Ask HN: Assuming this 2023 LtG paper is correct, how do you prepare? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Assuming this 2023 LtG paper is correct, how do you prepare?

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

93 points_ddzr127 comments

Understand that the papers emphasize they are not predictions, but illustrating complex relationships. (Or at least trying to illustrate complex relationships based on what we know of them right now). There is very little we as an individual level can do about whether or not full scale technological advancement occurs enough to reach steady state of equilibrium on a global level. It’s very important cognitively to realistically assess your personal ability to influence or not influence a global phenomenon.

Personally? I want to make sure my local community is strong. Even if no collapse occurs, a strong community is good. But if anything happens, a strong community is great. I do food coops (I buy a share of a farms crops ahead of the growing season, so the farmer shares the harvest with me. Sometimes I also pitch in to pack the shares for others in the coop!). I donate to community food availability(not just food kitchens but also paying way more for pay-what-you-can produce). I attend community events like cleanups, town halls, etc.

Most of us in tech are lucky enough to be able to work from the neighborhoods where we live, and be able to step out for the occasional chore. We inherently have more time to directly benefit our neediest. Why not take advantage?

> the papers emphasize they are not predictions, but illustrating complex relationships

If it has no predictive power, why should it be taken seriously? I'm concerned about the environment and sustainability too, but that's the exact reason we can't afford to throw empiricism out the window the second things start looking a bit hairy.

A paper not containing predictions is not the same thing as its having no predictive power!

This paper makes a lot of predictions despite the lack of predictive power. Hence, it should not be taken seriously.

Since the 1970's the group producing it has made a lot of very wrong predictions out of the hubristic belief that they can reduce everything about life to a simple system of differential equations.

What? Maybe my brain isn't big enough to understand this, but I don't see how you could disentangle the two without getting into pedantry.

Paper may say you can use this methodology with data beyond the scope of the paper to make a prediction.

However it doesn’t actually do the work to predict anything.

Kind of like the difference between theoretical math and applied math.

Take a look, for example, at the timeline in https://xkcd.com/1732/. It contains (almost) no prediction, but once you have internalized the information in it your own predictions on the climate topic are likely to become a lot more powerful because better informed.

Unfortunately for all of us, the model does have very good predictive power despite its simplicity. Herrington et al in 2020 checked the 1972 model scenarios (there were 4 such scenarios as sensitivity analyses) against around 40 years of empirical data and the results were close to observed ground truth [0].

0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?do...

I try not to be too harsh on here, but your interpretation of this analysis is unbelievably bad. It's absurdly easy to fit a logistic function to match the real-life logistic curve of some value of interest during the exponential phase of those functions.

However... That means almost *NOTHING* with regard to the actual logistic portion which is the part people actually care about. There exist an infinite range of different logistic functions that can be made to match in the exponential portion and the majority of those functions contain almost zero information about the future logistic portion. The error between them is essentially unbounded.

Calling that confirmation of predictive power is not misguided, it's just about as wrong as you can be.

This is not my analysis, and the first author, Gaya Herrington, explains the alignment between the model and empirical data here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KJpvc3i5j84

I also react with concern. Yes there are infinite curves, but there are limits to what is possible, so in actual fact there are not infinitely many possible futures here, and those futures are likely to fall within the limits of the 4 sensitivity analyses…and indeed have over more than 4 decades of follow up.

I know it's not your analysis. I said your interpretation of this analysis is flawed. You're misunderstanding that analysis to be confirmation of the predictive power of the model extrapolated into the logistic region. And you still are:

>Yes there are infinite curves, but there are limits to what is possible, so in actual fact there are not infinitely many possible futures here, and those futures are likely to fall within the limits of the 4 sensitivity analyses…and indeed have over more than 4 decades of follow up.

The key phrase there where your interpretation is flawed is: "are likely to fall within the limits of the 4 sensitivity analyses". That's so, so untrue. You simply cannot extrapolate logistic model parameters into the actual post-exponential-growth, logistic portion without seeing the actual logistic effects start to kick in. Those simply haven't been empirically verified here.

And speaking of... the original model they are analyzing introduces limits on that exponential growth in a pretty arbitrary and artificial way, particularly when it comes to the pollution terms.... which, I'll add, this analysis shows is also the parameter they most over-estimated by a large amount even in the exponential portion.

I want to believe in infinite growth too. Maybe asteroid mining could make this paper and model predictions way off. Indeed, that is the kind of thing we hear from Jeff Bezos: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/mining-in-space-is-com...

But also, yes, it IS reasonable to look at 4 sensitivity analyses comprising the most common rebuttals to limits of growth, observe alignment with more than 4 decades of empirical data, and believe based on that the model is pitching well above its weight. No need for ad hominem here.

You don't have to believe in infinite growth, the problem with the model that makes the scary bit after the slopes change to down are all BS because of: "However, it is important to note that the connections in the model and the recalibration are only valid for the rising edge, as many of the variables and equations represented in the model are not physical but socio-economic. It is to be expected that the complex socio-economic relationships will be rearranged and reconnected in the event of a collapse. World3 holds the relationships between variables constant. Therefore it is not useful to draw further conclusions from the trajectory after the tipping points"

That tells you this model disregards how every single societal crisis in the past was solved or at least mitigated: A massive change to the order of society (think germanic tribes conquering rome, magna carta type stuff, Napoleon et al taking France from a monarchy to an anarchy to an empire and, after calming down a bit, to a republic, etc. etc.).

Which of these graphs do you think supports the claim that LFG has very good predictive power? I browsed the first few, population, fertility, mortality, and food per capita. In each case the empirical data clearly diverge from all four LFG predictions, in exactly the direction I would have guessed. Or am I wrong in that analysis?

