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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

It's people and exponential growth. Doesn't matter what -ism you put on the end of your shovels.

That’s quite the Malthusian viewpoint. Alternatively: “Malthus theory, which holds that since the world’s resources are more or less fixed, population growth must be restricted or all of us will descend into bottomless misery. Malthusianism is scientifically bankrupt — all predictions made upon it have been wrong, because human beings are not mere consumers of resources. Rather, we create resources by the development of new technologies that find use for them. The more people, the faster the rate of innovation. This is why (contrary to Malthus) as the world’s population has increased, the standard of living has increased, and at an accelerating rate.“

https://space.nss.org/the-significance-of-the-martian-fronti...

Really the two are in feedback loops that may correlate and require certain strategization and working smarter instead of harder. Improved agricultural yields produce surplus food per person which allows a shift to industrialization which enables more secondary tertiary areas of specialization which can boost yields and give other benefits.

This dates back to the bronze age even and technically stone age in mesoamerican and neighboring southern native american cultures.

I'll take your Malthus and raise you a Bartlett. https://bollocks2012.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/the-greatest-s...

Also, from your linked article from random space cadets: "Unless people can see broad vistas of unused resources in front of them, the belief in limited resources tends to follow as a matter of course."

Sorry, but O(2^n) is going to grow faster than O(n^3), which is the fundamental limitation of the speed of light for a space-faring civilization expanding in a shell from its origin.

Exponential growth just does not scale.

*At the cost of catastrophic ecological destruction.

This specific strawman comes up so often that it ought to have its own name. Just because one guy underestimated the carrying capacity of the Earth a long time ago, and failed to predict farming practices that would eventually wreak havoc on the environment, doesn't make the population variable off-limits for discussion. Is it any more realistic to expect billions of people to voluntarily revert to an ascetic lifestyle?

Sure - so the problem with capitalism is that it allows populations to grow too much? Or in what sense is capitalism to blame?

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