this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Really Shitty Copper
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A community dedicated to making fun of Ea-Nasir, a Sumerian merchant circa 1750 BC, who sold exceptionally poor quality copper.
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Iron is stupidly abundant. That's awesome because steel is super fucking useful for boring hard duties like construction and tool making and basically all steel is majority iron by mass. It's also reasonably safe and easy to extract in a moderately pure form with modern techniques unlike other super abundant elements like silicon. There are special steel formulations that can be wildly expensive, but there's a handful that are dirt cheap because they're easy to make and widely useful.
Copper isn't like, rare, but it's no iron. It's also often mixed up with other stuff that makes copper mines ecological and health nightmares (at least here in the us). It's also become rapidly more and more in demand as the world is shifting towards replacing fossil fuels with electricity, causing higher demand for more and more copper for wiring and motors.
For real though iron is just crazy abundant
Good reply, but one nitpick:
Silicon smelting is arguably easier. If you have excess quartzite in your furnace it won't form silicon carbide, while steelmaking involves being really careful to not get too much or too little carbon in the melt. Silicon becomes expensive for electronics because the industry wants 99.9999% purity absolute minimum. What comes out of the arc furnace isn't read except for use in other metallurgy.
I'd also like to point out other elements can do the same basic all-around-skookum-alloy job as iron, like nickel or titanium. It's just that none of them are everywhere.
That's fair. At the end of the day, however you cut it, we live on a planet made primarily of iron, and though it's most concentrated in the core, it's still very abundant and at a very high abundance * usefulness * ease of processing to usefulness value
Yup.
I should probably mention silicon is a terrible metal for anything structural, as well, so that was never an option. It's below carbon on the periodic table and brittle like it.
Does silicon even form metallic bonds? Silicate minerals however are structurally useful as are carbonate minerals, they just can't do what structural metals can. It's not like we'd be totally fucked if the only abundant deposits of structurally useful metals in our planet were in the core (without a liquid ferromagnetic core we would be fucked), but we'd be relying pretty heavily on wood and stone for building which would prevent the massive structures that define our current artificial environment
One thing that would have been really tough would be high-temperature pressure vessels, like for heat engines. Other materials with good tensile strength exist (as do wood skyscrapers!), and so do refractory materials, but if you need both at the same time you're looking at either high-tech ceramic composites or metal.
Uhh, not sure. The band structure of the crystal lattice supports conduction like a metal, but not without an impurity to introduce the initial carrier, which is the whole thing behind why it's useful for electronics.
IIRC bond type is kind of a continuum.