Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future | Hacker News Reader

Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

sciencedirect.com

151 pointse12e252 comments

I do think some of the concerns here are right on the nose

> What can be done to minimize the chances of colossal failure or sub-systemic breakdown, which in the worst case could threaten preservation of science and human knowledge?

It seems like the two extremes are degrowth and malthus on the one hand, and haughty denialist expansionism on the other. One is borderline eugenicist and denies billions of people of our american/european standard of living. The other is naive and stupid and ignores the fact that we humans are capable of wielding planetwide power.

The same strain of thinking that lets someone imagine himself as a tiny speck inconsequential to the cosmos, leads to denial that our species can affect the biosphere we live in. There’s a lack of context and of material security and of a culture of cultivating peace and mutual support.

I think there’s a middle ground which acknowledges our need for stewardship, for human-in-the-loop systems level thinking about how we can garden our planet into a sustainable system that is not only able to support us but also helps us to thrive and to enjoy in the miracle of existence.

We have to take stock of what we’re doing that isn’t working, and push for long term success in renewables, efficient human living, beauty in our proximate environments (not just faraway nature preserves). And we have to reckon with needing to mine huge amounts of materials in order to manufacture things like batteries and solar panels to make all this happen.

Ultimately I think we’ll continue to make progress in exactly these goals and it’s important to not lose hope, and to try to positively affect those around you (especially young folks, children are the future).

Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics? It has deeply immoral roots and has led to some of the most messed up scenarios in our history, but it is also a crazy powerful tool we have been unable to leverage in a non-evil way.

(This is kinda tangential but related) I have a weird theory about humanities purpose: Assuming someone/thing created life (if life wasn't created then it truly is random chaos and we have no purpose), but if life was intentionally made then we were created for a reason. Determining what that reason was will tell us what our purpose is. The only clue we have is evolution. If we can reverse engineer the mechanisms of evolution it should give us clues about why we are here. What is evolution driving us to become? If we can figure that out we might be able to deduce what our purpose is.

I feel like one of life's huge leaps forward, on par with single->multicellular, is recognizing that these evolutionary mechanisms exist, furthering our understanding of and leveraging them. Anyway that is a long ramble to say it sucks that we as a species cannot really touch any kind of eugenics without genociding eachother.

This is one of the wildest things I’ve read on the internet… this year?

Why does a lack of creative design mean human experience is meaningless?

Agree, thank you for being first to say it.

That humanity is _converging_ on some "intentional" optimal outcome is dramatically depressing to me in a way that i wasn't prepared to read today.

Now i don't know what's left or right, but insofar as my time here is concerned, let chaos blossom! Way more fun

Haha thanks

Well a lack of a creator means we invent our own purpose I suppose, and garner whatever ethereal meaning from that we can.

That just feels hollow to me. The idea that we are just biological machines serving the unfathomable aims of some sky daddy is unsettling but suits me better than our purpose being a bunch of lame platitudes about being kind or whatever.

but then sky daddy is the biological machine inventing his own purpose.

>Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics?

As the word is currently used, no, but mostly because it’s seemingly used to represent, in the public consciousness

> intentional genetic control we dislike

When we do things such as “screening for down syndrome” [1], we are already actively engaged in a eugenics project, but we don’t think of it as one because it’s the kind of intentional genetic control we like.

I expect many, many more “genetic controls we like” as medical and biological sciences advance, I think “eugenics” will always be viewed as a dead end.

[1] https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/womens-health/201...

> When we do things such as “screening for down syndrome” [1], we are already actively engaged in a eugenics project, but we don’t think of it as one because it’s the kind of intentional genetic control we like.

Historically, many cases of "eugenics" involved a lack of informed consent, even blatant coercion. That screening is entirely voluntary–you have the right to say "no", and I know couples who have (due to moral objections grounded in their religious beliefs). That's a very big difference.

Yes this! Eugenics is only when someone else decides it for you.

it's not encoded in law, but we do have a society where who can have many children is determined by economic factors that are not fully under ones control.

lack of economic ability is not the same as someone forcing you not to have children. And you can still have children even when facing economic hardship - lots of people have done it (think immigrant families who start out poor). I would also claim that a lot of western nations subsidize families already, so economic factors is not considered eugenics imho.

How would you feel about a free test for $genetic_marker coupled with taxes for parents that have children with $genetic_marker? Surely that would count as "forced"?

GP said that we do have a society right now where economics is a eugenic factor. Please name one instance of the pattern you described in society today. I'm not aware of any tax on generic markers.

In practically any country with socialized healthcare you will be strongly encouraged to terminate a child that might turn out unhealthy, and in a lot of them you will lose "benefits" (on which you depend because you were forced to pay mandatory social insurance before, taking away your ability to save/invest by yourself) if you don't listen/go to the doctors as "you are supposed to because that's the system". Where I live in Central Europe, going to the gynecologist and listening to their recommendations is a requirement to get full parental social benefits - and the policy most certainly is also based on what's economical for the state/"the system", and only parents that were previously working can get the benefits.

Additionally, you will have to pay the full price for any treatment that's outside their recommendations, this often turns out higher in absolute prices than in any US hospital - even though the people are much poorer.

Then once an unhealthy child is born they often don't get the full benefits of socialized healthcare as they should according to the constitutions, the administration will say "the system works in a different way and you went outside it, so you need to take care of it yourself" and the parents are forced to pay for treatments and medical equipment by themselves because what "the system recommends" is not nearly enough (we are talking about US$ millions of additional out-of-pocket expenses in some real world cases that I follow locally). That could be interpreted as a form of tax too, especially since you are forced to pay mandatory health insurance in most of these countries.

I think this is exactly the kind of revisionist history Faro's post was talking about. "that was eugenics, this is NUgenics"

Lack of informed consent was never central to eugenics

> That screening is entirely voluntary–you have the right to say "no"

The child doesn't, though, and, if you'll excuse my frankness, I think the abortion affects his/her future the most out of all the parties involved.

If you'll excuse my frankness, at the point of screening it's much more an idea of a child, than an actual he/she.

I see what you're saying, and appreciate you sharing that perspective.

We could say that before conception, everyone agrees there is no child, and at birth, everyone agrees there is a child, so there is maybe a "spectrum" between "idea of a child" and "an actual he/she".

Your use of the wording "much more" sort of supports this "probability distribution function" idea of what a child is, and it seems like a helpful philosophical framing of this difficult and important question.

What I would say, though, is that if society is going to pick a point along that spectrum to base policy decisions on, then there is an imbalance between the risks of placing that point too early versus too late.

Too early means that some women's decisions will be unreasonably restricted, whereas too late means that some human being's lives will be unreasonably terminated.

The philosophically humble thing to do under such uncertainty would therefore be to err on the side of an earlier point, and in fact the earliest point possible, lest future generations look back on us like the slave owners or eugenicists of previous centuries.

Let me tell you what our purpose is: consciousness. It's to have good conscious experiences.

I think we'll soon achieve a pretty good understanding of meaning that we haven't acknowledge in a long time. I think philosophy has been misleading us into thinking purpose/meaning/motivation is not philosophically tractable. But once you acknowledge it's a property of consciousness (which I think is understandable to be a new insight, given we have finally come to terms with being amazing neural machines ourselves), I think it's a matter of studying information and neural experiences, together with a broader view (of survival, sustainability, and ethics) to have a pretty good idea of what it means to have a good life.

My current hypothesis is as follows: (1) Richness/Depth of experience; (2) Some kind of notion of beauty; (3) A well-functioning motivation system (which we associate with 'happiness'/'satisfaction'/etc. (4) Sustainability and ethics: ensuring all sentient beings through time and space share this wealth.

I hope we can approach a formal theory of ethics and meaning soon. I hope to form a community around discussing and organizing this knowledge (I am notoriously bad with promises though, so if anyone can please help, and join in). Imagine we had a "Super Declaration of [Lifeform] Human Rights", nearly-universally accepted, to guide us! (I think Effective Altruism is a nice step in this direction)

I think we are like fish in a pond, we don't have the cognitive tools to understand complex enough ideas to determine our 'purpose.' Seen in this way, 'purpose' is simply a symbol that represents another cognition, so asking the question 'what is our purpose?' is essentially meaningless (like a circular definition). I have been influenced a lot by Taoism and Zen Buddhism in particular, where the focus is less on answers to questions, but contemplating the phenomena of the questions themselves.

You're absolutely right - purpose does presuppose another cognition. The good thing is that if we have purpose then there's Someone out there who created us with a purpose. And if that someone wanted us to know what it was, they could tell us in many ways (including by leaving us with a desire for something so innate that we can't substitute anything else for it).

I used to follow this logic but I think it is limited by the fact that using desire as a guide for meaning is a cognition that can be overruled by other congitions. E.g. a religious person may decide to forego actions related to sexual desire because their philosophy follows some theology with rules on sexuality. You could argue that the religious devotion is just a more fundamental desire, but I think this leads to a circular definition ("meaning is derived from our fundamental desires" and "fundamental desires are what we find meaningful").

Instead, "what is the meaning of life" can be interpreted as a question with no cognitive answer, and thus in itself meaningless to ask. The question must then be "what is my meaning in life?" which is up to each person to decide.

Another question: if we desire something, how do we know that _someone_ gave us that desire? And who gave them the desire to give us that particular desire? I think it's turtles all the way down (but I'm not philosopher so would be keen to hear a rebuttal)

I'm with Aristotle - "all men desire happiness". Nothing else is desired for its own sake, but always for the sake of "happiness".

That said, I don't think that knowing that happiness is what we desire tells us very much. We need to go deeper or wider and learn more about the world and ourselves in order to answer the question "in what does our happiness consist". In other words, we need to examine what we have received (since the world and even our selves are experienced as a gift).

Which, coincidentally, is one of the ways that we can intuit that someone gave us what we have - because the principle of sufficient reason says that "an effect must have a cause sufficient to explain it" and we are an effect. "If I am a gift receiver, there must be a gift giver, and as their gift is great they must be greater still to be able to give so much away".

I agree on the importance of exploration and introspection to find meaning.

However, your interpretation of existence as a 'gift' is simply your own cognition, unrelated to the reality of experience. The tail is wagging the dog here. The duality of giving and receiving are just two linked concepts. If 'you' didn't create the universe, 'someone' must have! But then who made them? The buck has to stop somewhere, or maybe it doesn't exist.

That's right, the buck _has_ to stop somewhere. What else might we discover about this uncaused cause?

> If we can reverse engineer the mechanisms of evolution

Evolution is a very simple process, broadly speaking. You can implement your own model of it fairly easily. Survival is basically the only driving force, only those variations that survive to reproduce will be present in the next generation. It's a useful tool but we shouldn't let it guide us since it is quite blind.

