What are the five most important elements necessary for the survival of the human race? The least important? For the least, please disregard those that don’t occurr naturally.
Please disregard “five” in the above question, as I realize this may be too limiting. List as many as you feel are appropriate.
According to the US Army, the three most important are water, food, and shelter. =)
Or if you want to take it to mean chemical elements, they would be Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, and Sulfur. Extending the list past five makes it really long, but other elements would be Sodium, Iron, Magnesium, Clorine, Potassium, and so on. How far down the list do you want to go?
Or if you were to ask Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich, wouldn’t the most important element be love?
For basic life phosphorus is pretty important…wevets, I’d say more important than sulfur. Iron and calcium are also pretty fundamental for our life processes.
As far as “exists naturally” goes, do you mean found on Earth? For example, Technitium is not found on Earth without the help of humanity, but it is seen in stars. It’s not man-made there! Utterly unneeded for human life.
Some of the heavier metals would probably be the least important Earth-occurring for strict human survival (that is simply living)… uranium, the Lanthanides, and other heavy metals (Yttrium anyone?) we could easily do without and survive.
However, you specifically asked about the survival of humanity… we have to look into the future. Eventually we are going to come to a point where we will need to find a way to fend off some disaster that will threaten our extinction. Perhaps it will be in the form of an asteroid speeding toward Earth and the only way to save ourselves is to send up tactical nukes to stop it. In that case, uranium, hydrogen, and plutonium might be pretty important for human survival.
Okay, we survive that threat, but now we’re facing the end of our habitat. We could go look for some others, but that’s rather expensive endeavor. Eventually all places where organic life can exist will become inhospitable. Pretty bleak view of the future. If we truly want to survive, we may have to look at engineering artificial intelligence that will be just as good as us. For all practical purposes, they may become our key to survival and exploration of the universe. Why can’t a robot be human? Didn’t you get anything out of Spielberg’s drawn-out dreadful movie, “AI”? In any case, robotic based lifeforms are much hardier than life and would be able to exist harsher conditions. It may very well be our next evolutionary step If that’s how humanity will survive, then perhaps silicon and iron will be the most important (along with aluminum and titantium).
See, the question can be answered in many different ways.
Most important:
Air.
Everything else is gravy.
Make that breathable, non-toxic air.
Bryan Ekers+the statement, “and hold the gravy” sounds like a real breatharian. Unfortunately, such attitudes have led to more than a few people kicking the bucket prematurely. Not a very good survival method, I’m afraid.
I’m not a breatharian, of course, but just stressing the point that all the worries about calcium deficiencies and anemia and whatnot take a backseat when you’re sucking vacuum.
Love is like Oxygen, all you need is love!
do you mean elements like chemical elements, or elements like things?
You’ve never tasted my mom’s special recipe oven roasted lanthanides with yttrium mashed potatoes. And a uranium sorbet for dessert. Mmmmm, them’s good eatin!