How do you use up the planets (earth) resource's?

Question

Lets say I drink a can of soda. Is the soda I drank and the can I drank out of sucked into a black hole of nothing, never to return making mankind poor and reducing the atomic weight of our planet by a minute fraction, or are those items turned into something else. The sugar and water go to my body and are converted into fat or energy and the waste goes out as urine which is converted by our planet by microbes into other items which go back to basic water and nutrients for plants and microbes. The can can be recycled into another can easier than if the aluminum was mined and it is still apart of our planet.

Answer 1

Photons emitted from the sun is another example: http://www.a2dvoices.com/realitycheck/do...

Answer 2

You make an excellent point with aluminum.  The aluminum in a recycled can is usually reintroduced onto market shelves within 60 days.  Furthermore, it is much cheaper and less destructive to recycle than to mine.

With some other resources, however, especially oil, the products cannot be turned back into their original form once they are used.  Once they are spent, that's it.  Plastics and burnt gasoline can't be turned back into oil (at least, not yet).

Everything stays on the planet, but if things are not recycled they remain in forms which are useless to us.  So when we're left with mountains of garbage and water and air which are beyond cleaning, it can be pretty much said that the natural resources have been used up...at least for us.

Answer 3

You are not considering the whole picture, and working with incomplete information. This is known as a sophomoric analysis. It seems simple at first, but when you get complete information the picture gets a lot more complicated. It's more complicated than this, much more than we even know.

On the simplest level, we create synthetic chemicals that have no place in the natural world, cannot be degraded, and cannot be metabolized. So they build up in the environment and cause problems. Plutonium is the most toxic (not just radioactive) substance known.  It did not exist before we created it. Some synthetic chemicals mimic hormones and wreak havoc. Plastic never degrades, it just builds up and we get a Sargasso Sea of plastic the size of a continent in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. When in does "degrade" into molecule sized particles, it gets ingested and then works its way up the food chain.  You have synthetic chemicals in your body right now, built up in your fat (and breast milk if you're female). The effects may not be noticeable now, but when the concentration gets high enough or the absolute number of different chemicals gets high enough to cause interactions, you get problems.

This is just one example of a complication; there are many more.

Don't tell me this isn't happening. It's well documented if you look past the evening news platitudes.

Our economy works because we use the earth as an endless source of resources and as an endless sink for our waste. Eventually natural systems will fail, and so will we.

We are many generations away, perhaps an infinite distance away, from such complete knowledge that we could substitute artificial systems for natural systems.