Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

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Before someone says something like, "This is why we need to colonize Mars" remember: the laws of physics do not permit sustained exponential growth, full stop. Even with arbitrarily advanced technology that allows you to freely colonize the universe at the speed of light that only buys you polynomial growth (indeed, only O(n^2) growth) in the absolute best case.

Sooner or later mankind is going to run up against the limits of exponential growth. We can make conscious decisions about how to deal with it, or we can let the laws of physics decide for us. IMHO things will go better for us if we take the bull by the horns, but very few people seem to be on board with that even here on HN where gloomy Malthusian prophecies are rarely received with much enthusiasm.

Happily, I'm now old enough (and childless) so I can afford not to give much of a fuck. But sooner or later someone is going to have to. If it's not you, it will be your children, or their children. The sooner someone starts to give a fuck, the less painful it will be when -- not if -- we finally discover what the limiting factor to growth actually is.

Most likely these issues will get resolved the old fashioned way by violence. Climate change issues will get resolved the same way. Humanity has never made collective decisions for the whole planet and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

> Humanity has never made collective decisions for the whole planet ...

League of Nations, later becoming the United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights ... hopefully you will have heard of those.

Within the UN there are not that many members that complain much about the organization being dysfunctional or even useless. Unsurprisingly, all those who do are the USA and ones that are extremely dependent on the USA. One could argue that the USA is indeed an exceptional country, but not in a good way. The UN was explicitly set up with the goal of collectively solving global problems. The current status quo within the UN, where the USA regularly flaunts the treaties they signed/ratified or falsely accusing others of violations (without sufficient proof) just as justification for ditching their own commitments, says little about humanity and everything about the USA.

I have no doubt that the USA will indeed do everything to "resolve" these issues rather the old fashioned way by violence. Hopefully the rest of mankind will be a bit smarter than that.

”League of Nations, later becoming the United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights ... hopefully you will have heard of those.”

These organizations are/were a good thing but they haven’t been able to stop violence so far. The League of Nations couldn’t prevent WW2 and the UN couldn’t prevent a lot of atrocities and war since its creation. I wish they could. I also don’t think international collaboration will work once we have tens of millions of people having to move due to climate change or if overpopulation causes severe resource shortages.

I can follow that line of reasoning, but I think it is biased (maybe unintentionally) to the point where its conclusion is inaccurate.

Indeed, the League of Nations couldn't prevent WW2, neither did the UN prevent a lot of atrocities from happening. That is, aside from all the atrocities that it did actually prevent (probably numerously, but we will never know for they didn't happen). If not from starting, than at least from expanding to the point that they otherwise would have. As for WW2, besides its roots in the settlement of WW1, it was also the opportunistic selfish advantages that some particular countries (not talking about Germany) saw in it's unfolding, while pretending otherwise to the public, that made WW2 to unfold as it did (reminder: it was the USA who continued doing good business with Germany, until it was Hitler who declared war on the USA).

The real question to ask is: what would we have without the UN? All there would be is bilateral agreements between individual countries. It is well known from history how easily those create extremely complex situations where a local conflict can often quickly spiral out into global conflicts (because of conflicting agreements between allies of the involved parties). WW1 probably being a good example of that, and in fact a primary motivator behind the creation of what eventually became the UN.

Climate change will indeed cause all sorts of problems, violence no doubt among them. One thing is sure though, with only bilateral agreements between countries, it will be only more bloody and inhumane than with the UN at least striving for a global consensus approach. It's only with collective agreement that the effects of these challenges can be limited to their least worst outcomes. It will be bad either way, but that's no valid argument to fatalistically argue that nothing will matter. Of course, the USA could choose that none of this is their problem, and only look at their own self-interests. But that will rather sooner than later pave the way of their own inevitable demise (which in that case would probably be a very unpleasant one).

As long as a substantial part of the US economy and international political dominance comes directly from how the country profits from conflict elsewhere on the globe, little chance that the USA will ever sincerely contribute to making this world a better place. This is not to say that other countries are benevolent or sincere, but it is the USA who openly advocates breaking down whatever instruments we still have to resolve issues by consensus instead of violence.

The UN is by no means a perfect solution, but without it this world would likely be a far worse place. The world before it existed sure was. Something apparently only the USA (and a few vassals) seems to openly disagree with. I remember only a few other countries that did; mostly totalitarian ones and responsible for some of those atrocities that that the UN failed to prevent.

I think we are in agreement. The UN does good things but it's limited.

It could be argued that we've been making collective decisions for progressively larger groups as time goes by.

We have the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty[1], and the Montreal Protocol[2], for example.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

The world's population will peak at 11 billion in 2050, so that's the problem we are tasked to solve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI

Not only that but we're getting ever better at producing more with less.