You are engaging in self-delusion here.

The point of these papers isn't to make precise predictions of "the day civilizational collapse occurs" nor does it merely "illustrate some complex relationships".

It is to show every closed system, even only remotely resembling our own, is bound to end in overshoot&collapse unless you change central tenets of the driving economic paradigm. Namely abandon exponential growth for a steady (or oscillatory) state approach.

Individuals aren't helpless bystanders either. As adults in a democracy, it isn't only your right but your responsibility to bring about the necessary change.

We don’t live in a closed system though.

Looks pretty closed to me: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144427/all-of-you-o...

How many thousands of dollars does it cost to launch a kilogram of mass into orbit again? Out of orbit?

Do we even have a closed system that can support a small group of people indefinitely to launch? Unfortunately, we do not yet have such a system outside of the earth itself.

Earth's biome gets most of its energy from the sun. I think that's what the GP was getting at.

The physics definition of closed system allows exchange of energy. If neither matter nor energy can be exchanged, that's called an isolated system.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm not sure in what sense the others are using the term. The mechanism of collapse in the paper, exhaustion of fossil fuels, relies on not enough energy in the system, so I assumed energy was part of the calculation.

Since we aren't able to export our pollution out into space, or mine food on mars, yes, we live in a closed system. We live on a round spaceship known as Spaceship Earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth)

Strictly speaking, even if we were able to do that we'd still live in a closed system, just a much, much larger one. :)

Yes, we do.

For all practical purposes, earth's gravity well serves as a boundary for material resources at scale.

More importantly, the input of polluting material into earth's obviously very limited ecological system is limited. You simply cannot pollute as much as you want, so getting more stuff from the asteroid belt or whatever doesn't help.

The whole point of voting in my country is to serve as a check on the legislature against using the government to do things to its citizens. The ballot box isn’t a tool for societal change.

A dictatorship is a much better system for changing society, if that’s your goal for government.

> The ballot box isn’t a tool for societal change.

Then what is?

I mean, to a degree I agree with the GP. You can't fundamentally change a system from within the system itself. No democracy has ever turned via a series of elections into, say, a monarchy. The only way that happens is either by violent collapse (e.g. a coup or a revolution) or by gradual erosion of bureaucracy (where increasing corruption enables a few powerful individuals to seize control regardless of what the law says). The point of elections are not to make dramatic changes, but to make tweaks.

> The point of elections are not to make dramatic changes, but to make tweaks.

The point of bureaucracy is to limit change, to not allow dramatic change.

The point of democracy is to make decisions. And the larger the groups of people and the less frequently voting happens, the larger the granularity of those decisions.

Decisions should be able to change bureaucracy, add to it or subtract or realign or whatever.

When bureaucracy is used to gate-keep decisions that can be made in a democracy, it's not really democracy any more. And I think a lot of people, regardless of their political beliefs, believe that has happened: nominal democracy where votes don't really matter because they can't affect the bureaucracy.

I would say the point of bureaucracy is to make the functioning of a system consistent with some set of rules. The preservation of those rules in some specific form does not have to be part of the rules, and so does not need to be a goal of a given bureaucracy. However, a self-preserving bureaucracy can arise, either by design or accident. I would say every government that has ever existed fits that description. Can you think of a single one that has not been fundamentally conservative? "Conservative" meaning seeking to maintain the status quo that allows it to exist in its present form at any given time.

You didn’t address that I already participate in democracy. I’m just realistic in my actual capacity to execute change, which is inherently largely local, so I focus on local change.

That is assuming exponential growth inevitably leads to overshoot & collapse, which is a flawed zero-sum perspective. Growth (adding value) doesn't necessarily have to come at the cost of resources.

This approach is fundamentally flawed. Exponential economic growth can continue as long as economic substitutes can be found. For example, extrapolating the growth of road transport at the start of the 19th century would have predicted that by the year 2000 we would have so many horses that the entire arable surface of the world would be dedicated to feeding them. Fortunately, substitutes were found and the pasturepocalipse was averted.

Economic growth deals with money and things that can be expressed in money. If in the future human contact becomes a highly sought after commodity and people are willing to pay a market price of $1 million for a hand-holding session, then as far as the GDP is concerned, 1$ million of economic value has been created. For another example, a new smartphone delivers without any doubt orders of magnitude more economic utility than a traditional telephone in your home, while requiring a tiny amount of actual physical resources, miles and miles of dedicated copper wire for each subscriber etc.

Undoubtedly, there are still some human desires that are quite toxic to our limited planet and can't be virtualized easily - for example, the dream of suburban mcmansions a few billion earthlings share, and continuing to grow mindlessly would wreck a good part of the planet. It's quite a distant problem for all but the most prosperous and dense countries, but we will need to deal with it - "no, you can't have more than one home on each continent".

But fundamentally speaking, economic growth is about relative value we place on things not absolute consumption of resources.

It is precisely the point that in reality, the system under consideration is finite.

Consequently, you cannot find "economic substitutes" forever, as they are finite and limited themselves.

One central restriction here is the limit to pollution, which you cannot help by polluting with different stuff.

So long as the economy depends on physical objects, these restrictions apply. And they aren't "in the distance" either, but right around the corner.

> the economy depends on physical objects

That's entirely the point, the economy is quickly dematerializing. As the smartphone example shows, we can provide the same service (and in fact, a far superior one) using a tiny fraction of physical resources. Electronic mail and newspapers, online marketplaces, real time video-communication are in every way better, cheaper and environmentally friendlier than their traditional counterparts.

