The World is Running Out of Sand, and People Are Dying as a Result (medium.com) 180
You may be thinking: But sand is everywhere, there are whole deserts filled with the stuff. The sand in a desert, though, is useless as a construction material. The grains are out in the open and blow around for thousands of years. From a report: This rounds them off until they become useless as building blocks. Imagine trying to make a building with golf balls. In order to build, sand with angular edges must be used. The preferential type is the kind found in a river bed, sea, or beach. The fact that desert sand is useless makes for some unexpected situations. Despite being surrounded by endless miles of sand, the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, was built with sand imported from Australia. Dubai also imports sand for its beaches from Australia. Apparently desert sand doesn't do well in a beach atmosphere either. Sand also regenerates slowly. It takes thousands upon thousands of years for rock and sediment to break down into the usable grains we all rely on.
The world has seen a construction boom in recent years. The base that boom is built on, quite literally, is concrete. The United Nations estimates that the world consumes more than 40 billion tons of building aggregate -- sand, gravel, and crushed stone -- each year. Some estimates predict consumption will top 50 billion tons by next year, with China alone gobbling up much of the world's concrete supply as it undergoes a massive urbanization. According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey, between 2011 and 2013 China used more concrete than the U.S. used throughout the entire 20th century. Other parts of Asia, such as India, are rapidly expanding as well. The urbanization driving this construction boom, and increasing reliance on concrete, shows no signs of slowing. By 2030 the U.N. expects 60 percent of the world's population to live in urban areas.
[...] One of the prime issues with sand is that it's heavy. Heavy items incur large transportation costs, especially over a long distance. The scarcity and high prices attract the attention of criminals. Why go to a legal mining area when sand can be extracted for next to nothing elsewhere? "Sand mafias" are groups of criminals that illegally dredge sand from areas where extraction is prohibited. Since they're not following laws, all environmental protocols are ignored. Often rivers are illegally mined, destroying the habitat for fish and fishermen. Sometimes land from private villages is even taken over by these mafias. If they're confronted, violence often results. And according to a 2015 Wired story on sand mafias in India, police are typically of little help: "The conventional wisdom says that many local authorities accept bribes from the sand miners to stay out of their business -- and not infrequently, are involved in the business themselves."
The world has seen a construction boom in recent years. The base that boom is built on, quite literally, is concrete. The United Nations estimates that the world consumes more than 40 billion tons of building aggregate -- sand, gravel, and crushed stone -- each year. Some estimates predict consumption will top 50 billion tons by next year, with China alone gobbling up much of the world's concrete supply as it undergoes a massive urbanization. According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey, between 2011 and 2013 China used more concrete than the U.S. used throughout the entire 20th century. Other parts of Asia, such as India, are rapidly expanding as well. The urbanization driving this construction boom, and increasing reliance on concrete, shows no signs of slowing. By 2030 the U.N. expects 60 percent of the world's population to live in urban areas.
[...] One of the prime issues with sand is that it's heavy. Heavy items incur large transportation costs, especially over a long distance. The scarcity and high prices attract the attention of criminals. Why go to a legal mining area when sand can be extracted for next to nothing elsewhere? "Sand mafias" are groups of criminals that illegally dredge sand from areas where extraction is prohibited. Since they're not following laws, all environmental protocols are ignored. Often rivers are illegally mined, destroying the habitat for fish and fishermen. Sometimes land from private villages is even taken over by these mafias. If they're confronted, violence often results. And according to a 2015 Wired story on sand mafias in India, police are typically of little help: "The conventional wisdom says that many local authorities accept bribes from the sand miners to stay out of their business -- and not infrequently, are involved in the business themselves."
The US is the worst, it need to cut most. (Score:1)
You're not very bright are you?
All those countries you listed produce more pollution because they are bigger countries with more people.
Person for person, no one comes close to the resources used by a first world country and America uses much more than most.
Are you sure you aren't WindBourne? This is the same 'argument' he tries to use all the time.
How about the US half it's CO2 per person to get down to China's level? Or decrease it even more than that to the even lower levels of India Brasil etc.
Re: The US is the worst, it need to cut most. (Score:2)
Another per capital tard
Wrong, it doesn't matter what the USA does any more, not for resource usage and not for carbon load. Only chinese policy and practice do, and soon India's too. Their consumption will be the load civilization puts on the Earth. The u.s. could halve it's resource use and carbon fuel burning... And it won't matter.
