Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is so spot on. Someone asked me when we would run out of oil, my answer, "Never". "Never?!" they spat out, but look at how quickly we use it, look at how finite a resource it is, Etc. And I replied, as it gets rare, the price will go up, as the price goes up other things will be substituted, as they are substituted the demand will go down. Demand goes down and the time to exhaustion stretches out. Long tail curve, we never hit zero. It just gets so expensive that nobody uses it any more.

Systems do react, and that reaction is why you can never predict system behavior with extrapolation.

Neil Stephenson posits a more rational economic system for WoW (and presumably Diablo 3) in the novel Reamde. What is perhaps most interesting is how he deconstructs the flow of 'value' in the economy, trickling in from gold creation and trickling out with taxes and purchases. To bad Blizzard didn't read that first.

That said the notion of a 'no levels' RPG where everything is trained/earned is more like Everquest (nobody wants to go back to skinning 6,000 rabbits, trust me) but it is the place where the next big breakthrough will be made. And it will make the people who discover the recipe very wealthy indeed.

I agree with you, but the energy example is flawed in that it assumes we will find alternatives that aren't very expensive. We won't run out of oil, but we may very likely run out of cheap energy.

The statement "cheap energy" is really hard to quantify (like 'largest integer') you can say "Gee Coal is really Cheap and there is tons and tons of it!" Except that coal smoke is killing people, contaminating large swaths of land etc. But at $100 a barrel you can gasify coal and make clean gas power plants cost effectively, but what is the $100 really mean? Its local currency (US Dollars) in a world economy. At a high enough price you can build nuclear plants and fast breeder reactors that eat all their own fuel. And use that energy to make long chain hydrocarbons (aka oil) out of CO2 and electrolisys of water [1]. Politically nonviable but that too is a system, what do people vote for energy and synthesize oil for plastics or a degenerating quality of life? There is some thoughts that you can run F-T reactors using concentrated solar in the desert.

But to you point of 'running out of cheap energy' what does that mean if the economy has adjusted to the cost of that energy? Look at electric cars as a prime example, sure they are expensive today but what happens 10 years from now when they are everywhere? Now $200/barrel oil, converted into electricity at a fossil fuel plant is give you the same miles per $ as burning it as gasoline used to do in your internal combustion engine.

Constant adaptation by the system to the constraints applied to it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch

Over the last 60 years global energy consumption has grown exponentially. There is a strong case to be made that rising living standards globally and global economic growth are dependent on this level of energy growth.

Nothing you said can come close to meeting anything close to this level of growth and I see no reason to believe our system is prepared for anything less than such growth without great pain.

I've read if wind, solar, and/or nuclear were subsidized even a fraction as much as oil is, they would be equally cheap. Is that way off the mark?

eve style?

Clearly very much inspired by Eve Online but still in the Fantasy/Roleplaying vein. One of the interesting things was a physical model of the world with actual geology such that ore and such took a lot to mine. Of course SWToR was kind of down that path and it failed miserably so it may not be possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com