Scarcity is nonsense – Apparata

Prophets of doom and other supporters of the finite earth theory tell us again and again that the earth as we know it is about to collapse. In reality, the earth and humanity have never been as good as they are now, and there is no real scarcity.

Western economics revolves around scarcity

Our current economic system revolves around scarcity. There is a demand and a limited supply, you learned in high school economics. Everything that is scarce has a price. The scarcer, the higher this price. That is why, for example, gold is more expensive than air. This while we can do without gold, but about 5 minutes without air. It is often helpful to look at the world from a physics point of view. Because the only laws you really can’t mock, are the laws of nature. The rest is all invented by humans. Like the law of economics, which revolves around scarcity.

The world of abundance around us

All material things around us are made up of atoms. Atoms are virtually indestructible spheres that can only change through nuclear reactions. That is, the atoms that exist on Earth today are the same atoms that existed 4.5 billion years ago, when Earth was a red-hot ball of lava. There is no difference whatsoever between the atoms then and the atoms now. Except that some radioactive atoms have decayed and that the atoms are now stuck together in a somewhat different way than when the earth was formed.

This also applies to the energy sources on earth. By far the largest source of energy on Earth is the sun. Since the formation of the earth, the sun has only started to shine brighter. It is true that the natural radioactivity on earth is steadily decreasing, and the earth is therefore cooling down, but the amount of sunlight is only increasing. This natural radioactivity and the cooling of the earth also only provide 0.2% of all energy on earth. The rest, 99.8%, comes from the sun.

We can make anything we want by sticking atoms together in a different way. The atoms are just there for the taking. We just need to sort them and stick them together in a different way.

“Scarce” precious metal is not scarce at all

To give a concrete example: one of the most scarce chemical elements on earth is the precious metal rhodium. At the time of writing this article, the price is around $8,000 per troy ounce. A kilo of rhodium in your pocket, about the size of a hefty golf ball, is therefore worth around 2.5 tons. Enough to buy a house.

Nevertheless, rhodium is not scarce in an absolute sense. If you were to cut a cube of 10 × 10 × 10 meters out of the earth’s crust and remove all rhodium atoms from it, 1 in 1.5 billion atoms, you could still extract 2 grams of rhodium from it. In iron meteorites, of which there are quite a few in the solar system, the concentration of rhodium is even more than a thousand times higher: 2 in a million. Average. With enough energy, which comes in the form of sunlight, you can fish all the atoms you need from the environment and reuse them literally indefinitely. Because there are countless atoms on Earth alone, let alone in the rest of the solar system.

Artificial scarcity through patents

So why is there still so much scarcity? This is largely due to the things that are (still) scarce, such as human labor and machines, with which we can collect energy (such as solar panels and nuclear power plants), collect atoms (mining), sort (refinery) and stick together in a different way (manufacturing).

But an increasing part of the cost is going to be spent on patents and other intellectual property. Artificial scarcity. You can see this very clearly with many medicines, for example. For example, treating a rare form of hemophilia costs as much as $3.5 million per dose. This form of earning money on the back of the sick is absolutely abhorrent to a decent person. Especially when you consider that the medical research is paid for by us, the population.

But it’s just a symptom of the deeper things that are wrong in our society. Namely, driving up the cost price by creating artificial scarcity. The question is whether we should want to. Personally I don’t think so. In my opinion, poverty is not a natural phenomenon but a crime against humanity and we should do everything we can to eradicate poverty.