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The US is the #1 consuming country in the world. That is why you have the highest CO2 use. You waste the most electricity, waste the most food, use the most oil etc etc.
If you make so much why do you need import the most?
Why do you import over a billion dollars worth of good from China, every single day of the year?
How much of thier CO2 is used to produce the things you consume?
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It's total pollution output per country not per-capita. Countries which have drastically reduced pollution levels in major cities - the US and Europe - should do little or nothing compared to what 2/3rds of the people on the planet getting a free ride without significantly reducing their pollution levels to near the US and Europe's level as *measured by air quality in the top 10 major cities*.
Spoken like the truly ignorant person you must be.
WindBourne is it? Or at least an equally delusional American.
50 years ago those places were producing close to zero, some still are because they weren't (as) developed. Your kind tries to claim only already developed countries are allowed to pollute at such high levels because {insert completely stupid and illogical reasons}.
The US has been leading by example for 50 years? So why is it still so much higher than all the other Western countries? Why are th
All these problems share a common cause (Score:4, Insightful)
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But as long as we have ridiculous ideas about the sanctity of life and every sperm is sacred in the heads of people you won't see a solution to that problem.
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Thank you for volunteering! Your sacrifice will not be forgotten!
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But I alone can only abort so many fetuses and hand out condoms to so many teenagers, it has to be a group effort!
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The problem with this idea is to identify those "best" women. Every attempt so far failed miserably.
Re:All these problems share a common cause (Score:4, Interesting)
But as long as we have ridiculous ideas about the sanctity of life and every sperm is sacred in the heads of people you won't see a solution to that problem.
The place having the biggest construction boom in the past two decades has no such ridiculous ideas. That place is China. One-child policy anyone?
The places with the highest birth rates also tend to be places where the majority of the people live in shanty towns or similar and do not actually use a lot of concrete for construction.
It's not just about the number of people. It's about their standard of living.
Re: All these problems share a common cause (Score:2, Interesting)
Given the title "The World is Running Out of Sand, and People Are Dying as a Result" then it is a self correcting problem: as soon as enough people die, problem solved!
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Yes, because they were headed for a population crash, where the working generations would be substantially smaller than the generations it was replacing. Additionally, while the official policy was rescinded, the cultural impacts will still be felt for generations, and the skewing of gender birth rates can also impact population growth, as men outnumber women 118 to 100 at birth, meaning that population growth could not be as rapid per capita, as while men are important in reproduction, they do not do the
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And replaced it with a 2 child policy. Guess what, that's still below replacement level...
Most people didn't want the second child anyway, so now they are trying to come up with other incentives to get women to have more babies.
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Re:All these problems share a common cause (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, you may realize that it's not a problem... the 3rd derivative of world population has been negative for some time now, (since at least the mid 1960's). We now are clearly within the nearly linear portion of a logistic growth curve, and can fairly safely project that the world's population will be largely stable at a little more than 10b or so, and that it should *never* exceed 11billion.
Interesting point of fact, because the production capacity increases as the number of people grows, there is no reason to think that this size population will result in any worse shortages for segments of the world population than we currently have... the problems, if any, will be caused by limitations in distribution capacity rather than the raw ability to produce what people need.
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The problem is, simply put, that the "first world" consumes at a rate that is not even sustainable if only the first world consumes at this rate, and that the rest of the world also wants to do just that. China is already getting there. If Africa decides they want to live like Europe (instead of just in Europe, as right now) we're FUBAR.
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Perhaps you need to understand the difference between being able supply more than what people need as opposed to being able to supply their greed.
Nobody needs to be poor... but nobody really needs to have orders of magnitude more wealth as anybody else either.
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I've got no beef with communism, I'm not even strictly a pragmatist. I appreciate the need for idealism and idealistic solutions, but it's necessary to retain some sense of proportion here. What you're saying is that we don't need to ask people to have fewer children, because we can just have total, worldwide, economic upheaval instead. As though that were the easier solution, or more likely.
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Your proclamation of "it's not good enough" is built on the premise of wanting more than one's fair share.... ie, not being "good" in the first place.
