>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, what's the point if being a humanist of you don't care about the human?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
That second part has been true for pretty much all of human history.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_an...
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.
They just pushed pollution elsewhere, by outsourcing 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.
That's a good trend if true.
> 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...
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.
https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunk...
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...