So we can generate far more economic output (defined as transactions people are willing to make, for example software licenses, apps etc) using the same physical input.

No, it's not. The "virtualizable" part of the economy is limited. While it gets digitized, the remaining part continues to grow exponentially, rendering the former irrelevant.

The primary problem here is the generation of energy and pollution in general. The entire economy is oil-based and all those material products have a very limited lifespan, ending as pollution.

What you need is complete recycling, which necessitates to incorporate that goal in the design phase already.

> generation of energy and pollution in general. The entire economy is oil-based

The current system is unscalable, sure, but are these fundamental limits that preclude growth?

The total amount of recovereable uranium in the oceans is in the billions of tons. Orders of magnitude more U and Th in the crust. Fusion energy seems possible and the total solar irradiance is astronomical. Self replicating solar system probes, that would turn us into a Kardashev type 2 civilisation, are also conceptually possible, and could use only resources from other planets.

So we are many, many doublings away from hitting the physical limits on growth, and we can barely comprehend how our society would look like in such a scenario.

The question however, is a) whether what's conceptually possible is actually possible, and b) whether what's possible will become factual before we hit a hard limit. It's small consolation that having a Dyson sphere around the Sun would solve our energy problems if we've already run out of fossil fuels to run our logistics networks, and maybe we should have scaled back on the growth-seeking wasteful expenses and focused more on the bare essentials.

To be more specific the person you replied to has confused total amount present (of U, etc), with total amount recoverable (at any cost), and not even addressed total amount that is economically feasible (a cost that can be afforded).

WRT: "total amount"

Elements in suspension in ocean water become increasingly dilute as more of them are removed .. so "in theory" 'all you need to do' is move the entire ocean from one bucket to another and remove what you need as you do so ... (otherwise you are constamtly circling back for diminishing returns).

WRT: "recoverable"

Then there is the no small matter of exactly how uranium (or other elements) are extracted, by what means and at what efficiency - today it's unclear what the answer for that is at scale.

WRT: "economically feasible"

Once you have a method, how much can be recovered at a sensible cost .. for less energy than the energy expended for the recovery task, how much gold can you mine for lesss than the value of the gold recovered, etc.

It's not feasible to mine all the roadways on the planet to recover all the valuable minerals burnt away in catalytic converter.

You might want to read up on this topic. The total amount of Uranium in the oceans is estimated at 4.5 billion tonnes, constantly replenishing at a rate much higher than we could currently imagine consuming.

Feasibility studies were done since the 70s assessing the opportunity to exploit this resource, and found a that Titanium oxide hydrate adsorption bed could be able to extract the resource at a cost of a few thousand $ per pound, one order of magnitude over traditional mining. Since we are talking about exponential economic growth, the notion of economic viability has only a tenuous connection to present day reality, as such growth would drastically cheapen machine labor, even to the point of deploying a software command to build the factory.

It stands to reason that such factories could still recover uranium even if the concentration in the oceans dropped, say, by 20%, so the "recoverable" quantity - in this scenario of exponential growth - is indeed, in the billions of tons. Each cubic meter of ocean water contains 3 mg of Uranium or something like 100 kWh of energy, far more than the energy required to circulate ocean water to the surface to get at it. Of course, there could be ecological reasons why you would not want to do that, as well as an enormous source of energy to solve them.

> You might want to read up on this topic.

What, by reading the Uranium Resources, Production and Demand Red book every year for more than two decades?

Perhaps by developing and authoring a large chunk of a global mineral intelligence database and flogging that off to the US S&P ?

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

Reading several thousand economic feasibility studies?

Having a career in geophysics? Maybe mapping global K-U-Th from radiometric surveys after developing instrumentation?

Perhaps you might want to be less of a condescending tit?

So I gather from your invective spiked tantrum that you concede there are no fundamental hard limits that prevent the recovery, in principle, of at least 1 billion tons of U from the oceans, at a future price point we can't currently estimate?

Like I said before, we need to make a distinction between what's possible in principle and what's actually possible. There's nothing, in principle, that prevents you from winning the lottery, so would you therefore go on massive debt after buying a ticket?

> The total amount of recovereable uranium in the oceans is in the billions of tons. Orders of magnitude more U and Th in the crust. Fusion energy seems possible and the total solar irradiance is astronomical. Self replicating solar system probes, that would turn us into a Kardashev type 2 civilisation, are also conceptually possible, and could use only resources from other planets.

You are greatly underestimating how fast exponential growth gets out of hand.

At 1% annual growth in human energy use starting from where we are now, in around 9300 years our annual energy use would equal all the energy in the Milky Way galaxy. By "all the energy" I mean all the energy including the energy we'd get from converting all the mass into energy (E=mc^2).

12000 years from now, so a mere 2700 years after we are consuming an entire Milky Way per year, our annual consumption would equal all the energy in the entire observable universe.

There are similar limits if we look at population growth. At 1% annual population growth we would need the mass of the observable universe to make all the living humans in about 12300 years.

For population growth another limit 1% hits in 12000 years is space. Assuming no FTL, since every human is close to Earth now in 12000 years every human has to be within 12000 light years of Earth. The volume of a sphere of radius 12000 light years divided by the population after 12000 years of 1% growth gives a volume available per human that is about equal to the volume of one person.

One I've not calculated is what the limit is when you combine 1% energy growth and the speed of light limit on how fast we can expand human space. Long before the earlier limit of 12000 years to needing all the energy in the universe we'd reach a point where the energy density in human occupied space is enough to turn human space into a black hole.

