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: buildings, vehicles, robots, industrial machinery, computers, consumer goods and so on.

Extracting these plentiful elements and creating useful materials just involves energy, which is also massively abundant, 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. The point is that the reserves of raw materials needed to sustain civilisation are not going to run out (the entire Earth's crust  is made up of them) – 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. 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 view of what is possible and simply dictates what is easier when working within the current framework that we have inherited from recent centuries.

Of course no sensible person would advocate being wasteful just because material and energy are plentiful, and our use of resources must be carried out with minimal harm to the natural environment; however an important trend in technological progress is the tendency of products, and manufacturing processes, to steadily become more efficient – doing more with less.