> What is evolution driving us to become?

There is no destination for the evolutionary process. It's creation by subtraction really, everything that doesn't work gets eliminated. Mind you, it's always only applicable to the current circumstances. What works in one time and place will not always work in another. Hence the constant change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm

In my opinion the issue with the balance here is that no matter where you fall on the "climate scale belief" (except probably the most extreme of deniers), people consider anyone that thinks a better future than you is coming will be labelled a denier, while anyone who thinks a worse future than you think is coming is given a soft pass as just having stronger convictions. That unfortunately leaves the vast majority of people being labelled as deniers from people with stronger beliefs, no matter where you fall.

I think the vast majority of people today do know that climate change is coming, that we are changing the weather at a global scale, etc. Actual true deniers that say human have no effect in global climate, IMHO, are so few that they are not even worth mentioning besides anecdote (at a similar level to flat-earth believers).

The issue then becomes, what level of climate change vs what level of sacrifice are we willing to accept? It seems clear that even with this question there are extremes that are likely unwanted, and there's probably another distribution going from two extremes: do absolutely nothing now and people will die later due to climate change, and the other extreme is sacrificing the prosperity of developed and developing countries now (which means people will continue dying at a rate too high) and have a minimal climate change effect later.

Both extremes are too extreme and seem wrong, and somewhere in the middle seems like the obvious, correct solution, but where exactly in the middle is the important question that not many people seem to be talking about and baffles me.

The choice isn't even starting from the middle of the spectrum. We already have the foot on the accelerator, and it's unlikely we'll let up with our current generation of leaders. I think we'll continue to pollute at a rate far too great for the planet to handle, and we're going to have to get very good at remediation to continue living here.

It will only be once the next generation of leaders comes into power, maybe even the generation after that, as they will be living the climate reality enough to want to fix it (whichever level of severity it ends up being). At which point we'll be needing to focus on remediation still, before finally, hopefully, creating some kind of sustainable version of our current societies.

>I think we'll continue to pollute at a rate far too great for the planet to handle, and we're going to have to get very good at remediation to continue living here.

The planet will do fine, but even stating such a thing is still commit anthropomorphism. The planet will continue to exist for a long time, no matter what the fate of mankind will be.

Even life is most likely to continue prospering in a way or in an other.

We, the human species, are not the planet. Let’s stop to use formulation like "the planet is in danger". No it’s not. The biosphere already went through five major extinction, and life is still there.

When people worry about nuclear war, do you also console them that the cockroaches will likely live on?

You're absolutely right, the planet is in no danger. It's us humans that are in danger. We are polluting at a rate far too great for us humans to handle, and if we want to survive as a species we must do something about that.

Even that is gross hyperbole. Humans as species could survive even the most disastrous predictions, rendering entire continents uninhabited.

The top level post is correct. It is a matter of minimizing suffering.

Which will have to be through remediation... I never said the world was coming to an end. I said we aren't likely to stop polluting, so we should get really good at remediating what we will have wrought.

Sure, it would be a good idea to do something. I'm just calling out "if we want to survive as a species we must do something about that“ as hyperbolic. This is a point made in thread you are responding in

The rocks will be ecstatic to hear this news.

Humans aren't the only species evolved to live in this particular climate, and we won't be the only species impacted by an extreme outcome of climate change. Long term, of course, the planet will survive, and hopefully many species will thrive in our absence. But many will go extinct, and it will have been our fault. On a long enough time scale, sure, nothing matters really, the sun will explode and all our flyer campagins will have been for nothing. But we experience a much smaller timescale, and it'd be great if we gave some thought to not boiling the reefs and setting fire to the koalas while we're here.

> Actual true deniers that say human have no effect in global climate, IMHO, are so few that they are not even worth mentioning.

I'm not sure this is true, but even if it is, I think it's only become true recently.

It's getting harder to deny climate change lately because it's more obvious every year that the climate is changing. It's noticeably hotter and drier in the UK every year than it used to be. Hell, I'm standing at a bus stop as I write this at 9am and I'm only wearing a light jacket. I'm pretty sure that would be unusually warm for a September morning ten years ago, but the whole month has been like this in 2022.

I don't hear people saying "climate change isn't happening" much anymore - the more common sentiment now seems to be a shrug. "It can't be that bad, can it? Or at least the really bad stuff won't happen until at least a few decades after I'm dead? I'm sure we'll figure something out - technology keeps getting better so humans will probably solve this problem. And anyway there's not like I can do anything about it personally so I might as well just enjoy the weather." That's the prevailing attitude now, I think.

Yes, I believe it's a fairly recent change! I would think there were many more actual deniers 10-20 years ago, but today it seems we label people as deniers much easier (as you say "it can't be that bad" would be labelled as a denier today).

The problem is that _any_ action is criticized as sacrificing prosperity, even though it often just sacrifices the prosperity of a small number of people.

That's the problem of democracy - if it's only those who have to sacrifice who are voting in that particular governing entity, it's never ever going to pass.

That doesn't seem like a problem - that seems like a feature. Maybe "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" just stuck with me, but a just society doesn't sacrifice the prosperity of a few for the "greater good".

"Justice" is difficult enough to define that many books have been written about the topic. Personally I don't find it just to let a small number of individuals transfer wealth from future generations to their current self.

> but a just society doesn't sacrifice the prosperity of a few for the "greater good".

We fought a war to end slavery. A small number of prosperous people were severely inconvenienced by society enacting that greater good.

That small group of people is in fact connected to the rest of the world's population by a chain of progress that eventually leads everyone through the same level of prosperity. By turning the head and thus the direction of progress downwards you are committing the rest of the population to at the very least never achieving any level of prosperity greater than that. In the middle you're dooming them to stagnation at their current level and at the worst you're causing all of us to regress to a lower level of prosperity AND an increase in our impact on the climate due to the inefficiencies that come along with that.

Suppose we were in 1890 discussing how we need to get rid of horse manure in our cities and there were a hot debate on how this "horseless carriage" thing is highly experimental and threatens the livelihood of a whole supply chain around horses. As it turns out, you can get rid of manure and it does in fact make a lot of people poorer, but in the end it enables a lot more prosperity for future generations.

The big difference here is that horses were nearly exclusively used for transportation. Fossil fuels currently provide something like 80% of all the energy used. So if you want your analogy to be accurate then you'd have to be back in 1890 saying "Ok, we're going to get rid of horses AND fossil fuels".

Personally, I do think that burning oil derivatives is a waste and I would like to see it replaced where possible with a superior energy source but the only source that fits the bill for me is nuclear and the only responsible way to do it is to build the new power plants first and then phase out the old fossil fuel plants.

So we should pay now to have nuclear power in the future? Impossible, this lowers our prosperity! /s

Investment is not the same as sacrifice. Sacrifice means to destroy something for the sake of something else. When you say we should sacrifice the prosperity of a few for the good of the many (paraphrasing, this is what I interpreted your original comment to mean) then that implies we permanently reduce the prosperity of some group of people. Spending money to build more nuclear power plants is instead a productive use of that time/effort/money that will return on that investment if not with dividends from the sale of the power then with increased productivity and economic output made possible by a larger energy supply.

We know that nuclear power works, it's capable of producing massive amounts of electricity and powering whole countries anywhere we are able to build plants, output doesn't vary based on forces that are outside of our control, uranium is abundant and there are hundreds of years of estimated reserves in the ground. That is a plain and simple case for it to be a bridge to a future where we can produce excess and uninterrupted power using solar, preferably space based arrays that don't use up land, won't be affected by weather and produce power at night. Even better, it might be a bridge to fusion power, having more nuclear physicists and technicians around would surely speed up progress.

I'm averse to reducing prosperity for anyone because it has a very non-zero chance of us never recovering to a position where we can continue to increase prosperity for all. Put plainly, creating energy poverty in the West has a good chance of knocking us into a dark age where little to no progress is made and even regression may happen which, to your concern, would increase CO2 output and worsen climatic effects.

There's a big overlap here with COVID thinking. At the end of the day, people are OK with other people dying. And really, how could we not be? It happens every day. Particularly when the hardest hit people will be in other (poorer) countries, it just feels less meaningful to those who will likely fare better.

Yes, unfortunately for as harsh as it sounds for anything at human-scale that inherently has some live-threatening risk, the ideal design is pretty much never 0-deaths. Anything I can think of: driving cars, sports, almost any job, etc. would need massive restrictions, to the point of those actions not making sense anymore, to reduce death risk to 0. So while sure, trying to reduce unnecessary risk, there's always a minimal amount of risk we are okay with.

I don't see de-growth as an extreme option, in fact it is the only outcome possible in the long term, either in a planned manner, or through collapse.

In terms of denialists, I am afraid that actually the majority of people are overwhelmed by the huge issues we are facing, and just think we should enjoy life and forget about any responsibility.

I don't want to lose hope, but as things are now, I am afraid that we are far more likely to face collapse than to find a solution.

What do we mean with de-growth here? Human world population? Energy-consumption per human? long-lasting-non-recyclable-waste per human? Mankind GDP? Wealth distribution discrepancy?

On collapse, the only serious book I red was Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed".

I mean mostly GDP (yes economists, I am looking at you), but, alas, all these dimensions are linked.

I guess that decoupling is possible to some extent. I don't want to lose the hope that we can live happy lives without destroying the planet (or ourselves), but we need a very bold strategy, and I haven't seen any yet.

GDP is not something that happens in an economist's office.

This is another issue witha clear age divide.

Younger generation is overwhelmingly aware of the problem, but our decisiojn makers have an average age of 70 or some such. Older voters hold more power too. Brexit was overwhelmingly voted for by older people.

The west is in crisis because the young peiple are getting shafted at every step, from the housing market to the environment.

I love my grandparents, but I would never put them in a position of power - they just aren't as sharp and switched on as they used to be

Edit: for people downvoting, look at how age of politicians has increased in US. Look at how politics has become more disfunctional. The change is real

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/06/congre...

Also when they were young there was just roughly half the people on this planet comparing to today and even fewer enjoying a western standard of living.

I remember when the Chinese were known for cycling to work en masse. Now they're the largest automobile market in the world.

Old people can't imagine what it's like to grow up in such a world.

Sorry I am commenting in a hurry, but I just have to say... Our way of living - is not a desirable standard. Your mileage may vary, you may be "making it" - but most people aren't. We find reasons to be thankful, but most people are lonely, insecure, unfulfilled and comforting with junk food or media, 'retail therapy' or drugs. Most adults are 'feeling their age', unfit or overweight, medicating. Surrounded by and even consuming materials untested by natural history, that may be contributing to rises in autoimmune and cancer. Some goods are in relative abundance, but also overall as many ills.

