[ExI] too late

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 
Sent: Monday, 1 December, 2025 4:17 AM
To: spike at rainier66.com
Cc: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] too late

 

 

 

On Wed, Nov 26, 2025 at 2:38 PM <spike at rainier66.com <mailto:spike at rainier66.com> > wrote:

 

 > In a sense, we can turn 235 uranium into any element we want or need, with current technology.

 

For the last 80 years we've had the technology to turn lead into gold, the only trouble is the gold you manufactured would be thousands, or more likely millions, of times as expensive as digging it out of the ground.  

 

John K Clark

 

 

 

Ja, I didn’t mean turn anything into gold by fusing nuclei.  Rather we can mine anything we want from anywhere.  

 

The critical insight is that the graph of cost vs ore quality is log linear.  If you have ore with one part per million of something you want, it costs 1 oomblatt to refine it.  But if the ore contains only 1 part per 10 million, it costs… 10 oomblatts?  No.  It costs 2.  If that ore is so lousy it only has 1 part per hundred million?  3 oomblatts to refine it out.  Log linear (for the relevant ranges of typical ore (eventually that log/linear breaks down, but it works for the relevant ranges.))

 

The reason that is important: I read all this yakkity yak commentary on shortage of this, shortage of that, but it contradicted the evidence, which is spot price.  The spot price of any commodity is the objective truth: it indicates not just the supply vs demand, for commodities such as raw material, it is the collective opinion of people with money about the future supply vs demand indefinitely.  Reason: metal ingots store in a small space forever.  Any investor can buy any amount, guessing at its future value.

 

As metals go, silver is the big shortage vs demand material currently.  There was a big hype on rare earths (because of perceived demand for use in magnets for wind turbines and EVs) but the spot price didn’t agree.  During the biggest hype, the spot prices of those materials never reacted.  The collective opinion of investors (who study carefully rather than be influenced by hyperventilating journalists) is that we have plenty of those materials and can get as much as we need.  Alls ya hasta to do is look at the spot prices.  That is the proof.  The rest of it is just words, written by people who don’t know stuff.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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