[continued due to lameness filter]
Earth's oceans contain about 1.8 ug of vanadium per liter. Its a tiny trace. But if you multiply out by the total size of the ocean, it works out to 2.34 billion tonnes (Google calculator with ocean volume of 1.3 billion cubic kilometers plucked from a plausible source).
Propaganda glass half full: a mind-blowing amount of untrustworthy piss water.
Propaganda glass half empty: way too much trustworthy vanadium after all.
Given the problem, they're doing a reasonable job of hiding all this luscious vanadium. Most people have barely even heard of vanadium. (Or argon in the Earth's atmosphere, either.)
You can't filter out the vanadium in one convenient Google search. But you can do what they do in Iran: cascade your centrifuges to exclude the centrifudge. Search, record, excerpt, refine. Work your way to the leading edge of the surf, and stay there for a year at a time.
Now there needs to be another sharp warning here. Of course the powers that be can disrupt this, too. The word "can" here has popped its buttons, outgrown its pants, and needs a quadruple bypass ASAP. This is the volcanic island edition of the word "can". You brain has been damaged by too many popular media portrayals of evil bastards with tidy volcanic islands.
The problem with taking "can" to this level is that eventually society begins to eat its own flesh. A vigorous society does not want to make it impossible for its smartest people to do the kinds of things that its smartest people naturally do: refine, triangulate, repeat. War might actually break out. You might need to press those smartest people into prompt service. Better for you if you haven't damaged their brains with having first taken the mother of all "fuck you" hairy-cheeked dumps into the world's information oceans.
That's not how you manage the problem of having a society with a nucleus of smart people who notice the vanadium signal. Far easier to price them out of the conversation and keep them on a list, in case you actually need them at some future date.
How do you price these people out of the conversation? Been on slashdot lately? For every person here with a legitimate signal, there are ten blowhards disturbing the candle of illumination with low-resolution copypasta ideology, with zero coefficient of proximal originality. The most you can credit is tweaking the little red laser dot of the laser targeting system at whatever is easiest to frame as a shocking violation of "common sense". Of course, it's a completely bastardized notion of common sense, carefully manufactured by the vast engines of propaganda to keep the unwashed rubes from thinking too hard. It's not actually that hard to escape, but you have to wash yourself. And then you can't tell anyone what you've concluded anyway, because the unwashed have been carefully cultivated to not listen. That's how it's really done.
The tactics of the Russian IRA was a nice little microcosm to observe this in action. You pretend to align yourself with what you wish to disabuse, then you seed little kernels of volatile doubt, until the entire discourse catches fire. Mission accomplished. Who successfully studies for a final exams while surrounded by a fifteen-bell fire response?
The truth of the matter is that greater society has been vaccinated against vanadium. The truth is actually out there. It's darn hard work, but it can't be stopped in broad strokes. And then when you do isolate the vanadium (which is a wheel inside a wheel inside a wheel, but definitely not the last wheel) hardly anyone will listen to you. Why prevent smart people from finding the truth when it's so much easier to polarize ideologues to not listen to the truth no matter what?
What you need to do with the ideologues is pump their egos. So you feed them ersatz problems that seem to need a keen mind to resolve. You feed them the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle as an ersatz Easter egg hunt. 3 down, 4 letters: "ergo". What the gravedigger actually meant to say. Only he'd have been even better off with "ergot", which is a fungus, definitely apropos as he exhumed human bones, and not just any fungus, but one likely associated with lycanthropism. No, all this CSI Agatha Christie business does not prove you have a fine mind. What proves you have a fine mind is consilience, and an intuitive understand of asymptotic equipartition: in the extreme, all plausible comprehensive explanations shrink to an equiprobable disk of compact but non-unitary size. The very word "truth" has lately become propaganda, because it denies the underlying statistical reality of asymptotic consilience. Truth behaves like a unique point. But truth isn't a point, it's a compact disk of maximal uncertainty over what has yet to be winnowed out. You never arrive at certainly. You constantly arrive at higher levels of concentrated uncertainty concerning a much reduced ocean of nearly infinite filth and spam.
When an ideologue sticks a pin into a real thinker, there's your first clue. The real thinker puts forward a dense and compelling surface which is clearly studded with massive uncertainties. Because that's where real thinking always takes you. And then the ideologue pantomimes deflating your studded surface with a sharp pin, as if its a giant bag of gas. While sticking in the pin, the ideologue will also make a deflating or popping balloon sound so as to emphasize the rapture or the rupture of the thin rubber skin. Ideology is mainly about selling the pantomime. Real thinkers don't actually deflate like cheap condoms attached to undersea diving tanks. But on a drive by basis, they can be rather easily made to appear as if they do.
It's an important point, because as easily as real thinkers can be pantomimed out of the attention span of the average non-thinker, they are painfully hard to hide from other thinkers. The concentrated disk of intensified uncertainty is a dead giveaway within the brotherhood.
In a world where the average person can be deceived into worrying about whether the global Covid pandemic is a 100 million pound cover story for a much smaller thing, just about any level of political malfeasance becomes possible. Terrible cover story, but the one true Godzilla of public distraction.
