Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcadeparade | Hacker News Reader

Is capitalism compatible with human survival? You can't have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources.

>Report for the UN into the activities of the world's 3,000 biggest companies estimates one-third of profits would be lost if firms were forced to pay for use, loss and damage of environment

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-to...

It's true that massive regulation to account for all the externalities of the market is vital, but with 200 species a day going extinct already, and serious crises on the horizon, it should have happened a long time ago.

View on HN

> You can't have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources.

Blasphemy! I bet less than half of the otherwise smart people acknowledge this. Or they think we'll just terraform Mars some other planet light years away, soon enough.

You didn't have to wait long for the Mars immigrants, did you?

The problem is that accumulating enough energy to leave Earth will be very difficult. Oil still is tightly coupled to wealth. And if we survive long enough to decouple it, and are lucky enough that that is a smooth transition and don't end up way too poor to go to Mars, getting to Mars is still going to be a trip for wealthy masochists with no impact on human survival. (Wait, maybe Elon Musk is playing some Vonnegut-esque Marxist long con on the 1%'ers.)

I would find the Pollyannas more believable if we had a production line for thorium reactors cranking them out like the Chinese build coal powerplants.

I don't really disagree with any of your prescriptions, but from a purely theoretical standpoint the most critical resource for life is energy.

The ultimate source of (almost) all energy on Earth is nuclear fusion in the Sun. From the perspective of humanity, solar resources might as well be infinite.

At least in principle, if we could learn to recycle critical rare-earth elements, and to derive our energy more directly from the Sun (rather from through fossil intermediaries), there's no reason that our economic system would be unsustainable.

> From the perspective of humanity, solar resources might as well be infinite.

They aren't as soon as you continue to expect to have growth. Which the present systems still assume.

You can also have economic growth through more efficient use of the same resources. Again, there's probably some theoretical limit, but it certainly won't be a practical consideration any time soon (we're very inefficient).

Do you mean just printing more money (easy) or reducing the waste during the energy consumption (physical limits exist)?

What we know about the economy today is still mostly extracting natural resources, spending energy from one natural resources to process other, distribute, sell them and finally dump the results in landfills, air and water. We measure growth mostly by the amount of the matter involved in this process.

Printing money isn't growth, it's just inflation.

Reducing pure waste, or increasing output for a given input, results in growth. Yes, there are physical limits, but we're nowhere near them for most processes.

Then as soon as you assume you'd use always more solar energy (growth in energy use), the resources are finite. You have to achieve zero growth of energy use to have a sustainable state. Otherwise there's no infinite resource, not even solar energy.

You could (again, for practical purposes) always use more solar energy.

For reference, "the Sun delivers more energy to Earth in an hour than we use in a year from fossil, nuclear, and all renewable sources combined" [1]

And that's assuming only collecting solar energy incident on the Earth itself. Theoretically, we could also construct large arrays of solar collectors on the moon or in orbit.

[1] http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf

NB: I'm not saying this is likely or even realistic. In all likelihood, we are just plain fucked.

Is capitalism compatible with human survival? You can't have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources.

Maybe that's why people are trying to commercialize space/exploration?

They're trying, but a cursory evaluation shows it's a lost cause. Much easier to achieve a sustainable civilization (zero growth), as hard as that is.

What has a higher probability (honestly):

- getting an increasing majority of the population of people who for the most part of their entire lives are taught/live/believe by certain ideals (i.e. are not doing anything different now), to the benefit of the few, to convince themselves of another way.

- convincing the few who benefit now who have the means to try something new (or old) (i.e. who are doing something now)?

Meta: I wonder if people thought exploration of the globe was a lost cause a millennia ago?

I don't understand your choice descriptions. What are you getting at?

"Exploration" is the tying concept but other than that it's apples and oranges. Colonizing / terraforming another planet may be theoretically possible but also possibly require more expendable resources than our planet has to offer to the cause. Unlike Earth exploration.

Colonizing / terraforming another planet may be theoretically possible but also possibly require more expendable resources than our planet has to offer to the cause. Unlike Earth exploration.

It's easy to say that looking back, but there were people who believed the earth was flat. Blasphemy! But not then. Might have just as well been like comparing apples to oranges for them…

Colonizing and terraforming are both processes that can exist on a spectrum, and in that spectrum human beings to this point have proved to some degree that we can survive, not enough to make people believe ("but you can't grow your own food on ISS, it must all be for naught!") but enough progress to build upon by people who work within possibilities and not self imposed binary states that "complex" life forms themselves didn't come into existence as under such simplified states.

I think its more feasible that humans as we exist now, augment our bodies to exist in different places; We already do this on earth depending on the physical ailments that may affect people…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com