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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.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:31PM (7 children)
It's about damn time to get tantalum capacitors cheap and reliably again.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:59PM (3 children)
Don't get your hopes up yet. China is probably going to be studying those maps, then claim the areas where the deposits lie. Even if they have to build another stationary aircraft carrier to protect their interests.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:26PM (1 child)
WWIII here we come.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @06:58PM
I'm way ahead of you. I'm stockpiling sharp sticks and rocks. Why you ask? Because when WWIV comes I'll be able to flood the weapons' market at the climax!
(Score: 2) by leftover on Tuesday April 17 2018, @05:17PM
My first thought as well. China does seem to have latched onto the idea of cornering the world supply. This could disrupt their plan unless they claim it as you suggest. I wonder if a number of such announcements from elsewhere would further deflate their expectations. Who knows, some of the surveys might actually have been done before the announcements. Not really important in the world of political post-truth.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:27PM (2 children)
Yttrium, europium, dysprosium and terbium are what's listed in the Nature article.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:35PM (1 child)
Oh, so - rare earth as in those bottom rows on the Periodic table, not the actually rare and valuable ones from higher up...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:51PM
They're valuable to be sure. And they're rare in the sense that they tend not to be highly concentrated and easy to mine and separate for use.
But many things are valuable and rare compared to our use and the effort required to extract them. Sadly, tantalum can be found in places where people get exploited to obtain it. But that's often a problem of bad or nonexistent governments.
(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.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:41PM
Besides the whole "semi infinite" making it all sound weird, it's probably a stupid journalist interpretation. That most of them are located in the japanese economical zone of interest might not be so odd, that is where they surveyed. Still is there something unique about those waters or can we safely just assume that if we surveyed similar areas of the deep ocean we would find similar amounts of rare- or other kinds of metal and minerals and such. Seems quite plausible. Deep sea mining is a real thing, even tho it might in large parts still be theoretical and quite expensive so things are left where they are for the time being. That said with it there one can be sure that there are companies, organizations and governments investing a lot of time an resources into figuring out how to bring it to the surface.
So they found it and now they have to figure out how to get to it, preferable not via something from the Wile E. Coyote school of engineering. It's like companies talking about how many rare minerals there are in space. Great. Billions and billions, "semi infinite" amounts of it. We just don't really know how to get to it in a viable and economical manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining [wikipedia.org]