🚀 go-pugleaf

In response to the posting by John McCarthy:

Yes, I know about the Ehrlich-Simon bet. I also have a vision of the
entire planet being converted into a wasteland of tailings. And of
the entire landscape being covered by a vast slum.

You haven't responded to my main point that at some point it becomes
cheaper to prevent entropic degradation of that last fraction than
to first dispose of it and then go out and try to replace it.

As for the fraction of our economy that raw materials constitute,
that is largely an accounting fiction. Witness the general price
rises triggered by the 1973 rise in oil prices. A small ripple in
the availability of some critical resource can have a severe
contricting effect on many sectors of the economy without in
itself constituting a large part of the GDP.

The effect of having to mine "country rock" would be to raise the
cost of living to the point that only a small proportion of the
human population is capable of exercising the skills needed to
earn enough to survive. Of course, in fairness, there is a problem
of that kind in my envisioned compact cities as well, although for
a somewhat different reason. Either way, ordinary folks are going
to have it tough.

What you cite as experience in extraction costs is based on a
somewhat fortuitous distribution of high-grade ores. The thermo-
dynamic cost function provides a better guide. For some elements,
the difference in concentration between their highest-grade ores
and their concentration in the general environment is on the order
of 10^9. Granted, most of the more critical elements are not that
scarce, but a few of them are. Unfortunately, the world economy is
not so robust that it could tolerate general rises in the cost of
raw materials by a factor of 5 or more without severe contraction,
followed by the kinds of misery and social disruption we have seen.
Even modest rises have been seen to have serious disruptive effects.

The economy is balanced between growth and decline, and it does
not take much to start it down the long slide.

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jdr@starflight.corp.sun.com, starflt@uunet.uu.net
Jon Roland
Starflight Corporation, 1755 E Bayshore Rd #9A,
Redwood City, CA 94063-4142, 415/361-8141