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Japanese researchers have mapped vast reserves of rare earth elements in deep-sea mud, enough to feed global demand on a "semi-infinite basis," according to a new study.
The deposit, found within Japan's exclusive economic zone waters, contains more than 16 million tons of the elements needed to build high-tech products ranging from mobile phones to electric vehicles, according to the study, released Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports.
[...] The finding extrapolates that a 2,500-sq. km region off the southern Japanese island should contain 16 million tons of the valuable elements, and "has the potential to supply these metals on a semi-infinite basis to the world," the study said.
The area reserves offer "great potential as ore deposits for some of the most critically important elements in modern society," it said.
The report said there were hundreds of years of reserves of most of the rare earths in the area surveyed.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:12PM (6 children)
Half of infinity is still approximately infinity, right?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:37PM (4 children)
I swear. Your comment has been replicated across every forum that discusses this topic.
We can deduce that "semi infinite" means "practically infinite"; we'll hopefully be mining asteroids by the time this reserve even comes close to running out, and that means we never have to worry about it running out (it's practically infinite), because the asteroids themselves will provide a "semi infinite" supply of an even larger cardinality. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:41PM (2 children)
Sad thing is, as with most resources, if supply goes up so will the willingness to use more of those resources. No one needs more than 640kb of memory, after all.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:45PM
Bad example as 640 KB used to be the size of a fridge, and is now microscopic.
We'll see if it holds true if electricity from nuclear fusion hits 1 cent per kilowatt-hour.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 18 2018, @12:21PM
"Sad" because we need to mourn all those exploited bytes and tons of rare earths? All I can say is that if we manage to increase our supply of rare earths by a factor of a million while reducing its cost by a similar factor, there's not a lot of sadness to be had in that.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by arcz on Wednesday April 18 2018, @03:34AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by Wootery on Wednesday April 18 2018, @09:10AM
Yup. I could ramble at length about constructing correspondences, but I'll just quote Wolfram (emphasis mine): [wolfram.com]
The only place I've seen 'semi-infinite' used seriously is in discussion of Turing machines whose tapes extend infinitely in one direction, but have an 'end' (or if you prefer, a 'start'). [tutorialspoint.com] As you might have suspected, they have equivalent power to 'fully infinite' Turing machines, where there's no end to the tape no matter which way you move it.