Similar things were predicted in the 70s but new sources of energy and improvements in productivity invalidated those predictions. Obviously at some point limits will kick in (unless we can expand to other planets) but what to do about that is more of a political question than a scientific one. I personally think it is more appealing to attempt expanding the limits, as we've done in the past, than to pre-emptively adopt austerity measures to live within estimated limits.

Would law of physics kick in ? If it takes thousands of years to produce oil/gas/coal, and months to extract and consume it... then what political solution do have ? My concern is that we might hit an energy crisis (Russia/Ukraine is just the tip of the iceberg). We need oil/gas/coal for everything around us (clothes, transportation, heat, cement, iron, energy). For energy we could use nuclear for baseline, and some renewable. For iron, we could use hydrogen instead of coal (see above for energy) For cement, we could electricity (see above for energy) For heat we could use electricity (and better insulation) (see above for energy) For transportation we could use electricity for ground transportation (trains, trucks, cars, light mobility) and keep the planes on oil, hydrogen, etc. For clothes... well we could use the rest of oil left.

Our needs in energy are growing, and the reserve or oil/gas/coal is finite and even if there are still a lot available, it might be a long tail and so too expensive to extract. We might need to plan for a shortage (or too expensive) oil/gas/coal. Renewable is nice, but the amount of energy needed to replace oil/gas/coal is just massive, we cannot produce and install renewable fast enough. We need hundreds more nuclear reactors, just for US alone. This is likely a national security question. In that sense it is a political question based on physic emergency.

and as far as I read nuclear fuel isn't endless either...

"The fission of 1 g of uranium or plutonium per day liberates about 1 MW. This is the energy equivalent of 3 tons of coal or about 600 gallons of fuel oil per day, which when burned produces approximately 1/4 tonne of carbon dioxide." https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/14/1.html

Uranium is everywhere, enriching (separate 235 from 238) is a mechanical process (no chemistry involved).

"Uranium is a naturally occurring element with an average concentration of 2.8 parts per million in the Earth's crust. Traces of it occur almost everywhere. It is more abundant than gold, silver or mercury, about the same as tin and slightly less abundant than cobalt, lead or molybdenum." https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

And its "combustion" is carbon free. Nuclear power plants works exactly like coal or gas ones. A big boiler. Water is used to "slow" the neutrons to keep the reaction going, and also use to transport the heat.

Nuclear technology and engineering is quite impressive.

Electricity can be turned into gas. People do not need to live like US suburbanites. As fossil fuels deplete, this will happen automatically, through the price mechanism. That said, fossil fuels are nowhere near to depletion and may well last for centuries.

> That said, fossil fuels are nowhere near to depletion and may well last for centuries.

They ARE getting more expensive (see U.S shale oil in the last decade) because the best spots are always mined first. Once gone you have to dig deeper and harder and use increasingly more complex and expensive methods to extract it. At some point you will get negative return on energy - so even if it is there it will be wasteful to extract.

> They ARE getting more expensive

Good.

To give a recent estimate[0], here's what McKinsey (the big management consultancy) has to say:

> Global fossil-fuels demand is projected to peak between 2023–2025, accounting for a dwindling share of energy use, with oil production dropping by 55 percent and gas production by 70 percent in 2050

You're right that fossil fuels won't be depleted, and they will still be burnt long after their peak, but I don't imagine fossil fuels being extracted at scale next century.

[0] https://www.forestvalley.org/for-companies

We can all try consuming less. I'm hoping the market will have to correct us all out of sheer shortage. E.g gas for the car, meat and flight will get too expensive for many people. At some point it will probably happen I'm just hoping we'll get there while we can still correct our future.

Is meat, a car and cheap holidays worth destroying the planet and ravaging through the precious resources we have left? Very doubtful. We can use trains, eat more beans/soy and go to nearest beach/mountain where we live.

> Similar things were predicted in the 70s but new sources of energy and improvements in productivity invalidated those predictions.

ok, cool. So you've identified the limits (energy and productivity).

Are you sure productivity has grown? Is this growth sustainable?

For example, agriculture. Highly dependent on rapidly disappearing resources Like i.e. dirt. If you look at erosion rates in the US, we are on track to run out of soil by end of century. The petro-chemical fueled "green revolution" exhausts and kills biodiversity, leading to soil death in a century-- and we are 50 years into this. Water. See "US Drought Monitor".

So have we really achieved long-term (> 100 year) productivity improvements in agriculture?

> The petro-chemical fueled "green revolution" exhausts and kills biodiversity, leading to soil death in a century

Interesting. Is this version of Capitalism better described ad Vandalism?

> For example, agriculture.

I suppose this is not only an example, but probably the most critical type of productivity when determining how big of a population our planet can sustain.

> So have we really achieved long-term (> 100 year) productivity improvements in agriculture?

If you look back over the past 100 years we definitely have. If you look back over the past 60 years, yields of modern agriculture have tripled. Looking forward will always be speculation.

> For example, agriculture. Highly dependent on rapidly disappearing resources Like i.e. dirt.

I'm not disputing that such effects are going on in many places. Still, for productivity not only slow down but to actually go down, you need pretty strong effect sizes for such issues.

> Water. See "US Drought Monitor".

This is a factor that is harder to compensate for by fertilizers and modifications to farming practices. And some locations (possibly the US and even more likely, China) may be hit by this. As temperatures rise, more water is likely to evaporate from the world's oceans, though, and it has to come down somewhere. But that may be elsewhere, such as Central Asia, Canada or the Middle East.

I think part of the issue is how willing we are to increase our energy production. In dry, warm climates, solar is likelty to become quite cheap eventually. In other locations, I believe nuclear is our best bet (though wind is maybe more popular with many). If we're able to produce enough energy, we can produce most of the phosphates, nitrates and even de-salinated water that is needed for farming.

Personally I have relatively high faith that human ingenuity will provide technological answers to most such problems caused by our environment. I have way greater fear that war or similar conflicts may cause us to exterminate each other, or even that some day, AI will take over completely.

> I have way greater fear that war or similar conflicts may cause us to exterminate each other, or even that some day, AI will take over completely.

It's not like the energy/resource crunch is a totally separate problem to war. Together with climate change it is only going to increase the likelihood for war. It's kinda already happening in the the Middle East / Africa (I'm saying kinda because it's not the only reason for war...people are messed up...but it's not helping).

> If we're able to produce enough energy, we can produce most of the phosphates, nitrates

That's a big if yes? And even if, is the whole supply chain for modern agriculture sustainable? Are all fertilizers and material used renewable or are they coming out of finite earth resources? If it's finite - how long have we got? I'm not claiming to have all the answers but I just started looking at everything through this lens a few months ago ...and it's not going away.

> Are all fertilizers and material used renewable or are they coming out of finite earth resources?

Nitrogen is about 75% of the earth's atmosphere and potassium and phosphorus make up 2.6 and 0.1% of the Earth's crust, so we have plenty of all of them. To turn them into most of the common fertilizers, we need energy (and water, which is plentiful for this purpose).

And atoms don't go away (with the exception of atoms used for nuclear power). All we do is to recombine them. Some of these recombinations release energy (burning fuels) while some require energy as input.

Some elements may be very rare and difficult to extract (from sea water, for instance) except when found in deposits of high consentration. But first of all, N, P and K are not among those, and for those who are, extracting them from other sources simply means more energy is needed.

>> > If we're able to produce enough energy,

> That's a big if yes?

There is enough uranium on earth to cover our energy needs for a very long time. Way before that happens, we should be able to use Thorium or fusion. In addition, there are massive amounts of solar energy that goes untapped. The main limitation, even now, is human labor, and the fact that other sources of energy require less effort to leverage.

> It's not like the energy/resource crunch is a totally separate problem to war.

Not completely separate, but it is also not the case that war is a deterministic result of problems surrounding energy and resources. Even if we never expierience severe problems with energy and resoures, war is still possible, simply because some old man wants to be seen as a "great man" before he dies. Conversely, it is quite possible to navigate challenges with resources without war, by learning to co-exist peacefully.

Also, there is a third element, namely human and cultural capital. One indicator of this is the "workforce participation rate". One challenge of long lasting prosperity, is that an increasing percentage of the population stop contributing to the economy. Partly because of increased life spans, partly because they have personal savings that allow them to retire and partly because the system may collect inefficiencies and forms of corruption over time. (Just to list a few).

Some fraction of the population has the ability to be immensly productive, due to factors such as education, talent, opportunity, motivation, dedication and luck. Others are only marginally productive, while some will produce a lot less than they consume.

Generally, the relative frequencies of these groups is a much bigger influence on the affluence of a society than the availability of natural resources. This is linked to the fact that the production and optimal utilization of energy is primarily limited by (qualified) human labor, as stated above.

Nitrogen is only one ingredient, what about the others phosporus and potassium? If it was so readily available why did the war in the Ukraine affect the fertilizers market? Also what about soil degradation...? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus In the top 5 phosphorus producers are China, Russia, Morocco and Jordan. Sounds super stable.

> Way before that happens, we should be able to use Thorium or fusion.

I hope we can but it's not a given and no one knows the likelihood. Bigger VC investments are finally being poured into energy but nuclear fission and fusion are not new concepts - we haven't been able to do anything with them at scale yet.

> Nitrogen is only one ingredient, what about the others phosporus and potassium?

I did cover that, above.

> If it was so readily available why did the war in the Ukraine affect the fertilizers market?

Primarily because the most popular chemical processes for creating ammonium is to use natural gas to bind the nitrogen. (It carries the hydrogen needed as well as the energy, and is cheap when natural gas is cheap.)

But if you don't have natural gas, you can take the hydrogen from somewhere else (like water) as long as you have the energy needed.

> I hope we can but it's not a given and no one knows the likelihood. Bigger VC investments are finally being poured into energy but nuclear fission and fusion are not new concepts - we haven't been able to do anything with them at scale yet.

If we're willing to use uranium, we have enough energy there for a few hundred years (even if extracting it gets somewhat more expensive over time, it will take a while before the fuel becomes more expensive than hydrocarbons). And let's say we use 40/40/20 solar/uranium/other renewables, we can double that or more.

I'm pretty confident we will be able to leverage some other energy source before that time.

A key insight into agriculture is that the main reason we spread our farms out over massive areas of land is because it is simply more economical. If you think about it from first principles, farming outdoors has major flaws the biggest of which is seasonality. Most crops mature in a handful of months but must be grown only at specific times of the year in order to maximize yield. Doing this out in the open puts you at the mercy of nature. Besides the limited growing season you also have to deal with losses due to weather, pests, competing plants (weeds), and other local conditions like drought or soil quality. The only reason we do it is because it's cheap. It requires less initial cost to set up and less energy input.

