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Comment by gfaster | Hacker News Reader

Another way to make resources more abundant that sounds less like the start of a 1960s dystopian novel is simply using resources more efficiently.

So much of society in western nations and especially the US is seemingly optimized to be as wasteful as possible. We live in mansions surrounded by unused land so we have to drive our personal gas-burning suit of armor everywhere, and then we store it in fields of asphalt at our destination. We put resources subsidizing foods that no one will eat, and then ship them to people in ways that maximize the labor to goods transported ratio.

In the US at least, there really just isn't much motivation to be more efficient because the past couple of generations have been raised on perpetual abundance.

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It's a bit dystopian (if not wrong) to say that people will multiply until land is scarce, but to a large extent the problem is that cows and cars have multiplied until land is scarce. Removing/reducing those woudl go a long ways.

Cows are not making land scarce and cars could be said to increase the supply of land because they allow you to access more of it.

Cars are one of many ways to increase land supply and probably the least resource and fiscally efficient way to do it. If we want to make mobility and housing cheaper then we need to make these both more efficient. Car dependency is expensive, but changing it is one of the many things we need to do before we can become a post-scarcity society.

Cars suffer from the same problem as space rockets - the tyranny of the load/thrust equation.

For space rockets, the further you want to go, the more fuel you must carry, but all that fuel weighs something until burned, so you need yet more fuel just to launch the other fuel into space. So as your rocket's range increases, the needed fuel to reach that range grows at least polynomially.

For cars, having one enables you to drive to places... but those places need gas stations and parking. The more cars there are, the greater the proportion of land dedicated to roads, refueling and parking. But then there's less space for the places you'd actually want to go, pushing them further. And then you need more gas stations and parking to get that far. And then there's less space again. Repeat ad infinitum.

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