Material/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 materials in essence 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 well away from the fragile skin of life on Earth. The point is that 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. Of course this is no excuse to be unnecessarily excessive or wasteful. Any existing material scarcity actually has little to do with the reserves at our disposal.

There is little dispute that fossil fuel is a limited resource but with regard to energy there are vastly more plentiful and greener energy sources available; and as a feedstock for plastics and many other useful petrochemical derived materials, renewable biomass  can replace crude oil if necessary or even organic synthesis . Our current heavy use of fossil fuel is due to convenience and the fact that current economics make the alternatives appear less viable in comparison. However 'economics' distorts the perception of what is possible and simply dictates what is easier when working within the current framework that we have inherited from past centuries.