I just read Oryx and Crake and in it two of the characters are talking about civilization rebuilding if almost all the people are killed.
One characters says that “once it’s (the modern world) flattened, it could never be rebuilt.” His reasoning is that all the surface metals have already been mined and without these there would be no iron age, no bronze age, no steel age.
Is there any merit to this idea?
The idea doesn’t work. There was a thread on this last year, Metal and civilisation.
Not with iron. I recall reading somewhere that our known iron reserves might last us four centuries at current usage rates. Now, other things, like uranium and oil, might run out a lot faster. Certainly, there won’t be any SUVs clogging up the freeways to this hypothetical rebuilt civilization.
All the iron has been dug up and turned into steel. It’s all around us. You can walk into any number of dockyards, steel distributors, fabrication companies and such and find it handily lying around in nicely cut and formed bars, sheets, rolls, flats and angles. Civilization would have an EASIER time of it, if anything.
But since it is exposed to the air won’t it oxidize and be destroyed?
If so, then what’s the point of recycling?
Oxidize, yes. Be destroyed, no. I think you could easily melt down rusted steel and reuse it.
Did you bother to read that earlier thread?
Oxidized steel would be a whole lot better iron ore than anything you find in the ground.
I don’t think the rebuilding society would need to bother with a bronze age, though there’d be a pseudo-stone age until some survivor figured out how to resurrect the steel industry. Except that instead of using rocks we find lying around to make tools, we’d be using refined metals, ceramics, and plastics we find lying around.
No. I think I just skipped over your post. Sorry.
So, basically the rust could just be reworked into usable iron? This might be a stupid question, but given enough time will the iron oxidize into dust that will be scattered by the wind and not be in isolated spots that can be mined?
Perhaps but humanity would rebound so rapidly that that wouldn’t have time to happen. And ‘almost all’ is very variable. Taking the population of the UK (roughly 60M), 90% death still leaves 6 million people - 18th century population. 99% death still leaves 600K, a good sized city. Only at 99.99% - 6000 survivors - would you start to get problems, and those would be of people finding each other. But let’s say there are 600 survivors that manage to meet up and form a settlement. Because we retain the knowledge of earlier years, we’ll have the population double every generation of 25 years. After only 250 years (10 generations) the population is now 600K, and it only takes another 150 years (6 generations) to get back to a population of 40M. 400 years is not long at all.