On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, Colin Hales wrote:
> If means we can at least partly stop raping the earth to get basic
> minerals.....I'm not going to cry over it. Anyone with a gram (I was
> going to say ounce but I'm fed up with imperial units) of vision will
> get out of earth based bulk mineral stocks early.
Whatever humans do, they merely rerrange atoms. Natural processes caused
enrichment. There is no physical law preventing you from counteracting
local entropy increase by a larger entropy increase elsewhere (the Sun).
Specifically, nanotechnology allows you to establish facilities for atomic
and molecular separation with very high processivity and/or on a very
large scale. At this point, everything material becomes a resource,
putting an end to scarcity (at least, for a while).
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