Item — HN Reader

Yeah but in order to manufacture that computer and projector you needed vast amounts of energy, water, minerals, plastics, rare earths, compounds that don't exist naturally in our planet, pollution disposal, such as heavy metal contamination & arsenic compounds, waste acid, strong bases.

In fact the cost things like PECVD or dry etching is so disproportionate compared to drilling a hole in the ground, that I'm willing to bet a computer is the equivalent of hundreds of years worth of a blackboard with chalk.

2 comments

Exactly. Having worked on vacuum systems for physical vapor deposition, I can assure you that there's an enormous amount of energy going into gently wafting the materials onto other materials. (The wide area glass coater I worked on had a 2MW substation running dozens of 150-200kW power supplies (not full tilt all at once, obviously).)

Really, I recommend anyone look into this stuff. Just to get silicon to the purity and precise structure to just start chip fabrication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_process Imagine the whole supply chain, from smelting metal for wires and cases to plastic molding to storage, economies of scale truly are vast.

Sure but that one time cost has a 10 year depreciation. A lifetime of chalk is endless mining because you go through it so quickly. You're constantly buying chalk. You're not constantly buying projectors.

>that I'm willing to bet a computer is the equivalent of hundreds of years worth of a blackboard with chalk.

As someone who grew up near a limestone mine, I think you greatly underestimate how much work it takes to get rocks from the earth. I've seen some of the largest machines in the world working there. Its an huge operation.