khafra comments on Politicians stymie human colonization of space to save make-work jobs - Less Wrong

11 [deleted] 18 July 2010 12:57PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (70)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: khafra 20 July 2010 06:57:56PM 2 points [-]

A cursory googling for "peak rare earth metals" yields a likely affirmative response. Hafnium, Iridium, neodymium, lathanum, cerium, and several others are both necessary for modern electronics and/or EVs, and rapidly diminishing. Barring societal collapse or a new technological revolution on the scale of transistors, we'll probably want to go out and get more within the century--and that's not even including the advantage of avoiding the deletorious effects of mining on Earth.