Transcription
One of the things that Carl Sagan said 40 or 50 years ago is that people in in modern societies are so remote from the production systems on which they depend that they don't understand how production actually occurs. And he said we live in an extremely complex world in which production processes involve numerous mechanical and chemical and electronic processes which the vast majority of people don't understand.
So they're not prepared to interpret what's going to be the impact of losing fertilizer flow. They're not prepared to understand what's going to happen when we lose helium supplies. They don't understand the role of self sulfuric acid. Most people's association with sulfuric acid goes to back to maybe one or two classes in you know, fourth year or fifth year at high school when they work in chemistry classes if they still ever do that.
So most of us don't realize just how critical these inputs are to enabling the the life style that we currently depend upon. So we have an incredibly complicated sophisticated production system dependent upon a range of critical inputs and most of us don't know that. We're living in a fantasy world and reality is now hitting us in the face with what's happening and the straight of homos because like for example of helium very very few people I mean I had that fun experience on the on the diary of the CEO where they produced a helium balloon and they got me to breathe it. And I did the high pitched voice voice that comes out of that.
By the way, that's actually I since looked up and said why does that occur and it's because the helium increases the frequency of the sound waves coming out of your voice. You can do something to breathe something else and get a little voice coming out of it. It's all about the the sound waves that pass through the the medium, helium has a different effect on how fast those sound waves come out of your mouth rather than rather than air. So, that's why the voice change occurs. But, people think of helium as a party balloon, something you use to have a birthday and hang in a happy birthday uh 70th Here's a 73rd birthday or a 7th birthday. And the helium uh is is just a party joke for most people.
Now, in fact, to produce the sophisticated manufacturing gear that we use to make micro microprocessors, we have to have helium to freeze the temperature at which the machines operate to enable the incredibly detailed focusing of laser beams to cut channels in silicon to enable us to build the wave the to take the wafers of silicon and create microprocessors out of it. Uh it's in And without the helium, then the supply of microchips will stop. Without the helium, you won't be able to do MRIs. Uh without the helium, you there's a whole range of monitoring systems you need for advanced production processes, which can't occur.
Now, about 30% of the world's helium passes through the Strait of Hormuz. So, that is gone. Sulfuric acid, we think about sulfuric acid if we ever do just as you know, the something we used to do you know, one experiment to see what sulfuric acid can do to you know, dropping a coin into the sulfuric acid at a experiment at high school. But, without sulfuric acid, we can't refine copper. Copper is absolutely critical for transmitting electrical power. It's critical for making data centers. It's critical for um um um It's It's critical for it enormous range of production processes that we all depend upon. We're not aware of it.
Suddenly, because hydrogen sulfide is a side effect of of mining oil, uh then that is where the sulfuric acid is created, and that sulfuric acid passes through the Strait of Hormuz. The production process that depend upon sulfuric acid are not going to have the supplies anymore. And once their stocks run out, the goods and services that need sulfuric acid as a production input can no longer be made. So, we are going to realize just how fragile our system is courtesy of this crisis.
And it points out that again, the war was completely unjustified. There are the the um Iranians were not building a nuclear weapon. In fact, their leader, the very first person the Americans killed, had put a fatwa against creating nuclear weapons. So, it was all it's a farcical unjustified war. But what it's doing is not just damaging Iran, it's damaging the production systems of the entire planet. So, when when we bombed Iran and called and and laid Iran to make the sensible decision as a military strategy of blocking the Strait of Hormuz, we damaged ourselves. So, effectively, we were shooting ourselves in both feet. That's what we've done. We we sort of treat each element of the planet as isolated from every other element and think we can do something in Iran and not worry about the consequences in the rest of the world. Effectively, we're blowing Iran's feet off when our from we've got to crawl rather than walk.
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