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Quasi-Infinite Deposits of Rare-Earth Metals Found Underneath Japanese Waters

Low quality post by AnarchoPrimitiv
Fair enough. I just wanted to make sure you understood that you weren’t fixing or providing a solution with your comment. Blasting a system with no solution isn’t helpful.

Really, there is none, other than going back to pre-industrial era. You can only recover so much with recycling. Yeah, no shortcut here, I’ve thought about it. :)

Blasting something without a solution is FAR LESS damaging than what 99% of the population do and just completely ignore it, wouldn't you agree? And actually, there is a solution, and one that hasn't been dreamed up or hypothesized, but in fact, is concrete and directly from our history. Thanks to the most recent anthropological findings, we now know that humans did have a form of existence that was 100% sustainable, and was proven concretely to be so, for approximately 190,000 years. Currently, anthropologists believe that modern homo sapiens is approximately 180,000-200,000 years old. Furthermore, we know that for all but that last 10,000 years of that time, we lived elusively as hunter-gatherers (though it has been said that that term should be flipped as 80% of sustenance came from gathering), and that this lifeway has been the only 100% sustainable form of existence we have know. Furthermore, essentially everything about pre-civilized humanity being violent, brutish, short, etc has all been proven to be incorrect, and furthermore, this isn't a fringe of anthropology that believes this, it's the mainstream consensus. As Anthropologist Harold Barclay stated:

"Anarchy is the order of the day among hunter-gatherers. Indeed, critics will ask why a small face-to-face group needs a government anyway. If this is so we can go further and say that since the egalitarian hunting-gathering society is the oldest type of human society and prevailed for the longest period of time – over thousands of decades – then anarchy must be the oldest and one of the most enduring kinds of polity. Ten thousand years ago everyone was an anarchist."​
Furthermore, hunter-gathers live far better lives than civilized humans for the entirity of human civilization with the exception of the 20th century, in fact, many anthropologists believe based on osteoarcheology (the study of ancient human bones, teeth, etc) that pre-civilized hunter-gatherers had a much stronger immune system as they have found evidence in teeth of them healing from infections that would be a death sentence to modern humans without antibiotics. Furthermore, civilized people ate far worse than huntergatherers as Jarod Diamond spells out in "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race":

Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania.​

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.​
Diamond again on the superior health of our pre-civilized ancestors:

One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.​
For anyone that's going to reply with: "but hunter-gatherers only lived to an average of 23 years old". Well, that is an average with a high degree of infant mortality averaged in, however, from the fossile and bone evidence what has been discovered is that once a hunter-gatherer got passed the age of two, the vast majority lived into their 50's and 60's, with even more extraordinary examples demonstrated individuals living into their 70s and with degenerative conditions like arthritis, which means that their familiy members took care of them indefinitely when they couldn't take care of themselves. And, by the way, in agricultural societies. the average age was only 19, so even there, the hunter gatherers win.

All this info can be found here: http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race

I want to add that I have cited my sources, and not one piece of information is my opinion! And that's because, until I have done all the research and studying that the individuals I have cited have done, my OPINION means absolutely nothing. Furthermore, despite what America believes, everyoné opinion doesn't matter, doesn't deserve respect, and does not stand on equal footing with every other opinion. So, if anyone wants to refute me, I respectfully request that you refer to the peer-reviewed, scholarly conclusions of experts whom have dedicated their lives to these fields....that's not intellectual elitism, that's called rationality.
 
Good to see that China won't have a monopoly on these rare-earth metals.

It also makes me wonder though what would happen if this type of discovery were made in the South China Sea, given the militarization and disputed ground claims...
You never know they might claim the Mariana Trench & 1000 nautical miles surrounding it as their own. Their greed for land & resources knows no bounds :mad:
 
You never know they might claim the Mariana Trench & 1000 nautical miles surrounding it as their own. Their greed for land & resources knows no bounds :mad:

Same as any country. Greed is basic human nature.
 
Well, the USA did manage to get the oil from Saddam Hussein in IraQ.... They got away with that pretty well id say.... With the finesse and grace of a ballet dancer.


