If you try to make a planting bed in any settlement that’s more than say 100 years old on a site that was continuously lived on, you are guaranteed to come across at least some shards of glass, pots, plates, etc. Even if the spot was never explicitly a trash mound. Things break, people usually try to pick them up and put in trash, but (especially in grass) miss pieces. When kids break stuff you often don’t want them picking up sharp objects. Things get stepped on and pressed into soil. Many many reasons to find pottery shards where they seemingly don’t belong.
Also learning about this today. Apparently they're bad for ecosystems that had evolved with slowly decaying organic matter (because they eat it all quickly). In particular forests.
At least in my education they have always been framed as a vital component of the ecosystem and a sign of healthy soil. It's interesting to learn that's not true.
To some extent it's a matter of definition, and whether being caused by humanity means it's bad. After all, the native earthworms would eventually have migrated north and caused similar changes.
Is it bad that redwoods are doing very well in the UK?
The problem isn't "because it was caused by humans" per se. Invasive species because of the speed they migrate. Adapting genetically changing environment is the core of life in our planet, but it takes thousands of generations. Humans spread invasive species much faster than the local fauna can adapt.
Very true. But also, if the invasive specie didn't naturally evolved in the foreign place, will it actually last there for 10.000s years? Difficult to know since we won't be there probably but still...
There's invasive species that are hugely problematic, converting whole forests from fungal decomposition of leaves to bacterial (changing the soil conditions quite a lot).
I've read this, but I'm not 100% clear on this. I think it's probably entangled with the glaciation / interglacial transition, which happened relatively recently. Earthworms are invasive in Michigan, but so are _trees_ in that timescale. It seems like having a foot thickness of forest duff decomposing slowly is probably not a very ecologically stable situation, and might be a temporary phase as the forests creep northwards and the temperatures creep up. Earthworms are not especially frost-hardy, and need to burrow deep enough to survive frost, which is physically difficult as you go farther north.
Has a drastic change occurred in the forest floors of, say, temperate Georgia?
In general, the availability of credit has been a positive economic factor that helps enable capital expenditures that otherwise would only be available to the wealthiest. Lack of such credit leads to capture of means of production and rent seeking behaviors in economic terms.
However, it’s become more and more clear that not all credit is created equal and what you spend the resulting capital on matters a lot. If one buys a house to live in or equipment to make money with - that’s generally good use of credit, assuming costs do not outweigh the benefits. I can’t think of a situation where buying lunch that one has to finance is a good thing (as different from credit card points harvesting/optimization). The implications of anything similar to payday loans going mainstream feels like a large societal risk.
- Houses are gaining value over time while consumer goods such as food, phones, TV, cars are loosing value over time.
- A loan for a house can be paid back very slowly so that you effectively only pay your initial share of the price (and share the profits with the loan giver via interest). A loan for consumer goods must usually be paid back almost immediately.
It isn't just about appreciation. It is about utility and production.
A car loan can be a great investment if it gets you to a job you otherwise wouldn't have, even if it is going down in value.
Debt for an expensive degree that gets you a good job is the same, and entirely devoid of resale value. Debt for an expensive degree with no job prospects, not so.
This - utilization of credit in a way that helps the borrower pay back the debt can be okay (e.g. cost-effective, productivity raising tractor purchase), while allowing non-productive credit use (e.g. smart tv solely for entertainment or financial asset purchase) leads to individual's debt bondage and in the large, inflationary financial market crises and asset price bubbles
Both can lead to those bad outcomes. Many crises have been centered around assets that have some sort productive or utilitarian use.
Housing bubbles obviously come to mind, where there is obvious income and utility potential. Bubbles are about the balance of these return factors with pricing, not a result of their entire absence.
Either way, there is a fundamental question about whose moral authority it is too allow or not allow certain behaviors of others, and what that threshold is.
If I want to buy a smart TV, flashy car, or a case of beer on credit because I value pleasure today over cost tomorrow, who are you to tell me it is illegal?
It’s a rather old project (2009), so many articles covering it are defunct. Found some of the info:
“The purpose of the Prince Edward Island (PEI) Wind-Hydrogen Village is to use excess wind energy along with hydrogen technologies to offer sustainable energy. Excess electricity produced by wind turbines on the island is being used to power a 300kW uni-polar electrolyzer.
