personally I'd say don't bother, but I'm a nihilist.
The chance of our ever encountering one in person is close to zero. We might find evidence that they're there, but that's about it.
On the other hand, if you're deliberately spreading hyperbole to get people to act, please stop - it's backfiring.
Not really considering the "most pessimistic" predictions have the Atlantic current completely shutting down within the next 100 years (wipes out food supply), tons of countries like bangladesh becoming actually inhospitable from heat/humidity index (billion+ people dead), sea levels rising several meters (massive percentage of humanity lives near a coast), etc. - could go on for a while. Frankly, I don't think you really understand what you are talking about and suspect you're going to turn this into a pedantic "well that won't completely annhilate all human life so you are wrong" kind of back and forth that I don't feel like engaging in so I'll just wish you a good day and move on.
Humanity is immensely capable of large-scale adaptation.
10k years ago we were getting chased around by sabre-toothed tigers.
1k years ago we were still dying of hunger and lack of hygiene.
100 years ago the first biplanes took to the sky.
Now look where we are. Human progress is exponential. There's every reason to believe that we'll be capable of dealing with our problems as they come. Malthus was wrong 200 years ago, and you are wrong now.
We have clean energy options in solar, nuclear, and battery storage. These are getting better, cheaper, and safer every day. We've got people working on geo-engineering solutions. We've got remote work. We're automating and localizing manufacturing.
Defeatism is not the way.
We are still doing that. In fact, there are more people affected by hunger today than 1k years ago. And things are getting worse, not better. [1]
[1] https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-h...
I hope you're not arguing that the rate of hunger has done anything but gone down drastically in the past 1000 years.
That there are short-term oscillations change nothing about the very obvious long-term trend. Keep in mind also that most economies are still recovering from Covid. Heck, the EU is a rich area and is still recovering from 2008.
Now, 1000 years ago, there were ~0.3B people. [0]
The daily calorie supply is hard to get, but in 1200 it looks to have been about 2000kCal in the UK. [1]
Now we're up to 3000kCal per person per day, for 27x the population. [2] And honestly, we're not even trying to maximize this number at all; farmers are optimizing for profit, not for maximum calories. Absolutely enormous tracts of land go uncultivated. Hydroponic farming is used for minuscule percentage of our food supply. We're nowhere close to maxing out the food supply.
When I see complaints like yours I can only conclude one of these:
1) The people involved truly don't get the idea of rates, or long-term trends in rates, or the impact of technology on our lives
2) They aren't arguing in good faith and simply want me to be sad.
Both of these devalue the source of the argument.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...
Our example community used to have ten children total, and one died of hunger. The the industrial revolution happened. Now we have 300 children, and two died of hunger.
That's 288 children living materially much more abundant lives. 288 lives that wouldn't have existed. One of them might be a key scientist / entrepreneur that launches us to 1000000 kids and zero dying of anything.
While it's true that the industrial revolution has led to significant economic growth, I don't think that justifies the fact that two children died of hunger in your example community. Every child deserves to live a life free from hunger and poverty, regardless of the overall economic situation. It's not a zero-sum game where we have to choose between economic growth and the well-being of the most vulnerable members of society. And I'm not convinced by the argument that the potential benefits of economic growth outweigh the cost of individual lives. We should be working to create a world where every child has access to the resources they need to thrive, not justifying the deaths of children as a necessary cost of progress.
* In your example, one of the two kids that dies is your son. The other one is the kid who's death is going to launch his best friend in a downward spiral that will eventually lead him to push the button and start global nuclear war that kills everyone and everything on the planet.
> We should be working to create a world where every child has access to the resources they need to thrive, not justifying the deaths of children as a necessary cost of progress.
> It's not a zero-sum game where we have to choose between economic growth and the well-being of the most vulnerable members of society.
The deaths of the two children aren't "justified" and neither is the "death" of the hundreds who didn't get to live in the first place. We have to minimize deaths and maximize life.
You're right that it's not a zero-sum game. The best thing for everybody is maximum growth. In the year 1800 there was approximately zero concern for the welfare of the poor, and yet the breakneck growth in that century gave the poor vastly higher wages and made left-wing, pro-worker ideas like workplace safety and the weekend practical for the first time.
