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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Tell that to the whales.

Prior to 1700 there were estimated over 350,000 blue whales in the world's oceans. Now, only an estimated 25,000 remain.

Human-caused complete extinction is very common, particularly for megafauna. E.g. giant sloths in North America and most large animals in Australia went extinct within centuries or millenia of human settlement.

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Population management is a bit different. And while, yes whales are a tragedy, the paper in question is trying to make a point that running out of fixed resources will lead to economic collapse. Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with little felt economic pain.

Also, whales in particular are an interesting example, because the vast majority of them were slaughtered completely unnecessarily by the Soviet Union just to fulfill arbitrary production quotas: https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...

> Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with little felt economic pain.

I was reading GP's comment as not so much about whales as about the kind of thing that could happen to any flora or fauna, e.g. bees. Sooner or later we're going to deplete something that has unintended ecological and economic consequences.

Oh sure. But this isn't necessarily a new phenomenon: mammoths, the rainforests of Scotland, silphium.

But as a response to the paper, I just think it's a hard argument to make that there are specific material limits to economic growth.

It is a new phenomenon when the the thing that goes extinct is critical infrastructure (e.g., pollinators). We've seen similar things with the great potato famine: a critical resource went (temporarily) extinct due to blight, and the results were catastrophic. The paper is trying to make the same statement with minerals, but at a global scale, not just referring to the poor in one country in the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

map of population death toll:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/media/...

I'm not sure the potato famine is the best example, as a large part of the "famine" was due to British mismanagement/cruelty. The Brits kept exporting food from Ireland in spite of the famine, leaving the Irish to starve. Had they banned exports, like India is doing now for wheat, it likely would have been a historical footnote.

They also insisted nobody gift food to the Irish in excess of what the queen of England was giving them. Censored I think...Ottoman Empire's gifts this way. They had to maroon ships full of grain by accident, and tons of people sent food, like even Kenyans and Native Americans.

Ireland still hasn't repopulated. Still half its 19th century peak population roughly.

True, but is there a better analogy to a critical infrastructure failing that hard for that long?

USA took in nearly 200,000 tons of whales in 1858 alone, nearly all of it just to produce oil from the blubber, and the rest of the carcass was discarded. I'd say that was completely unnecessary as well.

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