Read more: “100,000 AD: Living in the deep future“
IN 1924, a young mining engineer named made an impassioned address to the Commonwealth Club of California. “The age of electricity and of copper will be short,” he said. “At the intense rate of production that must come, the copper supply of the world will last hardly a score of years… Our civilisation based on electrical power will dwindle and die.”
Copper – and civilisation – are still here. Yet almost a century on from Joralemon’s warning, similar wake-up calls can still be heard. The price of copper has on the back of increased demand from China. “Peak copper” is upon us, say some; reserves will run out within a couple of decades, say others.
Advertisement
Such prophecies of doom overlook something important. For most of our history, the way technology has developed has been determined by the materials available: think Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. But while we might label our era the Silicon Age – or perhaps more pertinently, the Hydrocarbon Age – we are not one-trick ponies any more. These days the rapid pace of technological development is more likely to change the materials we rely on.
The Engineering and Mining Journal-Press drove home the point in a prescient editorial response to Joralemon’s warning. “We can hardly believe that all our electricity will go back to the clouds where Franklin found it, just because copper is scarce,” it said. “Maybe copper won’t be required at all for transmission purposes; we may just use the ether.” And indeed we do, for long-distance communications that once required large quantities of wire. We also take full advantage of optical fibres, a technology whose widespread use was hardly imagined back in the 1920s.
That makes second-guessing tomorrow’s materials landscape foolhardy over timescales of mere decades, let alone millennia. “Within 50 or 60 years we will have made so much progress that it’s almost like hitting a big brick wall making any predictions beyond that,” says Ian Pearson of , a consultancy specialising in future technologies.
The rare-earth metals are a case in point. Shortages of these elements, whose applications range from touchscreens to batteries and energy-efficient light bulbs, are widely predicted within the next decade or so. Much beyond that, though, and it seems implausible to argue that we won’t have innovated our way around supply bottlenecks.
“It’s fashionable to talk about a shortage of neodymium for magnets in wind turbines, for example,” says Pearson, “but the fundamental problem is not neodymium. It is how we extract energy efficiently from wind.” No doubt there are as yet undreamed-of ways to do that without building turbines. In the longer term, other innovations may render the whole idea of wind energy passé.
Whatever problems we do face in the deep future, Pearson reckons a shortage of materials is unlikely to be one of them. “Regardless of what humanity is like in 500 or 1000 years’ time, we will probably still be filling only 10, maybe 15 metres of air above ground with stuff,” he says. “But there’s 6000 kilometres of ground with stuff in it beneath us.” It’s also plausible that it will become technologically and economically viable to mine nearby asteroids for elements we may be running short of.
Recycle the atoms
To ensure the continued survival of our species, it makes sense that we should husband the resources of Earth and its environs, rather than plunder them. Technology could make that easier. Whenever we use stuff, we hardly ever export the constituent atoms and molecules beyond the Earth system; we merely rearrange them chemically, for example converting carbon locked in fossil fuels into carbon dioxide. At present, we are not particularly good at converting our waste products into something useful. But given a few more decades, things could look very different thanks to new methods for nanoscale material manipulation, as well as genetically engineered bacteria that would eat waste up and burp it out in other forms.
By then things will probably be out of our hands anyway, says , an independent futurology consultant. At some point, we will create computers far more capable than ourselves. “What these machines may be able to suggest to us in the way of resource management or in the construction of synthetic resources is wholly unknowable,” he says.
That suggests we should be worrying about other existential threats in the deep future. “The idea that ‘things will run out’ is to think about the future using today’s concepts,” Hammond says.