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 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.   Sections Main Page > Fundamental resources > Material   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   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   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   Less material Recycling is likely to become far more widespread than it is now, reducing the burden of having to process new material to create goods and infrastructure. Product design and engineering is likely to become increasingly sympathetic to the recycling process which is becoming more automated as time goes on. It is possible that recycling could become so efficient, that a tiny percentage of industrial feedstock actually come fresh from the ground. After decades of using landfill sites, these may also become a viable source of already concentrated useful material such as plastics, metals and methane. Another possibility is that carbon could be harvested directly from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon and carbon-based compounds can have many useful properties such as very high strength-to-weight ratios and very low electrical resistance. Reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere also helps mitigate the effects of global warming, however staggeringly vast quantities would have to be removed to have any significant effect on climate change. However trees do exactly this, extracting billions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere to create wood. Of course it would be far more sensible to collect the carbon at the source of emissions than waiting until it has dissipated into the atmosphere before collection.

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