Comment on Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world
52fighters@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
I remember when phone lines were made of copper. We were sure that it would be impossible for everyone to have a phone.
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 if copper are economic to achieve with enough crack
One of my family members had that job for a good while. What’s interesting is the phone companies did not keep great records of what’s copper and where it is, so a lot of it is likely to remain in place for a long time. Something else he has seen is thieves cutting fiber, thinking it is copper, and causing outages, although that is less frequent than it was years ago.
shalafi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Only in first-world countries did everyone have a phone and the Earth’s population was half what it is now.