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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

> Dangerous because if people start believing this en masse, that prosperity is a zero-sum-game, then war is the only reasonable alternative.

It’s always been when resources are constrained. For all forms of life.

Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre lots and annual beach/ski vacations are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. The ones that don’t have this are unlucky to have ancestors who lost wars.

Although, I might agree that it’s best (at least for me) if people don’t realize this or think about it in these terms en masse.

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> Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre lots and annual beach/ski vacations are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. The ones that don’t have this are unlucky to have ancestors who lost wars.

True, but from a resource utilization perspective those things are pretty wasteful. We could definitely meet somewhere in the middle, our options are not “everyone lives like kings and some are destitute” or “all live like kings”. The idea that anyone needs those things (or even deserves them more than anyone else) is the real enemy here.

I’d much be here today than a king say 500 years ago.

Not only do I have vastly longer life expectancy, the quality of life during which I’m alive is likely much better, both physically and spiritually, except the getting 100 servants part.

You probably have 100 servants if you think about it. Between automation and all the specialized services you use.

Just the average basic combination of smartphone in the pocket, microwave oven and small electric oven in the kitchen and electric heating in the home do the work of literally dozens of people 500 years ago. For a king to heat their castle at night (or anyone to heat their home) required hours of very hard work. Getting timely information of any kind would have required the same, and couriers, court philosophers and so forth, and to make a basic hot dinner was hours of work even for modest mealtimes.

> Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre [...] are not going to happen for all 8B+ people.

Why not? There are ~7.7 billion acres of arable land on the earth. 0.25 acres per person would leave ~5.7 billion acres of arable land for agriculture.

The population number grows.

At ever-decreasing rates as standard of living increases.

Mormons, Hasidic Jews, Hutterites, the Amish. These are all US communities that have had fertility rates well above average for generations. Those are all culture bound groups. Even if they were forcibly assimilated

> The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...

Mormons and Catholics still show a pattern of decreasing fertility in recent years; they just had higher fertility before so they are merely around the level that mainline Protestants were once at.

I agree that in the long run, the fertility trend will reverse itself. But in the medium term, it’s not an excuse for not fixing global poverty.

Because it’s not just the land but the infrastructure that makes that land “livable”.

Installing sewers and electrical grids and internet and roads and grocery stores etc. is more prohibitive than land, even if that land was available for sale

I would argue that more technology is going to make our current use of those resources a lot more efficient going forward. Solar panels can mostly remove the need for an electrical grid for most people. Internet via StarLink (soon) will remove the geographical need for that. Roads are non-negotiable, sure, but they're pretty inconsequential. Things like DoorDash and Amazon are going to drastically reduce the number of grocery stores per capita going forward, or at least curb new construction.

No offense intended but this seems very naive to me. It feels very much like the promise of nuclear energy creating “energy too cheap to meter” from 50 years ago.

Technology will definitely help but think about it this way: people who live in those dispersed areas will likely be there out of necessity, not choice. How many people in say, rural Appalachia, are currently using Door Dash to regularly get groceries or can rely on solar to be off the grid? Grocery delivery doesn’t help much when you’re over an hour away because it drives up cost and limits the types of goods available. Those solutions already exist from a technological standpoint but they aren’t causing people to move en masse to these locations despite housing shortages elsewhere.

I live in the ozarks, much like Appalachia. So I can answer those questions at least anecdotally.

Door dash: none. Nobody is using it, or am incredibly small number.

Solar off grid: a decent amount. It’s certainly doable. It’s easier to be on-grid, though.

Maybe DoorDash wasn't a good analogy. I volunteered on a CSA in high school (Greater STL area, so fairly close to you), and honestly that model is surprisingly feasible. Supply chains produce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, and the closer you are to your food production, the better it is for everybody involved.

If we are talking in absolutes, then no it probably won't reach everybody. However, the technology is becoming more and more practical to use, so its including a larger number of people as time goes on. Regardless, its a lot more practical than convincing billions of people to change their standards of living, especially in a country like America.

Because we’re changing our climate at an accelerating pace due to the energy used to move mass further and further distances (caused by less dense living).

The problem is much bigger than just transportation. The planet has been warming since the industrial revolution.

There are creatures that already live in that land. Are you seriously suggesting we just overrun the entire planet and turn it into suburbia as a solution to our problems?

Parent posters math is flawed. You can usually fit more than 1 person in a home and besides we can build apartment buildings up for 50 times the density with as nice an environment.

Think of all the areas of the world in which neither the winners nor the losers of the wars have the things you refer to. Your statement (a) is incorrect, and (b) reveals that you have a dangerous and unpleasant view of your homeland (You're American; I don't think there's any doubt about that!) as a land of prosperity that is somehow due to its military prowess.

Isn't it fairly well-established that the US has maintained its economic superiority for so long by NOT being bombed to hell like Europe after WWII and afterwards using military force to destabilize developing economies in south america, the middle east, etc etc.?

You're subtly changing the topic by saying economic superiority. If we go back to prosperity, there are many other prosperous countries than the US.

