Beyond Scarcity

Beyond ScarcityInquiry

Draft for commentAn inquiryEvidence graded

Scarcity is not a fact about nature. It is a fact about technology.

We have always named our ages for what we dug up: copper, bronze, iron, and now oil and the rare earths. Extraction is limited by geology. Synthesis is limited only by physics. That distinction is the hinge on which the next era turns.

Begin with the shrimp Read the verification protocol
Status
Draft, open for comment. An inquiry, not a claim.
Published
Question
Can the elements we now mine be made instead, and how would we know?
Evidence
Every factual claim graded and sourced. How to read this page
Founders
Sayer Ji and Dr. Tia Kansara. Declared interest
Figure 1One cycle of a sonoluminescing bubble, computed. Driven by sound at 26,500 cycles a second, an argon bubble in water grows from 4.5 to about 37 micrometres while the pressure is low, then collapses in about a microsecond to under one micrometre, its wall reaching about a kilometre a second in this model. At the bottom of the collapse it flashes. Shown about 200,000 times slower than life. Computed Keller-Miksis equation, parameters after Brenner, Hilgenfeldt and Lohse (2002).

How to read this page

An inquiry is only as good as its honesty about evidence. Every factual claim below carries one of these marks. Unmarked paragraphs are our argument.

  • EstablishedPeer reviewed and reproduced, or published by an authoritative body, and not in dispute.
  • ReportedStated by its investigators; not yet independently reproduced.
  • ProposedA hypothesis or a projection: what the inquiry exists to test.
  • ComputedModelled from a published method, not measured.

“Resources are not, they become.”

Erich W. Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries (revised edition, 1951)
1

Strip away the flags, and every war is the same war.

Land. Water. Food. Gold. Oil. Timber. Rubber. Uranium. The resource changes; the logic does not. When something essential is finite and unevenly distributed, conflict follows as surely as gravity follows mass. The Scramble for Africa was driven in large part by raw materials. The war in the Pacific turned on oil. The Cold War was fought over ideology, and uranium became one of its strategic prizes.

That pattern has not ended. It has moved to a new row of the periodic table.

Someone has what someone else needs, and there is not enough for both. That premise has run human history like an operating system.

What if “there is not enough” was never a fact about the Earth, only a fact about our method of reaching what the Earth already holds?

2

A one-inch animal makes light nearly as hot as the surface of the Sun.

Established

The snapping shrimp closes its claw so fast that it fires a jet of water, and a cavitation bubble forms in the jet. The snap you hear is not the claw; it is the bubble collapsing (Versluis et al., 2000). Measured a metre away, a snap reaches 183 to 189 decibels underwater (peak to peak, relative to one micropascal) (Au and Banks, 1998), and colonies of snapping shrimp are among the loudest sources of background noise in warm shallow seas. The collapse also gives off a brief flash of light, which implies temperatures of at least 5,000 K inside the bubble, close to the surface of the Sun (Lohse et al., 2001).

Established

Sound alone can do the same. In 1934 two researchers in Cologne found that strong ultrasound makes water glow (Frenzel and Schultes, 1934). In the late 1980s Felipe Gaitan, a graduate student at the University of Mississippi, trapped a single bubble in a standing sound wave and watched it flash on every cycle, tens of thousands of times a second (Gaitan et al., 1992). Single-bubble sonoluminescence has since been studied in laboratories around the world (Brenner, Hilgenfeldt and Lohse, 2002).

Established

In the last nanoseconds of the collapse the bubble wall moves faster than four times the speed of sound in the gas inside, well over a kilometre a second (Weninger, Barber and Putterman, 1997). Pressures near the bubble are estimated at 40,000 to 60,000 bar (Pecha and Gompf, 2000). The light comes in flashes lasting tens to a few hundred trillionths of a second (Gompf et al., 1997). Fitted to the spectrum of that light, the temperature inside has been put at tens of thousands of kelvin (Hiller, Putterman and Barber, 1992); spectroscopy of bubbles in sulphuric acid has measured up to 15,000 K (Flannigan and Suslick, 2005).

For an instant smaller than a thought, matter reaches conditions found at the surfaces of stars.

The question was never whether starlike conditions can be reached on Earth at small scale. Biology settled that long ago. The question is whether those conditions can be controlled, directed and put to work.

3

The periodic table is now leverage.

Modern economies run on a few dozen elements, and their sources are concentrated in a handful of places. That concentration is a fragility every nation shares, including the nations that hold the mines.

