- the Great Pyramid is closer to 4600 years old
- we will always have common crust elements, eg 27.7% silicon, 8.1% aluminum, 5% iron, 3.6% calcium, 2.8% sodium, 2.6% potassium, and 2.1% magnesium; so the question is those and biological elements (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen)
- you can probably do space travel from that list, which gets you easier to consume versions of those elements as well, eg asteroids
- and from there interstellar travel is possible.
Mortar was used generously in the Great Pyramid's construction. In the mixing process ashes from fires were added to the mortar, organic material that could be extracted and radiocarbon dated. A total of 46 samples of the mortar were taken in 1984 and 1995, making sure they were clearly inherent to the original structure and could not have been incorporated at a later date. The results were calibrated to 2871–2604 BC.
To suggest otherwise is just insane aliens conspiracy theory nonsense. Is this post a satire of that BS? I really find it hard to tell.
Below the crust is the mantle, which is ~2,900km thick. Like the crust, is also mostly solid rocks and minerals, but punctuated by malleable areas of semi-solid magma. Composition primarily silicon, magnesium, and oxygen.
Below the mantle is the outer core, a liquid layer mostly made up of iron and nickel. The outer core is ~2,200km thick. It is primarily responsible for generating the magnetic field of earth.
Below the outer core is the solid inner core, with diameter of about 2,400km. It is solid and primarily made up of iron and nickel.
You're absolutely right about the recycling entropy battle - those diminishing returns are brutal. But I'm curious about where biological innovation might shift this equation. We're already seeing organisms that can work well beyond the traditional C/H/O/N sandbox - bacteria that reduce metals, engineered microbes that synthesize quantum dots. This hints at possibilities that blur your distinction between biological and industrial approaches.
The interstellar travel conclusion particularly caught my attention. While current biological systems are indeed low-power, that very efficiency might be what makes them perfect for long-haul space missions. Imagine hybrid systems where bio-engineered organisms maintain spacecraft over generations, working alongside traditional tech. Maybe slow and steady wins the interstellar race.
I'd argue we're on the cusp of even more radical transformations in materials science. What if atomic-scale manufacturing fundamentally changes our relationship with scarce resources? The jump from 65% to 15% iron ore might look tiny compared to what's coming. Maybe we're not facing a binary choice between current industrial systems and purely biological ones. The sweet spot might be in hybrid approaches that combine biological resilience with industrial capability.
Curious to hear your thoughts on this - particularly around how engineered biological systems might reshape our assumptions about resource constraints. There's something compelling about the idea of building civilization's next chapter on that 300-million-year track record of biological innovation.
Separate metals from organics, yes.[1] Reduce metals, probably not. Reduce means to pull a metal out of its oxide. This is way uphill energetically. It is usually done by heating the oxide to a high temperature in an oxygen-poor environment. The other direction, oxidation, produces energy, and there are some biological processes that use that.
Still, there are some bacteria which manipulate manganese.[2]
> What if atomic-scale manufacturing fundamentally changes our relationship with scarce resources?
I used to know Drexler, the early nanotechnology guy, back when nanotechnology meant pushing atoms around by mechanical means, rather than surface chemistry. Not much came of that. It's hard to apply enough force to break strong molecular bonds apart. IBM did manage to spell out "IBM" with xenon atoms, but xenon is inert and doesn't bond strongly to anything. No strong bonds to break.
Asteroid mining is potentially possible. Somebody will probably try it for gold and platinum within fifty years. It's unlikely to become cost-effective for cheaper metals.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/16/world/metal-eating-bacteria-i...
I bought his book Engines of Creation when it came out and his thesis had the air of inevitability - how could it not materialize some day ? It seemed so self-evident.
For iron (Fe2+) is about the same order of magnitude than getting organic matter of of CO2, which is what photosynthesis does, so it doesn't really sounds impossible. The main problem is that in an oxygen rich atmosphere, any metallic iron it would spontaneously get back to its oxide form pretty much instantly…
For context, it was founded over 800 years ago.
Perhaps, but unlikely.
As far as we know (but we could be wrong), interstellar civilization is the business of a Type II civilization on the Kardashev scale. They can extract fusion energy, raw materials, and information from multiple solar systems.
As far as we know? We know nothing and the Kardashev scale is just a toy hypothesis come on.
3 thousand million?
More like 10,000 at least [0]
Australian Aborigines are at 50,000 or so, depending on your definition of "organised".
