# Speculate: world where refined metals are rare. **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [February 17, 2011, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/speculate-world-where-refined-metals-are-rare/571735 "2011-02-17T19:16:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2011, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/speculate-world-where-refined-metals-are-rare/571735/21 "2011-02-19T19:13:21Z")
> [@Sunspace](#): > > Railroads would still exist, but they would be much more expensive. Either you build them with rails made of the right kinds of hard tropical woods, or you go inverse and guide the wheels down troughs in stone pavements. And they could be animal-hauled. The advantages of guidance and load-carrying would still be there. Those would be difficult to scale up, or make particularly efficient - and I’m not sure we would, just because we had no metals. Reason being: those technologies are pretty much what we \*\*\*did have \*\*\*before steel rails - and we didn’t scale them up, or manage to make them work very well (and not because steel rails would be possible later). ---
**Author:** ![drastic\_quench](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e36b37/32.png) [@drastic\_quench](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drastic_quench)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2011, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/speculate-world-where-refined-metals-are-rare/571735/22 "2011-02-19T19:31:04Z")
The bamboo industry would be huge. South East Asia still uses bamboo as scaffolding. Compared to hardwoods, it would be much easier to cut with stone tools. It also replenishes much more quickly then coniferous or deciduous forests. We’d probably be even better sailors. The viking longships didn’t use nails and they were some of the most efficient craft of their day. ---
**Author:** ![Balthisar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/balthisar/32/2825_2.png) [@Balthisar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balthisar)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2011, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/speculate-world-where-refined-metals-are-rare/571735/23 "2011-02-20T04:11:45Z")
I’m not really sure how to gauge the conditions in the OP. That would have a lot to do with how things work. Let’s look at is the other way: what if metals (in general) were 1000 times more plentiful than today? Would costs really be 1/1000th of what they are today? The cost of utilizing a material is dependent upon a myriad of factors. How much of the material exists? How expensive is it to acquire the material? How expensive is it to make the material useful? For the latter two questions, the market economy would negate the problem posed by the OP, so I’ll assume that the material question means that the metals simply don’t exist in the world, except at a level that’s roughly 1/1000th of what’s available today. So now my question is, have we exhausted 1/1000th of today’s material availability? Are we worried about peak copper or peak iron? I’m not meaning to be a thread-shitter. I’m guessing and fully understand that “one thousand times as difficult/costly” is an arbitrary statement to mean “it’s hard.” But a real answer depends upon why it’s hard, and how hard is it? In way of comparison, I’d always asked myself the naive question since I was a little kid, “what what the world be like if there weren’t dinosaurs?” Negating the truth that petroleum isn’t dinosaur blood, how would the world have been different if we didn’t have petroleum? It’s not really a different question than the OP’s. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2011, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/speculate-world-where-refined-metals-are-rare/571735/24 "2011-02-20T15:01:37Z")
> [@Balthisar](#): > > I’m not meaning to be a thread-shitter. I’m guessing and fully understand that “one thousand times as difficult/costly” is an arbitrary statement to mean “it’s hard.” But a real answer depends upon why it’s hard, and how hard is it? It doesn’t matter why it’s hard. The point is to explore what civilisation might have been like if we just didn’t have anything like the abundance of metals that we do have. It doesn’t even matter if that’s an unrealistically artificial scenario - that _ **is** _ the scenario - take it or leave it. If a real answer is one that attempts to explain how we would use more metals, it’s automatically the wrong answer. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2011, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/speculate-world-where-refined-metals-are-rare/571735/25 "2011-02-20T16:27:26Z")
On reflection, that might have come across a little more harsh than I intended. Point is, in a thread like this, the more detail you give about the hypothetical restrictions, the more likely it is someone will try to work around them - for example, if I’d stated that the metal scarcity was imposed by omnipotent aliens, then we’d have people blustering in, waving their dicks around about how we would use our scarce metals to make guns to fight or defy the aliens, which isn’t even an interesting answer. The question is really just: how might our civlisation have developed if we did not have abundant metal? It’s an unrealistic scenario, by definition. ---
**Author:** ![Swords\_to\_Plowshares](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b38774/32.png) [@Swords\_to\_Plowshares](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Swords_to_Plowshares)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2011, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/speculate-world-where-refined-metals-are-rare/571735/26 "2011-02-20T16:37:59Z")
> [@drastic\_quench](#): > > The bamboo industry would be huge. South East Asia still uses bamboo as scaffolding. Compared to hardwoods, it would be much easier to cut with stone tools. It also replenishes much more quickly then coniferous or deciduous forests. > > We’d probably be even better sailors. The viking longships didn’t use nails and they were some of the most efficient craft of their day. Nitpick: the Vikings were some of the first sailors to use iron rivets in their shipbuilding. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/speculate-world-where-refined-metals-are-rare/571735.md?page=1)