im not trying to be anything. its a cnbc headline, not some kid writing a term paper. if you know the subject it should be a mediocre joke. why are you calling people elitist for math jokes on a programming forum??
I think GP's point is that there is no such thing as "semi-infinite" and thus they can feel superior to them for not understanding how infinite infinity is.
They state 100s of years of supply but that is at present day levels of consumption, such a find and subsequent exploitation will cause a drop in price and then more consumption will take place.
I don't know if the exploitation will be fast enough to make a huge difference, at least for the time being. It being so difficult to get to it gives other leading countries, namely China, to re-think their exploitation and sale of these materials. They could find a way to stabilize the supply side market with this extra time. Especially since so much of the manufacturing using these materials is done in their country. Still though, I agree this new supply should change buying and manufacturing behavior.
Accessibility is always the problem. The Earth has a semi-infinite supply of energy, but accessing it in a usable and economical way is where the challenge lies.
There's massive amount of rare-earth metals in California and in my area in Oregon. But mining regulations force companies to buy from third world countries that don't have environmental, labor, and safety regulations because it has been effectively banned by regulation. We should have safe, environmental friendly, and living wage mining jobs here instead of this.
By the time Japan is able to extract and use that supply the trade war with China would be long over or one would hope so. The supply is several kilometers down. One would have to build a rig and then find a way to efficiently pump that material back up in large enough quantities for commercial usage (i.e. cheap enough to compete with China's supply)
China owns over half of the mines in Africa. It subsidised the infrastructure to get mined materials back to China.
That is all to say it now has extremely cheap access to any raw material it wants. Japan's super-expensive submarine sludge isn't going to make any difference.
Indeed. Which in practical, commercial terms is semi-infinite, since commercial mining does not involve a never-ending search for additional potential sources of material, only the mid- to long-term sufficient exploration and development of economically feasible sources. Where mid-term could mean approximately one human generation, and long-term a human lifetime.
Another example of such long-range planning in commercial ventures is the lumber business in North America and Scandinavia (that I know of), deliberately and systematically re-generating forests for continued harvesting while keeping their sight on a 80-100 year horizon.
I wonder how much of this is due to just looking for it. From the article they were forced to seek other sources after a trade dispute, and were able to find plenty on the seafloor. Is that luck, or an indication of how readily available these metals are on the sea floor?
I know other companies/countries are looking for sea floor deposits, but I don't think we've reached the point where it makes economic sense to mine there yet.
Don't know enough about the metals involved to answer, but usefulness is often a function of availability. They may be usable, but there may be more readily available alternatives that have been good enough. If this supply makes new materials even more available, it could still change things.
In the last few centuries, all developments of technology and the economy have repeatedly involved "quite a leap". I find it both intriguing and exciting.