Sacrificing growth for a softer approach to life gives you neither.
The best way to ensure every kid has the resources they need is to first become a rich society. The second step is to ensure your society stays rich by focusing on getting richer. When you're tapping an exponentially growing system to feed the poor, your first priority is to keep that system growing as fast as possible, not to throw a wrench into it.
But going back to your example, why are you trying to rationalize the fact that now two children are dead from hunger? If anything, the overall economic growth in your example and all the additional available resources should have made certain that not even a single child died.
And yet, here we are, with more that 8 billion people on the planet, all our technological advances and all the resources that we have and still, 1 out of every 10 people on the planet faces hunger. There is no sugar coating this. It is a tragedy.
Richer mothers are better able to plan their families and tend to restrict it to a number of kids they can feed. The answer is, and always will be, exponential growth.
The causes of any prolonged famine are political: local overlords and thugs grab the food and keep it under their control, so that they would stay on top of their local social pyramid and / or profit from reselling.
edit: typo
Famine was largely eradicated by the invention of the Haver-Bosch process.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/factbox-global-hunger-which-c...
It is just countries which are currently suffering civil war and violent conflict.
Here are two things to consider:
* the world has more than 78 countries. There are people affected by hunger even in first world countries. "Hunger in the United States of America affects millions of Americans, including some who are middle class, or who are in households where all adults are in work." [1]
* While 330 million is lower than 800 million, it is still immensely bad.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States
We should be doing more to prevent the worse global warming outcomes. The stakes are billions dying or having miserable lives, which should be motivating enough. I don't think it helps to spin a dark fantasy about it being too late & humans actually going extinct. In the long run, an 8x reduction in human population & a few centuries of bad weather isn't really even a close call, let alone a legitimate extinction risk.
You don't need 8b deaths to see we're clearly not on a positive trajectory, ocean acidification, wild weather patterns, climate feedback loops, famines, &c. will be problems we have to tackle by the end of the century and will absolutely destroy our capabilities to develop. All it takes is a major event and we're fucked, something that sets us back even 150 years, and it's game over, we wouldn't have the means to go through another industrial revolution because we used all the easily accessible sources of energy
Come on... mammals exist for a mere 300m years... if you worry about the death of our sun in a BILLION years but not about climate change you're an absolute clown, we'll face a couple of near (or full) extinction events by then
This is pretty much nonsense. Worst climate change predictions do not make the planet "uninhabitable", only some parts of it.
But we're living a mass extinction event if you consider biodiversity and populations in non-human species has plummeted; bug populations have halved in a decade, with that bird populations have taken a hit, ten billion crabs starved because of a heat wave (https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/research-confir...), etc.
No, 8 billion people won't drop dead, and life will continue in many ways, but in our lifetimes we'll see worsening food scarcity because of climate change (already happening), consequent famines, mass migrations, wars, etc.
But for a lot of people it mainly means food gets more expensive and the relative wealth of food choice we've had will be reduced, and houses will be built differently depending on the new climate trends.
That or the gulf stream will stop and the northern hemisphere gets covered in a mile of ice again. But that too won't happen overnight.
I don’t believe “civilization” is as resilient as you think. The late bronze age collapse, and all the mystery surrounding that event, did indeed take place over hundreds of years in a vast “global” society. I very much doubt anyone in that society could have predicted such a spectacular collapse. It’s not really a disputable fact that civilization has collapsed many times before and probably will again before we have to worry about these silly “billion year” concerns - maybe let’s just focus on the next 200 years?
Which will have a direct impact on the price of food as the pollinators disappear. Professional pollinator might be a high growth career in the coming decades.
In no more than 100 years or so, yes.
There are 8 billion people alive today. A few handfuls of whom will be alive 100 years from now.
Everyone dies.
Will the birthrate drop? Likely yes. Will resources become more scarce? Some, definitely yes. Will life be easier or harder 100 years from now? That's harder to predict.
Improved technology + greater demand = more resources become economical to mine. (Our deepest mines are ~5km and have actual humans toiling away in them. Heavier - and more valuable - metals tend to be deeper.)