Unfortunately the US are busy deciding how to tackle Russia and Syria so arent available for a sneaky full scale invasion.
Why then IraQ haw not built city like Dubai did Americans stole all what good?
 
Hmmmm, maybe we will see another Japanese mining operation like the old Battleship Island?
Hashima? well it is called Gunkanjima usually (which indeed mean Battleship Island)


hopefully since it's not WWII anymore and Japan is not North Korea .... it will not be a forced labor camp, right :laugh:
Battle-Ship_Island_Nagasaki_Japan.jpgNagasaki_Hashima_01.png
 
Good to see that China won't have a monopoly on these rare-earth metals.

It also makes me wonder though what would happen if this type of discovery were made in the South China Sea, given the militarization and disputed ground claims...

Aye. Agree on that. The pacific rim is probably littered with the stuff, and to be honest, I did not feel very comfortable that China, of all places, had a chokehold on the worldwide supply of rare-earth materials. Aussies, Filipinos and Indonesians should also start sampling their shores for this stuff...
 
Well, the USA did manage to get the oil from Saddam Hussein in IraQ.... They got away with that pretty well id say.... With the finesse and grace of a ballet dancer.


Unfortunately the US are busy deciding how to tackle Russia and Syria so arent available for a sneaky full scale invasion.
We've got plenty of military left over, lol.
 
Where's a moderator when we need the off-topic hammer?
 
Makes me wonder how any large scale mining will affect already straining fault lines under their islands, and is it really worth it.
 
Makes me wonder how any large scale mining will affect already straining fault lines under their islands,
Large scale is relative, this is all under water. Under 5km of water.
and is it really worth it.
Well, since rare earths are seldom found in concentrated deposits, the answer is most likely yes.
 
Nothing else like a news story like this can bring out so many America haters and enviro-hipsters
 
780 years is now "quasi-Infinite"? A touch of journalistic hyperbole, perhaps.
 
780 years is now "quasi-Infinite"? A touch of journalistic hyperbole, perhaps.
I believe the implication here is that by the time we can exhaust that, we'll have probably either moved on from our rare-earths reliance or developed processes to get them from sources that aren't feasible to exploit today.
Otherwise, if you're referring stictly to matter, the whole planet is not quasi-infinite.
 
There's a little problem to that story : it's 6000 meters underwater. So even if they manage to get there, they'll have to build a factory that can sustain 24/7, 6 tonnes by cm² of pressure.

Have fun with that.
 
Is this the moment when Britania takes over area 11 for its sakuradite?
 
There's a little problem to that story : it's 6000 meters underwater. So even if they manage to get there, they'll have to build a factory that can sustain 24/7, 6 tonnes by cm² of pressure.

Have fun with that.

Why can't they just bring the minerals up then process it on land?

Why does it have to be done underwater?
 
Why can't they just bring the minerals up then process it on land?

Why does it have to be done underwater?

I'm not in the business of mining, but is there even some way to get the materials on land, without going overboard with the costs? I mean, you'd still need something installed underwater to bring all that to whatever facilities you use for processing...
 
I'm not in the business of mining, but is there even some way to get the materials on land, without going overboard with the costs? I mean, you'd still need something installed underwater to bring all that to whatever facilities you use for processing...
Mineral container ships weren't invented yesterday. But yes, it's not the easiest imaginable thing.
 
Why can't they just bring the minerals up then process it on land?

Why does it have to be done underwater?

Something has to be done underwater, that's the first thing : no lights, high pressure, far from the coast,etc. Not impossible but hell of a problem.
You can think of dragging the mud into containers specifically designed to match the pressure during the course to the bottom from the top (and so not explode).
Second problem : this mud is highly toxic. You don't wanna know what it will cause to stir that kind of thing.

Let's just face reality : our planet is not infinite. We can't use phones like trash (a generation every 8 months ?!?), and empty the ocean until it will be a giant aquarium.

The only thing infinite to our scale is the sun, and processing of nature and time (which is quite slow).
 
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