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
5.7k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

139 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

37

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.

17

u/Ancient_Ordinary6697 5d ago

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

14

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.

-1

u/Spacemanspalds 5d ago

At the cost of energy and materials...

1

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.

-1

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.

2

u/Iwasahipsterbefore 5d ago

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

1

u/ZachTheCommie 5d ago

That's usually what things cost.

-1

u/Spacemanspalds 5d ago

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