing a repeat of that as well happening right now. Economists and scientists have sounded the alarm for decades that oil and gas are finite resources and that geopolitical tensions may impact everyone... no one gave too much of a fuck because one could always "drill baby drill", and now look where we are - Iran has blasted about 20% of Qatar's LNG capacity alone to pieces and blocked off the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices skyrocketing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano
- myrmidon 6mo agoI don't see the Guano industry as a straight counter-example, it even illustrates my point: If you had made predictions/scenarios in 1850 based on Guano deposits running out within a decade or two, you would have mispredicted completely, because a lot of the industry just transitioned to sodium nitrate (before synthetic fertilisers took over). Nowadays media landscape would've gladly made such doom-and-gloom predictions for global agriculture back then. I completely agree that quickly depleting reserves often indicate non-sustainable pricing for ressources (which is obviously bad long term), but that is very different from sudden collapse.
- nancyminusone 6mo agoExcept for gaseous hydrogen and helium, and some spacecraft, all other atoms remain on the earth and are recoverable with enough energy and effort.
- philipkglass 6mo agoOne more exception: uranium. It actually splits into smaller atoms when it's used as fuel.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- adrian_b 6mo agoGallium is expensive to extract because it is extremely diluted in the environment. It accompanies in very low quantities aluminum and zinc, so it is extracted only in the mines of aluminum or of zinc, as a byproduct. However, the abundance of gallium is similar to that of lithium, while gallium is used in smaller amounts, so there is no risk to not have enough gallium in the near future. On the other hand, all semiconductor devices with gallium also use some indium. Indium is used in even greater quantities in all LCD or OLED displays, to make transparent electrodes. Indium is an extremely rare element in the entire universe, comparable with gold, so for indium there is a much greater risk that its reserves will become insufficient. This could be mitigated by extracting such critical elements from the dumped electronic devices, but this is very expensive, because only small amounts of indium are used per device, so very large amounts of garbage would have to be processed in order to extract a sizable amount of it.