What happens when we run out of it?
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A quarter of Earth’s crust is silicon. Most sand is mainly silicon dioxide, i.e. silicon that reacted with oxygen. We will never run out of it. We might run out of the most easily accessible resources for extremely pure silicon, increasing the price for it a bit.
Computers are basically a giant array of switches controlling other switches. Each switch (transistor) can be turned on (conduct electricity) or off (block it). You cannot use materials that are always conducting for that, and you cannot use materials that are never conducting. Silicon is a semiconductor: As pure element it conducts relatively poorly and its properties can be influenced easily by adding some other elements to it. That’s a relatively rare property. The closest replacement would be germanium but that is far less common, and switching the whole industry from silicon to germanium would be extremely expensive. There are also some combinations of different elements that work, like silicon+carbon and gallium+arsenide. We use these in some specialized applications.
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