If you were to redesign the process you could conceivably build massive greenhouses to control conditions. If you had surplus energy you could also actively heat, cool and light these greenhouses. From a quick look, greenhouse conditions can produce 15 times more yield per acre. They reduce wastage by a comparably large amount as well since half of produce is thrown away due to cosmetic blemishes. They would also drastically reduce the amount of fertilizer and pesticide needed. I think you could drive yields even higher with round the clock lighting, studies as well as practical experience from farmers in northern territories have shown that longer daylight hours allow plants to mature much more rapidly.

An ideal farming setup to me would look like hectares of greenhouses located next to a nuclear power plant that can provide heated water for keeping them warm and cheap power for cooling and lighting.

I petition that the most pertinent predictions from the 70s came with works such as 'Future shock': there is "too much change in too short a period of time" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock ) and the "small is beautiful" motto, which were inherited from a more generic analysis published by L. Kohr ~20 years before ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy )

In a few words: there is too much of everything (size, density, speed, frequency...): no human group can anymore understand the current state of affairs quickly and correctly enough to be able to predict and therefore to plan adequately.

In such a light the PLAN proposed by the authors may difficult to pursue.

I think the authors do a disservice to their cause with the inclusion of judgmental, emotional rhetoric such as sentences like: “ From this perspective, it seems likely that future generations will label the past two centuries as the Fossil Fuel Age rather than the Industrial Revolution—emphasizing the critical importance of a now-depleted resource over a self-flattering celebration of human innovation”

It suggests they’re not looking at all options to solve our problems, and that there is a moral imperative to support a de-growth ideology.

Care to elaborate the options?

More importantly, it shows that they've been taken in by the Billions spent on propaganda to convince people that fossil fuels are necessary for modern society, and not an inefficient and polluting tech that we should be glad to move beyond with better alternatives.

That sentence is factualy accurate.

If you are not comfortable with that, it suggest you are engaging in double think.

Basically doing the same thing Russia does when it calls a war 'special operation'.

Basic premice is solid, after all we don't look kindly at the medieval peasants that pointlessly died of the plague because they didn't know to wash their hands. Or chopped down all forests in UK to build wooden ships to fight China and force them to accept Opium trade

Yeah but we don't call it the Deforestation Age or the Plague Age, and most people don't center those concerns when talking about the past.

Re plague, the one thing that could be argued actually comes to mind when considering the middle ages, those waves of disease killed ~ half the population. To compete, climate change would have to kill several billion people. I think it's fair to call that alarmist.

Lets imagine your are right.

So if you go to a person on the street, and ask them: "are you happy to live through something like the black death, but slighly better"? and the responce is gonna be "yeah, that's fine. We should not take action to prevent that"

Can you imagine the devastation it left behind?

Also the problem with the comparison is that the plague is finished withing a decade once everyone has immunity or dies. On the other hand clinate change is forever.

And if it induces drounght, crop failures and famine, it could kill hundreds of millions, maybe two billion - and then it would be worse

> So if you go to a person on the street, and ask them: "are you happy to live through something like the black death, but slighly better"? and the responce is gonna be "yeah, that's fine. We should not take action to prevent that"

It's not on the same scale, but 7 million people have just died to a pandemic and there is certainly no universal agreement that massive restrictions were appropriate to prevent that. So while the black death probably provides an upper bound, COVID provides a lower bound. Somewhere between, people will have a breaking point - but nobody was proposing "to solve COVID we need to roll back the industrial revolution and slash world population." I think we're agreed that would have been excessive? Let's say the measures for COVID, which significantly restricted civil liberties for two years, were a hundredth of that level; well, the deaths were a hundredth of the Black Death. It's certainly not obvious to me, at least, that the remedy isn't worse than the disease (pun not intended).

> And if it induces drounght, crop failures and famine, it could kill hundreds of millions, maybe two billion - and then it would be worse

I don't know, seems a stretch. You're kind of bridging an OOM here with great ease. :) I don't think it's plausible at this point to speculate that climate change will even reduce the food production capability of the world at all. It will certainly make the equator much harder to inhabit and create massive migrations; I think that's already dire enough, honestly. To be clear, I think it should be stopped. Just not at any price. I think spending an appreciable fraction of GDP on climate change mitigation and compensation while massively stepping up renewables is reasonable, abolishing capitalism and imposing birth restrictions, for instance, is not.

It feels a bit like some people here are only interested in climate change insofar as it provides a justification for enacting their preferred policies.

> I don't think it's plausible at this point to speculate that climate change will even reduce the food production capability of the world at all

You are creating the impression you have not read anything on the subject at all

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/climate-c...

I agree that it's likely for climate change to cause harvest failures in existing crop regions.

It's a fact though, the only emotional people here are the ones who feel threatened by such remarks

This kind of Malthusian thinking has a horrible track record. Imagine if we drastically altered the course of technological progress every time a cabal of "experts" declares that we're going to destroy the planet.

I'm not arguing that we should be reckless with the environment, but there are massive existential risks to humanity with this kind of self-limiting belief system. It's not obvious that one side of the argument is right.

If we even slowed down to linear growth from our current exponential path, life on Earth would probably suck within a generation.

This whole paper is lazy, panic-ridden grift. Why lazy? Because it's core thesis is that fossil fuels are a natural constraint... The word "nuclear" does not appear a single time in the entire paper!

We have more than enough carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen on this earth to do incredible things given an energy source. It's time to stop dooming and start exploring.

Also, fuck Mars. Why not try to make the desert liveable?

The clouds of Venus, 50km above the surface, also seem like a neat place to colonize. (relatively speaking)

The Gobi desert and the bottom of the ocean are far more hospitable for human colonization than anywhere off-planet (not to mention far, far cheaper and more energy-efficient)

I agree. We spending ridcolous amount of money and fuel to colonizing Mars/space but at same time we are not able to feed millions starving children on our planet.

Instead of panicking we should change our politics, that seems to me, is pathological in many ways. Our planet have enough space and energy sources. For example in Russia there is a lot of inhabited places with great weather conditions to live, but it is politics who makes those places terrible to live in.

Nuclear energy is incredible source of energy and waste could be shoot out into space?

Alarmism that predict inevitable collapse of our planet and blaming individuals as a source of those problems is hypocrisy. Individual will never damage environment as corporates driven by lobby and politics.

> I agree. We spending ridcolous amount of money and fuel to colonizing Mars/space but at same time we are not able to feed millions starving children on our planet.

And yet, in the very next sentence you contradict your own point (and rightly so): One is almost exclusively a technological problem, the other is almost exclusively a political problem. In nearly all cases, the reasons for a nation being underdeveloped are a mix of internal and external politics, and we still haven't figured out how to help them without making things worse in the long term. That's why it won't make one bit of a difference to them if we colonize Mars or not.

Energy source constraints are not the only ones that exist. We also extract many other things from the planet and transform them into other things that we use. These extractions/transformations are also very problematic, and subject to strong constraints. Examples:

* The clearing of forests for farmland for the ever increasing population and increased (unneeded) calorie consumption per person destroys ecosystems, and kills species.

* The growing of massive amounts of food extracts micronutrients from the soil, and these not replaced. This destroys the health of future generations.

* Cement and concrete are made by naturally occurring rocks and minerals, and these are also fast depleting. Mining for more difficult sources also result in pollution and destruction of ecosystems. Pollution also negatively impacts the health of current and future generations, and concrete cities destroy ecosystems.

* Plastics are made from fossil fuels. They break down into microplastics, and leach toxic chemicals into our food and water supplies.

All of these examples involve negative externalities shared by everyone in the world. All of these examples stem from fast and continued growth.

Yep. And energy constraints still exist unless some major breakthrough happens, nuclear is a temporary solution because it is non renewable (see my comment above).

What if we didn't have to use inorganic materials...

> Also, fuck Mars. Why not try to make the desert liveable?

Because it's too easy to get to the desert

Nuclear energy is expensive, tricky to get right and constrained by Uranium. We have about 230 years at today's consumption rate left. Sounds like a lot but today's consumption isn't much...many countries barely use nuclear. So imagine what happens if we need to increase nuclear by 10x ...oops now we have 20 years worth of Uranium left.

Also while not an expert on mining I do know that the best spots are mined first, meaning as/if we grow the dependency on Uranium it will only get more expensive to mine it in the coming decades.

Hey we're alright for now don't get me wrong. But 30-50 years from now it will keep getting harder and harder to sustain us unless we make some impressive breakthroughs that no one can tell are gonna happen.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo....

It looks like you stopped reading.

> Further exploration and improvements in extraction technology are likely to at least double this estimate over time

It also looks like you've forgotten about thorium, and geothermal, and solar...

My point is that the article is tremendously lazy.

I'm all for nuclear just lets keep in mind it's non renewable, expensive and tricky to get right. As for thorium I'm no expert but I assume you mean nuclear fission which is not a new concept and totally speculative at the moment is it was in the last 50 years. I really really hope there's a breakthrough soon that can be scaled cheaply. Solar and wind are very good but are built and maintained with fossil fuels and can't produce enough heat for heavy industrial processes like construction materials etc. We should totally go for them but they are a partial solution for a problem that might be unsolvable if we keep growing are energy consumption. I can't see why people resist the notion we need to bring energy consumption down.

That's the third post in the line of saying that this is still a far fetched or just far away maybe assumption - which is mind boggling to me because it is jot a cabal of experts but basically science agrees we are very much on the edge (time horizon is uncertain in relation to a human life, but in regard to earths age too close to the edge..) to do that right now?

And even if we'd had the time, our resources are finite, if we could do better (=sustainable for me) right now, why wait and sit on the lazy path and hope for future technological advances?

> has a horrible track record

care to elaborate ?

> Imagine if we drastically altered the course of technological progress every time a cabal of "experts" declares that we're going to destroy the planet.

Yeah imagine if we did that when petrol producers had internal reports about how much we'd fuck the planet in 50 years. Imagine not entering this era of crazy pollution, unsustainability and war, imagine working on alternative energy sources earlier instead of being under the influence of lobbies, the absolute horror

It made me think of that HN thread from a few weeks ago, people where boasting about their LIDAR enabled autonomous vacuum cleaners, if we stopped making these kinds of useless gadgets the world would suck within a generation ? I think the west grew weak, decades of unsustainable "growth" made their lifestyle degenerate in some kind of "convenience above all" lifestyle, their life is threatened if you take away their daily latte macchiato and their 4k oled tv. Some people really believe that if their amazon same day toilet paper delivery was to disappear the world would crash and burn in a single generation ?