Established
  • China mines about 69% of the world’s rare earths, and its share of rare earth refining was 85% in 2025, down from over 90% in 2023 (USGS, 2026; IEA, 2026).
  • The Democratic Republic of the Congo mines about 74% of the world’s cobalt (USGS, 2026).
  • Export restrictions on critical raw materials are at historically high levels after sharp increases in 2022 and 2023, and the new restrictions of 2024 came from a wider group of countries than before (OECD, 2026). In 2025 alone, the Congo suspended cobalt exports and China placed seven rare earth elements under export licensing (S&P Global, 2025; IEA, 2026). The International Energy Agency now describes supply concentration as an immediate economic security challenge, no longer a theoretical one (IEA, 2026).
  • Governments are building mineral stockpiles, as they once did for oil. Japan keeps a national stockpile of rare metals (IEA policy database), and in 2026 the United States launched a reserve backed by an Export-Import Bank loan of up to $10 billion (EXIM, 2026). In February 2026, 54 countries and the European Commission met at the Critical Minerals Ministerial (US Department of State, 2026).
  • In the United States a new mine takes on average 29 years from discovery to production, the second longest of the countries surveyed (S&P Global, 2024). World mine production of rare earths was about 390,000 tonnes, in rare earth oxide equivalent, in 2025 (USGS, 2026).
A white architectural model of an open-pit mine: a block of ground with a terraced pit descending in concentric steps, lit by a low sun.
Plate 2Inheritance. An open-pit mine, terraced as every large one is, takes what ancient stars forged and left under particular borders. Illustrative.

A stockpile is a tourniquet. It stops the bleeding. A tourniquet is not a cure.

Mining is an inheritance model: you extract what ancient stars forged and left, by cosmic accident, under particular borders. Sovereignty under this model depends on geology. And an inheritance can be spent.

4

Extraction is limited by geology. Synthesis is limited only by physics.

Proposed

The proposition under test: that controlled cavitation can concentrate energy far enough, inside microscopic volumes of water, to change one element into another. Not in stars. Not in weapons. In transient, localised forges inside the most abundant substance on Earth’s surface.

Established

The gap is large, and it should be stated plainly. Spectroscopy of collapsing bubbles has measured up to about 15,000 K (Flannigan and Suslick, 2005), around one electronvolt per particle. The core of the Sun is about a thousand times hotter, and fusion reactors need ten times the temperature of the Sun’s core (ITER). Any claim of nuclear change in cavitation has to explain how that gap is crossed. That is what makes it extraordinary.

Proposed

If it holds, what follows:

  • The feedstock is everywhere: water covers about 71% of the planet’s surface (USGS).
  • The apparatus is modular, from desktop to industrial.
  • Geography ceases to be destiny. A nation with water gains a path to elemental independence, and the leverage of a mineral monopoly dissolves.
  • The most ambitious resource strategy yet proposed, mining the asteroids, becomes optional. The answer was never above us. It may be in a glass on the table.

The periodic table would change from a relic of ancient stellar death into an engineering substrate.

5

What a laboratory in Buxton, Maine reported, and what it must still prove.

Reported

In 2009 a small engineering laboratory in Buxton, Maine reported a series of cavitation experiments in a final report to the project’s funder (LeClair and Lebid, 2009). The report has not been published; its results are summarised in conference slides presented in 2012 (LeClair, 2012) and described in an essay by one of our founders (Ji, 2026). We know of no peer-reviewed publication of these results. The investigators attribute the excess heat to zero-point energy and say their effect breaks the first and second laws of thermodynamics. This inquiry does not adopt that view. We set out their results as they state them, beside the test that would settle each one.

Table 1The 2009 results, and what would settle them.
ReportedWhat would settle it
Excess heat. 2,900 W of heat in the water for 840 W of electricity into the pump, a coefficient of performance of 3.4 as stated, and, according to the report, repeated twelve times by the same team. Calorimetry by an independent metrology laboratory, calibrated in the same rig against a heater of known power, with the uncertainty stated. A heat pump routinely reaches 3 to 4 by moving heat from its surroundings, so the test must show that no heat came in from outside.
New elements. Residues analysed by a university laboratory, a commercial laboratory and a private researcher showed 78 elements, including rare earths and platinum-group metals, in a system that, according to the report, began as water and aluminium. Blanks: identical runs without cavitation, and assays of everything the water touches, including the pump, the seals, the pipework and the aluminium itself. Cavitation is known to erode metal, and trace analysis finds dozens of elements in almost any real sample.
A stellar pattern. Even-numbered elements at roughly ten times the concentration of their odd-numbered neighbours, the pattern left by how stars make elements. Isotope ratios. Ordinary contamination shows the same odd-even pattern, because natural abundances follow it (Harkins, 1917; Burbidge et al., 1957). Nuclear change would leave isotope ratios that differ from nature’s, which ordinary contamination rarely can; the test must still rule out instrument interferences and isotopically altered commercial materials.
Radiation. Any nuclear change emits ionising radiation. The investigators report indirect signs of it; no measurements have been published. Continuous neutron and gamma monitoring through every run, by an independent health-physics team.
Established

