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

Fossil hydrocarbons are a limited resource, many would argue, but with regard to energy there are vastly more plentiful and greener sources available; and as a feedstock for plastics and other useful petrochemical derived materials, renewable biomass , biotechnology  and even organic synthesis  could replace our reliance on 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 conventional 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 times past.