We collectively completely lost our minds, go talk to your grandparents, ask them how life was when their fridge wasn't bluetooth enabled and connected to their apple watch...

There are no resource limits, only limits to the creativity of people to create explanations that allow us to transform raw materials from one state to another.

See The Beginning of Infinity by Deutsch and More From Less by McAfee.

This is false. There are resource limits, unfortunately (I guess?). Thermodynamics is a hard limit. There are many soft limits as well. Please look at this paper for an incredibly well researched physics-based review: (to appear in Nature Physics) https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pd...

Excerpt:

> At present, the waste heat term is about four orders of magnitude smaller than the solar term. But at a growth factor of ten per century, they would reach parity in roughly 400 years. Indeed, the surface temperature of Earth would reach the boiling point of water (373 K) in just over 400 years under this relentless prescription. Clearly, extrapolating our recent — seemingly modest — 2.3% annual energy growth very far into the future quickly becomes ridiculous, and cannot happen.

> This is not intended to suggest that waste heat is a bigger problem than, say, climate change from carbon dioxide emissions (...)

Limits which are millions, billions, or trillions of times beyond current capacities. For the moment, thermodynamic limits don't apply.

Exponentials can get away from you a lot faster than you might expect. For instance if we sustained a 1% annual population growth for another 13000 years the total volume of all living people would be more than the total volume of all the space within 13000 light years of Earth.

So unless we get faster than light travel or we greatly reduce the amount of space into which you can physically cram a living human we are under 13000 years away from a pretty hard upper limit.

Make more realistic assumptions than speed of light expansion of humanity and that limit gets a lot shorter even with growth rates quite a bit lower than 1%.

Uploading should allow us to vastly reduce the amount of space in which you can run a human mind.

> if we sustained a 1% annual population growth for another 13000 years

And if we sustained a 0.03% annual population reduction rate (like South Korea recently experienced) there would be less than 100 people on Earth after just 600 years.

So I agree that exponentials can get away from you a lot faster than you might expect, but I also think that trying to predict cultural norms 13 millennia from now is likely to be counter-productive.

Per the article, actually about 100-1000 times beyond current capacities.

In a way I agree that the feasible limits, even on Earth, may be orders of magnitude larger (say, in terms of population, perhaps) than we currently have. But the current rate of growth in any case is probably unsustainable because of imbalances like co2 emissions. I do think it's feasible to change to renewable energy in the short term, if only political motivation was a bit higher (please, go out and vote focused on climate change, folks!). If I were to lay out a strategy for humankind, I'd say we should focus on climate change for the next few decades, and then we can resume growing (to avoid possible collapse).

Limits to technology are actually non-trivial due to the atomic nature of objects, limited number of chemical elements with limited range of properties, etc.. Intelligence itself isn't free and keeping the Great Self-sustaining Rube Goldberg contraption working is not trivial. It's very hard to predict what limitations we can overcome -- see Moore's law slowing down. Some limits we've almost reached such as luminous efficacy (LEDs in lm/W). Soon we'll be faced with the question of whether we want to make Earth into a Caves of Steel landscape (ending most natural life to create a hyper-efficient human/machine habitat) capable of sustaining more humans or a Solarpunk landscape (preserving natural ecosystems) with a more limited population. I think there's a large degree of arrogance to the first, because I don't feel competent enough to evaluate the true value of animal lives, supposing a large quantity of animals are sentient, and they have intrinsic scientific and cultural value. I think this requires an exercise in imagination from all of us. In any case, it's probably a great idea if we could at least keep the oceans, rainforests, and major national parks healthy.

One crazy dream I have is to colonize not Mars, but Mercury. In Mercury solar energy density is crazy high. There's even some thermal energy from the solar thermal gradient. You can dig to get to nice temperature ranges and be safe from radiation, all this works well since the planet is tidally locked and therefore doesn't rotate, there's no diurnal variation. You can build a crazy Cave-of-Steel there and live your life in a cramped cell playing video games (or [insert activity]), if that's what your vision of heaven is.

In any case: Hack the Planet!*

*: In a good way, of course :)

Diamond-based molecular nanotechnology, combined with fusion and high efficiency solar as sources of power will make all of our technology and infrastructure carbon sinks. By the end of this century I expect we will be concerned about CO2 going too low and causing a glacial period.

PS Mercury is too far in-system to be that useful. It takes less energy to get to/from the outer planets than it does Mercury. The cold traps on the poles are interesting though--mercury potentially has all the raw material needed for a self-sufficient industrial colony.

We can just turn off the carbon sinks in that case, there's plenty of carbon around to grab off the ground. And release some methane if needed.

Eh, if it's economical to have the sinks at that scale, we probably won't turn them off for the same reason we "could" turn the CO2 sources off but don't.

You have suggested in the same comment that somehow we will have nearly limitless carbon-negative energy but also that the amount of energy to get to Mercury is too high to make the trip worth it. This does not follow from the initial assumption.

Why spend X/kg to get something from mercury when you could spend 1/4 or 1/8 as much to get it from the asteroid belt?

A lot more Mercury than sum of all asteroids. On the scale of "this century" this may only matter for von Neumann probes building a Dyson swarm, but that's not a 0% possibility and you did ask for a reason.

> co2 emissions

The ironic thing is that some of the earth's most fertile periods were associated with high levels of co2.

Because co2 reduces plant need for water, reduces desertification, and massively increases the food supply.

Given that solar power beaming is technologically feasible and practical, it is likely that the future will not be power limited like we are today.

The ideal setup is probably CO2 levels quite a bit higher than today’s, but with a sunshade filtering out UV-B wavelengths. All of earth would be habitable, but without major weather swings.

Ideal for plants is bad for us.

Um.. no? I don't know what you might mean here.

Higher CO2 levels will result in vastly more arable land, mostly from the reduction of deserts and the warming of permafrost. Higher CO2 levels make agricultural crops grow faster and bigger. Higher CO2 levels (within the range I was talking about) has no effect on human respiration. Ideal for plants is good for us too.

"For most crops the saturation point will be reached at about 1,000–1,300 ppm under ideal circumstances"

- http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm

"They found that if the outdoor CO2 concentrations do rise to 930 ppm, that would nudge the indoor concentrations to a harmful 1,400 ppm.

…

In fact, at 1,400 ppm, CO2 concentrations may decrease basic decision-making ability by 25%, and complex strategic thinking by around 50%, the authors found."

- https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/continued-CO2-emissions-wil...

Ok I didn't mean to imply maximally ideal. 300-400ppm CO2 would be a tremendous boon to both agriculture and most biodiverse wild ecosystems (e.g. jungles & forest tundra, not deserts). It would also warm polar regions more than it does equatorial regions, making northern Alaska, Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia more tolerable to large-scale, year-round human habitation, as well as Antarctica and Greenland (the resulting sea level rise being an issue tho).

300 ppm is the normal interglacial high, we’ve been above 400 ppm since about 2015: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/

So yes, going down to that would be an improvement ;)

We're be long dead before then

I think the parent post means that resources are strictly speaking improved goods not raw materials. I’m that sense innovation and thermodynamics are the limitations, not what rocks we pull out of the ground.

Of course if you assume continued exponential growth you will run into limits. The correct response to that is to not assume continued exponential growth indefinitely, since in the real world that never happens.

In actual real world systems, the growth curve is sigmoidal: it starts out with exponential growth, becomes linear, then asymptotically flattens as system constraints are approached. This is already happening with human population, and should be expected to start happening with other resource curves in the fairly near term. Any properly grounded analysis would look at the situation from this point of view.

wrong. As system constraints are reached, growth becomes negative. In other words, you need a steady supply of resources just to maintain existing stuff.

No, you don't, because "resources" don't magically vanish once you've used them. They just become harder to extract (assuming they're not already being renewed--in the biosphere, "resources" are constantly being renewed by biological processes); but that's what technology is for. For example, it is said that we are using up fossil fuels; but combustion processes don't need "fossil fuels" specifically, they just need easily transportable liquid fuels with decent chemical energy content, and we can make those, because the atoms that the fuels are made of are still there; they didn't vanish when we burned the fuel. We don't do that now because it's cheaper to use fossil fuels while we have them; but of course that will change as fossil fuels run out.

Similar remarks apply to just about anything we currently call "waste"; sooner or later, if we need to, we will find ways to recycle all of that "waste" into something usable. The key limitation is population growth, but as I've already said, population growth is already into the "asymptotically flattening" phase.

It's possible, of course, that population growth will in fact go negative (many projections assume that); but that doesn't mean it will stay that way. The exact sigmoid curve is obviously an idealization; real world systems do oscillate about reasonable equilibrium points instead of just staying stuck at them.

The exponential growth of neutron flux in a detonating nuke may be overwhelmed by a different function as the pieces fly apart, but I wouldn't want to be part of that even allowing for it being a metaphor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxsLrteNl0E

> limits to the creativity of people

Yes, therefore limits. At least in the short and medium term (which could be 1000s of years). Look at the technological advancement of Roman empire, lost for a millennium before human ingenuity advanced past that level again.

Good video from Jonathan Blow on rise of complexity leading to collapse and lost knowledge [0]. Add in energy and resource constraints (for the given world popuplation numbers) and we may be in for a bad time for a while in the near future.

[0] https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk

I really recommend Tom Murphy's (one of the paper's authors) blog about energy and our possible future https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/

It is only compatible because we are approaching peak population mid to late century and then we will slowly contract over time until extinction through lack of births... if trends continue.

If trends continue, there will be 10 billion Amish in 100 years.

It is not entirely without merit to say that religious folks that encourage large families like the Amish, Catholics and Mormons will dominate in the distant future. Hell, I have 45 first cousins (on one side) and they on average have 3+ kids so it might just be my extended family :)

That experiment has been running for 50 generations already, by now it should have reached steady-state.

Perhaps that's part of the reason that 84% of the world's population identifies with a religion.

I can't help but wonder if large families also beget religion just as religion begets large families.

Now I personally think every religion I've encountered is ridiculous fiction (no offence, just my opinion), but I will admit that there can be some pretty significant advantages in a community. Raising a ton of kids is probably just easier in a close community of similar minded families (a.k.a. the local church/temple/mosque). It's almost like it's intentionally engineered to be this way.

Religion is subject to natural selection just like anything else. Religions which produce more offspring that stay in the religion will always win out over the ones that don't.

Until it becomes outweighed by splitting resources amongst too many children. Everything has pros and cons.

So long as the children survive to give birth to more children it doesn't matter how poor they are. Evolution doesn't care for the comfort of anyone.

> So long as the children survive to give birth to more children

Big if. In a true famine, the poor usually die first.

> Evolution doesn't care for the comfort of anyone.

Evolution cares about sexual desireability and fitness. Rich people usually have more.