If anyone wants to calculate that limit I'd love to see the results.

You are treating the economics of growth like paperclip simulator.

How so?

I believe I'm treating the physics of growth, not the economics of growth.

If you need to use 1% more energy each year starting from what we use now per year, our universe does not contain enough energy to do that for more than 12000 consecutive years.

It is that analysis in specific that I object too. Its not obvious energy will increase the way you describe; as ive written elsewhere, the factors involved in current population/birth declines are not related to environmental carrying capacity, they are more closely related to the global monetary system and central planning, and it could have a relationship to high levels of economic development.

Existing political issues aside, an entire industry can die off and we can still call that growth, as we do when its replaced by something that creates more value at a lower cost, like the beginning of the automotive industry ending the reign of horses. We dont know if quantum computers will ever be realized for practical purposes, if they are then maybe we can unlock all the processing power anyone could ever need with much lower power consumption, or maybe we dont but computation simply becomes a less pressing matter after we reach some unknown level of technology (ie. If you are trying to capture a black hole to use as an energy source, you really might only need the computational power of a ti-86.

There is also, in my observation, a type of material ladder that bends ever towards the crystalization (forgive the terminology) of chemicals. Where raw wood rots in weeks to months, treated lumber can last a decade, vinyl can last 2-3, steel for 100+, who knows what comes next? These materials are likely to require lots of energy to create, but require less over their lifespan. There is a similar ladder in energy, starting with humans burning poop and currently sitting somewhere between nuclear and natural gas, where each step up on the ladder requires greater capital investment but produces less pollution and has lower lifetime costs, where nuclear is like the diamond of energy, huge investment to create something that will last this side of forever.

Another example is how modern farming yields far more produce than in the past, with less inputs. For example, vertical farming can yield 240x more produce despite using 99% less land and 99% water versus a regular farm. That technology is in its infancy and will innovate rapidly.

Or we might do away with farming entirely. Photosynthesis is less than 1% efficient while a solar cell can exceed 40%; so direct chemical synthesis of starch could become the primary source of calories in our food chain, further processed into proteins, fats etc. by appropriate bioreactors down the chain.

Let's get to advanced vertical farming first since it's yummier and see if we need to get beyond that, but I like how you think. ;)

Does that figure include the cost of manufacturing and installing the photovoltaic cells? Plants may waste sunlight, but they're very cheap to produce. Also, plants produce sugars from sunlight almost directly. Intuitively, producing electricity from sunlight and then using that electricity to produce sugars could not possibly be more efficient. It could very well be that storing energy in carbon-hydrogen bonds is intrinsically inefficient.

> producing electricity from sunlight and then using that electricity to produce sugars could not possibly be more efficient.

Per photon, no. Per area of sunlit land, yes, orders of magnitude more.

Also, the photosynthesis efficiency generally refers to the entire chemical energy stored in things like the leaves, stem etc., often useless in the food chain. Solar to food efficiency is abysmal.

Then, there is the question of fertilizer and pesticide use, runoffs and accumulation in groundwater and soil, destruction of soils by intensive agriculture, water use, substantial energy required to transport the large masses involved, the subtraction of that land from the natural habitat etc. Modern agriculture is a necessary evil.

>Per photon, no. Per area of sunlit land, yes, orders of magnitude more.

That's contradictory. The Solar flux for a given region at a given time is basically constant.

I don't think fertilizer (or something analogous) would be avoidable in such a scenario, since one way or another you need a source of nitrogen.

Having worked for two vertical farming startups… people have been saying the same thing for 20 years.

Turns out when somebody actually tries this in practice its not so feasible. Considering both of the startups failed in quite rapid fashion i would say it might not be so surefire like you seem it to be.

The most recent examples I've seen from the last few years are very promising. Big investors are moving in, too. Even if the attempts failed in the past, they'll keep getting better. Just like with anything else - renewables, fusion, etc.

You are right but for the wrong reason. This is why measures like GDP are just silly. Because you can have most of the population starving, while posting economic growth.

The LtG is measuring growth as resource use. So you are comparing apples to oranges. Who cares if GDP is rising if people are getting more hungry or dying in the streets?

People don't generally starve in countries with high GDP - when they do, it's a distributional problem and a flawed social system at work.

If we define GDP as the totality of transactions people are willing to make, then an inflation adjusted growth means that the average citizen will enter more transaction of a higher subjective value. Therefore (again, assuming inflation and the price of basic necessities is controlled for) it stands to reason more of those transactions will be directed towards the basic necessities.

So, generally, higher GDP means fewer people starving, with the distributional and inflation caveats mentioned.

The problem is that in such a world where most economic growth is "virtual", you have to increasingly work with artificial, deliberate scarcity to keep all the virtual goods from losing their value. I.e., you now have to intentionally make the world a progressively shittier place for the majority of the population, just to keep the economy going.

You can illustrate this effect with your example of the 1M$ handholding session. That's a shitty world right there in which no one who isn't a millionaire has any chance of human contact. But now suddenly there is a political imperative to maintain this state of affairs: Because should there suddenly appear a movement of people who want to decommodize human contact again ("free hugs" etc), this movement would trigger a risk of economic collapse.

Digging into things, I find that it all hinges on the World3 model.

Looking at a Python implementation of the model[1] I found this

    dcfsn : float, optional
        desired completed family size normal []. The default is 4.

This is clearly an abnormality, in and of itself. When you're living on a farm, or birth control isn't available, or are a member of certain groups, that number is effectively infinite. If you happened to live in the reign of Mao, it was 1.

