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Stefan Claudiu
The Zeitgeist Movement - Orientation Guide
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atoms are called
elements
. There are currently 118 elements of the periodic table, with 92 naturally available in our world (the other 26 are synthetic
ally made) and these elements basically comprise everything around us. The Metals category of elements are the most important, for they only melt at relatively high temperatures; their shape can be easily changed into thin wires or sheets without breaking, and heat and electricity travel easily through them. This makes them very useful for product creation/industrial application. These metals can be found in the earth's crust and in the oceans, either in their pure form, or more commonly, extracted from minerals. Global Mineral Reserves are currently measured by commercial output production. Sadly, this does not give a clear picture of what is available. While some elements/minerals are vast in abundance, such as Silicon, Aluminum and Iron, others are seemingly growing scarce, such as copper, lead, zinc, gold, and silver.45As far as this author knows, there has never been a complete geological survey of the earth's minerals/elements, only regional ones. This must be done in the future. Now, all in all, there are basically 3 components to understanding the carrying capacity of the earth. (a) Knowing exactly what the earth has as far as component elements/materials (b) Where technology is in regard to creating synthetic substitutions for certain elements/materials. (c) How society organizes/manages its use of these elements/materials. (a) We must have a full survey of all the planetary resources. This will give us key information
on how to proceed with our operations. For example, if we have an acre of land that we want to grow food with, the first thing would be to test the soil to understand what type of properties it has. This information would have a direct relationship to what can be grown. This would be the "carrying capacity" of that land, so to speak. From a planetary perspective, this is critical information that has a direct effect on our decision-making. (b)The difference between today and the past is our increased creative ability, through the scientific method, to solve problems. In regard to scarce materials, finding substitutions is an important field. For example, diamonds have long been considered a highly valued, scarce resource. One application of this strong mineral is as a precision machine-cutting tool. However, now, with the advent of synthetic diamonds grown in a lab, these tools do not require the expensive original. Many industrial materials today now have synthetic counterparts and this medium of scientific problem solving is very active. In fact, the scarcity of any raw material is only as relevant as the amount of work being invested into finding a substitute or workaround.
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The periodic table is an arrangement of the chemical elements according to atomic number as based on the periodic law. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/383726/mineral-deposit/82165/Geochemically-abundant-and-scarce-metals 41
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