the last grain of sand

category: notion

the last grain of sand

一盘散沙 / yī pán sǎn shā / Chinese idiom, literally: like a sheet of loose sand, fig. : unable to cooperate

And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. - Matthew 7:26

At the end of 2020s, the world was digging some 50 billion tonnes sand year out of river beds but also natural reserves. This would have been enough to build, every year, a wall 27 metres high and 27 metres wide that would encircle the entire planet at the equator but was also used to make windows, glass fiber for internet connections and chips for everything from smartphone to satellites and cars.

Everyone knew that modern concrete was not as strong as the Roman’s one and that mafias around the world were becoming an increasing part of the sand supply chain, so when building and bridges started showing signs of early aging around the worlds by the 2050’s it was assumed to be her an new consequence of the financial capitalism that had peaked just at the same time as COVID had hit us.

Even when prices of chips started to grow exponentially because purification of sand was becoming an issue, no one realised.

Years later, probably long after the last glass fiber Internet backbone had been layered in the ocean did people start to realise : we had left the Iron Age to enter the age of ink when writing history and then had entered the age of sand with industrialisation, but even more painful than switching from oil to renewables the exit from the age of sand proved challenging for humanity.

Too many nanoparticules of plastic had contaminated the sands around the world. They could not be used for anything but sand castles on the beach.

Humanity had used its sand thinking since antiquity the grains could not be counted and could be used without end, but never had thought they would see the last grain of sand being used to manufacture a human artifact.