The fact is that it *IS* good enough... the fact that it's not what people might necessarily *want* is irrelevant.
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the fact that it's not what people might necessarily *want* is irrelevant
What? What people want is the issue here. It can't be irrelevant, it's the whole point: we're talking about competing wants. Some people want more children, some people want more stuff. If people don't want more children then we have no problem. If people don't want stuff then we have no problem. Either one of those conditions would be sufficient.
But we do have a problem.
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That said, I'm not a quitter. I'm not about to throw my hands up in the air and say, "Well the world's getting warmer and we could stop it, but... it's going to continue regardles
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But as long as we have ridiculous ideas about the sanctity of life and every sperm is sacred in the heads of people you won't see a solution to that problem.
Yes, anti-abortion measures are certainly the problem. It couldn't possibly be what causes women to become impregnated so easily. Let's not look for humans to be fucking responsible adults or anything. Best to let children be and bend the world around their irresponsibility while ass-raping morals at the same time.
Yeah, that's the answer.
Killing humans won't solve this problem any more than killing cats and dogs does, and ignoring root-cause identifies the real ignorance.
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Ass-raping wouldn't be the problem... sigh, did you miss biology classes or did you get abstinence-only sex ed?
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We should put economic forces to work.
DNA is taken from every individual. Every person gets one "replacement" credit at birth. Every child that is born results in 0.5 credits charged to the mother and 0.5 charged to the father. All social benefits (welfare, food stamps, EITC, Medicaid, ACA subsidies, even Social Security and Medicare) are increased to those who still have their 0.5 credits. Social benefits are "standard" for those who have 0 credits. Those who are in "debt" due to having negative credits wi
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Interesting concept. Do you get to buy/sell replacement credits?
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The most effective way to reduce population growth, is education. In highly educated countries, women are more likely to work and less likely to have a lot of children. Good social security also reduces the need to have children in order to ensure you're taken care of when you're old. Prosperity and equality seem to be big factors in reducing the number of children people have.
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(INSERT SCARY PROBLEM) is due to overpopulation. All of them. The answer is not to waste time and money trying to treat all the symptoms; the answer is to fix them all at once by setting a goal to reduce the world's population by 75% by the year 2100. All other problems will solve themselves.
But as long as we have ridiculous ideas about the sanctity of life and every sperm is sacred in the heads of people you won't see a solution to that problem.
You've provided a self-defeating argument. If you don't believe in sanctity of life, then what's the problem with people dying from (INSERT SCARY PROBLEM)?
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That I value existing life over potentially future one.
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you and your existence mean nothing.
Aww. But I thought every life is sacred?
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My concept is not the elimination of existing life but avoiding spawning more.
Re:All these problems share a common cause (Score:4, Funny)
The answer is not to waste time and money trying to treat all the symptoms; the answer is to fix them all at once by setting a goal to reduce the world's population by 75% by the year 2100.
Washington has that well in hand. Indeed, it may well exceed that goal by a factor of 33%, any time now.
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The answer is not to waste time and money trying to treat all the symptoms; the answer is to fix them all at once by setting a goal to reduce the world's population by 75% by the year 2100.
I'm looking forward to doing my patriotic duty to celebrate Purge day! ;)
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"The largest use of pumice in the United States is the production of lightweight concrete blocks and other lightweight concrete products...The second most common use of pumice is in landscaping and horticulture."
So, no. The primary market is not acid washed jeans.
This kind of dishonesty is why people have distrust towards environmental issues. Don't do it.
Re:60 percent of the world's population to live in (Score:5, Informative)
Ahhh city folk.
No, no they do not. And I don't know if you've seen sand mining in action but it basically strips off the top soil out of a huge region of land , the mine closes 2-3 years after it opens and leaves the whole place completely environmentally wrecked. Your lucky if you get spares grass for cows, but probably not because all that soils been shredded out for the mineral sand and what remains is just bad dirt.
Its about the most un-endless mining you can think of, and rivers are frigging worth. You have about 3-4 feet of the stuff to dig up aaaand then thats it.
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Goddamn iPhone typing. By "spares" read sparse. By "worth" read "worse".
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Its crazy toxic. For the most part Cyanide is used for extracting metals out of sands, although there are others used depending on the type of sand mining, such as Arsenic for gold extraction. Some of its just dumped into the soil (Cyanide over time hopefully gets reacted out into saner compounds, Arsenic is elemental so it hangs about) some into the water table. Its not good.