Now, I assume there are many such nits to pick. I think the biggest limits to growth are the ERoI of fossil fuels, and the treatment of women and support for parenting in societies. Population crash is a real phenomenon in China, and most "developed" nations are somewhere on the curve, despite lifting an incredible portion of the world's population from crushing poverty, birth rates are falling.

Local change is about the only thing you can realistically have any effect on. Just try to pass on any knowledge and wisdom you can to others, especially with regard to repairing existing technology, and ways to work without it. As China goes offline in the next decade, and globalism collapses, we'll have a lot of jerry-rigging to get around the things we used to have in abundance.

[1] https://github.com/cvanwynsberghe/pyworld3/blob/main/pyworld...

Great comment and thank you for digging into the code!

Is there any reason to take this more seriously than garden variety malthusianism?

Yes, the malthusian growth model assumes resources grow linearly while population is exponential. This model is obviously wrong since we are using up resources exponentially.

If you're already an American, move to St. Louis.

- North enough that climate change will not affect it as much

- Inland so not at risk of sea level change

- Next to a large fresh water source

- Food security - weather suitable for all kinds of crops, even as temps rise

- A large enough group of people in a rich country that it will still be able to get resources as things get worse

- Because of the city/county split, the city crime rate is arbitrarily high despite being a safer metro than most. Means that housing prices are low. Places like Chicago are more at risk of becoming unaffordable as refugees crises get worse

- The region is one of the few that has been continuously settled from pre-colonial days, indicating some Lindy effect in play

I'm not disagreeing with you that St. Louis is good, but sea level rises in our lifetime will be a drop in the ocean compared to climate changes (severe flooding due to excess rain, heat waves, etc.).

No one cares about 4 inches higher water (Except maybe a few Florida boat owners whose boats can no longer fit under bridges).

It's not just about our lifetimes. Some people have children who would prefer that if they are to inherit a house, they will inherit one that will not be submerged or subject to the hurricane swell lottery when they leave it to their children.

And four inches doesn't begin to capture the potential.

The Lindy effect really doesn't apply there. If we were still a pre-colonial society and you were trying to find the best place to build your mostly-agrarian city, fine, but the conditions for survival are unrecognizably different than they were then.

St Louis is also the most dangerous city in the country. Macro trends 50 years from now don't matter if I'm just going to be murdered anyway.

You missed the part about why the stats are that way. Obviously you don’t live in St. Louis, you live in the other 90% of the metro area that’s merely “St. Louis”.

Don't take the clickbait "top X lists" too seriously. The metropolitan St. Louis area is not some killhouse, it's just that the city is geophgrahically smaller then other major cities. The bad crime parts of the metrpolitan area are overrpresented in the city, which again, is a small part of the greater metroplitan area.

A lot of places fit those conditions just fine.

Inland upstate NY, where I live, is one example. It ticks every one of those boxes (though the precise proximity to large clean water sources, of course, varies, there's ample clean water across this whole region).

It would be interesting to take the same model but use known inputs for different eras, i.e. 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, and see when it would then predict collapse.

They are estimating that population collapse is a function of resources, google "civilizational metrics", everything from food to steel production looks like an exponential graph. Population decline will/is occuring, just due to things like 50 years of inflation and a century+ of central planning. They were totally wrong then, and now as an inevitable chapter of history begins, they are saying "look, we were just off a few years!".

That said, you should take the apocalypse as an opportunity to brush up on philosophy. We could have engineered our societies such that they are further constrained in their ability to violate human rights, and avoided this entire thing, but they didnt have a full deck when they wrote the constitution. You can help build a better tomorrow by demanding universifiable moral values and sound economics lie at the foundation of the society to come.

>"look, we were just off a few years!".

Which is what most every doomsday cult does when the world doesn't end on the predicted date. Just off by a few years.

Seriously - the original study doesn't make definitive predictions so it can't be proven wrong but they keep updating the model to push the collapse date back "by a few years" because we keep diverging from their original trend lines.

Even if their predictions were valid it could be another 'peak oil' moment where we simply invent new technology that undermines the original assumptions.

The comprehensive technology sensitivity analysis already takes into account a possible rate of technology development beyond what has been achieved before, so that argument is baked into this analysis. Another sensitivity analysis for their being twice as many resources as previously known is also accounted for. The initial 1972 estimate placed collapse around 2040. This update places peak civilization around 2018 based on human development index, with slight but measurable decline since, and more decline in the forecast.

Look at whats happened, populations around the world have been squeezed into a tighter box, war, sanctions, lockdowns, mandates, environmental regulations, inflation, pitting people against eachother. Not a single thing there about our inability to produce commodities due to resource constraints, some nimrod cited oil prices like some oil producing nations couldnt flood the market with $60/barrel tomorrow if they wanted; no, the oil price is high because of a rapidly deteriorating geopolitical order. I see no decline in future prospects as quickly as internet infrastructure is being built (breakneck), nor for the innovation in cars, energy, housing, the only thing that holds a lot of it back is, a rapidly degenerating government.

> This update places peak civilization around 2018 based on human development index, with slight but measurable decline since, and more decline in the forecast.

I read the footnotes, the Human Development Index peaked in 2019 based on data up 2021. In a purely coincidental and no way related development there was a global pandemic in 2020 and 2021.

So they're making projections based on a trend of 2 years driven by an unprecedented and no longer active global pandemic (but coincidentally the data for 2022 and 2023 isn't out yet). And you're taking this as fact?

>You can help build a better tomorrow by demanding universifiable moral values and sound economics lie at the foundation of the society to come.

What, specifically, does this even mean?

The fact that you'd posit this and not understand that these premises can't be readily agreed upon makes me feel like you're too dogmatic to see the forest for the trees.

