this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
336 points (83.9% liked)
Technology
71843 readers
4215 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How much old copper piping is still out there that could be replaced by other materials to recover the copper? I'm sure there are other common obsolete applications. The nice thing about metals is that we already have a pretty robust recycling chain in place for them. That plus the remaining supply plus aluminium plus other replacements plus careful design to minimize the use of copper where it's absolutely necessary might be enough to carry us through.
There's also the idea of crashing a metallic asteroid somewhere convenient, like the Outback.
If you have the tech to do that, just capture the asteroid in orbit and mine it in space.
I'm envisioning extracting more copper and other metals that would be utilized in space, so - yeah, if you can develop smelting and refinement capabilities on-orbit there's some attractiveness there, but down on the mud-ball we're going to use over a million times as much material as we are currently utilizing on orbit and beyond, so getting that material down is going to be a whole lot cheaper and more efficient as a "natural skyfall" than any kind of controlled re-entry.