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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

The first one won't happen because it is good for literally no one. That's not prisoners dilemma. That's not even a dilemma.

The second one is happening full speed and has happened throughout the history of humanity. If you'd looked at wood usage 200 years ago, we looked doomed. If you'd looked at whale oil around the turn of the last century, it was all over.

We're shaking off oil now. It's taking a while, but every time the price of oil goes up, the profit for replacing it gets higher. 100 years from now, our 20 billion descendants will have more than enough of this curious mineral oil stuff for whatever archaic activities such might be used for then.

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Past performance is no guarantee for future results. Other civilizations have failed in the past for mismanaging resources.

Your argument optimistically assumes that we'll be able to cope with the environmental changes that our activity is causing. Supply is only one part of the equation. For example, our CO_2 emissions, whether or not they cause global warming (that's mostly controversial in the US AFAIK), are causing ocean acidification, which could have a massive impact on marine life.

In dynamic systems as complex as the earth, tipping points are impossible to predict. That being said, we've never been pushing as hard for one.

Regarding growth, I have a hard time understanding how an exponential growth of our activity can be sustainable, especially in terms of energy requirements, which should be proportional (AFAIK). I believe that the current system is tautological. We need growth to sustain growth, but it hardly benefits people anymore. Wealth and happiness are related up to a point we reached in western countries in the 1960's IIRC. And after the last downturn, the economy restarted, but it didn't bring the jobs back.

I hope that there are alternative economic models. That's why I was talking about the prisoner's dilemma. I think that we're stuck on a bandwagon in a headlong rush.

I know that I'm very pessimistic about this, but I'm genuinely concerned. I can only hope I'm wrong.

Wealth and happiness are related up to a point we reached in western countries in the 1960's IIRC.

I think you're confusing absolute well-being with emotional satisfaction. The latter is often relative: Humans judge themselves in comparison to others, and are often happiest when they perceive themselves to be at the top of the pile. No amount of wealth is likely to change that. As our more "basic" needs of food, health and shelter are increasingly easy to acquire, yes, we'll focus more on that kind of emotional satisfaction.

But again, it's a relative phenomenon. If you think you'd be just as happy after being transported to the 1960's as you are today, I think you're fooling yourself. You'd miss all sort of features of the present day that our massively greater wealth has facilitated (and you'd miss a few years of life expectancy, too). Your absolute well-being is almost certainly much higher, and while that might not lead to emotional satisfaction, it's certainly worth pursuing. Better to be Socrates dissatisfied...

Objective well-being is an oxymoron. You can take all the objective indicators that you want, when it comes to happiness, subjectivity trumps them. Try to convinced someone undergoing depression that he's got everything to be happy...

> Better to be Socrates dissatisfied...

That quote refers to intellectual curiosity, not material wealth.

What new energy source are you relying on to support such an 'optimistic' prediction. What's going to replace plastics? What are you going to feed your 20 billion?

I can sort of see this working if fusion can be made to work in the next few years. But for the sake of the rest of the eco-system I hope man doesnt get anywhere near to that population.

How about solar satellites beaming energy down to the earth. We get hit by a very minor amount of sunlight from the sun.

Only 0.000000724654% of it reaches the Earth. That’s 7.24654 billionths of the Sun’s total light.

the earth receives about 274 million gigawatt-years of solar energy

Put another way, the solar energy hitting the earth exceeds the total energy consumed by humanity by a factor of over 20,000 times.

And thats only only 0.000000724654% of the suns output. Now once we start harvesting our relatively unlimited power source food will no longer be a problem. Build 100 story greenhouse's etc.

I am hardly concerned about our future growth, considering we now have plans to start mining bodys in space. Perfect launch spot for providing our future energy needs. In fact I wouldn't be supprised if the energy is the main factor in planetary resources future plan to add trillions of dollars to the gdp.

>considering we now have plans to start mining bod[ie]s in space //

We need new resources in the next couple of decades (at the outside IMO, ie eariler would be better). Do you realistically see us harvesting a varied collection of minerals from space in that sort of time-scale.

> energy source

Algae based bio fuels sounds promising.

> replace plastics

If we stop using oil for fuel, there's plenty left for plastics. Oh, and carbon fibre is promising.

> What are you going to feed your 20 billion?

Food. There's plenty of unused room for it, and even then, there's hydroponics. Solve desalination, or hook up a cheap abundant energy source to what we already have, and there's even more room.

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