I remember when phone lines were made of copper. We were sure that it would be impossible for everyone to have a phone.
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Only in first-world countries did everyone have a phone and the Earth's population was half what it is now.
There's a lot of copper pairs left underground. Many hundreds of thousands of kilometres of it. Use it as a pull-through for fibre-optic bundles, and everyone can have gigabit internet.
Seriously though, there'll come a time when that underground obsolete copper will become economic to retrieve.
All kinds of copper are economic to retrieve with enough crack
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Sounds like doomish stuff. We innovate all the time. If copper and lithium are short supply items then technology will morph to use something else.
Eh. Or we could just keep some areas impoverished and underdeveloped and profit off their cheap labor...
!remindme 15 years
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Abolish copper coins. Job done :-)
Largely done already, as I understand it. Most use zinc now.
Have they tried pulling it out of the walls of abandoned buildings? There's a lot left in there that no one uses anymore. /s
they just need Detroit crackheads. five guys and a week and they'll have every building in Houston stripped.
Well the earth is already developed enough so i guess the copper was enough???
Catch me in Uganda
Yeah but maybe instead of wasting all pur fucking resources on phones which we buy every year we could pour some of that into developing critical infrastructure in places that need it. Also aluminium, if youre desperate, is a pretty good replacement for copper. I have a really hard time believing copper would be an actual bottleneck in this.