Has Anyone Seen My Europium?

Limits are in our minds.

Audio narration by David Marlow

“Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered.

And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many new ideas remain to be discovered.”

Paul Romer

Color televisions were a new thing about 60 years ago. They were bulky, expensive, and often limited to only 3 channels.

As a kid, it was my job to ‘warm up’ the tv by turning it on a few minutes before we sat down to watch.

The color image was produced by a cathode ray tube. The tube would fire a stream of electrons at a screen with red, blue, and green pixels which would blend to create a color picture.

🔴 Making the red required one of the rarest elements in the universe, europium.

The remarkable thing about europium is that it glows red when charged with electricity and is the only element on the periodic table that will do that.

📍Without europium color television was not possible.

As color televisions became popular the limited supply of europium caused many to fear there was a physical limit to how many color tubes could be made for televisions or any other application.

Of course today we have color screens everywhere. None of them require tubes.

With the LCD screens, we have now, a limited supply of europium isn’t even an issue. Had you ever heard of europium before today?

As humans, we underestimate the vast number of possibilities that remain. Be it for technology or our lives, there are always going to be new ideas.

The only limit is the will to look for them.

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