A universifiable moral value you could read up on is the nonaggression principle, with further reading into argumentation ethics. This would be as close to the euclidean geometry of ethics as humanity has come; a way of arguing against the nonaggression principle while staying morally consistent yourself has yet to be found, and evidence against that possibility is discussed in arguementation ethics. By virtue of the fact that you typed a response rather than searched for some way to commit violence against me demonstrates that you perfer peaceful solutions to violent ones.

> By virtue of the fact that you typed a response rather than searched for some way to commit violence against me demonstrates that you perfer peaceful solutions to violent ones.

It doesn't, the peaceful solution was significantly easier to enact than the violent one given this specific situation. If that's how this line of discussion tends to go then it strikes me as people finding ways to justify their beliefs versus a sound rational argument.

A sound rational person such as yourself probably understands that the tone they bring to a conversation matters, as well as the actual content of your speech, lacking as it may be.

Its ok, ill help you formulate a rational arguement, its useful to start with standard paragraph form. -thesis-Its morally permissible for me to initiate violence against a peaceful people. -supporting evidence-These people over here are different. -commentary-Those people are less deserving of human rights and moral dignity than I. -conclusion-Since some people have less value than others, its ok to subject them to violence if it confers sime benefit to people of higher value like me.

My default assumption is that the collapsitarians are as correct in 2023 as they were when they predicted the imminent collapse of humanity and its descent into barbarism toward extinction back in the late 1700s.

There is a reason every prediction of doom has been updated with new editions or "recalibrations" every decade or so for the last several centuries.

The collapse dynamic seems to get attention since it implies that everything will appear fine until some Wile E. Coyote moment when you realize too late you've run off the cliff. I think discontinuities are rarer than continuities in complex systems. If the world will get worse, it will more likely be a gradual worsening than a collapse.

Also, miracle wheat happened and soylent green did not.

I found it surprising that ChatGPT is restricted from accessing this website: https://chat.openai.com/share/4ccee094-20a7-47eb-88c8-e0103e...

Anyway, in short, I would never try to prepare for worst-case global scenarios because the magnitudes don't make sense for me to try to influence. Even if I was a prepper - I would have no insight into what would signal me being prepared/safe.

I try to focus a lot on optimizing my local conditions because they influence my daily life much more significantly and with much higher guarantees.

I'm in the market to buy a house in the next year or so and even asking myself the question, "Will living in <area> be a good choice in 50 years?" seems like a laughably difficult question to answer. I can look at how insurance prices are changing and historical patterns in temperature fluctuations, or I could bet on living next to civilization is better than living in the middle of nowhere, or I could bet living in a colder region is smart because it'll warm up, or I could find a warm region with geographical landscapes that insulate it from more extreme weather patterns, etc. etc.. but then what if the North Atlantic Current collapses and all the historical weather patterns are void?

In the end, I haven't found it good or healthy to try to build my life in the direction of that mindset. Instead, I strive to adopt an anti-fragile mindset and lifestyle (https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Ince...).

I want to be healthy and fit so that my body and mind are adaptable to the ever-quickening pace of the world. I want to minimize my physical and mental addictions. I want to be kind, friendly, and outgoing to those in my local community as to strengthen them and to increase the likelihood of reciprocity. I want to be comfortable with leadership, and have enough confidence to lead when I feel I can get us to good outcomes. I don't want to make decisions based off of anxiety, fear, or scarcity. I want the systems I employ in my daily life to be efficient to the point of mindlessness. I want enough money to have a couple of years of runway if I have a serious injury.

None of my strategies guarantee me survival in black swan events, but who cares? Nobody's getting out of here alive anyway. Try to not make your lived-life hellish by envisioning what a worse tomorrow could be.

> ChatGPT is restricted from accessing this website

Huh... they're banning ChatGPT specifically from accessing anything on their website. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/robots.txt

  User-agent: GPTBot
  Disallow: /

Is it really that surprising? ChatGPT is effectively re-selling their content without giving anything back. What interest does Wiley have in helping ChatGPT grow?

Not surprising, but they can just consume SciHub instead.

That does not seem surprising for a publisher.

Maybe the most important line of the paper comes toward the end, in 4.2: "Another uncertainty is the impact of crises, such as the 2008 financial crisis or the Covid-19 pandemic ... LtG as a model is not able to reproduce these short-term events. Rather, it serves to reveal broad trends and dynamics."

There's an important connection here I don't think the paper draws so explicitly. What will matter most to any of us, in terms of planning and preparation, is what masses of other people will do in response to these crises, and our models for that are still much less precise than our models for climate, resource depletion, etc. Hopefully we get closer to Foundation territory sooner rather than later, for the sake of better long-term projections, though as we've seen through relatively benign algorithms for engagement on social media, that too will probably lead to some uncomfortable places.

So in terms of personal preparation, until Hari Seldon shows up, our own human intuition (i.e. rolling the dice) will reign supreme. Unfortunately. Does it seem like your fellow humans will innovate sufficiently if every major port city goes underwater? Or does your gut tell you we'll panic, fight a global war, and send ourselves back to something that more closely resembles the 19th century? Feel it out and plan accordingly.

The majority of people will assume it's not true because as humans we bias towards optimism and lying to ourselves. We choose to artificially scaffold logic to fit our positive bias and you're going to see a lot of arguments in this thread attempting to refute this study. Most of those comments will be of that nature: composing different facts and figures and evidence in a specific way to fit their own desired outcome.

Studies prove that the majority of people are like this and I'm one of them.