Re:Really...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Young people are the target. The idea is that since young people are rather ignorant of how world works due to lack of experience, they can be primed with certain kinds of propaganda.
Most of us older folks already have enough experience to know that most of these hyperbolic "small problem we're going to sensationalize" claims are bogus. If price of sand goes up enough, we'll simply start using crushed rock instead. That's it.
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Stone dust, the remains from rock crushing for gravel, has already been tested for concrete. It works fine:
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
This shouldn't be surprising, since it is the same stuff the bigger gravel comes from. If there is not enough of the dust, we can just crush the rock finer until there is.
Re: Really...? (Score:2)
...we'll simply start using crushed rock instead
Can't we just let them have Florida and Long Island?? We could even include the residents at no extra charge...
Re:Really...? (Score:5, Insightful)
The other thing that you get good at as you get older is spotting a straw men and ad hominems.
The problems being reported in this is not indicative of our "running out of sand", but the price of cheap, legally-mined sand rising. This is how economics works: in a capitalist society you'll never run out of a mineral resource because it will get priced out of practicality, leaving you with plenty of that commodity still in the ground that you just can't use. This has three consequences: (1) people try to get more efficient at using the resource; (2) people look for alternatives; (3) the rising price of the commodity fosters conflict and crime, until the first two consequences succeed in reducing the demand.
So we'll always be able to make natural sand-based concrete; it'll just be too expensive to use as liberally as we do today. That's the reason we aren't using crushed stone today: it's physically feasible, but economically pointless. If it ever becomes economically feasible to use crushed stone, either there's been some kind of rock-breaking technological breakthrough, or we're paying a lot more for concrete.
A world in which concrete was expensive would look very different, and transitioning to such a world would likely involve some societal stress.
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This is how economics works: in a capitalist society you'll never run out of a mineral resource because it will get priced out of practicality, leaving you with plenty of that commodity still in the ground that you just can't use. This has three consequences: (1) people try to get more efficient at using the resource; (2) people look for alternatives; (3) the rising price of the commodity fosters conflict and crime, until the first two consequences succeed in reducing the demand.
You mean like gold, oil and diamonds? Once the price goes up, it's more economically feasible to invest in getting the stuff out of the ground. Which in turn increases supply, which in turn reduces price. That's why fracking is a thing.
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Not really. Sand is a tiny fraction of cost of concrete. Crushed rock can't be all that much more expensive, seeing how it's used for concrete TODAY according to the story itself. It's just more expensive enough to use sand at this point in time.
Like I noted above, your knee jerk reaction is completely in line with how this kind of propaganda works. It primes you to think among the certain lines, catastrophising a tiny problem.
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If crushed rock were economical to use in Dubai concrete, they wouldn't ship sand from Australia. They'd crush rock from a local quarries. It would make sense to set up a crushing plant because Dubai uses a huge amount of concrete and has plenty of rock.
Sand commodity costs represent 2% of the finished price of concrete. That means it represents a bit more than 2% of the input costs, but we can reasonably conclude it's not a limiting factor in concrete use *at present*. But remember we're talking about a
Re: Really...? (Score:1)
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Exactly this. It's not that there's actual risk with sand. It's that economic opportunism by organised criminal networks can cause significant impact.
This applies to everything from stealing cabling for scrap metal to dumping toxic waste. Italian mafia for example is well known for doing the latter for profit.
Re: Really...? (Score:2)
False, that type of sand already used. Just adds some percent to cost of concrete and commercial buildings recoup their construction costs many times over. There is no problem, no cause for panic. The world will not run out of sand for construction, that is a lie and soundbite for someone with agenda to profit
Actually the problem is not concrete (Score:1)
We're running out of sand because of the silicon required by all the cryptocurrency mining servers being built around the world. Someday a way will be found of grinding them into the aggregate we need.
Plastic! (Score:2, Troll)
We are running out of everything (Score:2, Insightful)
We are running out of every non-recyclable material on earth, wether it is sand, copper, oil or anything you can think of. We live in a finite planet, and thus nothing can be mined forever.
