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The potential for economic progress is in no way limited by any fundamental lack of natural resources. Despite the claims so often made that we are in danger of running out of natural resources, the fact is that the world is made out of natural resources -- out of solidly packed natural resources, extending from the upper limits of its atmosphere to its very center, four thousand miles down. This is so because the entire mass of the earth is made of nothing but chemical elements, all of which are natural resources. For example, the earth's core is composed mainly of iron and nickel -- millions of cubic miles of iron and nickel. Its oceans and atmosphere are composed of millions of cubic miles of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, and of lesser, but still enormous, quantities of practically every other element. Even the sands of the Sahara desert are composed of nothing but various compounds of silicon, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, aluminum, iron, and so on, all of them having who knows what potential uses that science may someday unlock. Nor is there a single element that does not exist in the earth in millions of times larger quantities than has ever been mined. Aluminum is found in some quantity practically everywhere. There are immense quantities even of the very rarest elements, such as gold and platinum, to be found floating in trace amounts throughout the oceans, for example.
What is true of the earth is equally true of every other planetary body in the universe. Insofar as the universe consists of matter, it consists of nothing but chemical elements, and thus of nothing but natural resources.
Nor is there any fundamental scarcity of energy in the world. More energy is discharged in a single thunderstorm than mankind produces in an entire year. Nor is the supply of energy in the world reduced in any way by virtue of the energy man captures from nature. Heat from the sun provides a constantly renewed supply that is billions of times greater than the energy consumed by man. The total quantity of energy in the world remains a constant, for all practical purposes incalculably in excess of what mankind consumes, and will remain so until the sun begins to cool.
The problem of natural resources is in no sense one of intrinsic scarcity. From a strictly physical-chemical point of view, natural resources are one and the same with the supply of matter and energy that exists in the world and, indeed, in the universe. Technically, this supply may be described as finite, but for all practical purposes it is infinite. It does not constitute the slightest obstacle to economic activity ã there is nothing we are prevented from doing because the earth (let alone the universe) is in danger of running out of some chemical element or other, or of energyc
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