Lisp inventor John McCarthy on human progress and its sustainability

I feel like any such discussion must address the fact that, globally, phytoplankton has declined by 40% in the past century. That's 40% of the base of the food pyramid for all ocean life. That's 20% of the plant life in the world, and accounts for 20% of the oxygen we breathe. Whatever is causing it, something significant is happening to the ecosystems of earth.

http://wormlab.biology.dal.ca/ramweb/papers-total/Boyce_etal...

What a refreshing and extensive analysis, based on research and hard numbers. You might not agree with John McCarthy, but at least he brings up clear, verifiable points of discussion. It's too bad that strident alarmism will always out-shout the more reasoned approaches to what is, fundamentally, a very important problem.

Great article, but it might be more complete with a mention of the rising acidity of the oceans and how as the ph drops, many of the shelled animals at the bottom of the ocean food chain who depend on their shells for protection will not be able to form shells (the acidity eats away at the calcium carbonate) making a whole category of the food chain susceptible to extinction.

I appreciate the optimism in this article that humans are "on the right path", but the bottom line is humans have already caused a major disruption to the biosphere via carbon emissions, and the carbon emissions are still increasing which will have an effect of ocean life, thus humans.

I'd like to see more thought going into "helping people live better lives while living in balance with nature", rather than "We can expand the human species to 20 billion - let's do it!"

21901 hits since 1995 - little over 1000 hits a year. Let's see the HN effect now. [One hour later - 22797, a little way off 900 in an hour.]

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Reocities link for the rebuttal linked at the bottom of the article.

http://www.reocities.com/RainForest/Canopy/2265/no_prog.htm

A compelling article when it was written, and I think many of his potential solutions to problem have promise. But the article really suffers from not having been revised in the intervening years. For example, the view of oil is very '90s: everything will be fine until oil stops coming out of the ground, and then we'll have a crisis. But oil won't stop coming out of the ground for decades, so we have plenty of time to deal with it.

But the idea behind peak oil is that even a relatively small decline in oil can lead to drastic increases in prices, which would have devastating effects on the world economy. Peak oil isn't even addressed in McCarthy's writing, as far as I can tell.

Related is agriculture: McCarthy portrays it as an issue of water and arable land. But it's also an issue of fertilizer, and fertilizer production is dependent upon petroleum. So if we have a drastic spike in petroleum prices, that will lead to a drastic spike in fertilizer costs, which would lead to a drastic spike in food costs. See Egypt for an example of what happens when that occurs.

Finally, the Ehrlich/Simon bet. Again, compelling at the time, but the bet ended in 1990. 21 years ago. That's hardly a compelling statement on the state of the world in 2011. What would the result of that bet been had it been replayed from 2000 to 2010? From looking at this: http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/ it looks like all 5 metals in the bet have risen in price over the last decade.

EDIT: I found one reference to peak oil on the Hydrogen page, but it's given no serious analysis.

While it may be out of scope, it would be nice to see how he would address the increasing level of automation and its factors on classes, labor, wealth, and population.

I basically agree with the analysis, that technology makes human material progress potentially sustainable well beyond our current numbers.

Our biggest challenges are social and economic ones. First and foremost, is to push against the tides of conservatism on both the left and the right, which see sustainability as either a matter of "going back" or as unworthy of a goal at all.

I have read through these pages. Undoubtedly many of the things he states, particularly with respect to how long nuclear energy could supply us, are correct but only under the assumption that we don't continue to increase our usage of energy. It's hard to see how that assumption holds in a world that is continually growing its economies. Exponential functions grow very fast. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY)

You may then counter that a decoupling of economic growth from its material and energy underpinnings is possible. This has yet to be effectively proven. We have only seen partial decoupling so far. For more information on this see the writings of Tim Jackson in his book Prosperity without Growth.

I also urge you to download this spreadsheet (from the BP website) showing the growth in usage of fossil fuels (http://tinyurl.com/2yhx7d). We may find alternatives to these but if we do, we will have to bring the alternatives online at roughly the same level to supply our societies with the energy they now require to function. This is no easy feat. It's good know, quantitatively, just what's required.

That's how web pages were back in 1991, and how they should look again in the future: just plain raw content and links, no frills and graphic fluff.

I remember reading through these pages back when I learned about McCarthy, probably 10 years ago or so. I think he's a born optimist, like I'm a born pessimist. He fails to mention fresh water shortages around the world, too. And a couple of other huge pending problems of the sort. I'd like to see convincing information that we are not currently in overshoot...

In the tradition of the late Julian Simon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon This will make John McCarthy reviled in some fashionable circles. I wonder if he speaks with Stanford Prof. Paul Ehrlich.

I'd also be interested to see what the people of HN think about this essay I wrote about long term energy needs:

http://seanseefried.com/blog/files/22-june-2008.html

all these human progress discussions imply, or bounded by, one hypothesis - there will exist only one species of humans. Is divergence of the species into 2 or more is such an unprobable event?