Life in the Fifth Epoch - The End of Mining Earth and Environmental Devastation

A Little More on These Important Topics

As the title of this Substack site describes, my work is about healing humanity and this planet.  I see part of humanity’s healing as healing the damage that humans have inflicted on Earth, and the damage is prodigious.  I briefly touched this subject earlier, and this post will go a little deeper.

Giant tortoises were perhaps the first casualties of the rise of humans.  Homo erectus was an apex predator that drove species to extinction in Africa and Asia well more than a million years ago, with their stone and other tools.  When the human line learned to control fire, its ability to manipulate the environment grew.  Intentional burning of grasslands and forests is an old human practice.  By 12,000 years ago, when plant domestication began, Earth’s easy meat was either extinct or would soon become so.  Large mammals had never been devastated like that, and what we see in Africa today is a mere vestige of what all of Earth’s inhabitable continents used to look like, animal-wise.  New Zealand was spared the human presence until less than one thousand years ago, and its amazing bird-dominated ecosystems were destroyed by humans in about one human lifetime.  This has always been the human way. 

Gold, silver, and copper could be found in nuggets, and meteorites could be comprised of nearly pure iron, and that was humanity’s introduction to metals.  When humans became sedentary, metal use rose and so did mining.  Mining has always been a brutal business and devastating to the environment.  Wood was used to refine the ores, which led to deforestation near the mines.  Coal was first mined in China about 6,000 years ago, and the Chinese replaced wood with coal for refining metal about a thousand years ago.  But the English took advantage of coal like no other people had ever done, which led to the Industrial Revolution.  Mining, particularly of coal and iron, skyrocketed with early industrialization.  Long ago, I looked at pictures of urban life in Europe in the early 20^th century, and I was startled to see that everybody was covered in soot.  Mountain ranges in and around Minnesota became a key source of the USA’s iron, and entire mountains disappeared.

Industrial mining is an environmental disaster in several ways.  One is that they are often open-pit, which means that they are huge, open holes in the Earth, where there was once a forest, for instance.  The groundwater is often contaminated from mines, and lakes have been built to hold the waste.  With regularity, those dams that make those lakes have burst and killed entire rivers, even wiped out human settlements.  Miners have brutal, often-short, lives.  In neocolonial fashion, the West has moved many mining operations to poor nations, so those people can deal with the health effects and environmental devastation and we can get the metal. 

Some years ago, I saw an American economist’s bright idea for solving the USA’s energy problems.  He advocated building nuclear reactors in Mexico, so that they suffered the costs and risks of nuclear reactors, and they could send that electricity to the USA.  That was neocolonialism at its most brazen.  Today, California has partly solved its energy and pollution problems by having coal-fired power plants built in Wyoming (near coal deposits), for instance, which send the electricity to California.  Visibility in the Grand Canyon has declined over the generations because of the coal-fired power plants in the region.  And that is not to speak of their contribution to Global Warming. 

Brian O’Leary was a leading advocate of space colonies and asteroid mining.  Asteroids were an obvious choice for mining, as the energetic costs were vastly less than mining the metals on Earth and sending them into space.  Mining asteroids also has the virtue of not devastating Earth to get those metals. 

When my friend got his underground exotic technology demonstration, he was shown antigravity technology as well as free energy, and I imagine that advanced materials were presented, which I have heard about for many years.  In the Fifth Epoch, humanity will become spacefaring, mining asteroids or the other rocky planets would be easy, and robots would do the work.  Earth would never be mined again. 

Humans have also reduced Earth’s plant biomass by half, killed off half of Earth’s coral reefs in my lifetime, and 96% of mammalian biomass is humans and their domesticates.  In the Fifth Epoch, all of that ends.  Indoor farms can provide all of humanity’s food (humans would largely, if not entirely, become vegetarians), and they could be put anywhere in our solar system, not displacing Earth’s ecosystems.  I already discussed the end of cities as we know them.  Humanity’s heavy tenure on Earth would end.  But all people will be richer than Bill Gates, too, just as the average American lives a richer life than Europe’s richest man did three centuries ago.  I call that a true win-win-win.