The only real question is at what pace are things running out, and how easy it is to replace them? The market's laws will rise price of things the less available they are, until eventually it will be more price convenient to use an alternative. With sand in particular, it eventually rise the price of it so it will be conv
Slashdot has had some good ones (Score:2)
Like the story about how bamboo bicycles would be the next big thing and would be more sustainable than aluminum when aluminum is 5% of the Earth's crust, but this one takes the cake. What a testament to what great lives we have made that we need to scare ourselves with such obvious B.S.
90% of the earths crust is silicates. You want them a given size or shape ? Hit them or melt them. I'll worry about having enough sunlight for everyone on the planet before I worry about concrete aggregates.
Oh one other th
Re: Slashdot has had some good ones (Score:2)
I had to look that up, but yeah, true.
https://www.sandatlas.org/comp... [sandatlas.org]
Shocked about the amount of oxygen too, I didnâ(TM)t know that.
There may actually be sand mafias, but people underestimate how stupid people can be. There are almost surely industrial processes for making sand however you want, which could be powered by a dam on the river rather than ripping up the whole river.
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Yes I did. I'd just put it up there with the 5 or 6 times the world has managed to hit peak oil, or the Club Rome report that had every resource vanishing and their prices rocketing by the year 2000, uniquely funny in light of the commodities price collapses that had mines going bankrupt because they couldn't service interest on debt.
Re: Slashdot has had some good ones (Score:2)
summary is bullshit. Sand from crushed rock is already used in many places, it's just a more expensive. There is no problem, there is no shortage. Alarmist bullshit is what this is. Increasing the cost of a concrete poured 5 percent won't end civilization
Seems like Hyperbole nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
A 3 minute google search and I was able to find many, many articles outlining uses for desert sand. Among those uses... building materials.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90... [fastcompany.com]
Re:Seems like Hyperbole nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are building the tallest building in the world, you use the best construction materials possible. You have no other choice - you are pushing the bounds of construction technology. But such construction is not performed that often.
For sidewalks, single dwelling homes, and the numerous other applications that consume the majority of sand - desert sand is probably just fine. One might have to tweak their designs to accommodate the sand but that is a small price to pay if it allows use of a construction material that is readily available.
Planet Money - Peak Sand (Score:2)
Solution (Score:3)
Reprocessing sand (Score:2)
Couldn't they use a solar furnace to fuse the sand grains together, then grind them down to get grains of the right size?
Running out......again (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what has actually run out since 1971. Not a god damn thing. Not once, not ever.
Every time it has been corporations whining that they had to pay $.04 per ton for something instead of $.01, or people who want to pay $100 a month for rent in a city where the cheapest 400 square foot apartment costs $500,000 to buy and rent is around $1900 a month, or people who want you and the gov't to fund their pet program so they don't have to do honest work. They get all worked up and make a lot of noise hoping to get idiot politicians to support their cause and pass a law that forces things back or provides them with a subsidy, in other words steal money out of your pocket to put it into theirs.
The only thing that has run out since then is my patience. Socialism and crony capitalism needs to be once and for all labeled the environmental toxin that it is and steps taken to get rid of it. We could treat it like we do any other toxic waste, load it up on ships and dump it in the 3rd world.
Somalia would be perfect.
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As long as humans run the show, you'll probably get one or the other or a mix.
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You know what has actually run out since 1971. Not a god damn thing. Not once, not ever.
You sound like one of those people who think peak oil means no oil.
In 1971, my drinking water came from rainwater collected in dams. Now it is mostly from ocean desalination and underground sources.
House prices have risen dramatically with population growth so much that the majority of young people cannot afford to bu a home with back yard, except on the distant fringes.
Wild ocean fish has become a luxury item. But chicken is cheap, or farmed fish from Asia.
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No I'm an engineer. I have a brain.
Peak oil by definition is the maximum output of oil based on the current level of technology. That value has been re-evaluated and raised every decade since they started pulling it out of the ground. When the easy stuff is gone, they pull the harder stuff, etc. We will never reach a point where they pull all of the oil out of the ground. The funny thing that people do not realize is that the plan
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You know what has actually run out since 1971. Not a god damn thing. Not once, not ever.
Must be nice for you living in a rich country where you can simply import what you don't have.
Back in reality which we call the world:
Water: 1.1bn people lack access to safe fresh drinking water. Remember that next time you're drinking it from a bottle.