More from Less by Andrew McAfee points out that we're creating ever more wealth with fewer physical inputs.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43822733-more-from-less

McAfee is an MIT academic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McAfee

Colonizing Mars doesn't really make the problem go away even temporarily.

It's still the case that at the local teashop I frequented, I see endless row of empty parking lot and empty storefronts not being used by anybody. We have a sedentary lifestyle because we built our urban area around not walking.

I don't even understand what life means without economic growth anymore.. no new companies, no new technologies, no new anything. Nothing to strive towards, no chance to escape the station of life you were born in. Its like growth is THE civilization level goal we've had since forever. We need to move from A to B. What do we even do without a place to go? What will happen to civilization without a goal we can all organize around in elaborate structures called societies and clubs and companies and move to? Maybe if i was younger i would have answers, or that question wouldn't even matter but not anymore.

(OP if you have any thoughts on it i'd love to hear them)

Not OP, but read your comment and felt inspired to respond.

I understand your mindset - in a sense, the absence of growth implies death, all life needs growth, etc.

However, growth is not a purely-quantitative, 1-dimensional value. There are an infinite number of possible futures that all constitute growth relative to here and now. Which aspects will do most of the growth? Will there be more humans? more relationships? more industry? more data? more meaning? There are an infinite number of things that can grow, and even within a single vertical, multiple ways to grow.

Therefore, any specific growth we undergo has an "opportunity cost" of whatever other ways we could have grown. Not to mention, most kinds of growth require some destruction, so in addition to potential value, you lose the immediate value of whatever you destroy.

Therefore, in my view, the 2 ways we need to grow the most are:

- Get smarter in the ways that would enable us to accurately predict good ways to grow. This helps us do the following better:

- Build up the -potential- to grow, or at least remain alive, in dimensions that, right now, to us, seem good or necessary.

- Learn how to know when, and how, to unleash that -potential-.

Does that make sense? And does it relate?

No (economic) growth != no change.

The main thing we need to get past is the assumption that is currently woven deeply into our financial system that debt is sustainable because the next generation will be more productive than the last. That kind of growth has to end somewhere. That does not mean that we can't keep inventing new stuff.

How come? The amount of 3D space grows as r³ if r is the expansion radius. Even though planet surfaces are 2D, the number of planets grows as r³, too, given a reasonably isotropic universe.

Because the limit to growth is the derivative of the available volume. If the volume grows as r^3 then the available growth rate is r^2.

But this really is a minor detail. Our current economic models (and in particular our assessments of the risk of debt default) assume long-term growth of k^r for some k>1. That is not sustainable under any circumstances.

Just for the record (because I realized this after the comment was locked for further edits): that should, of course, have been k^t (time) not k^r.

If we can modify our desires for growth to be oriented toward metrics that don’t scale with physical resource consumption, we can solve this problem. Such sustainable growth metrics could include miniaturization or quality increases in physical goods, or even changes in some information good. And the happy news is many parts of the economy are already undergoing this transformation. You can read about the decoupling of GDP and carbon emissions for some interesting research on this topic.

No, that won't help (except, as with every other technological innovation, to delay the day of ultimate reckoning). Quantum mechanics imposes fundamental limits on miniaturization, and the second law of thermodynamics (and the Landauer limit) imposes fundamental limits on efficiency gains.

What about information and quality? I see no reason why a species couldn’t sit around coming up with increasingly fashionable jokes until the heat death of the universe. I think that’s where we are headed.

It is entirely possible that what you are suggesting is the beginning of an answer to the problem. But it is not immediately obvious to me that our current social structures will support an economy based on people inventing good jokes. I think that will take some kind of radical change, and thinking about what shape that kind of radical change might take is exactly what I'm hoping to encourage people to start doing. So kudos to you for thinking along these lines, but I don't think that actually solving the problem will be quite as simple as writing a good one-liner.

Nothing would make me happier than to be proven wrong about this.

What I hope for, is that as the information economy continues to grow, its political power will eventually exceed that of physical industry. At that point, it will be possible to put in place policies like a carbon tax that will reduce environmental harms while further weakening the political power of the harmful industries. Ultimately we could cap and tax or cap and trade all sorts of environmental harms, not just carbon emissions. Wealth would accrue to companies that generate economic value while society determines the total level of allowable environmental harm (which could be negative).

I think other approaches like “rise up and destroy capitalism” would protect the environment faster if successful but have less chance of success.

That sounds like an eminently sober assessment of the situation. My concern there is that the information economy seems to be growing its own set of harmful externalities, at least by my own quality metric, which places a high value on personal freedom. But one problem at a time I guess.

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light.

https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

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