Therefore I'm going to what everyone else does and that is work and drive to work, spend time with my family, spend time with my friends and not do anything different everyday. I guess being self aware of my own biases makes me slightly different, but in this case people who are self aware probably just choose to avoid thinking about it. We got daily problems to deal with and the environment is still too abstract to consider even when there's a lot of evidence suggesting it's too late.

This is the reality of people. It's predictable. Even people on this thread "claiming" to do something about it likely aren't doing much or doing anything meaningful. What's written in this thread is rationalization to keep doing what they're currently doing.

Only a very small small small percentage of the population can actually be genuinely panicked by what the evidence suggests. They will be making drastic changes to their own lives and attempting to change the world. People who build and construct their lives around rationality are the ones we classify as extremist.

I'm not saying these "extremists" are smarter or have higher IQ. It's more of a behavioral trait among a small portion of the population. They lack the normal biases people have, and I think this may have a small association with lower IQ as some of them are unable to weigh the rational logic against the consequences of going against the grain of popular opinion/behavior.

> as humans we bias towards optimism and lying to ourselves

I'm not convinced that the optimists are the vast majority among humans. It seems more like pessimists never get anything done, due to their outlook on the world (survivorship bias.)

Although in this case, you'd think the pessimists would be the ones to take action. Perhaps the real optimists in this case would be those who believe that in spite of these processes being in place, they can do something about it.

I find the resistance to understanding these models so interesting. I talk to friend about this and few people are able to get over their initial optimism bias. Some of us who have familial experience with less ideal circumstances—war, poverty, genocide, and hyperinflation—do not hold the same biases.

I think people like me who think about things like how we got here i.e. evolution, the scale of the universe, how insignificant our planet is, let alone us (in terms of the scale of the universe) also lack optimism bias. What is gonna happen will happen. Surely COVID19 shook the "it wont happen to me" vibe out of everyone though? I mean, COVID19 happened to everyone on the planet. Whether they got sick they were effected and could see the danger of a pandemic. (Well anyone with a brain...)

I think it is also prisoner's dilemma. You can YOLO now, and see the world, and then doom, or you can sacrifice, live environmentally friendly, spend your weekends lobbying, and then doom. But if everyone did something!

If I read the footnotes correctly, they claim things peaked in 2019 because the numbers were lower in 2021 and 2021 (no numbers for 2022 and 2023 in their sources). I'm sure the unprecedented but temporary global pandemic had absolutely nothing to do with that.

If you’re really serious about survival, build your local community up. Volunteer to help folks in need, learn the names of your neighbors, and get to know them so that you have folks you trust when you need help.

LtG - Limit to Growth -- re: Worldwide growth rates

World3 was so 2005. The new hotness is World4

You read up on permacomputing[0] and embrace the resilience mindset.

[0]: https://permacomputing.net

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38594008

I tried for a bit to understand this paper since the result, if true, seems extremely significant. If I understand correctly they are saying that non renewable resources, specifically oil, will soon run out, leading to a collapse in industrial output which in turn leads to a loss of agricultural efficiency and thus famine.

In their plots, they show non renewable inputs to industry and farming running out right about now.

This seems like complete nonsense? You can make a model say literally anything...

If this was true, we'd see commodity prices going through the roof as a long term trend. And even if that was happening, the food supply would be the last thing affected due to the demand being completely inelastic.

i am a but concerned about soil compaction after the transition though. Farm machinery has been getting heavier and heavier. Compaction is already an issue. If we change to batteries within the next 30 years this problem will get much worse very quickly.

They show availability of non-renewable resources declining from the 00's to a few decades ahead, depending on what resource you track. And those almost perfectly coincide with those resources prices exploding.

The book uses some very well informed geological predictions. Where it completely fails is on making any good sociological prediction derived from those. (Like the impact on farming.)

> They show availability of non-renewable resources declining from the 00's to a few decades ahead, depending on what resource you track. And those almost perfectly coincide with those resources prices exploding

Are you referring to something available online? Not sure I want to buy the 1972 book, but I'd love to see this data.

Energy prices do not follow the simple price elasticity curves of substitutable goods: check out the non-correlation curve between availability and price for oil, as published by JM.Jancovici, also his explanation of why.

Things are complex.

"If this was true, we'd see commodity prices going through the roof as a long term trend."

Yes. Sure. Like USD 1000 a barrel. But wait, the economy is already collapsing at USD 100 a barrel. Fact is, the workers can only afford products within some price range. In fact I believe we will indeed never run out of oil. A lot of oil will just stay there, where it is. In the ground.

The question is, are the problems with inflation and balance sheets of many central banks linked to the limits of growth and are this countermeasures?

Also some interesting posts from Ugo Bardi:

https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/peak-civilization-how-th...

https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/the-decline-of-the-west-...

I find it funny that a blog taking it's name from the Roman empire would make the claim decline must be faster than growth.

The growth of the Roman commonwealth was largely completed over the course of the republic's 482 year lifetime.

The empire that followed was established in 27 BC and ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Even the fall of the western part took slightly more than 500 years.

Rome ended around 500.

"ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453"

Then you can claim it never ended. "Up until about one century ago, the Roman Empire was popular enough that the rulers of Russia still used the title of “Czars” derived from the name of the first Roman Emperor and they called Moscow “The Third Rome,” with the first two being Rome and Constantinople."

(don't underestimte this claim for Russians self identity!)

This graph gives a pretty good description:

https://davidgalbraith.org/trivia/graph-of-the-population-of...

