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I have to believe that somewhere in the parameter space of human diplomacy and relationships there is the possibility for expansion and coexistence without utte

I have to believe that somewhere in the parameter space of human diplomacy and relationships there is the possibility for expansion and coexistence without utter annihilation of one side. I always thought that the Romans empire expanded solely out of greed and power lust. One day I was reading about one of their very, very early battles. Turns out the population of Rome and of the neighboring city had expanded to the point where there was only enough resources for one city to survive. Rome won, and in a quest to secure resources and protect the home city from getting sacked, did not stop expanding. I recommend the book, "The Fates of Nations" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fates_of_Nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fates_of_Nations ). It's dark, but very realistic. The fundamental problem of human affairs is that we are animals born to reproduce, living in a world of limited resources. The real hope for the human race is not a new moral code. It's thorium and the birth control pill. Only the combination of sufficient energy and controlled population will enable us to share the same planet without clawing each other to death.

DaniFong 17y ago
Thanks for the book recommendation. I will read it. As I'm sure you appreciate, I've been thinking a lot about it. In my current thinking, it seems that there must be a new moral code. The powers of individual people, or even small groups, are too great. A million dollar act can cause billions of dollars of damage (e.g. 9/11) causing a many trillion dollar response (our current wars) and we haven't even seen the first real acts of biological terrorism. And what would become of a human population consisting of one group willing to take responsibility for the finiteness of our world, and one group unwilling to do so, intent on expansion, growth, greed and reproduction. There must be some moral code, some mode of thinking, some sociological structure, to deal with this. (PS: Are you really that keen on thorium? People can still make dirty bombs and I'm not sure about how secure it is in terms of preventing enrichment, and as far as I can tell it's more expensive in terms of amortized cost than uranium reactors, which are more expensive than coal, which in some cases is more expensive than wind and, possibly soon, solar. So plan A for me seems to be using the nuclear reactor that we've already got: the one floating in the sky.) --- Also, thorium isn't enough. It's just one in a long list of limitations in terms of the planet's resources. We fix more nitrogen than all of other life in the planet combined. Human beings have reshaped one third of the Earth's surface. About one billion people on Earth now enjoy an 'american' standard of living, and thusly an american standard of consumption. In 20 years it will be 3 billion. We don't really have room for another factor of three, even just looking at the amount of food that we'll need. At the currently level of technology, for example, it is not even remotely possible for south and south east asia to switch from a largely vegetarian diet to one which consumes half as much meat as the average american. --- I highly recommend the article "A Sober Optimist’s Guide to Sustainability" http://sloanreview.mit.edu/beyond-green/a-sober-optimists-guide-to-sustainability/ http://sloanreview.mit.edu/beyond-green/a-sober-optimists-gu... "The guiding principle of more: It’s interesting to imagine what it would take to change that principle, even by degree. Because making that change seems so fundamental to what you’re saying we’re going to have to do. I think this is the most difficult issue. And it’s not one you can tell people about. But you can show them. One of the simulation models we use is a model of the overall interactions between population, resources, pollution, technology, and the environment. We’ll run the model live in class. We’ll say, “Okay, here is the simulation, and some very unpleasant things may happen yet in this century. But everything in the model is uncertain. Let’s assume there’s a whole lot more cheap oil and gas available. The marginal cost doesn’t rise so quickly as we pump more out of the ground.” Then you just slide a lever in the model and instantly see the result. What happens, of course, is that by relaxing the constraint that’s limiting economic growth by lowering the availability and raising the price of energy, the economy grows even more, for an even longer time, until it hits some other constraint. So if you relax the constraint on the availability of fossil fuels, then you hit another constraint, which might be climate change. And if you go in and you relax that constraint, even magically assuming we can solve the climate problem right now, and for free, the economy grows even further until you hit another constraint, such as soil fertility or fresh water, and you see agricultural productivity fall. Relax that constraint, and you’ll grow until you hit some other one. Pretty quickly people discover for themselves that as long as everybody in the world wants more—as long as everyone in the world wants to be as rich as we are, and we all want to be richer than we are today, there’s no solution. What makes it particularly hard is that this is a conversation that’s not permissible in our society. Even the English language doesn’t allow it! There are words for not having enough—shortage—but there’s no word for excess demand. There’s no such word as a “longage” of demand."
- timwiseman 17y ago
  A very interesting and very long post. Am I understanding you are advocating a limit on the human population? How would you suggest actually achieving that?
  - DaniFong 17y ago
    More specifically, I am proposing a limit to the impact of human populations on the rest of Earth's environment -- in practice this is a limit on human populations too, though it could still go far. I don't have any answers I really believe in as yet. One incomplete idea I have been toying with is that much of human population growth is driven by the 'biological clock,' one's reproductive age ends relatively soon, and so if (a woman) wants to have children she needs to do so relatively early in life. Were lives longer and were the reproductive years extended, perhaps there would not be such a drive to reproduce so quickly; in a similar if distinct way to how reducing infant mortality reduces birthrates. Reducing the age of reproduction is nearly as important as reducing the number of children, in terms of limiting the rate of exponential expansion. I don't know any collection of strategies that seem complete, however.
- bokonist 17y ago
  I'm not an expert on energy. But my impression is that Thorium is the current front runner for a) being able to meet our energy needs and b) having enough to last hundreds or thousands of years. Using the sun cannot be plan A, because as far as I've heard, solar panels barely output enough energy to pay back the energy it takes to make them. I hope that technology will improve, but it's by no means certain that solar power's EROEI will ever match the 5X of nuclear power, or the 10X of fossil fuels. Energy is by far the most limiting constraint. With sufficient energy, you can alleviate other constraints. For instance, if you have enough energy you can desalinize ocean water and use it to irrigate crops to feed large amounts of people. You can always convert energy into other resources, such as food or steel. But if you don't have energy, you get Max Max. Finally, the real problem is not necessarily hitting a constraint. If the U.S. reaches a point where we cannot continue to grow our resource usage intensity, that's not a catastrophe. The disaster is when you hit a constraint, but your population keeps growing, because then each person will face a declining standard of living. The other disaster is when you max out a resource and then it grows more scarce, as again, you'll face decline.