And, inferring from the article, I kinda like the idea that advanced civilisation fade back into nature. Modern humanity is about 100,000 years old. Is that long enough for a civilisation to rise, peak, and fade back into nature? It's a fantasy trope, obviously, but it's cool to think about again with this angle.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_continuously_in... shows a city from 6000BC, so 8000 years ago. I'm not sure that a city is required for an organised civilisation, but an organised civilisation is definitely required for a city.
The thing is interstellar travel makes no sense except in science fiction books: there's literally nothing of interest to be worth trading in other planetary systems, and trade has always been the motive for maritime exploration, because it's what get you the massive funding such endeavor requires.
And btw even close space colonization doesn't make any sense either: we may end up with a vanity base on Mars before realizing that it costs a lot, for living conditions that are more harsh than at the top of mount Everest. Even if world population wasn't plateauing and headed to a decline, colonization of Siberia or even Antarctica would make much more sense.
Space is big, inhospitable and mostly empty, its size doesn't work with the time frame the human species is working on.
>interstellar travel makes no sense
For vacation or finding new spices to sell, no, but if you've exhausted all the matter in the solar system or humanity outlives useful solar output from the sun and fusion energy is still +20 years away, there isn't really a choice.
The time it takes for interstellar travel doesn't make sense on human time scales, but people still plant trees knowing they will not live to sit under their shade.
Stuff like this really gives me faith in humanity amidst the insanity I see in the news.
I've been watching a "volunteer" oak sapling grow for the last few years and I'm trying to work around it so I don't have to cut it down. I may very well be dead before it provides appreciable shade, but it's nice knowing that it's there.
On the other hand, when my now 14-year-old was three, he stuck a cast-off bit of a branch (I think it's a basswood?) into the ground outside the house and declared it as his tree and watered it faithfully for a few days before losing interest. That "branch" now towers over the house and shades a room that used to get pretty hot in the afternoon. If I had any idea that it would actually take root and grow, I'd have moved it farther away from the house.
I like trees. I've planted a few using the County's native sapling program and it's been nice watching them grow over the last 15 years.
Space on earth isn't going to run out anytime soon (as I said colonizing Siberia and Antarctica is much more approachable, and there's the oceans too!) especially since the world population is plateauing!
> but if you've exhausted all the matter in the solar system or humanity outlives useful solar output from the sun and fusion energy is still +20 years away
That “if” really feels like “I'll need a second hat if I grow a second head in the night”.
> The time it takes for interstellar travel doesn't make sense on human time scales, but people still plant trees knowing they will not live to sit under their shade.
That's a good analogy, because individuals do, but for-profits mostly plant trees with short lifetime and quick return on investment. And you're not going to fund space travel with individuals' money…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42388557
It's about multiple orbital rings around earth, and what that would enable.
Just needs some more https://daniel-suarez.com/Delta-v_synopsis.html and 'Critical Mass' ( sequel https://daniel-suarez.com/index.html ) to get into early The Expanse stage :)
Have you read Delta-V or a summary of it at least?
The 'opera' part is just about common human/political stupidity, the space and technology parts don't seem to be.
Which ors.deaken.dev conveniently leaves out, at the moment, like empty geopolitics :)
With vast discretionary spending, people would be able to sacrifice some pleasures for pleasures related to achieving a long-term impractical goal. Space travel does not have to be the most efficient means of enjoying life to be a human choice.
A colony in Antarctica would be much more practical than one on the Moon, but a Lunar colony is more romantic.
If material trade is not worthwhile, conquest may be somewhat discouraged. (Some people might wish to rule all of humanity or convert/exterminate all heretics, so no distance would be perfectly safe, but a perceived threat in Antarctica would be easier to eliminate than a perceived threat on the Moon or in the Large Magellanic Cloud.)
> A colony in Antarctica would be much more practical than one on the Moon, but a Lunar colony is more romantic.
This really highlights the problem with the belief of “space colonization”: people have a romanticized fantasy of what it would be like: because it's so remote, and dangerous (and expensive), a lunar base would be the exact opposite of isolation: people would live packed in really tight space with little opportunity for isolation or intimacy except in the bathroom. It would be the modern version of being a sailor in a 17th century merchant ship, hopefully without the scurvy.
> but a perceived threat in Antarctica would be easier to eliminate than a perceived threat on the Moon or in the Large Magellanic Cloud.)
