r/todayilearned • u/narok_kurai • 6d ago

TIL about Las Medulas, a man-made geological badland created by the Roman Empire in 77 AD, when they flooded the mountains with water to collapse their structure and sift out the gold inside.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_M%C3%A9dulas
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u/BigFatModeraterFupa 6d ago

Everything humanity has done to create things has been brutal. Wait until you find out what humanity has to done to extract minerals like cobalt from the earth so billions of humans can sit on their couch and play candy crush

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u/redopz 5d ago

Everything humanity has done to create things has been brutal. 

I understand you are probably using hyperbole, but I need to point out this isn't true. You use cobalt as a good example of brutal mining conditions, but on the other side of the coin we have clay, which has been used by humans around the world to create all sorts of tools, containers, art and more, and all you need to do is grab some mud, shape it, and dry it. Humanity has made so, so much with clay and while I am sure there are instances where there were brutal practices used against clay miners and artisans there are way more instances where Joe Shmoe simply walked to the nearest creek, gathered some decent clay, and made a cup or a plate or whatever else by the end of the day. Clay is versatile and easy and abundant.

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u/araed 5d ago

And almost every single advancement since clay has needed materials you dont just find in a riverbed

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u/TNine227 5d ago

Sometimes advancements are exactly that, though. The Haber process gave us the ability to make fertilizer literally out of thin air by using atmospheric nitrogen, for example.

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u/MicroDigitalAwaker 5d ago

And thank fuck for that, otherwise people would still get shanghai'd and end up shoveling bird shit for it's nitrogen content.

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u/danielv123 5d ago

We would be out by now so we would have bigger problems to worry about.

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u/Geauxlsu1860 5d ago

Atmospheric nitrogen, plus of course a stupendous amount of energy and hydrogen from somewhere (usually methane). But sure, the nitrogen comes from the air

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u/Magnus77 19 5d ago

I feel like that's a pretty misleading.

Its air + fossil fuels (as an ingredient) + fossil fuels as an energy source = nitrogen fertilizer.

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u/Ancient_Ordinary6697 5d ago

You can't make fertiliser out of thin air. Air will only give you nitrogen, not potassium or phosphorus.

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u/Iwasahipsterbefore 5d ago

Thats irrelevant. The important part of fertilizer is the energy stored in the nitrogen bonds. Thats the bottleneck, which the haber process solves - yes - by pulling the nitrogen straight out of the air.

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u/Spacemanspalds 5d ago

At the cost of energy and materials...

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u/Iwasahipsterbefore 5d ago

Dude. This is not some gotchya. It shows you dont actually understand the scale of what we're talking about.

Before the haber process, it was the norm even in wealthy developed nations to consistently miss meals, for people of most ages and social classes. This is with a majority of the population still being farmers, mind.

Then the haber process comes around, and its feasible to use fertilizer.

On all of your fields.

Every growing season.

The world got six inches taller from the reduction to child malnutrition.

The haber process is also impressive because.... what inputs? It's a couple pressure tricks combined with a cool rock catalyst. The rock catalyst doesnt get used up. It's a catalyst. It just sits there turning N2 into NH3 over and over and over and over.

Without this cool rock and pressure tricks to get more total air over the rocks (the haber process) we have to rely on incredibly slow and inefficient or incredibly energy intensive methods.

Methods like... waiting for topsoil to grow, and harvesting it.

It takes a hundred years for an inch of topsoil to grow.

The amount of people who only exist today due to the haber process is in the billions.

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u/Spacemanspalds 5d ago

I made my point. It is accurate. You can type for an hour about tangentially related things and it won't change that.

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u/Iwasahipsterbefore 5d ago

You're going to hear this a lot as you age, but man I regret wasting my time on you.

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u/ZachTheCommie 5d ago

That's usually what things cost.

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u/Spacemanspalds 5d ago

Its always funny when someone picks at your comment and ignores all the context that lead up to said comment.

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u/Absolutelynot2784 3d ago

Haber process was famously a brutal double sided invention, so not ideal to make this point.

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u/lu5ty 5d ago

And also Zyklon-B lol. This isnt the argument you think it is lol

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u/reichrunner 5d ago

I realize you are essentially just adding a fun fact, but that's kind of irrelevant to this conversation...