When can all natural resources (oil, tin, coal..steel, etc) be used up on earth and people have big trouble?
First, capitalize Earth. It’s a proper noun, just like Mexico or London.
short answer:
We will have big trouble from running out of…
oil, in 20-30 years
tin, never
coal, in 200-300 years
steel, never
oxygen, in 20,000 – 2,000,000 years
fresh water, in 30-50 years
long answer:
The resources you mentioned fall into two categories: things which undergo major chemical changes when we “use” them, and things which don’t.
For example, when you take oil (which is made of carbon and hydrogen) and burn it, that’s actually a chemical reaction with oxygen, and the result is two new substances (water and carbon dioxide) which are completely different from the two old ones. The purpose of the reaction is to produce energy, and once it’s done it would be extremely difficult to undo it. Let’s call this category of resources “consumables”.
On the other hand, steel and tin are both mainly composed of iron, plus other minerals mixed in by heat, not by chemical reaction. When we discard them, they haven’t been destroyed. For example, all the tin cans which have been tossed into landfills are still there and, if we wanted to, we could dig them up and recycle them.
Consumables such as oil, coal, trees, and oxygen, generally accumulate over a long long period of time and the danger is if we use them faster than they are being replenished. Our consumption rate of trees isn’t a lot faster than the regrowth rate, so we aren’t in big trouble there. We are consuming oxygen much faster than it is being replenished but there is such a huge quantity of it in the atmosphere that it would take us thousands, if not millions, of years to use it all up. We are consuming coal and oil at a rate thousands of times faster than they forms naturally, and while there is enough coal to last for a few centuries, there is only enough oil to last for a few more decades.
It’s worth mentioning, however, that you don’t have to wait until something is completely gone in order to have “big trouble”. Imagine if you and nine other people were marooned on a tiny island with nothing but a couple hundred coconut trees, and you had nothing else to eat or drink except coconuts. When you reached the point where only a few dozen coconuts remained, you’d probably start fighting over them. The same will happen with oil when the supply starts to dwindle. In fact, we are already fighting over oil.
As for the non-consumables, there is no danger of actually running out of them, but we can get into big trouble when too much of it is put into a place where we can’t reach it. For example, fresh water never really disappears, but when you pour a bottle of water onto the ground it’s very difficult to get it back out of the ground and into the bottle again. The big trouble with fresh water is that our population is growing very fast and the availability of fresh water isn’t growing. It’s expected that half the human population will live in areas that don’t have enough fresh water in 30-50 years from now.
One final note, though you didn’t directly ask about this: Using up the consumable resources has other consequences besides just the fact that the resource is gone. For example, burning coal and oil has increased the carbon dioxide level in our atmosphere by 30% in the last century, not to mention the messes created by oil spills, or the coal miners who have died of black lung disease.
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