DaniFong 17y ago

Thanks for the book recommendation. I will read it. As I'm sure you appreciate, I've been thinking a lot about it. In my current thinking, it seems that there must be a new moral code. The powers of individual people, or even small groups, are too great. A million dollar act can cause billions of dollars of damage (e.g. 9/11) causing a many trillion dollar response (our current wars) and we haven't even seen the first real acts of biological terrorism. And what would become of a human population consisting of one group willing to take responsibility for the finiteness of our world, and one group unwilling to do so, intent on expansion, growth, greed and reproduction. There must be some moral code, some mode of thinking, some sociological structure, to deal with this. (PS: Are you really that keen on thorium? People can still make dirty bombs and I'm not sure about how secure it is in terms of preventing enrichment, and as far as I can tell it's more expensive in terms of amortized cost than uranium reactors, which are more expensive than coal, which in some cases is more expensive than wind and, possibly soon, solar. So plan A for me seems to be using the nuclear reactor that we've already got: the one floating in the sky.) --- Also, thorium isn't enough. It's just one in a long list of limitations in terms of the planet's resources. We fix more nitrogen than all of other life in the planet combined. Human beings have reshaped one third of the Earth's surface. About one billion people on Earth now enjoy an 'american' standard of living, and thusly an american standard of consumption. In 20 years it will be 3 billion. We don't really have room for another factor of three, even just looking at the amount of food that we'll need. At the currently level of technology, for example, it is not even remotely possible for south and south east asia to switch from a largely vegetarian diet to one which consumes half as much meat as the average american. --- I highly recommend the article "A Sober Optimist’s Guide to Sustainability" http://sloanreview.mit.edu/beyond-green/a-sober-optimists-guide-to-sustainability/ http://sloanreview.mit.edu/beyond-green/a-sober-optimists-gu... "The guiding principle of more: It’s interesting to imagine what it would take to change that principle, even by degree. Because making that change seems so fundamental to what you’re saying we’re going to have to do. I think this is the most difficult issue. And it’s not one you can tell people about. But you can show them. One of the simulation models we use is a model of the overall interactions between population, resources, pollution, technology, and the environment. We’ll run the model live in class. We’ll say, “Okay, here is the simulation, and some very unpleasant things may happen yet in this century. But everything in the model is uncertain. Let’s assume there’s a whole lot more cheap oil and gas available. The marginal cost doesn’t rise so quickly as we pump more out of the ground.” Then you just slide a lever in the model and instantly see the result. What happens, of course, is that by relaxing the constraint that’s limiting economic growth by lowering the availability and raising the price of energy, the economy grows even more, for an even longer time, until it hits some other constraint. So if you relax the constraint on the availability of fossil fuels, then you hit another constraint, which might be climate change. And if you go in and you relax that constraint, even magically assuming we can solve the climate problem right now, and for free, the economy grows even further until you hit another constraint, such as soil fertility or fresh water, and you see agricultural productivity fall. Relax that constraint, and you’ll grow until you hit some other one. Pretty quickly people discover for themselves that as long as everybody in the world wants more—as long as everyone in the world wants to be as rich as we are, and we all want to be richer than we are today, there’s no solution. What makes it particularly hard is that this is a conversation that’s not permissible in our society. Even the English language doesn’t allow it! There are words for not having enough—shortage—but there’s no word for excess demand. There’s no such word as a “longage” of demand."

timwiseman 17y ago
A very interesting and very long post. Am I understanding you are advocating a limit on the human population? How would you suggest actually achieving that?
- DaniFong 17y ago
  More specifically, I am proposing a limit to the impact of human populations on the rest of Earth's environment -- in practice this is a limit on human populations too, though it could still go far. I don't have any answers I really believe in as yet. One incomplete idea I have been toying with is that much of human population growth is driven by the 'biological clock,' one's reproductive age ends relatively soon, and so if (a woman) wants to have children she needs to do so relatively early in life. Were lives longer and were the reproductive years extended, perhaps there would not be such a drive to reproduce so quickly; in a similar if distinct way to how reducing infant mortality reduces birthrates. Reducing the age of reproduction is nearly as important as reducing the number of children, in terms of limiting the rate of exponential expansion. I don't know any collection of strategies that seem complete, however.
bokonist 17y ago
I'm not an expert on energy. But my impression is that Thorium is the current front runner for a) being able to meet our energy needs and b) having enough to last hundreds or thousands of years. Using the sun cannot be plan A, because as far as I've heard, solar panels barely output enough energy to pay back the energy it takes to make them. I hope that technology will improve, but it's by no means certain that solar power's EROEI will ever match the 5X of nuclear power, or the 10X of fossil fuels. Energy is by far the most limiting constraint. With sufficient energy, you can alleviate other constraints. For instance, if you have enough energy you can desalinize ocean water and use it to irrigate crops to feed large amounts of people. You can always convert energy into other resources, such as food or steel. But if you don't have energy, you get Max Max. Finally, the real problem is not necessarily hitting a constraint. If the U.S. reaches a point where we cannot continue to grow our resource usage intensity, that's not a catastrophe. The disaster is when you hit a constraint, but your population keeps growing, because then each person will face a declining standard of living. The other disaster is when you max out a resource and then it grows more scarce, as again, you'll face decline.