Maybe somewhere out there in the Slashdot landscape are five to ten people who will read this post and go "yeah, baby, yeah". I totally understand where I reside on the cultural energetics landscape. I can persuade nothing and no-one in bulk measure. There's this old cliche that you win the battle by converting one person at a time. That's a dangerous half truth. You can win the battle this way, but the ground is also shifting under your feet. By the time you win the battle by this patient method, will you even care about your victory, or will the world under your feet have already changed so much that your victory is totally hollow?
There's also a dangerous half truth that "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Hmm. Wherever that tricksy word "progress" appears, Houston, we have a problem.
George Bernard Shaw was channeling a societal age where all our wood was behind one arrow. "Progress" was the universal invocation of that one chosen arrow. He was born into the 1860s. Transcontinental rail lines, the telegraph, Darwin, Maxwell, Heaviside, Mendeleev's periodic table, a final end to official slavery among the world's blushing paragons of liberal democracy.
Somewhere after the OPEC embargo of the mid-1970s, progress as we knew it began to MIRV. It was clearly no longer just a solitary fat arrow of collective societal progress, but some other creature of many heads.
It's no longer possible to harbour dark personal fantasies about playing the unreasonable man (or woman). We're in a post-MIRV society now. The very concept of progress itself is under asault from all fronts. One unreasonable man to one unreasonable wagon. Completely useless post-MIRV.
I finally do it, I suppose, with the fascination of watching a habitual drunk stagger out of a pub blind stinking plastered without actually killing himself, some tiny brainstem of self-preservation still operative out of pure habit alone.
Lately the human enterprise has become the most fascinating drunken walk a man could ever hope to observe. It's not that we don't continue to have a brain, it's how cleverly we now talk ourselves out of actually using it. You know the ones. All those people now mired in anti-vax agitprop, penny wise and pound foolish, and a ready army of same for any issue of import that could possibly arise down the road.
What's too little appreciated about human intelligence is that it rarely feeds well on its own outputs. Like an over-amplified microphone, it readily begins to squeal. Human intelligence is designed to be embedded in a complex, challenging world. We pretend that we are abstracting thought, when what we're really doing is abstracting ourselves out of our natural, vigorous embedding. Social media has fundamentally changed the parameters of how we mutually embed in modern cognitive society. We already knew the human mind was unstable on insufficient embedding (sustained solitary confinement is slowly but surely worming its way onto the official register of crimes against humanity). And now we are playing around with the other side: excess embedding. For this reason I do not participate in bird-chirp circle jerks. On Twitter you can achieve the miraculous dufecta of being both under-embedded and over-embedded at the same time. Terrifying to behold, and yet fascinating as all fuck.
So here's the final payload, the BIG LIE finally exposed. This is the golden era of consilience, and don't let any acne-riddled partisan tell you differently. Over my own short lifetime, my powers of consilience have increased at least 1000 fold, due to having a trillion-dollar library at my fingertips (the Internet) and actually knowing how to use it. Do not divide by the number of turds in the ocean. That's a mug's game.
What it's NOT, however, is the golden age of anyone else giving two hot damns about your miraculous power of consilience, deployed wisely. It's one of those horrible King Midas fairy tales, where you wish upon a golden lamp to achieve Solomonic illumination, but what you imagined would be a shining lighthouse of virtue is dwarfed by a plague of locusts, newly enhanced by CRISPR to glow like doomed fireflies after licking the radioactive plate clean at Tense Mile Island. You puny little Solomonic lighthouse doesn't stand a grey snowball's chance in a xmas-illumination dollar store.
Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy, but was also cursed by the god Apollo so that her true prophecies would not be believed.
Maybe there is hope yet. Maybe five people give a damn about this long post I've just written here. If it's as much as par five, I count myself blessed. Yes, I wield the superpower of consilience (flame of Anor), but unlike Gandalf, I can also do the math. The true battle is not what you can figure out, it's what you can get people to care about concerning what you've figure out. In the majority of cases, persuasion achieved to energy-expenditure ratio is deeply in the red. That's how it really works. The partisans, ideologues, copypasta artists, and Russian IRA baristas of bullshit have won this round going away.
So the Enterprise is on a collision course with a giant space iceberg, and the navigation and propulsion systems have been ransomed for Bitcoin by a galactic nemesis wiped off the face of the universe by an unexpected supernova. Decryption password destroyed. You feel a great disturbance in the iron law of Narrativium, as if the entire teeming multitude of REvil cried out in blimary and were suddenly silenced; there's no saving Enterprise (or Earth) this time.
But on the plus side, you got a plush front row seat to rival the captain's chair, and not only a big fat big screen TV, but pretty much the iconic, original big fat big screen TV. You're wearing Fonzie's original leather jacket, and inside the pocket is a napkin autographed by Leonard Nimoy. Groovy! You'd pay a lot of money to go to a theatre to watch this epic collision. And here you are, actually onboard, with pretty much the best bird's eye view in the history of humanity, Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe, drinks are on the house. So it's true that the robotic parking attendant drove all the fancy space cars over a cliff into a giant space heap; this is not a reversible calamity. There will be no refunds the morning after. There will not be a morning after. But what's to complain about, really?
Ultimate consolation prize: The more you sit back to enjoy your looming demise, the harder you are to finally manipulate. Nothing greases an epic calamity of Ringwheels within Ringwheels spiraling out of their gyres like a zesty pinch of Zen saffron.