Finding Resources 3052

Finding Resources 3052

The Age of Finding Resources will have ended by 3052. No longer will factory fishing fleets be able to comb the seas and haul out the protein that they had done during the 20th and 21st Centuries. While some species of sea life will become extinct others will have populations whose size falls beneath the Viable Fishing Threshold and the taking of their meager numbers will stop. This stoppage will significantly impact Pacific Ocean populations particularly since they have been dependent on the taking from the sea for many decades even up to now. The increased human populations will demand more and more each year until the sea can no longer sustain their numbers.

There has been a paradigm of prospecting for minerals and fuels and devising methods of extracting what has been found buried under sometimes miles of rock strata. During each year that passes the easier deposits are found and mined leaving the deeper more expensive deposits in place. With each passing year, Engineers devise ever more elaborate and intensive means of getting to the resources and bringing them to market. Where once a tunnel was dug into a coal seam and the coal scraped out and rolled on rails to the tipple, now the practice of removing entire mountain tops to reveal the coal has been made feasible due to the relative costs of the other methods and the other sources of energy.

Even though there may be a century or two of coal still available for the finding and taking, there remains two variables in the formula that cannot be ignored. Coal is primarily Carbon compounds and Ash bound up in a clump that we burn. While we obtain the heat from the chemical reaction of the Carbon and Oxygen of the Atmosphere, the waste products of that reaction are CO2 and the Ash. That CO2 mixes in the upper atmosphere and hold the sun's heat there for increasingly longer times. The Ash contains all the other elements that do not burn in the furnaces. Some of those elements are heavy metals that all are toxic to humans and other animal life. Lead, mercury, arsenic, and radioactive elements like Uranium are all present in that Ash. We must contain that Ash and keep it out of our water supplies so that we do not poison ourselves.

Fortunately, geologists calculate that the feasible amount of coal and oil that we can find will last only a couple of centuries. This means that even if today we fail to curtail our burning of fossil fuels, there will be about 800 years of recovery time to for us to design a world that is compatible with the warmer climate, design methods of extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere and replace our energy production with sources that do not destroy our biosphere.

There is no reason to expect that the fossil fuel corporations will ever voluntarily alter their modus operandi to do anything differently until the supplies run out or become too expensive to extract and distribute. Therefore, the world will be plagued with a period of degradation before it reaches a place of sustainability. The energy providers will however begin to dabble in the so called "alternative energy" methods in order to be ready to switch over as the cost ratios change. Some of those ratio factors will be the force of public opinion and how fast the environment changes due in part to the impacts of their enterprise.

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