What do smart phones, aircraft engines, hybrid electric vehicles, machine tools, missile guidance systems, and petroleum refining have in common?
Cobalt.
That’s the metal Mesopotamians used four millennia ago to make blue glass. Had they known its potential uses, they might have started Apple; after all, they were near the Garden of Eden. Seriously (Why do people transition with that?), the ancients knew little about the potential for any metal beyond its use for cutting and stabbing, but that they found cobalt and made use of it is testimony to their relative technological sophistication.
Why sophistication? Cobalt isn’t something that appears naturally in an isolated state. It’s locked in ores of other metals, copper for one, nickel for another. So, the Mesopotamians must have separated it from its ore, one containing either copper or nickel. How? Try melting it, but consider this: Cobalt melts at 2,723 degrees Fahrenheit (1495 C). That’s hot. Copper melts at 1,981 F (1083 C), and Nickel melts at 2,646 F (1452 C). See, really hot. Kitchen ovens reach 550 F by comparison. And extracting cobalt from the other two metals requires a bit of chemistry in addition to heat. That bespeaks of some sophistication, but you can prove me wrong by setting up your own backyard smelter.
Cobalt isn’t ubiquitous in Earth’s crust. So, not every country has its share. The Democratic Republic of Congo has a bunch of it; China, Russia, Australia, Canada, and some other countries have some, also. DRC extracts about 64,000 MT yearly, more than half the world’s annual production. Because the metal is relatively rare, difficult to extract, and useful in modern tech like lithium-ion batteries (check your phone or tablet or electric car), cobalt’s price is high, and for a while it was made even higher by a civil war in the DRC.
But there’s another cause of its high cost: Generally, getting it depends on our need for the other metals that are far more abundant in the ores than cobalt is. In other words, if the world demand for copper or nickel is high, then there’s greater motivation to extract cobalt. Because you are addicted to electricity running through copper wires, we have a greater availability of cobalt. And those pennies. What’s all this talk of taking them out of the U.S. coinage? What would happen to all those prices that end in $0.99? You need your copper, you get your cobalt. The latter depends on the former. But the former, the catalyst for getting the latter, is so common in civilization, that it seems to most of us a bit unnoteworthy. You don’t turn on those electric switches with the thought, “I’m blessed to have copper in my house.” But because of copper you are blessed with electricity that runs through wires and in your portable smart phone through those cobalt-bearing lithium batteries.
That cobalt’s availability is tied to copper’s need is analogous to our interdependence. Have addicts, need addiction counselors, the latter requiring years of training. And not everyone can be a counselor. We have to extract the high-quality ones from the matrix of society’s ore. And with increasing numbers of addicts, we need increasing numbers of counselors or greater numbers of people within populations who understand effective counseling methods.
Human problems seem to be straightforward, so we’re often reductionists. Think of “Get over It” by the Eagles, whose chorus runs:
Get over it;
Get over it.
All this whinin’ and cryin’ and pitchin’ a fit;
Get over it; get over it.
What appears to be a simple solution like “Just don’t do drugs” isn’t as useful as copper, nor is it as readily available. If our current society doesn’t want to become an analog of Frank Herbert’s Dune society dependent upon the Spice (Melange), we need to extract more counselors from our common human ore or learn what addiction counselors know about the physical, psychological, and social malady of addiction.
Those cobalt blue eyes in Herbert’s consumers of the Spice are the window glass through which we see troubled lives with no simple solutions to their problems.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
Cobalt.
That’s the metal Mesopotamians used four millennia ago to make blue glass. Had they known its potential uses, they might have started Apple; after all, they were near the Garden of Eden. Seriously (Why do people transition with that?), the ancients knew little about the potential for any metal beyond its use for cutting and stabbing, but that they found cobalt and made use of it is testimony to their relative technological sophistication.
Why sophistication? Cobalt isn’t something that appears naturally in an isolated state. It’s locked in ores of other metals, copper for one, nickel for another. So, the Mesopotamians must have separated it from its ore, one containing either copper or nickel. How? Try melting it, but consider this: Cobalt melts at 2,723 degrees Fahrenheit (1495 C). That’s hot. Copper melts at 1,981 F (1083 C), and Nickel melts at 2,646 F (1452 C). See, really hot. Kitchen ovens reach 550 F by comparison. And extracting cobalt from the other two metals requires a bit of chemistry in addition to heat. That bespeaks of some sophistication, but you can prove me wrong by setting up your own backyard smelter.
Cobalt isn’t ubiquitous in Earth’s crust. So, not every country has its share. The Democratic Republic of Congo has a bunch of it; China, Russia, Australia, Canada, and some other countries have some, also. DRC extracts about 64,000 MT yearly, more than half the world’s annual production. Because the metal is relatively rare, difficult to extract, and useful in modern tech like lithium-ion batteries (check your phone or tablet or electric car), cobalt’s price is high, and for a while it was made even higher by a civil war in the DRC.
But there’s another cause of its high cost: Generally, getting it depends on our need for the other metals that are far more abundant in the ores than cobalt is. In other words, if the world demand for copper or nickel is high, then there’s greater motivation to extract cobalt. Because you are addicted to electricity running through copper wires, we have a greater availability of cobalt. And those pennies. What’s all this talk of taking them out of the U.S. coinage? What would happen to all those prices that end in $0.99? You need your copper, you get your cobalt. The latter depends on the former. But the former, the catalyst for getting the latter, is so common in civilization, that it seems to most of us a bit unnoteworthy. You don’t turn on those electric switches with the thought, “I’m blessed to have copper in my house.” But because of copper you are blessed with electricity that runs through wires and in your portable smart phone through those cobalt-bearing lithium batteries.
That cobalt’s availability is tied to copper’s need is analogous to our interdependence. Have addicts, need addiction counselors, the latter requiring years of training. And not everyone can be a counselor. We have to extract the high-quality ones from the matrix of society’s ore. And with increasing numbers of addicts, we need increasing numbers of counselors or greater numbers of people within populations who understand effective counseling methods.
Human problems seem to be straightforward, so we’re often reductionists. Think of “Get over It” by the Eagles, whose chorus runs:
Get over it;
Get over it.
All this whinin’ and cryin’ and pitchin’ a fit;
Get over it; get over it.
What appears to be a simple solution like “Just don’t do drugs” isn’t as useful as copper, nor is it as readily available. If our current society doesn’t want to become an analog of Frank Herbert’s Dune society dependent upon the Spice (Melange), we need to extract more counselors from our common human ore or learn what addiction counselors know about the physical, psychological, and social malady of addiction.
Those cobalt blue eyes in Herbert’s consumers of the Spice are the window glass through which we see troubled lives with no simple solutions to their problems.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
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