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Comment by 7373737373 | Hacker News Reader

All life seems to expand until it runs out of resources. Unless we learn to manipulate atoms better (and could we even do it more efficiently than nature?), conflict seems to be inevitable.

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Making our current consumption more efficient won't help much; the existence of induced demand means that making consumption more efficient will just incentivize more consumption. What we need is less consumption, but when you try to tell people this the usual reaction is to wring their hands and tell you that such a thing is impossible, which is their way of tacitly admitting that they'd personally rather destroy the planet than reduce their own standard of living.

Why less consumption?

We are sitting on a huge ball of matter, and even consumption typically does not destroy any matter nor loses any to the void of space.

(The sun is a great source of energy. We also have nuclear fission and fusion, otherwise.)

> even consumption typically does not destroy any matter nor loses any to the void of space.

Yeah if you scale back to the universe nothing ever changes and nothing matters at all.

If you start looking at air/soil/water pollution (which is only a fraction of our problems) it's clear that our ways of life are far from ideal. But sure, the atoms are still all there, I don't think that's the part that matters tho

Induced demand applies to "free" resources. If you tax resource consumption it will go down overall.

Yep. The thing that keeps any particular form of life in check are predators. A large amount of plant growth promotes herbivore populations, which promotes carnivore populations. If carnivores or herbivores overeat, they crash their own food supply, causing their own population to decline due to food scarcity. Ecosystems reach a form of homeostasis this way.

Humans have eliminated anything even close to being their predator at any significant scale, except our own behaviour. As a result, we run the risk of exhausting our own food (read: resource) supply.

insufficient food or insufficient oxygen also do the job.

I'm assuming you include 'disease' as a predator (i.e. viral/bacterial/microscopic actors).

> except our own behaviour

Oh, well, no risk of that predator disappearing anytime soon, then...

Yes this is why humans must figure out how to keep themselves under control. If they don't then something else will do the job for us and we won't get a say.

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