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Latest revision as of 03:06, 13 February 2007

Intro

Air, water and the twenty most abundant elements in the Earth's crust provide almost all the material needed to create the multitude of machines and goods that mankind requires: food, drugs, houses, vehicles, robots, industrial machinery, computers, consumer goods and so on.

Extracting these plentiful elements (and their compounds) to create useful material essentially involves energy (which is also plentiful) and the right processing methods. From a technical point of view there is practically no limit to the volume of material we could extract and make use of, if we so wished, even while minimally disrupting complex and fragile ecosystems. The reserves of raw materials needed to sustain civilisation are simply not going to run out, because the entire Earth's crust  is made up of them. However this is no excuse to be unnecessarily wasteful in our consumption. Advanced recycling will reduce the need to extract material from the ground and more efficient design will allow us to do more with less .

The point is that any existing material scarcity actually has little to do with the reserves at our disposal.

Twenty most abundant elements in Earth's crust

Approx figures for the 20 most abundant elements in Earth's crust:

Element	% mass
Oxygen	46.71
Silicon	27.69
Aluminum	8.07
Iron	5.05
Calcium	3.65
Sodium	2.75
Potassium	2.58
Magnesium	2.08
Titanium	0.62
Hydrogen	0.14
Phosphorus	0.13
Carbon	0.09
Manganese	0.09
Sulfur	0.05
Barium	0.05
Chlorine	0.05
Chromium	0.04
Fluorine	0.03
Zirconium	0.03
Nickel	0.02

Notable missing from top 20: Copper.
Carbon might replace copper for many electrical (and thermal) conduction applications - see [1], [2] and carbon nanotube  for further information. In September 2013, a proof-of-concept computer was built from carbon nanotubes [3]

Figures from [4]
Figures rounded to two decimal places
Also need to have a list based on ease of extraction and energy required
Element links in list point to element's Wikipedia article

Constituent elements of seawater

Approximate composition of seawater by mass:

Element	% mass
Oxygen	85.7
Hydrogen	10.8
Chlorine	1.9
Sodium	1.05
Magnesium	0.14
Sulfur	0.09
Calcium	0.04
Potassium	0.04
Others	Trace

Figures from [5]
Need to find definitive primary source
Element links in list point to Wikipedia article

Constituent elements of air

Approximate composition of dry atmosphere by volume:

Element	% vol
Nitrogen	78.08
Oxygen	20.95
Argon	0.93
Carbon	< 0.01
Others	trace
Not included in above dry atmosphere:
Water vapour  (variable)	~1%

Source: NASA
Carbon dioxide updated (to 1998) by IPCC TAR table 6.1 [6]. Figure for carbon extrapolated from this
Edited text from [7]
Element links in list point to Wikipedia article

See also

• Fundamental resources of humanity
• Recycling - making the most of materials we have already extracted from the environment
• Post-scarcity
• Resources in (near-Earth) space