Is metal in the Earths crust for a reason?
Metal is in the earth crust because metals represent about 80% of the elements on the periodic table. The heavy elements are made in the interior of stars and, when stars explode, the metals (and everything else) gets scattered into space. As this stuff cools and starts condensing, planets slowly form. Therefore, the planets are made of star stuff. Since we are made of the stuff from the planet, we are made of star stuff. The earth is certainly a precious planet to us but we are not precious to the planet. Earth existed long before we came along and will exist long after all signs of human activity are gone.
There is no reason for the metals being there. They are simply present because they were generated by stars before the formation of the solar system and ended up condensing into the Earth as constituents of the rocks. If we remove the metals from the rocks they are still on the Earth. We use them to make things which eventually get buried again anyway so the metals will all return to the Earth. Plus by using them we can improve our quality of life and advance scientific progress and economic development, which is a good thing. The amount of metal we are removing is very, very small and only comes from carefully chosen mines anyway.
There’s no known “reason” for metal along those lines. Our mining activities impact such a thin layer of crust, any effect would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect. In any case, the metals don’t get too far from the crust to begin with…pretty much all of what we’ve mined will return to the crust in a very short time period (geologically speaking). New metal also makes it to earth in the form of meteorites.
