Week of 10/10: Argument in Material Science
For my blog today, I am going to find some source that talks about an argument in material science. I'm going to search through Michigan State's scholarly articles to see if I can find anything, but based on the fact that I haven't been able to find much information through the library so far I will probably end up going online to search for some type of document.
Since I cannot find many arguments that are currently active in the material science world, I decided to go towards a more broad approach. I decided to look into if the world will ever run out of metals. Now clearly it will run out eventually, but will it run out any time soon? Even within 1000 years or so?
I found what seems to be a credible website with the answer. It says that metal wise, the earth it plentiful. In 100,000 to a million years it could be a different story, but humans will most likely have the world destroyed by then anyways. The article stated that metals will become less available when the prices rise above what anyone wants to pay, and that will happen long before we run out of the metals.
I think that all of this sounds about right. The earth is incredibly dense, and has many elements. There are also resources buried deep in the earth we haven't even found yet since we haven't been able to explore every part of the world. There are remote places that must be flowing with resources, and we will one day find them if we ever start running very low on our resources.
Worstal, Tim. "When Are We Going To Run Out of Metals?."Forbes. 2011. Web. October 10, 2013.
Mine. 2012. Photograph. TIME, New York City. Web. October 10, 2013.
I have often wondered about this topic myself. After reading your post i have 2 Questions I am wondering if you have the answers to. Do you know what metals we will reach the point where we will not practically be able to get more of first? and will we live long enough to see such issues be a problem?
ReplyDelete