Abstract
THE comparatively rapid depletion of the earth's available resources in this mechanical age was considered by Prof. R. A. Gortner, of the University of Minnesota, in a paper before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December (Science Service, Washington, D.C.). It is pointed out that irreplaceable stores of natural resources absolutely essential to modern industrial civilisation are disappearing into the ‘maws of industry’ and so are wastefully dissipated over the earth. While the publicity of technocracy directs attention to the part played by mechanical energy in remaking economic conditions, the shelves in some of Nature's cupboard are showing signs of exhaustion of the materials necessary for a mechanical age. In particular, Prof. Gortner mentions the approaching exhaustion of copper, antimony, tin, lead, zinc, chromium, manganese, nickel and iron, which are stored in parts of the earth accessible to man. The rate of use of some of these metals is doubling each decade. We still use tin-foil for wrapping up sweets and cigarettes. At the present mining rates, iron will be exhausted in Germany in about fifty years and in the United States in about a hundred years. The supply of sulphur in the United States will fail in fifteen years, the coal of Germany in less than a thousand years and of the United States, notwithstanding its huge lignite deposits, in less than fifteen hundred years. It looks as if the machine age may starve to death before long, a victim of to-day's profligate use of metals, coal and oil. Water power, alcohol from vegetation, solar energy, etc., are at present totally inadequate to replace oil and coal. Will future civilisations look back upon the industrial civilisation of the twentieth century as an age of robbery ?
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Machine Age's Starvation Predicted. Nature 131, 393 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/131393d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/131393d0