This planet has a ridiculous amount of water, most of it just needs energy to be treated or desalinized.
We get more energy from the sun than we could even think to use, not even mentioning the gargantuan stores of uranium and thorium.
We have enough space to give every human (not just every family - every individual human person) a large house on a big yard. This wouldn't even cover the earth - we could fit all that in just Ontario.
Not to be nit picky but it would be a subjectivity pretty small house if you wanted a yard of any useful size. My quick math said you’d have about 1446 sq ft per person (not including the niceties like roads, stores and fast food joints)
In all honesty though I was surprised it was that close.
Yes our technology allows for new mining techniques, and there are lots of reserves of some things, but ultimately it's all finite.
These kinds of calculations aren't very useful IMO, because they ignore the massive amount of overhead space needed to support a human life in a modern society: roads, train stations, airports (I guess not necessary if everyone lives in Ontario...), schools, water treatment plants, electric power generation facilities, farmland, commercial buildings, office buildings, warehouses, factories, landfills/garbage processing, the list goes on. Look at any modern city, including the dense & walkable ones: the amount of total space for housing, while significant, isn't that much of the total land area of the city, and that's ignoring all the stuff outside the city needed to make the city work (especially agricultural land, but also power generation, and other dirty industries that are either well outside cities, or on their periphery).
Also, at a very minimum, humans need food and water to survive. You're not going to grow enough food for your family in your yard (and certainly not year-round). And freshwater resources are scarce in many places. Ontario cannot grow crops year-round, and only has so much water.
I allowed for some overhead, but even ifyou double or quadruple the space requirement, it's abundantly clear that space isn't an issue.
> Ontario cannot grow crops year-round,
It can, and it does. There are greenhouses and hydroponics - we would never spontaneously concentrate ourselves like this but if we did mass hydroponics and vertical farming would suddenly become much more economical.
Also, in this scenario we're free to move our ultra-dense spot anywhere on the planet, I just like Ontario.
> and only has so much water.
Ontario happens to have an absolute crapton of water - 20% of the world total. But that doesn't matter. Water goes in a cycle. If you have a large starting volume, the only limiting factors are energy and money to purify used water.
I think you'd have to more than quadruple the space, but sure, I do agree humans don't absolutely need to be spread across the world. Still, I think you're discounting things like resource extraction (mines), but I guess since people don't normally live in such places we can ignore those.
Personally I have wondered sometimes what the world would look like if almost everyone concentrated into cities laid out like Tokyo (i.e. very dense, and not very car-friendly). There'd probably be a lot of abandoned places.
>There are greenhouses and hydroponics - we would never spontaneously concentrate ourselves like this but if we did mass hydroponics and vertical farming would suddenly become much more economical.
Forgive me for not knowing that much about agriculture, but are greenhouses and hydroponics really viable for growing enough food for all of humanity? (Of course, they wouldn't be much help for growing livestock or seafood.) And has anyone really shown vertical farming to be viable? It looks like a nice idea in theory but seems to require advances in robotics to be economically feasible.
>Ontario happens to have an absolute crapton of water - 20% of the world total. But that doesn't matter. Water goes in a cycle.
Ontario might be OK here, but a lot of cities really do face freshwater shortages, for instance in the American southwest and Los Angeles. Of course, it'd help if people didn't use so much water for their lawns...
I think we have more urgent problems.
I very much doubt humanity will be around in a few million years time. We will have died out, or evolved significantly, or altered ourselves. In a billion years there will be nothing even remotely resembling us.
I can imagine a billion dollars or a billion bits. Working with computers we deal with units of a billion pretty often. I also know how long a year is and as I get older they feel pretty short. Obviously we won’t personally be around to see it but it does feel like the clock is ticking.
Let's say you live to be 97—quite old!!
1 Billion years is … 10,309,278 of those 97-year lifetimes, if strung end-to-end.
Barring a major disaster, by 2100 we will have a vibrant Earth + off-Earth resource ecosystem via machines/AI.
And mastered the ability to adapt food production and our bodies to off earth environments.
