this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Perhaps it’s time to start researching alternative materials.
That alternative material is aluminum. It's like a top four abundance material in the crust. It's just super fucking hard to refine from minerals that don't like to give it up without oodles of energy. Like, turn minerals into plasma levels of energy. So the irony is, to grow our energy economy past the need for copper, we will first need to grow our energy economy.
Should fusion ever actually meet its promise, then this is one of the likely things we could do with this level of energy.
If we ever become a spacefaring civilization, it'll almost certainly be necessary during the colonization of other planets/moons/asteroids, since the geological processes that concentrate copper on the earth are not present in those places. Whereas aluminum is plentiful any place rocky.
I see what you did there...