In nature we see these two strategies as well. Some species try and have as many babies as possible, where others have fewer but concentrate resources to make sure the few are more likely to survive. Neither strategy is optimal in all situations.

You're mixing up personal fitness with the fitness of a meme. Sure rich people have more surviving children in the long run, but why don't we ask the rich Pagan Roman Senators how well their money protected them from the hungry Christian mob?

We aren't heading to extinction just on account of birthrates, it's the transition phase with a large number of elderly dependents and a small number of workers that is going to be the real problem.

Unless most work is intellectual/creative and most manual labor is automated or machine assisted 50 years from now. There are way more 70+ year olds still in the workforce currently than ever before and it isn't crazy to think retiring at 60 is a thing of the past.

Retirement for the masses is a relatively new, rich invention. It seems likely ar some point we will revert back to working until we become unable to work.

Yeh the whole concept of putting in 20-30 years on the police force and then retiring with a 70% pension for the rest of your life seems… nuts.

I think most places are lower than 70%. The military is similar with 50% base pay, although their pay is generally much lower, especially since police can work overtime.

> Retirement for the masses is a relatively new, rich invention.

Average life expectancy beyond 70 years is also fairly new.

Right now we are seeing the dawn of the automation of creative work. Or at least a change in its barriers to access that will decrease the ability of creative professions to make a living. It's still early days but the writing is on the wall.

We are also seeing a trend where technology is leading to additional surveillance and control for the population as opposed to a reduction in inequality and rising living standards.

Yeah, that will be a problem for sure. We will get a preview of it in Asia.

Despite all the fearmongering and wailing and gnashing of teeth, Japan is doing okay with a shrinking population.

They have a long fall ahead of them.

https://www.ipss.go.jp/site-ad/index_english/esuikei/econ2.h...).

Going from 128m in 2010 to 87m in 2060.

And despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth, they'll probably continue do fine, as they have since their population leveled out 30 years ago.

The doomsday predictions haven't just started now, and they weren't only about events in 2060. They started decades ago about population growth slowing, population leveling, population dropping. They've been pretty consistently wrong.

>They've been pretty consistently wrong.

They haven't been wrong, they turned out to be right for everyone. People who didn't live through the boom of the 1950s can't imagine what it's like to live in a world where things improve for everyone every year.

Japan didn't start growing like it did before 1980 again, everyone else stopped too.

China has been basically the only driver of world economic growth for the last 40 years. Which is kind of astonishing considering they are communists.

> They haven't been wrong,

No, they have. I don't know who you're talking about, I'm talking about the sustainable population doomsayers.

I mean they have been in a state of continuous deflation for a long time. They certainly didn't live up to the 1980s predictions of world domination.

What do you mean, you mean that?

Predictions of world domination were equally the same kind of substance-free propaganda and fear mongering. No serious people actually thought a country of ~100 million would economically dominate the world.

Nor was not achieving world domination wasn't the anti-sustainable-population propaganda fearmongering of the 90s and 0s that I'm talking about, so I don't know what part of my comment you're trying to respond to.

Yes, because Japan has had decades of being the only country in the developed world with that distinction, while the rest of the global economy continued to grow. That gave it advantages and opportunities that won't exist for many countries once the developed world at large ages into mass retirement

> Yes, because Japan has had decades of being the only country in the developed world with that distinction, while the rest of the global economy continued to grow.

That's not what the propagandists claimed though.

> That gave it advantages and opportunities that won't exist for many countries once the developed world at large ages into mass retirement

What unique advantages and opportunities that won't exist for others? This sounds familiar.

For one, they could be a high-end export-driven economy, as there were lots of wealthy (by global standards) consumers. They've now built out the bureaucratic and practical infrastructure of building where they sell at scale. They also had time to test out various central bank/financial/strategic policies to figure out what worked.

With the rest of the developed world (outside of the US and a few others) moving into aging demographics more-or-less all at once, export-driven economies are going to be hard-pressed as global consumption decreases in the developed world. They also won't have time to experiment.

Now sure, theoretically governments could learn from Japan's successes and failures and, being forward looking, could initiate policy 5-10 years in advance to offset the worst of the impacts and... sorry I just laughed into my keyboard. It's going to be a show, people will wake up one morning, stuff will be expensive and broken, no one in power will understand why, problems will be denied for months until things break beyond the point of no return, and the solutions will be rushed, poorly directed and half-assed. See Germany's current energy woes.

I don't think any of this opportunity was enabled by Japan's population demographics at all. Germany, South Korea, Hong Kong, are notable exporters of secondary and tertiary products.

It wasn't enabled by Japan's demographics, it was enabled by the world's demographics relative to Japan. Japan has had to deal with a mass-aging demography in a relatively friendly global environment. They've had the latitude to experiment and develop various approaches.

Germany, South Korea, and others are going to hit the same problem in a much more hostile global economic environment, as most of the wealthy global consumers are going to simply disappear. At present they're woefully unprepared to deal with any of it.

I don't think so. As I said, those other countries didn't have the same relative demographics as Japan. This just sounds like a fringe theory that isn't really borne out by evidence.

There are SERIOUS problem expected to come, primary for working population, pension, and national insurance. Some are delayed thanks to huge national debt. Demographics is really good indicator for the future, but it's hard to improve.

30 years ago there were SERIOUS problems expected to come. The doomsayers were all just comprehensively wrong, there's just no fearmongering your way around that. Japan is a stable and prosperous society that's not significantly worse off than the best and richest countries in the world. On the contrary it's right up the top of many metrics.

It's funny, still today it has like 4x the GDP per capita of China and yet hearing it from these propagandists^Weconomists you'd think China is some kind of futuristic wonderland where everything turns to gold and Japan is a crumbling wasteland (or soon will be.... aaaany day now, for the past 30 years).

Japan's got issues, every country does. You think the US or Europe don't face serious economic problems in the next 40 years? As populations around the world peak and resource extraction and primary production peak, cheap fossil fuels are phased out, everybody's chickens will be coming home to roost. That's not a Japan problem, that's everyone's problem. Rich countries like Japan have a lot of room to cut expenditure and raise revenue. They don't because it's not popular, but they can and will (have to).

Refuting propaganda does not mean that the demographic trend ceases to exist. It's true that there is a cottage industry of doomsayers, and nation-based agendas that criticize Japan and praise China, but we still have the raw numbers indicating that Japan will be one of the first if not the first laboratory where we can see and understand the effects of rapid aging and worker imbalance. This will be relevant because the EU and China will have to deal with this too.

It does not mean that Japan is doomed, but rather that some policy will have to be implemented and some large change to the structure of the economy will have to happen in due time.

The thing with demographic problems is that they are background noise for a very long time and then suddenly become a much bigger problem. You can verify this yourself by playing around with some simple math such as having a cohort of 100 people at t0, set an average expectancy, and seeing the effects of different birthrates as time goes on.

2019: but the robots will take our jobs!

2022: we need more robots!

Any technology that enables us to do more things tends to be a good thing. But we are suspicious of it because we know it remains to be seen whether the tech will actually be used to improve our lives

Although I find the prospect disturbing, I think at some point (assuming we manage this dangerous transition) we will produce children in a technological way that is decoupled from human mothers.

I could also see a social movement developing that campaigned for this on the grounds of equity for women. It could be presented as both essential for the species and empowering for all genders…and that might be true.

Not an entirely unbelievable end game. Will it be done by families or the government?

Good question. Probably both, depending on the country you live in.

I got to the plan section and was mighty disappointed. This is simply a treatise on how bad humans and civilization are in the eyes of the new age Gaia religion. All problems and very few “pro human” solutions.

That's a problem with this article, and too many like it.

OK, we're going to run out of various natural resources over the next 100-200 years, let alone the next 1000-2000. We will have a mostly sustainable society, like it or not. But it need not be a low-tech one.

Energy probably won't be a problem. We have so many low-cost renewable sources now that the fossil fuel industry has trouble getting capital. The energy situation may look bad for another 10-20 years, but not for much longer than that.

What looks like a problem? The US Geological Survey has studies for all the major useful minerals.[1][2]

Some minerals are recycled easily because they're used in their elemental form. Copper and aluminum are good examples. Others get used up by being combined with other minerals in a way that's hard to undo. Manganese and vanadium are good examples, because they go into steelmaking. It's hard to un-make steel, although you can recycle it as steel. Something to expect is metal scrap sorting that does a quick spectrographic analysis on each item and routes it to the appropriate bin for re-melting. There's probably a startup opportunity there.

Expect lithium battery recycling to be a major industry. Lithium batteries are a far higher grade source of lithium than ores or brines.

Biologic systems are more recyclable. Biology is mostly C, H, O, and N, assembled in different ways. This doesn't necessarily mean "natural". We can expect to see a bigger role for semi-biological processes such as fermentation, synthetic enzymes, and such. The Impossible Burger uses a synthetic enzyme to produce the taste of blood people want in a burger.

This sort of thing is probably enough to get through the next 100-200 years. The next 1000-2000 years will be tougher. But more technology will be available.

[1] https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program

[2] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022.pdf

Recycling steel as steel is a pretty widespread thing to do, and steel accounts for almost 90% of manganese consumption.

If you want manganese for some non-steel purpose, A36 structural steel (like girders) is 1% manganese, which admittedly is less than ideal; manganese nodules are up to 30% manganese, and in the US people mine manganese ores of less than 5% manganese content. (The ores sell for about US$7 per tonne, and given that manganese is the 12th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, they might always be cheap.) But if you're looking for ores, well, discarded non-rechargeable alkaline batteries are more than 30% manganese, so you're probably better off digging through landfills than diving to the bottom of the sea.

I think X-ray fluorescence scanning is a thing that minimills have been doing for decades.

Overall I think we should expect recycling to be a major industry. Your point that lithium batteries are a far higher grade source of lithium than ores or brines is a good one, and applicable to many products, though I'm not sure if it's literally true in this case. Given lithium-ion batteries' energy density of about 500 kJ/kg as against the 13901 coulombs per gram of the lithium ions themselves, working out to 51 MJ/kg Li at 3.7 volts, the batteries can't be much more than about 1% lithium, and I think there actually are Bolivian brines that are richer than that, certainly if you omit the water. But for many resources, deposits found in landfills will be the richest available terrestrial resource for a long time.

For many minerals the USGS Yearbooks from four years ago give a more complete picture than the MCS, which are indeed great: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...

The Murphy et al. article points out that we can get through the next 1000+ years at current growth rates without even expanding beyond the solar system or unlocking new sources of energy such as Hawking radiation, though for some reason it's pessimistic about our chances of doing so.

> the taste of blood people want in a burger.