Compounding acceleration by science, tech & econ has anlready initiated the trend toward fully-designed, post-biology, post-evolution life.
Time is now hyper-deflationary. Every succeeding year is worth more than the preceding one.
A multi-system economy is only thousands of years away. A galactic civilization, a few hundreds of thousands.
The earth & sun won’t look much different by the time we are sending probes, perhaps with warp drives, to other galaxies.
I do think 2100 is a stretch, space is hard, but we’ll likely have all the basic elements of that proved out by then.
Old bottlenecks are evaporating.
Reusable systems, cheaper faster rocket production, & the loss of dependency on traditional pilots are just three profound bottlenecks we have passed in the last few years.
Machines are getting smarter (not even talking about general AI) and smaller, launch costs are collapsing, demand for resources accelerating, and systems for refueling, communication, etc. are bifurcating.
The last & only BIG bottleneck left now, is simple recognition of relative economic profitability. Just as there has been an explosion of satellites, there will be an explosion of resource extraction the moment it becomes relative net profitable, on a forward predictive basis.
(I.e. shareholder returns for demonstrated viability relentlessly accelerate investment, long before positive cash flow is required.)
Human lunar & Martian bases are just a distraction, however intriguing and likely. They are not a brake on the Solar System resource economic loop, any more than the continued inefficiencies of biologically manned orbital stations held back the explosion of communication satellites.
But by 2500 sure. And likely by 2500 some form of self sustaining asteroid with propulsion will leave the solar system.
I used to think ince that happens for a few thousand trips, humanity will survive enough that our descendants will last billions of years. Not the same biology, certainly not a single culture, but once the technology exists nothing can stop the spread.
Then I read about the “light cage” concept.
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/empiremap.php#ligh...
Right now, all we seem to be doing is putting ever more powerful tools in the hands of the same, barely evolved ape minds. Not a recipe for long term success AFAICT.
Ironically many of our biggest worries, like climate collapses, extreme pollution, inequality, huge regional wars (Taiwan), population collapses, pandemics, don’t present much risk for expansion into space.
Only a full civilization collapse or extinction event would do it.
So definitely a long term optimistic outlook for “life”.
But the specific ways things play out could still be catastrophic from individuals perspectives. The rate and nature of changes these next decades will be profoundly disruptive & challenging to every aspect of our existence, all at once.
—
If we don’t reflect the universes non-human created resources as a joint inheritance, in a legally and economically explicit way, there is going to be a great culling of some kind - there is no way around that.
We need formal recognition and a societal structure supporting that, for a shared ownership of raw natural resources in some way, to have a soft transition.
I don’t see this as a violation of capitalism, but as a completion of property rights under capitalism.
It accomplishes what communism tries to do by mistakenly socializing production, instead by joint shareholding of nature’s original undeveloped resources as a gifted asset nobody created. And allowing capitalism to do its job of maximizing that value for all of us.
Bidding to extract resources, rental of limited shared resources (land) etc can continue unchanged. But everyone will be compensated for their part of raw resources as they are privatized or used exclusively.
While I am more on the side of decline and fall (not absolute doom!), I do not rrule out that we overcome a lot of our issues.
In my opinion, this is wildly overoptimistic.
Not because we could never do it, but there won’t be any motivation to.
We will send relatively tiny ships, initially as probes, then as resource extraction & reproduction systems.
With laser acceleration & fusion deceleration (potentially fed by hydrogen collected collected from the target system), travel between systems can happen within 1-10% of the speed of light.
So only ten or so years to the closest systems.
That (propulsion) technology is not far off now. The bottlenecks are the need for further miniaturization, and our economy could not yet support the cost of, nor is it ready to benefit from, that scale of investment.
Whatever “format” our technology/lifeform has evolved to, we will be able to be sent it in extremely compact form, given any thing large can be recreated at the destination.
—-
Ironically though, despite a decade or so sounding very fast to us now, with time deflation (I.e. absolute time translating to higher & higher subjective time as “we” and our ability to process information & act speed up), decades between systems will subjectively Become be aeons of time.
But resource needs will also accelerate, so the necessity will be there.