A uni-polar electrolyzer uses alkaline liquids, rather than solid polymer, as its electrolyte. The electrolyzer can produce about 6kg of hydrogen per hour. The hydrogen is then stored as compressed gas in storage tanks that have a total capacity of about 500kg. The hydrogen is then used in the bi-fuel hydrogen/diesel genset to power the village when there is no wind.”
The growth is unsustainable argument is very strange to me. We absolutely have the technology to make growth sustainable, but societies choose to go for other things because overall growth and advancement of humanity is not generally a goal at mass individual level.
For example, currently society is busy transitioning to electrified transport. Los Angeles had a vast network of that 80+ years ago (red car light rail system). We also have had nuclear power as an option for a very long time. And yet, red cars were scrapped, rail removed, freeways built, we still burn gas and what not for power, and California has a ban on new nuclear… It’s not that we can’t do all this, it’s that for various reasons we choose not to.
It’s quite human-centric to assume that all other possible civilizations will make the same choices. It seems more likely that there will be as many choices and value systems as there are possible life sustaining planets out there. This doesn’t answer the paradox of course.
> We absolutely have the technology to make growth sustainable
No, respectfully, we don't.
Every organism that succeeds in doing what you advocate for (growing "sustainably") is swept from the record. If life doesn't cycle (grow/shrink) or otherwise live in equilibria, life exhausts its niche on any meaningful timescale, and the universe sends it into oblivion.
Perhaps interestingly, even records of "successfully" growing are purged, because the most effective thing that persists records of life on long timescales is the descendant path of the life itself (whether that's specific DNA sequences maintained as mutational clocks by cellular machinery, or libraries of books and concepts maintained by specific civilisations), and uncapped growth collapses the informational diversity required for life to thrive and persist -- by which I mean that we, as continuously persisting living biological and cultural structures, are the best evidence of living things like us existing a million or a thousand years ago.
When the lineage dies, evidence of the experiment rapidly decays, compared to actually successful experiments that refrain from growth and collapse of their ecology. Only DNA/culture that doesn't "succeed" in growing beyond its resources survives on a significant timescale. When an overly zealous strain of life grows too much and fails, evidence of that life is swiftly and rapidly purged as well, for any later life that cares to try to look.
I don't why biological limitations restrict humanity's long-term future.
We are already ignoring them - right now it's freezing outside, and no human could not survive in such weather using biology alone. I am also living in a city which is way too dense to sustain natural human society.
There is always a risk of entire species dying out, for example via global war, or everyone suddenly deciding they don't want technology and then freezing to death in the winter; but there are no universal long-term limitations. At some moment there will be independent colonies at other worlds, and then humanity will be eternal.
The idea that we should use finite natural resources more slowly or not at all to be sustainable doesn't make sense. What are we saving them for? Future people who would also uses them unsustainably? If we're sustainable forever, then future people won't need them. If future people do need them, they won't be sustainable and won't last. So why don't we just use them up as fast as we like?
Perhaps future people will have some important but finite need for them. So we save them for that one big moment when they're used for the really important purpose that will never be important anymore in the future of the human race? Seems unlikely such a use will appear, at least not one more important than what we've already done in building our industrialized society.
If the finite resources here are fossil fuels then the idea is to never use them again. It was a bad idea to continue using these a long time ago and it will still be a bad idea in the future. Sustainable energy production is not about deferring something, it’s about not poisoning where you live. That does not mean giving up on useful technologies. For example, synthetic hydrocarbon fuels can be made in a carbon neutral way, it’s just very expensive today. These would solve for some applications where EVs are not yet practical, etc.
Using finite resources more slowly gives you more time to invent alternatives. Imagine what would've happened if we used up all fossil fuels we had alternatives.
Peak oil is a good example of scarcity theories diverging from our observations. What happened when the known, easily exploitable oil fields were exploited? Additional exploration was incentivized. New techniques were developed for accessing petroleum resources which were previously unknown or unprofitable.
