troyunrau

Couple other resources:

Municipal burning restrictions: https://www.gov.mb.ca/wildfire/burn_conditions.html

Fire risk map: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/interactive-map

Fire smoke forecast: https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/

Fuck

No, assuming the rock id is correct (pet rocks), then these were discovered in situ -- hanging out outside a hotel.

Smh my head

If you hold your nose really close to the screen, you can pretend to smell it. It's part of the new jpeg metadata.

Oh right! I'm looking at you "prairie snowdrift" -- your white blossoms are not cute enough! Just look at "gumball goodie" over here...

Shhh, they'll hear!

Things like platinum notwithstanding, It will almost always be more expensive to go get things in space than on earth.

Hell, even on earth it is often too expensive to get metals like iron if there isn't rail or a port nearby. Imagine having to fly iron ingots around and the associated aviation fuel cost. Whatever crazy fuel bill you're imagining, multiply by a hundred or more if you're imagining getting it from space.

No, all of those metals in space are best used to build some future version of our civilization _in situ. _

Very true. However, it doesn't add new material to the equation. If we need it to build electrical infrastructure, recycling won't suffice.

Recycling aluminum is actually literally the best thing you can recycle in terms of environmental impact and cost efficiency. There are other things we recycle, but nothing pays off nearly as well.

Chekhov's dropped gun

That alternative material is aluminum. It's like a top four abundance material in the crust. It's just super fucking hard to refine from minerals that don't like to give it up without oodles of energy. Like, turn minerals into plasma levels of energy. So the irony is, to grow our energy economy past the need for copper, we will first need to grow our energy economy.

Should fusion ever actually meet its promise, then this is one of the likely things we could do with this level of energy.

If we ever become a spacefaring civilization, it'll almost certainly be necessary during the colonization of other planets/moons/asteroids, since the geological processes that concentrate copper on the earth are not present in those places. Whereas aluminum is plentiful any place rocky.