What makes you think that? If we have transportation mediums able to build a colony on the moon (that is, able to send tons of material out there) we have the means of transportation needed for carpet bombing it! But you wouldn't even need that, as a moon base would be as dependent from earth as an antarctic base is from mainland (you're not going to put a TSMC chip fab on the moon anytime soon…)
The modern space rockets are slow and easily detectable, and I am sure that if one could get to the moon, and then wanted to build a system that shoots them down, they'd be able to. Especially given that moon-based interceptors will have much smaller gravity well to worry about.
Another argument is that very technically complex products, like space rockets, require a complex society. So if Earth falls into anarchy, there is a good chance the supply chains would be disturbed enough that no one could build multiple space rockets full of bombs even if they wanted to.
You realize that any failure of a life-support device (air containment and renewal, water storage and renewal, heating) means you're dead before anyone can send help? It's like being stranded on an inflatable boat in the middle of the ocean: one tiny hole you can't fix and you're dead.
> provided the colony is self-sufficient and does not depend on supplies from Earth. Mars is better then Moon though.
Please tell me how your colony is going to manufacture the semiconductors it relies on in a self-sufficient way…
> So if Earth falls into anarchy,
That's the opposite argument from the one you made above (“Some people might wish to rule all of humanity or convert/exterminate all heretics” is the opposite of anarchy!) and in that case you're as safe on Antarctica from a military perspective.
> there is a good chance the supply chains would be disturbed
Which means death in medium terms, because as I said above as no space base can be self-sufficient (heck no country on earth can be self sufficient in the modern world already, how do you expect a small spacial colony to be better at self-sufficiency than China?!)
Which is the topic of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car? from 2006.
So 'mass market' could very well have been possible about 30 years ago, without Grumpy Management … … …
As long as you can get to one of those stages before you run out of the required industrial capacity you should be fine.
If we absolutely had to, I think the human species could moonshot our way to either fusion or asteroid mining inside a couple decades. At least with our present resources, maybe not in a century from now.
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5045860
The conclusion: most material demand is for elements so common on Earth that supplies will never run out. Only more energy is required to deal with super-low-grade ores (like 10% Fe basalt instead of 15% Fe taconite). The rare elements can largely be substituted so that the residuum of non-substitutable demand can stretch supplies to millions of years.
As you'd expect of a paper coauthored by Alvin Weinberg in 1975, the energy solution proposed is "fission breeder reactors" but there's a nod toward the long term potential of solar power and fusion.
Sure, but if you had a consideration for human well-being, if you had a society where people thought about "what should things look like in a hundred or a thousand years" you wouldn't have any impetus for exponential growth.
Organized human civilizations go back 2000-3000 years. Industrial civilization at scale goes back less than 200. A useful starting point is the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (1830). This the moment when the industrial revolution got out of beta, and, quite literally, picked up steam.
Extractable natural resources are somewhat finite. Sometimes, with more inputs, you can get more output. Fracking is a modern example. An older example is taconite, the low-grade iron ore (15% iron) mined after the reserves of high-grade ore (65% iron) were exhausted.[2] Gold and rare earths are extracted at great expense from very low concentrations in the raw material. At some point, extraction in high volume becomes impracticable.
We're only two hundred years into high-volume mined resource extraction. The USGS has a Critical Materials List.[3] Most of the current problems are political and commercial, not outright shortages. USGS lists known reserves for mined resources. Most have at least a century of known resources left, but not a millennium. On a time scale of civilizations, that's not long.
Recycling is a battle against entropy. Almost all gold is recovered. About 80% of aluminum is recovered. About 60% of steel is recovered. Each time around, you lose some through dispersal into forms not easy to collect and recycle. So that, too, has a diminishing returns problem.
Sometime in the future, perhaps closer than the distance in time since Oxford University was founded, most of the minerals will no longer be available in large quantity. It will be a slow, but difficult transition.
Biological systems, though, mostly keep shuffling around C, H, O, and N. That's been working for over 300 million years now, pretty much recycling the same atoms. Long term, on the scale of millennia, systems running on the weaker bonds in that space can go on for millions of years. That's the default mode of planetary operation.
Energy isn't a long-term problem because forms of energy are convertible, and wind and solar keep working as long as the sun does, at least if there are enough materials left to build generators. That looks like a long-term win on the scale of thousands of years. Millions, though...
It's quite possible that industrial civilizations have a finite lifespan, bounded by material availability. Doesn't mean there can't be sentient civilizations. Or that they're limited to "nature". Biological systems can be engineered, too.
But you don't get interstellar travel out of biology. Too low-powered.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railw...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taconite
[3] https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/us-geologica...