"But scarcity", as an argument should not be deployed where it will hamper further innovation and value creation. Consuming petroleum fuels increases our standard of living and productivity. It is from this comfortable perch of increased productivity that we are able to apply our resources towards finding additional energy sources.
Thus far there have not been "Limits to Growth" along this path of natural market incentives. Yet, it is easy to see how fears of scarcity could hamstring the process. The actions driven by these fears could potentially limit growth and manifest the fears into a reality.
Scarcity arguments typically have powerful political incentives. Central planners are tasked with determining which uses of energy are 'righteous' or acceptable. Some have even suggested that carbon credits be issued as a new form of currency. Move over petro-dollar, there's a new sheriff in town. Permission slips to consume energy, gatekept by our betters, the benevolent central planners.
The motivation against freely consuming fossil fuels is climate change. These central planners are usually cynical actors, but they respond to and take advantage of the work of quite intelligent scientists who point out that if we continue to do this much longer, we will likely destabilize global agriculture, especially in less developed areas. This will cause our economy to collapse and global tensions to escalate dramatically alongside the deaths of many millions if not billions of people. Artificially introduced incentives may be a decent way for us to use the market to evolve ways out of this problem, since without those incentives the market appears to be a relatively short-term thinker.
If there had been a few thousand times less coal on the world but all of it readily accessible the Industrial Revolution had been over before we had time to move on from steam engines. We probably would have used all of it for heating in antiquity.
Petroleum fuel oils eclipsed coal for transportation purposes, due to the ease of operation. Initially, readily accessible surface petroleum was viewed as a nuisance which devalued land. Oil exploration only became profitable because these readily accessible resources were exploited and monetized.
Similarly, tin mining developed during antiquity. As easily accessible surface deposits were exploited, new sources were tapped from Cornwall to Bactria.
Scarcity theorists overlook the human element. Humanity itself is our greatest resource. Increases to our standard of living drive productivity gains. Leisure time offers opportunities for our ingenuity to solve additional problems. When measured by the decentralized markets, these endeavors further increase human productivity. The cycle continues and we all benefit.
Kind of like what we did with megafauna, big slow growing trees, forests, and I imagine a lot of dinosaur fossils. But if you're imagining such an impoverished world, what if there had been no fossil fuels at all? Or no humans or no Earth. It starts to get a bit silly going down that track.
But where are we at now? Have we already invented the alternatives so it doesn't matter how we use what's left? Or are we waiting for future people to consume those resources to invent some as-yet-not-invented alternatives? How will they even know they're on the path to inventing those alternatives and decide to consume the remaining resources for that goal instead of uselessly saving them forever like a hoarder?
Turns out we didn't use up fossil fuels before we invented at least some alternatives, so lucky us. But that's not because previous generations restricted their economic development to altruistically save some for us, which is what modern save-the-resources people want.
Economic growth, in our current paradigm, requires the production of ever more goods, which in turn requires ever more energy and natural resources. That is unsustainable, because nature is finite.
My personal theory is that any advanced civilization that is capable of interstellar travel must have conquered their animal instincts and realized that growth for the sake of growth is pointless.
An important point to think about, but ultimately wrong I think.
The reason that the software industry is so valuable today is not just that it's innovative, it's also that it can grow in a way that isn't strongly constrained by material.
The material required to provide one dollar of value in digital goods or services is very little.
This leads to a virtuous circle, since business unconstrained by material attracts more capital.
Basically, we can shift the physical economy to a circular cradle-to-cradle economy, and then continue getting growth from digital goods and services.
Note that this does not simply mean we'll all be living in VR - digital goods and services are growing across all industries.
For example, back in the day, drugs were discovered by massive wet lab experimentation programs. Today, increasingly components of a drug discovery program can be done in silico.
Is "sustainability" for the sake of "sustainability" pointful? For all we know, everything may just be reduced back to energy in a Big Crunch in the future, so the outcome is the same regardless. Is a civilization that languished in stagnancy for millions of years have any more paticular meaning than one that burned brightly but briefly?
Or escaped into a nested zeno's paradox of temporally-halved simulated existences to provide the internal illusion of continued growth while externally emitting signatures of decline.
These are only finite within Earth. Add even modest solar system travel capabilities and a lot more resources open up. Mining asteroids is just one idea there.