Rome had a population of around 1MM (some claim 3MM) and ralaitvly quick declined to 0.1MM. NYC has 8MM Inhabitants. Imagine it would collapse quickly to 0.8 MM with many houses not occupied, broken and the infrastructure rotten. Non functioning cars on the street and if you were to ask one what these cars are they would tell you: No idea. Some kind of horse carriage but much to heavy, we don't use it anymore, because they lost most of their knowledge in technology.

Assume it's as correct as every other Malthusian argument that has been made since 1798.

Google a guy named Malthus and read about his predictions

Read about the Victorian workhouse, the Irish potato famine, and Rawanda in the 1990s. In the latter example, the average person had less than a backyard worth of land to work on for subsistence. Jared Diamond discussed the case of Rawanda in his book, Collapse. Joseph Tainter provides many examples in his book. It has happened before, just not within the limits of experience of those living through all of the exponential growth we have lived through, so it is hard to imagine.

From a summary of the relevant chapter: “In the Northwest Rwandan region of Kanama, population densities were higher than in Bangladesh, the most crowded nation on Earth. With nowhere to move and set up a home, most women and all men in their early 20s lived with their parents, putting further loads on each tiny farm until the average person lived off one-seventh of an acre. By 1990 40% of Rwandans were consuming calories below famine levels.”

https://www.supersummary.com/collapse/part-3-chapters-10-13/

This is just bullshit negativity wrapped up in an academic veneer. Prepare for explosive and unlimited growth instead. Invest into new skills. Be optimistic. Make everything better around you. Make systems better and more efficient around you. We will obtain limitless resources from other stars, planets, and rocks floating around in space. We will create new innovations that will once again change the calculus on resource utilization and give us more yield even with far less input.

Human systems will continue to improve. We will produce better systems and better software and better hardware. We will renew what is already in place and settle the moon, Mars, Venus, Europa, Pluto, and beyond.

Keep in mind that the global population will drop significantly below replacement in the coming decades as well.

Where do you propose your "limitless" supply of toys to fit within the finite confines of earth?

Even if you could "spread out to the stars", earth stays a closed system. It can take only a finite amount of pollution, which we actually already overstepped.

You propose escapism. That's not a solution.

Earth is indeed finite, but if presently accessible resources give humanity tens of thousands of years of runway, that is for all intents and purposes limitless - because in that time the science and tech that get developed will resemble magic. Consider how peak oil turned out to not be a problem after all. Now humanity is on the verge of a renaissance in nuclear reactors, a revolution in fusion reactors, and the success of renewables deployment at scale.

I propose making everything better around us.

"There's no way the earth can support 1 billion people, especially with peak oil within the next five years!" -Someone in the 1980's, probably.

1780's?

That was Malthus, in the 1780's. His 1980's alter-ego was and is Paul Ehrlich who warmed up Malthus prognosis with numbers adjusted to fit our era. Ehrlich is, just like Malthus, known for failing in each and every one of his predictions. Both Malthus as well as Ehrlich failed - and in Ehrlich's case most likely ignored - to take into account that the population not only grows but also develops new technologies. These new technologies increased the carrying capacity of the world's economies faster than the population increased which has led to a staggering reduction of the fraction of the population which lives in poverty.

"Because we've been able to grow enormously in the past, we'll always be able to grow enormously in the future", is what you're saying?

You start by operating as though this sort of bullshit is not correct. Since the beginning of recorded history, people have thought that they were at the end of human growth. Despite that, people operating as though their future will be brighter have defied their predictions.

There's tons of examples of civilizations dying and ending. There's tons of examples of species going extinct.

History is not just linear growth with constant "defied expectations".

History is not linear growth, but it is just growth. In fact, historical growth trends are pretty much superlinear.

When a civilization/empire dies, people should think of it more like the failure of a company than a zombie apocalypse. People largely continue their day-to-day lives, just with a new person in charge.

As a prime example of this, people think of the end of the Roman empire as starting some sort of "dark age" where humans made no progress for 500-1000 years, but it really was the end of one government structure with one power center and the beginning of another. Technology and society continued to develop.

> In fact, historical growth trends are pretty much superlinear.

There's no evidence of this at all. We are at a peak right now so it only seems this way. (In fact arguably technological growth seems to be slowing down, only IT seems to be growing).

Extending history beyond just "recorded history" or "recent history" will make it clear that the earth is full of cycles of dominant species and civilizations becoming extinct.

I am suggesting that people believe constantly that we are at a peak because we have never been at this level before. For example, this was a very popular belief in Victorian England and the 1650's in the Netherlands. These are societies that experienced rapid growth for a while, and then started to see the top of the S curve. Just like humans see the bottom of the S curve and think "it's an exponential explosion!" (see the AI doomers), humans see the top of the S curve and think "it's all downhill from here," when things are really just slowing down.

Now that you have mentioned it, do you have an example of a civilization before recorded history "going extinct"? In fact, do you have an example of such a cycle of a "civilization going extinct" (interesting choice of words to use "extinct" there) where the prosperity of ordinary people materially declined?

Rapa Nui.

Are you referring to the largely unconfirmed story that Rapa Nui was in some sort of decline cycle before Europeans came and ravaged the place?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-easter...

First off ecocide is the default narrative accepted by most of academia. You're just posting an obscure alternative hypothesis here that's been promoted to you through popular media.

Here's another alternative hypothesize again over popularized by the media to the general public: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/rethinking-the-fal...

Either way it's still an example of a civilization ending completely.

Dinosaurs. They could have had metal cities for all we know and basically zero evidence would survive until today. All we have left are chickens /s.

get right with god

Move to this island and live happy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Matthew_Island

Everybody knows the limits of growth are bullshit and they are just some doomsdayer :-)

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