The field has been here before. In 2002 the journal Science published a report of nuclear fusion in collapsing bubbles (Taleyarkhan et al., 2002). Independent groups could not reproduce it (Shapira and Saltmarsh, 2002; Camara et al., 2007), and in 2008 Purdue University found that the lead author had falsified the research record, presenting a confirmation of the work as independent, and upheld the finding on appeal (Purdue University, 2008). In 1989 a claim of fusion at room temperature followed a similar course (Fleischmann and Pons, 1989; US Department of Energy, 1989). Those histories are why the protocol in section 9 is strict. They are not a verdict on this work. Only a test can give one.

These findings remain contested. They have not been reproduced by an independent laboratory under full instrumentation. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary verification. That is not a hedge. It is why Beyond Scarcity treats this as an inquiry, not a claim.

We cannot assume the second future is real without rigorous verification. Neither can we dismiss it without testing.

6

This is the human operating system of scarcity. It has been running for millennia.

Established
  • Amnesty International documented children as young as seven working in artisanal cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2016), for the batteries in devices they will never own; UNICEF estimated in 2014 that some 40,000 children worked in mines in the south of the country.
  • At Baotou, in Inner Mongolia, waste from processing iron and rare earth ore fills a tailings pond of about 11 square kilometres; where the tailings are exposed, gamma dose rates reach 10 to 18 times local background (Liu, 2011). Communities like these have no voice in the supply chains that depend on them.
  • Economists have a name for how mineral wealth so often fails the places that hold it: the resource curse (Sachs and Warner, 2001).

If an alternative to extraction is being proposed, “we must mine because there is no alternative” is no longer an answer. The answer is to test the alternative, rigorously and at scale. The urgency is not only scientific. It is moral.

7

The most consequential fork of this century.

Future one

The extraction endgame

Critical minerals financialised, militarised and monopolised. Price shocks on every headline. Export controls hardening into blocs. Mines that take decades to open. A single port closure cascading through defence, semiconductors and the grid. Children still underground. Tailings lakes still spreading.

Brittle. Competitive. Entropic: a system running down.

ProposedFuture two

The synthesis threshold

Materials become manufacturable: not all at once, not in bulk, but progressively and measurably. Pilot facilities publish yield curves. Independent laboratories confirm isotopic signatures. Peer-reviewed papers appear. The first uses are niche: medical isotopes, research-grade materials, reference samples. If it holds, modular units reach industrial scale within a decade, and within two, geology-dependent sovereignty begins to erode.

Resilient. Generative. Negentropic: a system building order from available energy.

Scarcity becomes technological rather than geological. And technological scarcity, unlike geological scarcity, can be solved.

8

No one is excluded. Everyone is given a way up.

Future two does not arrive by condemning future one. Coal plants, nuclear operators, miners and refiners are not the enemy of synthesis; they are the industrial base that would carry it, given a validated path. The tiers exist so that any operation, starting anywhere, can climb: from Extractive, through Transitional, to Regenerative, and toward the state this project is named for. Each rung is measurable. Each step is verified. The summit is defined, not a slogan.

  1. IExtractive
  2. IITransitional
  3. IIIRegenerative

Read the draft standard

9

Due diligence on the most important question in materials science.

The responsible path, as a protocol. Each step is a condition, and the result is published whichever way it falls.

  1. 9.1
    Register the protocol first.

    The apparatus, the measurements and the analysis, published before the first run.

  2. 9.2
    Replicate independently, at national-laboratory scale.

    By a team with no stake in the outcome.

  3. 9.3
    Monitor radiation throughout.

    Neutron and gamma, through every run.

  4. 9.4
    Measure energy with verified margins of error.

    Calibrated in the same rig against a known heat source.

  5. 9.5
    Certify the chain of custody of every element.

    Before and after each reaction, by independent accredited laboratories, with blanks run on the same apparatus and samples analysed blind.

  6. 9.6
    Publish in peer-reviewed journals, whatever the result.

    A negative result closes the question as surely as a positive one opens it.

Governments are committing billions to stockpile minerals. A fraction of that could establish whether minerals can be made from water. If the answer is no, a modest research budget is spent and a question is closed for good. If it is yes, elemental sovereignty becomes something every nation can have.

