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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Unlike oil, lithium can be recycled in extremely high percentage.

By the time this will be a problem in 100 years, we'll have long moved to something else, like graphene or whatever.

I don't know why people are freaking out about it so much. My guess is it has to do something with oil propaganda. After all, the best myths are those that have a "seed of truth" in them. So once the oil industry started its anti-lithium propaganda, a lot of people must be thinking "well, it does ring kind of true, doesn't it?", even though their "facts" are 99% misleading.

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>By the time this will be a problem in 100 years, we'll have long moved to something else, like graphene or whatever.

You know, that's not inevitable, it's more of a religious viewpoint. There's no contract humanity signed to guarantee timely delivery of scientific breakthroughs.

No, there is a thing called the market price which does that for us.

When oil reaches $300 per barrel, demand will drop substantially. When it reaches $1,000 a barrel, demand will be drop to only a tiny fraction.

As prices rise, complements get more attractive. Other sources of energy, from solar, wind, to nuclear become far more attractive.

And that’s without inventing new complements. Which will happen, and likely be as cheap or cheaper than oil ever was.

We can't simply buy new inventions.

We don’t have to, we already have complements to replace any natural resources we run low on. Inventing better ones just makes the transitions easier.

Substitutes, not complements, but yes.

>By the time this will be a problem in 100 years, we'll have long moved to something else, like graphene or whatever.

That is a big assumption, and honestly irresponsible.

Why is it irresponsible? Stone age did not end because of the stone shortage.

Because you're blindly assuming we'll have a break through in battery technology in the next 100 years. Shrugging off a shortage of lithium as a non issue because we'll just come up with something better is irresponsible.

In the history of humanity was never a case when technological advancement was doomed by a lack of a resource. Aluminium was extremely limited and valuable and no one was givinf damn and for a good reason - it does barely cost anything due to the massive technological paradigm shift. In fact, if people think about it more then five seconds, then pretty much every particle on this planet is limited and can be a potential bottleneck. Breaking news, let's all just die to protect our previous mother Earth.

I don't care about doomsday scenarios, because I kept hearing them every day, if there is anything more irresponsible then it's blind alarmism.

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