Peak Quartz

All your solar panels, all your silicon computer chips, depend on one vital ingredient. High quality pure quartz. they tell you that solar panels are made of sand, but that’s not the case, sand is just a euphemism for hiqh quality quartz, that is, quartz with few contaminants.

There’s plenty of quartz in the world, it’s an abundant mineral. What there isn’t, is abundant high quality quartz, with few contaminants. I quote:

China indeed possesses abundant reserves of quartz mineral resources; however, the presence of ore bodies capable of producing high-purity quartz is exceedingly rare. Domestically, the production of high-purity quartz from natural crystal sources, exemplified by Jiangsu Pacific Quartz Co., Ltd., has been limited, with an annual capacity not surpassing 20,000 tons. Furthermore, much of this output is directed towards the preparation of medium-purity or standard-purity quartz products. As the resources of natural crystal-grade quartz gradually deplete, a looming shortage of high-quality quartz raw materials becomes evident.

And from Wired magazine:

Silicon for solar panels has to be 99.999999 percent pure—six 9s after the decimal. Computer chips are even more demanding. Their silicon needs to be 99.99999999999 percent pure—eleven 9s. “We are talking of one lonely atom of something that is not silicon among billions of silicon companions,” writes geologist Michael Welland in Sand: The Never-Ending Story.

Keep in mind, they also need the isotopes to be pure. When they want to build quantum computers, they need one particular isotope, Silicon 28, which is 92.2% of all stable Silicon. When they have any Silicon 29 present, another stable isotope, it triggers quantum decoherence. Computing, depends on predictability. Predictability, depends on knowing exactly which isotopes you’re dealing with.

And then there is a very long lived isotope, Silicon 32, which can eventually decay with a half life of 157 years, into phosphorus 32, which eventually turns into sulphur 32, which is stable, but doesn’t belong in your computer chips. So if you think you built a genius computer chip, but it contains some Silicon 32, then it eventually will start misbehaving, as isotopes decay and cause chaos. This also reveals how insane it is, to think that computers could eventually start building themselves.

So underneath all the euphoria about solar panels, about AI, about quantum computing, lies these true hard physical limits. If you can’t find the right silicon, free of contaminants, free of the isotopes that you don’t like, then there’s no quantum computer, no computer chips, no solar panels, for you.

For biological organisms like us, it doesn’t work like this. We evolved to make use of the isotope ratios that we naturally encounter in our food and we are able to deal with some degree of chaos in the behavior of the products of those isotopes produced by our bodies.

For the computer nerds however, these are hard physical limits that will start to interfere in their AI revolution at some point during this century. Eighty percent of their quartz came from a mine in Appalachia. That mine was hit hard by the recent hurricane. People can’t get to and from their work, there was a disruption that lasted for months. Nature knows the right spots.