Spider Star

The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin

"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine

"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review

"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly

"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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Robert Silverberg May Drown in Gallium

July 15th, 2008

In his Reflections column in Asimov’s this month, Robert Silverberg is lamenting the “Death of Gallium.” He makes the case that gallium, a pretty useful element that is used in electronics and flat-screen TVs, is running out. This is a specific example of one of many limited resources, relatively rare elements in particular, that our civilization is using up. He finds the issue particularly dire given that humans will persist for millions of years.

That last bit is questionable, you might think, but so is the rest of it.

We never run out of anything.

I’m not talking about recycling, but if our civilization is going to be around so long as Silverberg supposes, mining landfills for the gallium in the discarded TVs is one obvious no-brainer to keeping gallium available. Asteroids and other non-terrestrial bodies provide another potential source. Still, these possibilities are not the real issue with Silverberg’s reflections.

What I’m about to point out isn’t a very popular notion among most liberals and environmentalist, with whom I have a lot in common. It’s just based on the empirical realities of science and economics.

Silverberg and others who make the same mistake and issue a clarion call for a stop to growth look at some resource, like land in the case of Malthus or gallium in this case, estimate how much there is and how fast we’re using it, and issue a pronouncement of doom. This kind of thinking led Paul Ehrlich to write the amazing failure The Population Bomb some 40 years ago that predicted we’d all have died of starvation years ago. Well, that didn’t happen, but he did keep on with his doomsaying and predictions about the extinction of resources, much as Silverberg is doing now.

Thing is, a smart guy named Julian Simon called Ehrlich on it. In the 1980s, they had a wager about the prices of commodity metals. Simon bet Ehrlich that the average price of any five metals that Ehrlich chose would be lower in ten years. After a decade, Ehrlich sent Simon a check for nearly $600, representing the price difference between $1000 of the metals in 1980 and the price in 1990.

I didn’t have to turn out like this, but history and economics suggested it would, which was what Simon was betting on. Why? Two reasons.

First, there is continual technological innovation. New technologies that tend to be better and cheaper replace old ones. A major example is that of vacuum tubes being replaced by transistors, and so on. Once the demand for vacuum tubes is gone, the materials needed to build them are no longer in such demand. And if a technology starts to become very expensive (as in gallium-infused flat-screen TVs), other technologies that might have been more expensive before suddenly become much more competitive and may replace the previous one.

No one will use the last of the gallium, the last drop of oil, or the last of any resource. Long before then, the commodity becomes so expensive to use that people stop using it and move on to something else.

Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t conserve, recycle, or be concerned about limited resources. I am saying that when it comes to commodity metals, calls of extinction have never come to pass, and for good reason.

Furthermore, if Silverberg is actually positing us lasting for millions of years — which actually seems arbitrary to me as we’ll likely last only thousands more or less if we destroy ourselves or much more than millions if we don’t — then technological development will drive his thesis extinct. Once we develop the ability to control materials atom by atom, recycling becomes easy and there can be a vast array of technologies available to solve any individual problem. Market forces will make one of them affordable.

So, may Robert Silverberg someday drown in gallium.

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