Novella, Most important resource: ideas

What are the primary, most important, or most limiting resources that human civilization depends on? Material resources are certainly significant. We need to build our civilization out of something, and we always seem to be facing a crisis of “peak” whatever—peak oil or peak helium—as our demand for a resource begins to outstrip our supplies. Land is also in limited supply. There is only so much land on Earth on which to grow our food, build our homes, and contain our industries. It would also be nice to leave some land for the other 10 million or so species that we share the planet with. I would argue, however, that the primary resource, the one resource to rule them all, is ideas. With science and technology, we have, so far, been able to overcome all our other resource limitations.