I'm no historian/economist/geographer, but isn't it sufficient to invoke having a huge empty continent with vegetation, climate and soil suitable for agriculture and human life activities in general, that only needed a bit of genocide to get rid of the low density previous occupants? N. hemisphere East-West wide continent and all that.

> It’s always been when resources are constrained.

What resource is that constrained today? Beach access? I don't think people would even think about a war over that.

BBC: Global resources stock check (2012)

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20120618-global-resources... (image: http://i.imgur.com/L5qWNN9.jpg)

Rainforests, coral reefs, coal, oil, gas, aluminium, phosphorus, tantalum, titanium, copper, siliver, indium, antimony.

According to that, we should be just about out of antimony by now. Yet somehow the market for drugs and batteries still seems to be humming along. 2/10 fear porn.

Even better is only 80 years for aluminum, the third most common mineral in Earth's crust, constituting 8% of its weight. What an absurd alarmism.

Even if we can't get more. It's not like we're using it in a nuclear reaction that turns aluminium into something else. The aluminium is still there.

Not to mention how incredibly recyclable it is. In the US alone aluminum is made from scrap >30% percent of the time [1].

[1]: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/aluminum-statistics-and-in... (click on an annual PDF).

And after 4 generations, less than 1% of the original material remains.

   percent remaining = 100 * (r^generations))

Where r is expressed as a decimal 0 <= r <=1.

Even at 90% recovery, over 90% of the original material is lost after 22 generations. The highest recycling rate of any material in the US is lead (mostly from auto batteries). The USGS reports that rate as ~70%, though this may be the amount of recycled material in new production.

Good to know that BBC thinks rainforests and coral reefs are non-renewable.

They are. If you kill a reef it’s gone for a really long time. And the rainforest needs time to grow back. What makes something renewable is that we take care to steward it. Forests in the US are renewable because the forest service surveys them and limits their uses so that they will continue to be available. In contrast the slash and burn agriculture that replaces the rain forest just consumes more land without replacement. The cattle farmers extract the resources from the soil and then move on. Nobody replaces the plant life they burned out. So it’s not a renewable resource in human time.

> Forests in the US are renewable because the forest service surveys them and limits their uses so that they will continue to be available.

Not really. More like we already cut them all down and it's easy to have sustainable use of young forests.

Also, the US Forest Service only manages national forests, and doesn't really focus on productivity.

An awful lot of forest land is managed by commercial foresters, with an eye towards maximizing the value extracted over long periods of time.

And then there is the management of small plots, which is also often done by commercial foresters, with an eye towards immediately extracting as much value as possible once they convince the landowner to let them do a cut.

As with cornavirus: if you're killing them off faster than they're reproducing, they're not.

And recovery of degraded habitats may take centuries or longer.

Extinction of species is forever.

That's not what non-renewable means.

That's precisely what it means.

Use at rates greater than formation or in a manner which will result in extinction of a resource is nonrenewable and unsustainable.

http://www.differencebetween.net/science/difference-between-...

But we're not actually running out of those resources though. They just end up in forms that are much more difficult to utilize (they cost more), but the elements are still there. With enough energy and need it can just be reused. We're just nowhere near the point of that being necessary.

Can you point me to the rainforest and coral reef mines?

More seriously,

> They just end up in forms that are much more difficult to utilize

Right. And as the costs of, say, energy rise, people use less of it. Which means less mobility, less heating or cooling, less plastic, quite possibly less medical care.

Which means a drastic lifestyle change for the nonrich advanced-economy participants, no joining them for most everyone in less advanced economies, and more authoritarianism, war and civil unrest for everyone while the, um, "adjustments" settle in.

But things are fine, sure.

Carbon and other emissions which alter the climate are one big example.

>> Dangerous because if people start believing this en masse, that prosperity is a zero-sum-game, then war is the only reasonable alternative.

> It’s always been when resources are constrained. For all forms of life.

The comment you're responding to is saying that resources aren't constrained; we're just not using them effectively. That's a political problem and it can be solved only when people believe it can be.

The amount of energy required to move x amount of mass is a math problem, not a political problem.

We’ve already seen what happens to the world’s ecosystem when a very small portion of the world’s population lives a comparably luxurious lifestyle, and unless a breakthrough in thermodynamics is achieved in very short order, I don’t see how it can scale to the whole world.

All those new jet setters, car driving commuters, and air conditioned homes aren’t going to come without consequence. I’m not aware of any technological breakthroughs that can enable us to use resources without heavily altering the ecosystem.

>The amount of energy required to move x amount of mass is a math problem

If the energy isn't lost to friction then most of it can be recovered. Although I think it's impractical, the Hyperloop concept is one way to reduce friction. Instead of increasing transport speeds beyond current air travel, it could be used at the same speeds but much lower energy cost.

Nuclear energy and solar power can/could solve most of the polluting energy problem and can work today. Increasing meat consumption and the need for more farmland to support it, I feel is a harder problem to solve.

Meat doesn't require farmland, it will be produced in ordinary factories in a few years.

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