Oil: We have all but run out of easily accessible oil. We're now digging to incredible new depths in parts of the world, while stripping entire rainforrests for tar sands in others to accommodate your indifference.
Coal: That we've not run out of, not in Austr
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I'll respond to one of your items, because most of the rest are weak talking points and can be countered with a 2 minute Google search.
How pray tell do we have an ever growing population on planet Earth, including the non-rich countries of which you speak, if 1.1B people do not have access to safe drinking water? You do realize even in the crappiest of countries the quality of life has gone UP, not down, for almost everyone. Again do a 2 minute Google search and po
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How pray tell do we have an ever growing population on planet Earth, including the non-rich countries of which you speak, if 1.1B people do not have access to safe drinking water?
That is the dumbest and most nonsense comment on the internet. I'm not sure what's worse, your thought that everyone suddenly dies because of unsafe drinking water, or that the death rate is not independent from birth rate and that I can only imagine if you extend your logic the human race can't grow unless we all live for ever.
I apologize. I said you're the problem and that it looks like you may not always have been. But given your critical thinking ability I was wrong. You clearly always have been. ... Or
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The quality of life for those people is going up.
The longevity of those people is going up.
Though it does seem the average IQ on the internet is going down. Maybe there should be a quiz or something.
You do realize if those 1.1B people did not have "safe drinking water" they would all be dead in 3-4 days. Don't recall hearing about 20% of the planet's population suddenly dying over the weekend.
You do understand that the concept of "safe drinking wat
Epoxy (Score:3)
Mix the sand with some good binder or epoxy. Yes, it will cost more, that's life.
"People are dying"? How? (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, how are people dying because sand has to be imported into Saudi Arabia? Makes no sense, the summary doesn't support the headline, so why bother reading the arrival?
I mean come in - three big paragraph 'summary' that doesn't even support the most dramatic claim in the headline... and by the way being forced to import sand isn't by itself, proof we are "running out of sand", it is proof it isn't conveniently located where we need it. See Sam Kineson's comments on starving people in Africa (spoiler
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I guess you missed this part from the summary:
Seems like we could make it (Score:4, Insightful)
Sand is basically finely ground rock. That doesn't seem like an insurmountable technical problem by today's standards.
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Sand is basically finely ground rock. That doesn't seem like an insurmountable technical problem by today's standards.
The problem is two-fold. Features and cost.
1) Not all sand is equal. Not noted here but covered in a recent Planet Money podcast [npr.org] is that the sand that is stolen often has characteristics that make it particularly popular for why it's being stolen. The stolen sand often has a color or texture that makes it wanted elsewhere. For example: much of the beach sand is uniformly the same shape (cubic) and size. This makes it ideal for construction, where a powdery, desert sand wouldn't work. While you can sieve cru
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No need to make it!
You know whose got a monopoly on irregular shaped, uneroded sand particles? The Moon!
We could solve this crisis by getting Elon to launch rocket loads of moon sand at the middle east and boot strap the whole interplanetary trading economy.
Concrete Also Fixes Oxygen (Score:1)
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/. recently has a story about a concrete like formula that fixes CO2. It's not very fast, it's very expensive, but it's pretty strong. Of course, it's still under development
What else is new? (Score:2)
We are sucking everything of any value out of our planet, soon only a lifeless husk will remain.
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Comment removed (Score:3)
Time (Score:1)
Need further proof? (Score:2)
Stan Lee died this morning.
'Nuff said.
Sand people (Score:2)
"Sand mafias" are groups of criminals that illegally dredge sand from areas where extraction is prohibited. Since they're not following laws, all environmental protocols are ignored. Often rivers are illegally mined, destroying the habitat for fish and fishermen. Sometimes land from private villages is even taken over by these mafias. If they're confronted, violence often results.
But do they come back in greater numbers?
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Not miles. The only countries still not using the metric system are the USA, Belize, Myanmar and Liberia. Not the United Arab Emirates.
They're surrounded by a metric fuckton of worthless shit.
Better?
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They're surrounded by a metric fuckton of worthless shit.
For reference that's about 1.102 imperial fuckloads (or 0.98 long fuckloads).
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Deserts used to be ocean bed. They actually find entire whale skeletons in the Middle East deserts.