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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 datapharmer on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:59PM (14 children)
The frontier is always "nearly limitless" to those who pillage them and leave behind ruin and damnation for future generations who get to visit the tree museum of the redwoods and suffer the cancers of industrialization and mining.
Britain had nearly limitless forests until it didn't, as did the American East, then the American West. The passenger pigeon was so limitless it's flocks would darken the skies until the last wild one was shot. Then water was pure and limitless until rivers started catching on fire and states began fighting over water rights. Now the oceans are limitless with ever younger and smaller fish catches and rare metals plowed from the deeps as soon the cosmos will be too.
We'll never learn.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:06PM (1 child)
+1 true, but depressing.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday April 18 2018, @09:12AM
Oh, I don't know. I think a simple +1 Depressing would fit this site well enough.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:08PM
This. Infinity times this. And very well put.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:37PM
If I (or some version of my consciousness) live to see the cosmos become a limited resource, I'll call that a win.
Back on my Malthusian soap-box, if we keep doubling population every 50 years into the future, by the year 7018 (laugh if you will, but the pyramids of Giza were built ~4600 years ago...), that's 1.0E40 people, or 3.3E28 people per star in the Milky Way. Without FTL travel, or some kind of miniaturization of the human body, we're doomed to grow our population more slowly in the future than we did these past two generations.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @05:18PM (1 child)
I'm not convinced that mining the sea floor is remotely as bad as mining anything on dry land. First, there's just not that much on the seafloor in most places; hurting coral reefs is bad of course, but those only exist offshore at relatively shallow depths, not out in the open ocean. And while we certainly are overfishing, the sea floor itself is not the home of the stuff we eat. Finally, roughly 3/4 of the Earth's surface is covered by water, so when we mine on land, we're screwing up the 1/4 of the planet that really matters the most to us, both ecologically and as far as being a place where we want to inhabit. If we're going to mine a place on this planet, mining the sea floor (away from reefs) seems like the least-bad option.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:56PM
We didn't realise the effects of mining on land until we'd been doing it for quite a while (we've been mining clay since the literal stone age), and we probably still don't realise all of them. I can't tell you what we'll fuck up on the ocean floor, but it could be way worse. I doubt the effects will be contained at the depths of mining, and most of our biosphere resides in the ocean in general.
That isn't to say we shouldn't mine the ocean; from a certain perspective we're an entropy engine that becomes more efficient over time. There are no shoulds, but turning rocks into processors seems pretty cool. There is the risk that we'll fuck up an ancient equilibrium by killing way to much plankton or something, causing a chain of extinctions that could include humanity, thus making us (the planet) radically less effective at producing entropy. That wouldn't seem so cool, so we might want to proceed with caution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @05:39PM (3 children)
We learn. Easter island. We just don’t think it can happen to us.
Hell some see it as their duty to bring the end. They will of course suffer none. Saved by the rapture.
Everyone can read you post. Few will ever believe it til they are unable to escape the cesspool.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:40PM (2 children)
"Hell some see it as their duty to bring the end."
Count me in that column. I'm not into Raptures, but cold hard physics. The "reason" you exist is that complex chemical systems like life are more effective at transferring energy (and thus entropy) from the hot sunshine on one side of Earth to the colder space facing side and the relatively hot core (both compression heat and radioactive decay) and space.
If you want a basic reason for life on Earth, it's hard to get lower level than that one. Thermodynamics and probability rather than philosophy or enlightenment.
Now, since I at least delude myself that I have some sort of choice (free will) in my actions, I might not want to do that transfer in the most efficient and quick way (some refer to that as "more environmentally sound". Call it whatever you want). But, that's my own preference and in no way stops the ultimate ends.
*grin* Now there's a depressing way to look at it.
Or is it? Since we have no greater "duty" as it were, we get to set our own purposes within those limits of thermodynamics. I find that rather freeing.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Wednesday April 18 2018, @10:20PM (1 child)
The meaning of life looks different at different levels of abstraction. Physicists have their version, philosophers have theirs. In between are plenty of valid answers.
It's probably the same as asking how to implement a sort function.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:20AM
With my luck they'd implement it as bubble sort. ;)
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday April 17 2018, @05:49PM (2 children)
At least the asteroid belt has no ecology to screw up.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:37PM (1 child)
Wanna bet? I'm sure Space-Greenpeace or one of the other treehuggers will find some microscopical alien bacteria whos life matters more then minerals.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:42PM
I've run into people who argue seriously that we never should have gone to the moon or space as humanity will ruin the environment there.
I rated them as puddin' heads. ;)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 18 2018, @12:20AM
To be fair, it's not a lot of ruin and damnation. And the cancers of industrialization have their enormous benefits. After all, you're communicating near instantaneously right now with hundreds of people from all over the world using that infrastructure.