So space will be deflationary, along with time. A meter & a second today will have much more relative meaning in the future as everything becomes more compact and faster.
Think about how the digital latency around the planet remains a constant, but as computing centers increasingly compactly, and grow in processing power, by orders of magnitudes, distributed computing with any serial or regular merging component will have to become ever more & more local.
Mars is big latency today. In 50 years, cross planet communication will be a relatively big latency.
Likely 40 years eventually, for the first trip, because no point sending a craft that takes 400 when waiting results in tech that takes 40.
Sounds like climate change is already, and major military conflict/genocide very soon will be, basically entirely solved problems in your book.
They still matter.
How long intelligent life depends or cares about a “natural” Earth biosphere is impossible to predict. “We” will for a while. But for how long?
Wars and any destructive conflict will always matter. They increase existential risk for individuals and collectives, and waste resources.
We are used to casually equating the future of the Earth, the biosphere, intelligence, civilization, humanity, our systems & communities, and each of us as individuals.
But they are all different things, whose trajectories are increasingly separating.
"A basically fucked Earth, but with the surviving elites continuing to party on as usual" by 2100 is where we seem to be headed on our current trajectory.
But profitable problems get solved when they are solvable.
And advances in different areas are increasingly non-separable.
—
In any case, space resource extraction & manufacturing will replace harmful counterparts on Earth.
And provide vast wealth, sustainable materials, energy, and other advancements that could enable serious Earth greening & rehabilitation efforts.
Better to welcome & harness increasing options, than command the tides to stop.
Except that we have thought similar things before.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union people (in the west) thought that we had been through the great danger of nuclear war, and were set for a peaceful and prosperous future. SO much so that the idea of "the end of history" became extremely influential.
IMO that is why the west is finding it so hard to cope with the world turning out to be a dangerous place.
> The best starting point would be what does interest him and what is he most likely to focus on.
I am not convinced we are seeing compounding acceleration. I think that era is past.
We are still advancing technologically, but I think it is questionable whether we are doing so at an accelerating pace:
Blog post on that topic: https://pietersz.co.uk/2012/05/innovation-crisis
>The Gombe Chimpanzee War, also known as the Four-Year War,[3][4] was a violent conflict between two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in the Kigoma region of Tanzania between 1974 and 1978. The two groups were once unified in the Kasakela community. By 1974, researcher Jane Goodall noticed the community splintering.[5] Over a span of eight months, a large party of chimpanzees separated themselves into the southern area of Kasakela and were renamed the Kahama community. The separatists consisted of six adult males, three adult females and their young.[5] The Kasakela was left with eight adult males, twelve adult females and their young.
It doesn't even take ages for things to change.
It's unfortunate that the public idea of conservation has become so associated with stasis.
Follow the orange dot on each page of my book:
I was looking at the ocean floor and using smooth ocean floor as 'fast moving' and rough ocean floor as 'slow moving'.
South America is moving 3 cm / year. using that with the ocean floors and some guestimation,,, between 120 and 113 m years ago SA moved about 12 cm / year and slowed down to 3 betwen 113 m years ago and now. Assuming no movement from Africa
(and if there was enough gas around for sound to carry, that too!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet)
I guess this is close but not like the Hollywood blockbuster it should be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlhlCWplqk
https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/collision-may-have-formed-...
I'm not sure of relative abundance of elements in the crusts of other rocky worlds, though at least generally Mars seems to have a greater prevalence of iron, and fewer of the lighter metals, in its own crust.
See: <https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/a/20711>
Citing:
Arya Udry, Esteban Gazel, and Harry Y. McSween Jr., "Formation of Evolved Rocks at Gale Crater by Crystal Fractionation and Implications for Mars Crustal Composition", Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 123 (2018), Issue 6, pp. 1525-1540. <https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JE005602>
Harry Y. McSween Jr.1,G. Jeffrey Taylor, and Michael B. Wyatt, "Elemental Composition of the Martian Crust", Science 324 (2009), Issue 5928, pp. 736-739. <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5928/736>
(The fact that we now have geological studies of multiple specific regions of Mars delights me.)