That is not a gamble. That is due diligence.

If these conditions are met and the results hold, this is not a startup success story. It is a platform shift in civilisation.

Join the convening
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Glossary

Cavitation
The formation and violent collapse of vapour bubbles in a liquid where its pressure drops. To most engineers it is a problem: it erodes propellers and pump impellers. It is also how a shrimp’s snap reaches starlike temperatures.
Sonoluminescence
Light given off by a bubble collapsing under sound, in flashes lasting tens to hundreds of trillionths of a second.
Re-entrant jet
The fast jet of liquid that forms when a bubble collapses unevenly near a surface, and that pits the metal it strikes.
Coefficient of performance
Heat delivered divided by electricity consumed. A heat pump typically reaches 3 to 4 by moving heat from its surroundings. The 2009 report gives 3.4 for a system that, its investigators say, drew no heat from outside (LeClair, 2012). Reported
Odd-even rule
Elements with even atomic numbers are usually several times more abundant than their odd neighbours (Harkins, 1917), a sawtooth left by how stars make elements (Burbidge et al., 1957). Because ordinary matter follows it, contamination shows it too.
Isotope ratio
The proportions of an element’s isotopes. Nature’s ratios are nearly constant for most elements, so a sample with different ratios points to a nuclear history, once instrument interferences and isotopically altered commercial materials have been ruled out.
Transmutation
The change of one element into another by a nuclear process, as in stars, reactors and radioactive decay.
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Questions a sceptic will ask

Isn’t more energy out than in impossible?

In a closed system, yes. Energy is conserved, and this inquiry assumes it is. Sonoluminescence does not create energy either; it concentrates the energy of a sound wave into a tiny volume. The 2009 claim is that the heat in the water exceeded the electricity into the pump; its investigators attribute the difference to zero-point energy, a view this inquiry does not adopt. If that holds under calibrated, independent measurement, the energy came from a source the measurement did not account for, and finding it would be the discovery. If it does not hold, the test will show where the measurement went wrong. We do not ask anyone to believe it. We ask that it be measured.

Hasn’t this been replicated?

No. According to the unpublished 2009 report, the experiments were repeated twelve times by the same team, and residues were analysed by three outside parties, one of them a private researcher (Ji, 2026). Repetition by the same team is not replication. No independent replication with full radiation monitoring and verified energy margins has been published. That gap is the work.

Why hasn’t mainstream science accepted it?

Because extraordinary claims face, and should face, extraordinary scrutiny, and because the field remembers 1989 and 2002 (section 5). The right response to both is the same: test it properly, in the open, and publish the result whatever it is.

What does Beyond Scarcity actually do?

We write the standard, convene the people who can test the question, and publish the protocol. We do not ask the world to take anyone’s word, including ours.

·

Reading and references

Further reading

These essays, by one of our founders, argue the case at full length. They say that over unity has been achieved and that the breakthrough has happened. This inquiry accepts neither claim until the test in section 9 has been run.

