Comment by tener | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tener | Hacker News Reader

This exercise of "if everyone/everything was like X" is very fallacious. There is no path that takes the current world we are living in all the way to this simulated reality that makes no sense. "If everyone were like Elon Musk..." reads like a start of a joke or a horror story, but never a feasible reality.

The truth is that, once resources become scarce, various optimization mechanisms kick in. For example, Israel produces a lot of food in the desert thanks to various water usage optimization techniques.

Human civilization uses a tiny percentage of the total energy delivered to Earth. This again is tiny percentage of power generated by Sun. There are abundant resources all around us that we simply need to learn how to effectively utilise. This is not sci-fi stuff, these are "merely" engineering problems.

The challenge is to get to that "post-scarcity" (or whatever you call it) future sustainably, without killing ourselves or making Earth a toxic hellhole. This requires cooperation, but you won't get that by going around and claiming falsehoods or persuading people with fallacies.

> There are abundant resources all around us that we simply need to learn how to effectively utilise. This is not sci-fi stuff, these are "merely" engineering problems.

I think the "we simply" is the least simple part of it all. We act as if everything is just a matter of time and engineering, but nothing assures that, and even if it does we're still running against time. This isn't a CIV game, we don't know if these hypothetical saving techs will ever exists.

It's pretty much all sci fi for now, and without intent it will still be sci fi. There is no law of the universe that guarantees what we call "progress" actually makes us move towards a better future. You can call it "tech progress", "engineering progress", "discoveries", the wording doesn't matter. Lead paint was progress, freon was progress, gas powered vehicles was progress, &c. Anything that's new is called progress and only decades later we can really assess what was beneficial or not. (cue electric personal vehicles)

In French we have an idiom: "fuite en avant"; "Not facing one's problems, running away from one's problems without solving them, or continuing a problematic action without considering its future consequences" and I feel like it can be applied to tech very easily, especially when the main technocrats argument is "we'll do more of X, Y, Z and eventually we'll find a solution"

I don't think the point is to describe a probable future where everyone lives like the Dutch. The whole point is that it wouldn't be possible.

It's just an easy to understand illustration of how our current civilization is largely resting on unsustainable foundations. Finding solutions to the engineering and societal challenges that you mention seems to be the goal of the project.

> The whole point is that it wouldn't be possible.

Why so?

Life needs energy, we can harness energy better to produce engineered food and desalt water.

I'm not referring to quality of life, but "living" in the broader sense including the enabling infrastructure and resource dependencies as they stand today.

ok but technological evolution follow the same curve. We would not be able to sustain current population with 1900 technologies. It's very strange to completely discard technology evolution in this equation.

if you harness too much of it, waste heat boils you off anyway.

I don't see the goals stated anywhere. I see solutions, but they have implied assumptions with an agenda. And how do you evaluate a particular solution against the alternatives without any goals or metrics?

I can definitely get behind some of the solutions they propose! But it is important to give a truthful rationale for these. Otherwise this is a slippery slope, like lying to your children about medicine because they will get better if they take it.

I stand by my assertion that the methodology they picked ("pick a subset of civilization, make a prediction as if everything was it") is fallacious. Imagine a sustainable, closed-loop civilization, satisfying all the goals you can dream of. It is inevitable that not every part of the system will be balanced when looked at in isolation. If you are allowed to cherry-pick a subset of that civilization and scale it arbitrarily, you are guaranteed to arrive at the same unreasonable conclusion as they give us.

To make it less abstract, let us consider nature itself. There are siberian tigers which eat 9 kg of food a day. This is a lot! If every animal were to eat that much, all animals would quickly starve. Clearly, nature is not sustainable!

The problem is that all tigers want steak, but only a fourth of them can afford it. That number is increasing as the tigers get richer in general. And the steak industry is ruining the world.

The price of steak will go up until demand equals supply.

(And there will be plenty of incentives to come up with cheaper steaks or steak alternatives.)

That's the thing though, this price is going up but is artifically lower than alternatives because external costs (e.g. greenhouse gasses emitted or water used) are not factored in the cost.

Just like you (presumably), I'm all in favour of water markets and emission taxes / cap-and-trade.

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