To be clear, (most) burgers do not have noticeable blood in. The red juice that comes out of them that makes them "bleed" is in fact myoglobin, a protein found in animals’ muscle tissue.

https://sage-answers.com/why-is-my-meat-bleeding/#Should_a_b...

>Something to expect is metal scrap sorting that does a quick spectrographic analysis on each item and routes it to the appropriate bin for re-melting.

Steinert has a product line that uses XRF to sort different alloys in mixed aluminum scrap: https://youtu.be/td8IDt2ke1E?t=96

Nice.

An air-jet sorting machine controlled by X-ray spectrometers. That's impressive. No robotic arms required. Apparently, already cost-effective. Mixed metal recycling can now achieve very high recovery rates.

Air-jet sorters with vision systems have been around for decades, usually for agricultural products. Throughput is huge and cost is low. It's possible to sort individual rice grains.[1] Most vegetables in US supermarkets today have been through an automatic sorter.

So now this has made it to metals.

[1] https://www.sgsorter.com/rice-color-sorter/

I interpreted the PLAN section as a call for more interdisciplinary study, and a focus on complexity rather than traditional academic reductionism. What makes you interpret it as 'how bad humans and civilization are'? It's going to be difficult to implement their PLAN without humans or civilization.

>infinite exponential growth which is impossible on a finite planet.

its impossible in any space with non negative curvature. the kind of growth that is unsustainable in a finite region is any growth at all.

constant growth != infinite growth constant growth just means converging growth if the population is shrinking all we need to do is increase gdp per capita.

Zeno has entered the chat.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_an...

> constant growth != infinite growth constant growth just means converging growth if the population is shrinking all we need to do is increase gdp per capita.

In theory. In practice GDP growth is strongly correlated with things like energy use and waste/pollution generation. There will come a point when either that correlation has to be broken or growth has to halt.

While GDP growth has historically been strongly correlated with energy use and pollution (including CO2/greenhouse gas emissions), due to the switch to service and digital economy, in rich countries GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already, already before year 2000. The correlation is already broken, and it seems quite plausible to continue GDP growth even with a decrease in energy use and waste/pollution generation.

> due to the switch to service and digital economy, in rich countries GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already.

They just pushed pollution elsewhere, by outsourcing manufacturing.

That strengthens the effect, but no, the growth is decoupled even if you take into account the energy and pollution cost of the outsourced manufacturing.

The same goods (and better goods) take less energy and pollution to produce than in 2000, and a lot of physical goods have been effectively replaced with features in digital devices; and the main part of GDP growth for developed countries does not involve any growth in consumption of goods but rather the consumption of services - the shift from an industrial economy to a service economy has quite fundamental impact on the nature of growth.

Do you have a current source on the decoupling claim accounting for outsourcing?

That's a good trend if true.

It was true in the UK ten years ago (although this Guardian article[0] tried to downplay the success):

> The amount of greenhouse gases linked to goods and services consumed by UK households, including emissions from the foreign manufacture of imported products, rose by 3% between 2012 and 2013, the most recent data shows. But the figures are almost a fifth (19%) below the peak seen in 2007, when UK consumers were responsible for nearly 1.3bn tonnes of greenhouse gases.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/02/uks-carb...

> The same goods (and better goods) take less energy and pollution to produce than in 2000

But thanks to the rebound effect we make/sell/trash more of them

Like with airplanes, it doesn't matter that Rolls-Royce make their engines 5% more efficient every 10 years if in the meantime you have 4 times as many plane flying.

A different analysis here:

https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunk...

> GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already, already before year 2000

Only because we delocalised all the industries to Asia, globally co2 = gdp, before and after 2010

https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/GDP-CO2-wor...

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gabe-Scelta-2/publicati...

The USA is the exact opposite example of this. US carbon emissions have fallen 15% since 2005 but the massive US economy continues to grow. There’s no requirement that more growth always == more pollution.

population cannot shrink forever

Part of the problem is people thinking, "myself and everyone I could ever have the notion of caring about, and everyone they could ever have a notion of caring about" is the same thing as infinity.

The universe is so goddamned big that it's hard to fathom how long it would take us to actually ruin the entire thing, or at least the parts that aren't flying away from us at faster than the speed of light. But 5% annual growth for a billion years eats up a ridiculous amount of real estate.

If people what to have more than two children that it is absolutely impossible.

If 'people' have more than 2 then yes. If my N siblings collectively have 2N kids then we are at break-even.

As effort for return goes, defending people for not having children may be one of the most effective acts of environmentalism someone can engage in.

5 percent growth for just the length of human history overflows the double precision floating point type.

Also if we really value life, we should probably optimize for total lives lived. The universe will not last forever and entire galaxies are being lost to both the cosmic horizon and blackholes at an alarming rate.

For some reason Earth seems to be the only planet with life, so every second we spend without making life interplanetary we are snuffing out an unfathomable number of future human and animal lives.

This is sort of a selfish viewpoint to take, is it not? I mean I don't necessarily disagree with you, just... the reasoning seems strange to me.

It’s ultimately a humanist set of values that lead to that conclusion. If we value human happiness we should try to make as much of that as possible.

Sure, but more lives doesn't mean a net increase in happiness. A trillion people who live in the edge of starvation are probably less happy overall than a few billion who are well fed.

I mean, what's the point if being a humanist of you don't care about the human?

There's a whole philosophical discourse about this very topic[1] and I'm not well read enough on the topic to adequately hash out the "repugnant conclusion".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox

Except starvation has gone down and quality of life has gone up for the large majority of the human population. Where are you coming from with "a trillion people who live in the edge of starvation"? Some assumed doomsday situation?

Not to be a buzz kill but things have been getting better.

> Not to be a buzz kill but things have been getting better.

Past performance does not guarantee future results. In fact, what this article is saying is that mathematically, our future results are practically guaranteed to be worse than they have been in the past. I don't find your comment at all persuasive because you have not even attempted to grapple with this issue presented in the article.

No, but past performance does provide evidence, and in the outside view, "no really, this really is the time where we're growing too much and are gonna collapse" has not been true yet. Will it happen eventually? It has to. Will this be the one? Probably not. Are we close to the limits where it'll actually occur? Probably not.

Did... did you read the article you're commenting on?

Honestly I only care about the happiness of humans that actually exist. The theoretical happiness of humans that were never born concerns me not even a little.

Is that a reasonable conclusion? Is it better to have a population of 8 billion or a population of 8 trillion where on average everyone is 1/1000 as happy? Is happiness even something where it makes more sense to measure a total rather than an average? If we value high speed in the 100m sprint, should we add more runners to ensure a higher total speed?

I think you can value Life without maximizing number of total deaths (or total lives lived, same thing). At some point quality matters as well as quantity.

If maximizing the total number of lives is really all that's important, we should cease all human activity that isn't necessary to sending ants to other planets.

You can't "snuff out" something that doesn't exist yet.

That aside, if that were indeed our goal, then we should be forcing people to breed as much as possible, even if it causes short-term quality of life decrease - since population growth is exponential, every human not born today that could be born means billions less in that hypothetical future.

Something about this reminds me of the authority anti-abortion activists bestow upon themselves.

It's easy to speak for the unborn because they cannot speak for themselves and will not contradict you.

Surprising though, how neatly the interests of the far future unborn align with those of the wealthy and powerful today. Ah well, just a coincidence I'm sure.

How does anti-abortion benefit the wealthy?

Wait, you think it's the anti-abortion people who are bestowing upon themselves the right to decide what the unborn want?

If you want to be suspicious of a "coincidence", then maybe consider that mothers tend to be more wealthy and powerful than their unborn children, and see how that wealth and power plays out.

Nothing guarantees we're on a path that leads to that. We might very well be the proverbial frog being boiled alive

People think that all new tech = progress = we'll have star trek at some point.

Don't forget all these things are sci-fi, 101% sci-fi, for now all we did is put a few dozen dudes a few hundred thousand miles from earth inside tiny ass metal cans.

Some people apparently think it's easier to terraform Mars than keep our home planet clean. One being a dead rock, the other being a planet we evolved to thrive on for the last few billions years that we half way fucked up after 200 years of industrial "progress"

You don't have to believe that all new tech = progress. Just that on average new tech makes things better over the long term.

That second part has been true for pretty much all of human history.

Sure, but that's like a bacterium saying "exponential growth is unsustainable" after having colonized the extent of a petri dish. Technically it's correct; practically it's irrelevant.

I would love to hear what the authors of this paper think about permaculture; not the woo-woo hippie stereotype of permaculture that is so prevalent ("herb spirals", cob ovens, etc), but rather the specific principles and methods outlined in Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (Mollison, 1988). After reading their article , especially the points on creating actionable solutions, I would think they would readily embrace the framework created by permaculture.

I don't know about Tom Murphy's (from the paper) opinion but I do see permaculture being taken seriously by people in the field - Post Carbon Institute for example (https://www.postcarbon.org/).

Thanks for posting that link. I took a look at their website and it's reassuring they way they succinctly pitch permaculture: "One collection of ideas and skills that’s already handily packaged and awaiting adoption is permaculture—a set of design tools for living created by ecologists back in the 1970s who understood that industrial civilization would eventually reach its limits." The phrase "already handily packaged and awaiting adoption" is a simple message that could get the point across to policy makers and the public (even though it ignores that there have already been successful permaculture-based ecosystem restoration projects for decades now).

The paper has several key flaws: - it does not address recent dematerialization and improved efficiency per human in the first world. - it does not address "off planet" in any way. We can build the surface area of over a billion earths just by disassembling mercury and using it to build rotating space habitats. - it doesn't address the fact that human energy consumption is a tiny fraction of what is available in our own solar system. Less than 2 billionths of sunlight hits earth at all, and efficiency keeps going up. much less than 0.1% of the earth has solar panels, so with solar alone we can increase energy production more than a trillion times more than today. - it doesn't address the potential other energy sources like fusion, which have capacities far beyond fossil fuels.

All of this has the net effect of the paper sounding smart but its only applicable in a scenario where technological progress stops and we never truly leave the planet.

I actually think it's good for people to think of plan B options, but plan A should be to build tech, get off planet, and have a trillion+ hunans living in luxury.

Population stabilisation: Most of the societies even in the developing world are now seeing stagnation in replacement levels of population growth. It will be challenging in the future to ensure economic growth rates of present times for that reason alone. When population stagnates, labour becomes expensive, consumption decreases and growth flattens. Even the last remaining regions of Africa are now seeing rapid urbanisation, and consequently will see this trend in the next 20 years. In a way, evolution itself is forcing humanity to cut down on its wasteful ways. The authors of this article should have touched upon the factor of population deflation in their article to make a more balanced case.