References

  1. Amnesty International (2016). This is what we die for: human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo power the global trade in cobalt. Press release for the report; includes the UNICEF estimate for 2014.
  2. Au, W. W. L. and Banks, K. (1998). The acoustics of the snapping shrimp Synalpheus parneomeris in Kaneohe Bay. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 103, 41-47. doi:10.1121/1.423234
  3. Brenner, M. P., Hilgenfeldt, S. and Lohse, D. (2002). Single-bubble sonoluminescence. Reviews of Modern Physics 74, 425-484. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.74.425
  4. Burbidge, E. M., Burbidge, G. R., Fowler, W. A. and Hoyle, F. (1957). Synthesis of the elements in stars. Reviews of Modern Physics 29, 547-650. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.29.547
  5. Camara, C. G., Hopkins, S. D., Suslick, K. S. and Putterman, S. J. (2007). Upper bound for neutron emission from sonoluminescing bubbles in deuterated acetone. Physical Review Letters 98, 064301. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.064301
  6. US Department of Energy, Energy Research Advisory Board (1989). Cold Fusion Research: A Report of the Energy Research Advisory Board to the United States Department of Energy. November 1989.
  7. Export-Import Bank of the United States (2026). EXIM approves Project Vault loan.
  8. Flannigan, D. J. and Suslick, K. S. (2005). Plasma formation and temperature measurement during single-bubble cavitation. Nature 434, 52-55. doi:10.1038/nature03361
  9. Fleischmann, M. and Pons, S. (1989). Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium. Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry 261, 301-308.
  10. Frenzel, H. and Schultes, H. (1934). Luminescenz im ultraschallbeschickten Wasser. Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie 27B, 421-424.
  11. Gaitan, D. F., Crum, L. A., Church, C. C. and Roy, R. A. (1992). Sonoluminescence and bubble dynamics for a single, stable, cavitation bubble. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 91, 3166-3183. doi:10.1121/1.402855
  12. Gompf, B., Günther, R., Nick, G., Pecha, R. and Eisenmenger, W. (1997). Resolving sonoluminescence pulse width with time-correlated single photon counting. Physical Review Letters 79, 1405. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.79.1405
  13. Harkins, W. D. (1917). The evolution of the elements and the stability of complex atoms. Journal of the American Chemical Society 39, 856-879.
  14. Hiller, R., Putterman, S. J. and Barber, B. P. (1992). Spectrum of synchronous picosecond sonoluminescence. Physical Review Letters 69, 1182. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.69.1182
  15. International Energy Agency (2026). Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026. Press release.
  16. ITER Organization. Hot, hotter, hottest: a plasma of 150 to 300 million degrees, ten times or more the temperature of the core of the Sun.
  17. Ji, S. (2026). When Water Becomes Sovereignty and the Oldest Reason for War Dissolves. Essay, 21 February 2026. By a founder of Beyond Scarcity; see the declared interest.
  18. International Energy Agency, policies database. Japan: International Resource Strategy, national stockpiling system (JOGMEC).
  19. LeClair, M. L. and Lebid, S. (2009). Utilization of crystallized cavitation reentrant jets for zero point energy production. Final report to the project’s funder, 12 October 2009, on experiments of 24 and 25 August 2009. Unpublished; summarised in the next entry.
  20. LeClair, M. L. (2012). Discovery of macrocationic crystalline H2O cavitation reentrant jets and their role in cavitation zero point energy, fusion and the origin of life. Slides, Seventh Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water, October 2012; supplement to WATER 5. Not peer reviewed.
  21. Liu Hua, National Nuclear Safety Administration (2011). The situation of NORM in non-uranium mining in China. International Commission on Radiological Protection.
  22. Lohse, D., Schmitz, B. and Versluis, M. (2001). Snapping shrimp make flashing bubbles. Nature 413, 477-478. doi:10.1038/35097152
  23. OECD (2026). OECD Inventory of Export Restrictions on Critical Raw Materials 2026.
  24. Pecha, R. and Gompf, B. (2000). Microimplosions: cavitation collapse and shock wave emission on a nanosecond time scale. Physical Review Letters 84, 1328. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.84.1328
  25. Purdue University (2008). Purdue sanctions professor for research misconduct. News release, 27 August 2008.
  26. Sachs, J. D. and Warner, A. M. (2001). The curse of natural resources. European Economic Review 45, 827-838.
  27. Shapira, D. and Saltmarsh, M. (2002). Nuclear fusion in collapsing bubbles: is it there? An attempt to repeat the observation of nuclear emissions from sonoluminescence. Physical Review Letters 89, 104302.
  28. S&P Global (2025). DRC attempts to address surplus cobalt supply, declining price with export ban. 25 February 2025.
  29. S&P Global (2024). Mine Development Times: The U.S. in Perspective. 18 July 2024.
  30. US Department of State (2026). 2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial.
  31. Taleyarkhan, R. P. et al. (2002). Evidence for nuclear emissions during acoustic cavitation. Science 295, 1868-1873.
  32. US Geological Survey (2026). Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Cobalt.
  33. US Geological Survey (2026). Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Rare Earths.
  34. US Geological Survey. How much water is there on Earth?
  35. Versluis, M., Schmitz, B., von der Heydt, A. and Lohse, D. (2000). How snapping shrimp snap: through cavitating bubbles. Science 289, 2114-2117. doi:10.1126/science.289.5487.2114
  36. Weninger, K. R., Barber, B. P. and Putterman, S. J. (1997). Pulsed Mie scattering measurements of the collapse of a sonoluminescing bubble. Physical Review Letters 78, 1799. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.78.1799
  37. Zimmermann, E. W. (1951). World Resources and Industries, revised edition. Harper & Brothers.
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Declared interest

Declared interest

Sayer Ji, a founder of Beyond Scarcity, works with the company developing the technology reported in section 5. He takes no part in choosing or briefing any team that tests it, and Beyond Scarcity takes no part in judging the result.

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Cite this inquiry

Beyond Scarcity (2026). The Synthesis Question: an inquiry. Draft for comment, 27 October 2026. https://beyondscarcity.earth/inquiry