Material/Intro

Air, water and the twenty most abundant elements in the earth's crust give us practically all of the raw material needed to create the machines and goods that mankind requires, such as:

• Buildings and construction materials
• Cars, trains, ships and aircraft
• Industrial machinery
• Robots
• Computers and electronic products
• Food

Extracting these plentiful elements and creating useful compound materials just involves energy, which is massively abundant, and the right processing. From a technical point of view there is practically no limit to the volume of material we could extract, if we so wished. This is a simplistic picture of course, and does not take into account the damage wrought to the environment in the process. The point is that these reserves of material are not going to run out, and there is no reason for people to go without unnecessarily.

However no-one, or at least no sensible person, would advocate wasteful processes just because material and energy are plentiful, and the biosphere must be considered; but one aspect of technological progress is the increasing efficiency of design and manufacturing – i.e. doing more with less.