I came to the comments expecting them to be hopeful and supportive but most seem to be critical and barely engaging with the paper at all. These people are trying to produce a network to study the world in a different way to make life better through avoiding existential risks. How do people see this in a bad light? The paper uses some language that may seem pessimistic, but to me seems on the whole fairly realistic and balanced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY

This. This is really the real direction we need. Changing to renewable energy is only one small part of the whole problem. The real problem is that there are too many people on the planet.

The richest 10% of the global population are responsible for an estimated 47% of emissions. The problem has never been that there are too many people. The problem is that there is a small number of people that are destroying the planet for the rest of us.

> The problem is that there is a small number of people that are destroying the planet for the rest of us.

I wonder if taking part in this forum is almost a sure indication of membership in the 10%, so perhaps it's us destroying the planet for the rest of them?

Could this be a case of Zipf’s law? I.e. there will always emerge a top 10%? In which case the true solution is to decrease human population across the globe.

This is such a lie. There are not "too" many people. Let's look at four nations China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. These make up about 40% of the population of the world [1]. If you look at their per capita emissions, China is highest (7.6), India is 1.8, Pakistan is 0.9, and Bangladesh is 0.6.

However, look at the highest numbers on that list and you'll see nations like Qatar at 32.5, Kuwait at 22.0. Yes, Granted, they don't have huge populations so overall, they're not pumping out that much. However, Australia, America, Canada also are emitting >14 tons per capita. The vast majority of these people do not need to be emitting that much but they do so to fuel luxury, and their "standard of living" while telling the people of countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China that they need to do better. It's pretty hypocritical.

The top 15% of the world needs to emiting much less. Not the bottom 40%.

Pakistan is an even more interesting example because currently a third of the nation is underwater (literally an inland sea has formed [3]) because of floods that were defintely far more exacerbated this year due to climate change. They're the ones suffering from it (along with good old goverments being incompetent and not planning enough) while they've not benefitted from the emissions in the slightest.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

2. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods#/media/Fi...

Demography is not as simple: China have chosen in the past an apparently logic solution, limiting numbers of new birth per woman so lower the total population. After a certain amount of time they realize that doing so new humans found MORE elders then their parent, generation after generation, as a result they have to work to care them instead of having a life. As a result the society can't evolve, there are not enough HUMAN young and active resources to evolve.

A war kill many, but mostly young, so again you'll end up with a mean elder population. An epidemic typically kill the elders BUT no one can really program it enough in a mass controlled genocide that only modern sibling of ms adolf from Austria can imaging.

The real problem is that we live to live. Not to work, not be workers. Thief's and criminals against humanity who actually run many world society, essentially all the westerners and most of the third world countries, pretend to treat humans a software, slave workers and can't really foresee the real outcome. They dream a future they can't build, that can't work, and they pretend to impose their vision stating that no, it does work indeed.

>This age of modernity is characterized by consistent growth in energy use, economic activity, and resource consumption, and a generally increasing standard of living—albeit inequitably distributed.

This paper states this as though it is desirable and inevitable. There's no reason human society needs to keep expanding like a cancer or a virus. Sustainability is both possible and desirable. This isn't to suggest we shouldn't explore and/or colonize other worlds, but it is to suggest that constant growth is not intrinsically beneficial. Many of the most serious problems we face as a society are a direct result of overpopulation and "growth".

> This paper states this as though it is desirable and inevitable.

No it doesn't? Two sentences later:

> But modernity has been enabled by the rapid and accelerating expenditure of our one-time inheritance of fossil fuels, and by drawing down the resources and ecosystems of our finite Earth—none of which can be sustained as we transition from a resource-rich frontier to a human-dominated planet.

I still don't fathom this singular deposit of fossil fuels in the earth, are they truly some artifact of a huge die off of living creatures from centuries ago or is there some steady generation through time that replenishes and generates the crude oil beneath our feet? I'd like to learn more about where the fossil in fossil fuels comes from and just what sort of biomass quantity we're talking about and when on earth that quantity of biomass was originally generated and walked the earth.

I got curious to see what an oil well cross section may look like to see a pool of oil, there's some fascinating stuff on Youtube in this domain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzDrheWDhGw

There is a steady generation of fossil fuels. It is many orders of magnitude slower than consumption, so basically modeling it as a fixed quantity is accurate.

aha, that's a pretty sharp conceptualization then, if it's being generated at too slow a rate we basically drain the reservoir before it can fill up and replenish.

If you're interested in the historical process, personally I like the videos of PBS Eons a lot:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pbs+eons+coal

This was was pretty interesting with nice animations "History's Most Powerful Plants" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pLQwa6SyZc), but it's more presenting conclusions and theories of mechanisms than how those conclusions were arrived at. I recall hearing similar things without such nice imagery or focusing on a particular plant as a kid but where's the adult explanation that has all the caveats and messy parts of the story that don't line up and all that. I've never seen or heard that part.

They mention certain bacteria not being present to breakdown the plant matter of that special tree, but what about fungus, I would think fungus has been around a pretty long time. There's something very hand-wavy and too tidy about it all. I guess one thing is known is that these are carbon based materials and where does carbon primarily come from and how did it get way down in the bottom layers of the earth is a big question. I think today we'd identify the atmosphere, but it would be surprising if it was the other way around, if carbon mostly came from the earth and got released up as CO2 somehow. But CO2 is very stable, I think we'd expect the dominant source of an element to be all bound up in its most stable forms.

I'm curious too how deep down do oil wells go. This hit has some fascinating real world depths apparently. Hydraulic fracturing reaches depths ranging from 5,000 feet to 20,000 feet. https://www.petro-online.com/news/fuel-for-thought/13/breaki....

I'm curious next how much oil can be extracted from a well and how we could back track to that being some percentage of some originating mass and if the two things match up to some realistic numbers with our experience for how much mass one finds in a forest today, etc.

> what about fungus

https://jgi.doe.gov/news_12_06_28/

> The comparative analyses suggested that around 290 million years ago, right at the end of the Carboniferous period, a white rot fungal ancestor with the capacity to break down lignin appeared. Prior to that ancestor, fungi did not have that ability and thus the lignin in plant matter was not degraded, allowing these lignin-rich residues to build up in soil over time.

That's fascinating, the evolution of enzymes to shift the measure of what is stable over a given period of time.

> Once you have white rot you can break down lignin, the major precursor of coal.

I'm curious there how is it know that lignin is the precursor to coal.

What is coal anyways, is there a molecular structure to it. Ha, what a cool hit for that search, a rock, who'd have thought. I never heard of a maceral before.

> Coal is a sedimentary rock that is composed principally of two basic classes of materials: inorganic crystalline minerals and organic carbonaceous macerals. The macerals form the combustible part of the coal and are, in turn, divided into three maceral groups—vitrinite, exinite, and inertinite. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012150...

To my knowledge, it literally never happened that humanity ran out of a ressource and it turned out not to be replaceable.

As they say, past performance is not a guarantee of future results

Obviously, but I'll need a bit more than a 50 years old computer simulation of a few coupled PDEs before I give back my job and go live the peasant life.

> give back my job and go live the peasant life

There are a whole lot of scenarios between amazon same day toilet paper delivery, lidar enabled autonomous vacuum cleaner, 3 tonnes tesla doing 0-60, bluetooth enabled fridges and the peasant life

Sorry for not being clear, but the current level of argumentation of degrowthers is insufficient for giving up the tiniest amount of technology-enabled comfort.

So thanks but I'll have my lidar enabled autonomous toilet paper, it doesn't go against my religion.

Without competition you don't have a market. You don't even have political discourse. You have centralized, planned economy and society, clearly defined 'optima', in which the academics have all the power. I think this should be added to the discussion section as there is an obvious conflict of interest here. Maybe we shoulkd have a world without power instead ...

I think this is covered in the supplement, 4. Economics, f) Free market...

I would agree that competition in some form is essential, but we must also be mindful of issues with competition such as market failures.

That says nothing about power or about academia itself. The whole supplement is a "list of superficial assertions we hold to be true even though we have no idea if they are", that are typical political anti-capitalist rhetoric

They are "working hypothesis" to be studied, and thus implicitly they are being considered skeptically. I agree they should consider power, I would imagine that would come under cultural aspects. As to Academia, they explicitly criticize Academic silos; the whole network is a way to address problems with reductionism.

I'm not sure what makes you think they are anti-capitalist. I suspect you didn't read the whole thing because they say "To be clear, the authors are not making blanket statements about the pros and cons of markets, capitalism, socialism, or communism. (These are tasks for the scholarly network whose creation we urge.)"

Edit: on a side note, I'm genuinely interested in how you would envision a 'world without power'?

> I'm not sure what makes you think they are anti-capitalist.

Their list contains these:

- Our current economic model emphasizes means (income, spending) over ends (wellbeing)

- The free market may not be the best way of meeting basic human needs, such as water, food, and air quality (empirically false)

- Relentless focus on short-term performance and growth, together with a discount rate that devalues the future, blinds decision-makers to long-term challenges (content-free rambling)

- Humanity will need to reevaluate its place in the natural world, shifting from consumerism to conservation, and accepting planetary boundaries

- It is essential that humanity reframe its decisionmaking processes to value ecosystem health, resilience, sustainability, human rights, and true quality of life above traditional economic indicator

> envision a 'world without power'?

Not possible , but a world with less concentration of power is possible

That's a fair list and I can see how it can be read as anti-capitalist, but I think that is basically projecting political beliefs onto the paper (as I said before they explicitly avoid supporting any particular system). I hope that these points can be addressed within the current capitalist system, but obviously some changes to the status quo would be required. The essential point of the paper is the importance of studying these things within a multidisciplinary framework of planetary limitations.

How would you best reduce concentrations of power? Personally I think some Austrian school ideas have merit (increasing local power relative to central governments) and direct democracy.

The graph says it all and by the way similar graphs exist for lithium and all the rare earth elements to construct so called renewables.

We don't need rare earths to make renewables, we choose them because they are cheaper; and calling renewables "so called" in this context is a bit weird even though yes the sun will eventually die.

We mostly don't use rare earths to make renewable energy at all. Solar panels and lithium batteries don't have any rare earths in them. Most wind turbines do: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... but Amory Lovins argues that the advantage of doing so is small or even nonexistent: https://rmi.org/rmi-reality-check-greener-friendlier-alterna...

The turbines of ENERCON don't need "rare-earths", because of their ring generator https://www.enercon.de/technologie/komponenten/

Of course you don't need rare earths to build electrical wind turbines; the Europa paper I linked above explains that even today 25% of wind turbines are rare-earth-free, and people have been building large-scale electrical generators for 156 years even though rare earth magnets were only invented about 50 years ago.

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