Speaking seriously for the mo, an important industrial metal whose supply has waxed and waned (sometimes critically) over the last few thousand years is tin. The ancient Sumerians (circa 2500 BCE), eager for more bronze tools and weapons, had to travel quite a bit in search of new tin sources when local mines were played out.
In more recent decades, bauxite (aluminum ore) supplies have waned a little, as aluminum has largely displaced tin in the making of disposable containers.
Red marble is still extracted in Verona, Italy.
Why? Did mankind learn to write only in the last 100 years?
On animals plants etc - we don’t “run out” of these as there isn’t a fixed supply. If we decide to eat all the seedcorn in the world instead of planting it we will run out of corn, but that’s through negligent planning - the possibility is there to make more corn.
However there is a limited amount of coal in the world and we burn that “using it up” eventually there will be no more.
I know that there are things that we have forgotten how to do, which is sort of similar, but we can find other ways to do it - ie we have no real idea how the builders of Stonehenge got the stones there from Wales - but we can do it on trucks.
So have we ever exhausted a finite natural resource?
There must be a quite a few resources for which we’ve had to resort to less convenient forms of extraction – does that count? For example, there’s not much elemental iron (and perhaps tin and some others) on the surface of the earth that can just be gathered and melted. We have to mine an ore, smelt it and refine it before we can access the iron. I imagine that most of the surface deposits of crude oil have also been depleted. That probably doesn’t count, but the ore might – we’ve probably exhausted all the elemental iron on the Earth’s surface. There are still resources that can be converted into iron, but they’re chemically different.
I really don’t understand the point of the question. People have told you, for example, that there really was a fixed supply of passenger pigeons. They’re all gone. You dismiss this, apparently because there’s an unlimited supply of other plants and animals, and anyway because it was just bad planning.
The Stonehenge, thing, I would dismiss because that particular method isn’t really a natural resource. You dismiss it because there are other ways to do it. Either way, I wouldn’t argue about its relevance.
It’s still an important point, however, in whatever it is that you’re trying to get answered here. The commonality between your rejection of particular plants and animals on the one hand, and particular methods on the other, is that any one particular plant or animal or method can be replaced by another. You’re considering the utility that the resource provides. That’s fine.
But why is your coal example any different? If it runs out, it can in theory be replaced by something else, e.g. sunlight.
I think you’re using an unworkable definition of “finite natural resource”.
Minerals and other non-living resources never run out completely: they just become so rare or difficult to obtain that something else becomes more economically viable to use in their place.
Nitpick: the last passenger pigeon, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. She is still here, stuffed, in a tasteful little memorial, next to the last captive Carolina parakeet.
Signed,
Obsessive Cincinnatian
There is surely a significant difference between plants and animals - which can reproduce and something like Iron that can’t.
Yes mankind can be shortsighted and greedy enough to wipe out any given species, and nature has a habit of doing this all on her own as well. It appears that nature isn’t too bothered if we run out of pandas.
However we are not going to “run out” of cows while we have at least one cow and one bull left. However no amount of careful management is going to increase the amount of platinum in the world. We can’t leave two bullion bars together and hope for the best.
So your actual question is “is there any element or compound that once existed on earth, which no longer exists on earth and cannot be synthesised”. The answer is no.
Are you sure?
As much as I think it makes the whole question a lot less interesting and useful, I think the OP is trying to get a list of things that truly have/can run out EVEN WITH careful husbanding.
For example, if my world is my 20-acre farm, 200 miles from the nearest supply depot, I can husband and renew my seeds, etc., indefinitely so that I always have fresh grain and vegetables. But if my furnace’s coal bin is finite, then no matter how slowly I burn the coal, I will one day run out.
So in this case, as others have mentioned, we’re talking purely about minerals in the OP.
And the answer is, no. We’ve never run out of a mineral. Could we eventually? Maybe, but not likely during the lifetime of the human species. More likely, as others have said, it would eventually become so difficult to extract the remainder–despite ingenious new methods–that it would no longer be profitable, and people would use something else for their process/product.
…all of which Demostylus just said, in two lines.
While we’re on this subject, has it ever become economically necessary or viable to dig up landfills in search of specific things? I know that landfills sell off scrap and some metals are commonly diverted from rusting away in a yard someplace because it’s economically viable to recycle them. I’m talking about actually taking a backhoe or other equipment to an established garbage disposal and extracting something specific that had been left to moulder.
(As an aside, I constantly wonder why we still bother with ores and such when there are rusting steel cars in landfills.)
Alright - given that my initial query is a bit tight. Let’s try an expanded version:
Given what we know now about the possibility of wiping out apparently renewable resources like edible pigeons - are we in danger of doing that to any useful animal/plabnt in the near future (by that I mean an animal that we can either eat or wear or a plant that provides a nutritional/medicinal use right now)
Gorrillas spring to mind, and we came close with the Blue whale. Any more?
I can give an explanation of why I believe it, on balance of probabilites. I can’t prove it beyond all doubt, though.
We actually can increase the amount of platinum in the world, by synthesising it in a nuclear reactor. Not enough diamonds? Can synthesise those, too. Gigantic sapphires are made on a routine basis for use in supermarket scanners. Oil? Not a problem. There’s a number of processes for synthesising it from all kinds of things. I don’t think coal would be too hard to synthesize, but (AFAIK) no-one’s tried yet. Why bother when you can still get millions of tonnes of it very easily.?
The limit that you eventually hit is the rate of consumption of energy. Sunlight is “energy income”. Things like oil and coal are energy “in the bank”, energy that came from sunlight in the past. Uranium, thorium, etc. are also energy “in the bank”.
It takes energy to make new platinum, or to make new oil. Once you’ve withdrawn all of the energy “in the bank”, you have to make do with your “energy income”, and that’s what sets the limit on what you can do in a sustainable fashion.
(I’ve limited the argument here to just mineral type things. If someone wants to point out that there are probably compounds in say, silphium, that we can’t synthesise because we can no longer determine what they were, feel free)
Given that new pharmaceutical treatment are developed every year from rare or fairly recently discovered plants or insects, and given that vast tracts of the ecosystems of those species are destroyed every year, a useful species may have been destroyed in the course of this thread.
True enough - but also impossible to quantify. Nature itself makes loads of things extinct all the time, so we will never know. However there are plants and animals who’s usefullness is well known. Are we about to wipe out any of them?
There’s been quite a bit in the press lately about Cod - there’s a possibility that we could fish some species to extinction.
It’s easier to do with animals that require a certain size of population just to survive - that was the problem with the passenger pigeon, I think - not that we shot and ate every last one of them, but that we depressed the population to the extent that their natural flocking behaviour was disrupted and this upset their breeding to the extent that the species went into irreversible decline.
True – but all resources come from somewhere. In that sense they’re all renewable. But in a practical sense, if we use it up and it will take a ludicrously long time to renew, then it’s effectively gone. I submit that the rate at which helium is being formed is a helluva lot smaller than the rate we’re using it up at.