Space is huge, but space is also empty. Mining asteroids is really energetically expensive if you want to get the material back to Earth. It’s a very reasonable thing to do if you want to build stuff in space, though.
> a lot more resources open up. Mining asteroids is just one idea there
We should certainly explore and hope to discover rich deposits of varied resources that are worth expending the time and energy to find, extract, and use. However, to our knowledge, asteroids probably consist of clay and silicate rocks, some containing nickel-iron[1]
If we accept the hypotheses of an expanding universe then we find ourselves in a pickle as our potentially infinite resources race out of our light cone faster than we can chase them.
Perhaps what you view as unique, quirky human behavior is just one manifestation of a common pattern in advanced intelligence. In the long run, most J curves are S curves.
"The growth is unsustainable argument is very strange to me. We absolutely have the technology to make growth sustainable, but societies choose to go for other things because overall growth and advancement of humanity is not generally a goal at mass individual level."
The limits of growth are real. Very real. And unfortunately, many problems we are seeing might be the prelude to the prediction.
"It’s quite human-centric to assume that all other possible civilizations will make the same choices."
Well, there should be many and we see none. This is not encouraging. While the best idea to look for life is to look for an entropy source, I think advanced live in space may be similar to us. They would need some kind of sensors (eyes, ears) and likely they would have been predators at one stage in the evolutionary path.
Those links are so oversimplified to not be useful. The arguments are for an ideological point of view and not a real analysis. Just consider that population growth is stagnating and going into decline. While energy use per capita is likely to increase, it’s not clear at all that things will continue as before even a 100 years from now. Even the AI race is seeing smaller models perform as well or better a year old ones. We are definitely in a fast growth phase of energy use there, but will it continue to grow indefinitely or will we become much more efficient and hit diminishing returns stalling further investment or plateauing energy use? Who knows… On the scale of the next 100 years, humanity can definitely meet its energy needs with nuclear and clean sources if we have the collective will. Will we? Time will tell.
The argument that our rate of growth will decrease in the future is not incompatible with the argument that our current rate of growth is unsustainable.
Sir, on this planet we obey the laws of thermodynamics, but politicians don’t seem to mind. If you argue that growing energy by 2% yoy is oversimplifying, look at previous trajectory and who gets to lose their jobs if the pattern stops.
Your first link says that in 400 years, we’ll need a second location to continue growing.
And…?
I think that actually supports the other person’s view: if your entire argument amounts to “in 400 years, we’ll need to have space stations or settle Mars with nuclear!” that isn’t really an argument against growth now.
The link predicts that in 400 years we reach a growth limit at the 100% solar exploitation of earth's entire surface area, so it's likely we'll have to get off planet well before that.
It goes on to predict that to maintain
> 2.3% annual energy growth for 1350 years from the present time
Will require total exploitation of our local star. This is a tight timetable to construct the relevant dyson sphere, even with the associated gains in engineering/construction efficiency and expertise.
There are additional cogent arguments that bypassing the solar energy requirement (with e.g. nuclear methods) will pose significant challenges in radiating the waste heat within ~1400 years.
These projections are based solely on the rate of growth, so it seems clear that while we may be able to keep growing indefinitely, the rate at which we do so will need to asymptotically approach zero.
I couldn’t have predicted 2024 from 1624 — so I assume I’m similarly incompetent at forward predictions of 2424.
Trying to guess from 1AD what 2024AD would look like would make me sound like I was speaking myths — so again, I have to assume I’m similarly unable to guess at the timeline (4000AD) where we’d run out of galactic solar energy what our existence would be like.
There’s nothing in my grandchildren’s grandchildren’s time that would prohibit growth — and I’m okay admitting I lack the wisdom or capability to solve problems on so grand a scale. The links posted bolster my position that the “limits of growth” are irrelevant to me, almost entirely.
To the extent that they may impact my great-great-great-great-grandchildren, I think they’ll be better able to handle the troubles of their time with the benefits of a robust economy, vibrant society, and abundant wealth. Nothing you’ve posted suggests that I should try to limit growth or that anyone would benefit from the attempt.
Certainly--I am still investing in the stock market.
