Where it matters, ranking is impossible—or, at least, inadvisable. The heart is not more important than the brain; vitamin C is no less indispensable for human health than vitamin D. Food and energy supply, the two existential necessities covered in the preceding chapters, would be impossible without mass-scale mobilization of many man-made materials—metals, alloys, non-metallic and synthetic compounds—and the same is true about all our buildings and infrastructures and about all modes of transportation and communication. Of course, you would not know this if you were to judge the importance
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