Hacker News Reader

Comment by dachworker | Hacker News Reader

Politically, we need economic growth. It is what made us "civilized". Before we had ample economic growth, the human ambition to get more wealth and power used to mean, to go to war and take all that your neighbour has. And people should not make the mistake of believing we are somehow not exactly the same people we were 100 or even 1000 years ago. People today, are still killing each other over land, for example.

So yes, the energy/climate crisis should be taken seriously, but proposing a utopia that ditches one of the major constraints on our way of life is no solution.

View on HN

"It is what made us "civilized"."

Not true, it was technology what civilized us (and jury is still out), not growth. Yes, if people are not hungry or sick, spend time doing meaningful work, can talk to others and generally enjoy life, they're less likely to be violent.

But you don't need growth (use more resources and produce more material goods) for that. We can already technologically attain that state for everyone on the planet.

Despite these technological marvels, there are still people who pronounce BS about how we have to compete for resources in order to survive. But (thanks to technology) it hasn't been true since at least 1960s.

What utopia? Material scarcity is certainly not one. Agree with the rest.

I however have hopes for the future. Our society is still locked in and "end of history" mentality that makes most of us believe that economically and socially we have reached the end of the road and that all that is left are minor tunings. The next "collapse" or "big" crisis, that can come from anywhere (not necessarily be a purely economic thing), may shake that belief from us.

The article suggested we are facing a collapse because some resources will be exhausted, but I missed what resources there are talking about? As far as I'm aware there is still heaps of everything.

I don't think we should be digging everything out of the ground we can, but I don't here anybody saying we are about to run out of anything.

It’s been said about helium and fossil fuels pretty regularly for the last 20 years.

Malthusian themes have been recurring for the last 200 years.

Every few years a functional illiterate with disproportionate reach in media thinks that "current reserves of X" is a value describing the total amount of X available on the planet and that this can only ever shrink and will hit zero in our lifetime. The doomers scream and have a tantrum over our impending apocalypse for a year or two, then it fades into an embarrassing silence before repeating with theme Y instead.

Eventually we've rotated through the entire doomer alphabet and we're back at screaming about X again, as is the case with the OP article which I didn't read and never will but can reject in its entirety based on having seen the Doomer pattern a hundred times before.

Yes, and these predictions have always turned out wrong.

We are still getting a lot of helium as a by-product of natural gas extraction. If helium gets more expensive, people will make a bigger effort to capture it.

Availability of nutrition rich soil to grow stuff is one thing - google some facts about fertilizers and the resources they are made of. Clean water is also not a thing you can take for granted.

What facts? There was a big scare about ten years ago about how we are going to run out of phosphorus in about five years. Look for 'peak phosphorus' or so.

Obviously that hasn't happened.

If we look further, we wouldn’t be the first species that disappears for failing to adapt.

Your "we can’t change" logic gives us only one future, that of bacteries caught in the great oxidation event.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com