However, this thread is about detecting alien civilizations in far off star systems so I'm not sure why you'd expect any of this conversation to be relevant to your immediate situation.
You can clearly see the energy growth slowing down starting from 1980's or so.. and yet the rest of article keeps going like this is not happening, and same rate from 1650's will hold for many more years.
It won't. Population growth is slowing down, per-human energy growth is probably even decreasing compared to 20 years ago.
Agree, the forced two-party system is very limiting and the identity tied to politics is emblematic of modern US. In EU, as I believe in India from the anecdotes in the article, a lot of the identity is tied to the place you are from and the social strata the family occupies. Those are somewhat immutable things (where you were born and what family you are from), so deciding to break off communication with that community is “expensive” socially because there is no other community that will readily accept you as their own. Whereas in US, it’s quite normal to change social circles at will. Density/proximity makes it much more obvious, but the semi-fixed social circles I believe have a lot to do with it. Many US expats report loneliness when moving abroad for similar reasons - it’s hard to find a new inner circle in societies built around other identities.
Even that spending is not effective. Drive California roads and you’ll often see fixes that aren’t much better than the damaged roads they replaced. And let’s not talk about our wonderful train projects…
In theory, this money would make a lot of difference. In practice, it’s heartbreaking.
Most tax dollars go to social security, health (including medicare) interest and defence.
So on the one hand, very little of that is infrastructure. Mostly it seems to go on "keeping people alive".
Now sure, the govt could invest the money instead, and let a bunch of (mostly old) people die.
In our "money" equation, old people have little practical value (and there's no line in our fiscal analysis for measuring our humanity).
Which perhaps is why it's best not to evaluate returns on govt spending the way you would measure returns on personal investments.
[As a PS I'd add that all those taxes, flowing back to the old people, is flowing back into the economy, which is what keeps businesses in business, and keeps those share prices going up.]
Nevertheless, welfare for olds is in no way an investment when those same individuals have reached the end of their productive years and have a decade or two to live. The point was that calling taxes "an investment" is largely untrue when most tax dollars don't go to anything of the sort.
Social security and medicare are not means-tested in any way whatsoever. In fact, they are massive welfare programs that make our budget structurally unsustainable to give money to the demographic that has had the most time to build up wealth and assets. Around one-third of all US wealth is held by Americans over seventy years old. Perhaps instead of an estate tax, we should explore having those well-off seniors use their savings and home equity instead of demanding government funds. Not to mention decades of subsidizing housing demand has drastically inflated housing prices, and younger Americans are now paying many of these retirees several times what those properties went for decades ago, an increase well in excess of inflation. In other words, through multiple channels, the young are being sucked dry by the old, despite the fact that the old hold a huge chunk of wealth.
I'd also point out old people are a terrible way to feed money back into the economy. They are generally the last people to adopt any innovation outside medicine, so increasing their share of spending draws dollars away from new innovation and towards constructing bingo halls. That has a caustic effect on our long-term economic outlook.
There will of course be the poor grandmother whom we don't want eating dog food. I doubt anyone disagrees with you on that. Let's just not pretend all of them need the checks they presently receive.
Social security, specifically is a mostly or was mostly a way to force retirement preparation on the masses who decided they didn't want or know how to before this. Most wealth is now held by middle aged people in the US actually, housing issues isn't even caused by old people but by multinational banking/holding corporations like BlackRock and its like.
It's invested. In infrastructure, schooling, endless wars on foreign soil, etc. You not agreeing with the quality of the investment is a separate issue. You probably don't agree with every investment in the private sector either.
Infra in CA is not going so well. Roads as an example are terrible compared to most developed countries. When last years winter storms damaged many roads, the newly paved replacements are not very smooth at all and some have been redone multiple times in the span of a single year. I don’t know what the causes are, but when comparing to EU where they have to account for freezing temps, CA doesn’t seem THAT complicated. Yet EU highways on average are a lot better.
What are you doing to change this? Are you trying to make the situation better? California has been run into the ground for the last thirty years intentionally. Many residents love having mentally ill people die in the streets. They have created an entire system to support this. Money has been drained away from roads and schools to pay for ever growing "programs" to employ rich white ladies so they can brag to their friends about their incredible virtue.
You are free to leave. There are plenty of low-tax countries. If you want to live in the US, Europe, Japan,..., then you must pay to be part of our reindeer games.
That said, PLEASE get involved and try to direct public funding and attention towards core activities (roads, schools, infrastructure) instead of ever more ridiculous programs to employ Berkeley graduates in virtuous-looking jobs. Utah does a great job at this sort of thing. Instead of learning from them, our political elite degrade them and insult them for their religious beliefs. I once repeated a colleague's obscene jokes, only I stated that he said them about Muslims instead of Mormons. He lost his mind trying to correct me. It was amusing.
From your reply you haven’t actually lived in either Europe or Japan. They generally do not have people die on the streets and you enjoy some excellent infrastructure. It would be nothing short of amazing to get half the services or protections people in other developed countries take for granted.
The community college system does a good deal here. As an example in California, students can get a great deal of their undergrad lower division work done at a community college for a fraction of even UC or State university cost (which for instate students is already fairly low).
Community colleges are also where folks would normally turn to for casual the classes they wanted to take but didn’t necessarily want the formalities of the full degree. Online delivery of there helped further but vs MOOCs, CC has geographic and residency restrictions for who can actually study there.
> But here’s the thing: Low – or, for that matter high – birth rates are not a problem in and of themselves.
High birthdates are a problem with scarce resources and tend to be associated with poor treatment of women[1]. Low birthrates are an extreme problem because as people age, they need to be taken care of. Even if that old person is very rich through responsible investments in their younger age, that money won’t bring them the proverbial glass of water without another younger person there.
Like with most things in life, balance is important and hard to achieve.Two to three kids per family seems to be ideal, but comes with an extreme life style hit unless you happen to be very well off. There are many irrational worries too that come with being a parent. While not perfect, I’ll take some support over none. „Too much” support is an ethics/ideology question and also has to do with social cohesion and ability of the society to integrate new members into that cohesion.
I have been thinking about this a lot. Its quite easy to find arguments to having kids that bring benefits to parents and / or the parent generation in general.
I dont have a philosophy background, so I would be really interested to hear arguments for what benefits an unconceived child receives from being conceived in todays world.
Even when assuming that not all outcomes are necessarily going to be bad, there is a real risk that they will experience a really troubled world. What justifies exposing someone intentionally without their consent to that (any?) risk of suffering?
I've noticed that very few of the pronatalist ideologues focus on the lived experience of the children after they're born. They consider it very important for people to have lots of babies but absolutely no concern for the babies after they become people. Thus the massive effort to ban abortion in the US but absolutely no concern for the life of the mother. She's already been born, after all.
When we brought women into the formal economy, we didn't reduce men's hours and meet in the middle, we just doubled the labor supply. Of course the proceeds went to capital. The market-induced-labor-quota (cost of living / hourly wage) now says a married couple has to devote 80 hours per week instead of 40 to the formal economy in order to afford the same house and suddenly nobody has the time/money to afford kids. How could it be?
The solution isn't to go back to oppressing women, the solution is to put downwards pressure on formal economy hours/week until people have time to raise their own kids again. This can be done in a gradual and non-sexist way with overtime policy.
Health care and education are important sidekicks in this drama. Our policies to individualize and increase the costs (and yes, that's policy: everyone knows what happens if you train too few doctors, everyone knows who loses if John Smith, BCBS North Dakota, and Canada are bargaining against each other for drug prices, and everyone knows what happens if you flood a competitive market with debt) also provide steep disincentives to raising children. Start fixing these problems, you start fixing the birth rate.
Of course, you should expect to be fought tooth and nail at every turn by those who profit from the problem, but what else is new?
To take this a step further, I’d argue such framings encourage either creation or amplification of risk perceptions in order to sell the remedy (and for political gain), at least in the US. Kids aren’t really allowed much autonomy the way even their parents enjoyed. All interactions are in a sense supervised and structured.
From a scientific perspective, the text is very rich and shows somewhat chronological evolution of beliefs and society systems. Coupled with responses to catastrophic events/influences, like the Babylonian captivity influencing what heaven and hell were understood to be, there’s a lot to study/research. There are many university courses on the subject that are not a religious class.
