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Exponential growth is unsustainable. After a few thousand years there won't be enough matter in our solar system. In any case technological progress has slowed

Exponential growth is unsustainable. After a few thousand years there won't be enough matter in our solar system. In any case technological progress has slowed way down in the past century. It would be foolish to bet on it saving us.

dogruck 9y ago
You also seem to assume that societies continue to grow at an exponential rate while they simultaneously innovate. And I do not know what your talking about regarding tech progress. Are you kidding?
- toasterlovin 9y ago
  If you zoom out far enough, all life grows at an exponential rate until it reaches the carrying capacity of its environment. Perturbations in the curve exist only to the extent that you are zoomed way in or the species you are looking at is struggling to avoid extinction.
  - dogruck 9y ago
    Yeah so easy forget that in the scale of Earth's maturation, Humans have just recently arrived.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    That depends an awful lot on how you define "carrying capacity". For example, I'd define carrying capacity as to include consumer preferences in how much they want to have babies. And if you include consumer preferences, well that changes the equation a whole lot. It means that you aren't necessarily going to get in a position where the stopping point is literally people starving to death. All you have to do is have the environment cause 2 people to only want to have 2 babies. And there are a whole lot of reasons as to why 2 people might only want to have 2 babies, other than being forced to under the threat of literal starvation.
    - Houshalter 9y ago
      >All you have to do is have the environment cause 2 people to only want to have 2 babies. Those 2 people will be quickly replaced by the couple that wants to have 3 babies. Unless you pass and strongly enforce laws limiting reproduction, which our culture seems unwilling to do, you will get overpopulation. Nature has a lot of population control mechanisms other than starvation. Like disease and predators. But humans have mostly eliminated those.
    - toasterlovin 9y ago
      IMO, a better lens by which to examine human preferences is to take the position that humans are poorly evolved for modern life and that what we are witnessing right now with regards to plummeting birth rates is selection pressure which will force the human race to evolve immunity to modern life. As best as I can tell, the version of the human race that will result probably looks a lot like the fundamentalist religious sects that have high birth rates (Amish, Haredi, Mennonites, Hutterites, etc.). And the very poor.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  I don't know what makes people think technological progress isn't slowing down. By any metric you choose to look at it is. GDP growth, life expectancy, etc. A modern person would be basically familiar with the household and lifestyle of 1940. A few differences, but most of the technology that we use today was already in place by then. Cars, electricity, washing machines, indoor plumbing, etc. A person from 1940 going back 77 years would be entering a different world. The only real exception is computers, information processing technology. One exception doesn't disprove a trend. And even those have begun to slow down now that we are approaching the physical and economic limits. I strongly recommend The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War which pounds this point home with example after example of just how much the world changed during the second industrial revolution.

dogruck 9y ago

You also seem to assume that societies continue to grow at an exponential rate while they simultaneously innovate. And I do not know what your talking about regarding tech progress. Are you kidding?

toasterlovin 9y ago
If you zoom out far enough, all life grows at an exponential rate until it reaches the carrying capacity of its environment. Perturbations in the curve exist only to the extent that you are zoomed way in or the species you are looking at is struggling to avoid extinction.
- dogruck 9y ago
  Yeah so easy forget that in the scale of Earth's maturation, Humans have just recently arrived.
- stale2002 9y ago
  That depends an awful lot on how you define "carrying capacity". For example, I'd define carrying capacity as to include consumer preferences in how much they want to have babies. And if you include consumer preferences, well that changes the equation a whole lot. It means that you aren't necessarily going to get in a position where the stopping point is literally people starving to death. All you have to do is have the environment cause 2 people to only want to have 2 babies. And there are a whole lot of reasons as to why 2 people might only want to have 2 babies, other than being forced to under the threat of literal starvation.
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    >All you have to do is have the environment cause 2 people to only want to have 2 babies. Those 2 people will be quickly replaced by the couple that wants to have 3 babies. Unless you pass and strongly enforce laws limiting reproduction, which our culture seems unwilling to do, you will get overpopulation. Nature has a lot of population control mechanisms other than starvation. Like disease and predators. But humans have mostly eliminated those.
  - toasterlovin 9y ago
    IMO, a better lens by which to examine human preferences is to take the position that humans are poorly evolved for modern life and that what we are witnessing right now with regards to plummeting birth rates is selection pressure which will force the human race to evolve immunity to modern life. As best as I can tell, the version of the human race that will result probably looks a lot like the fundamentalist religious sects that have high birth rates (Amish, Haredi, Mennonites, Hutterites, etc.). And the very poor.
Houshalter 9y ago
I don't know what makes people think technological progress isn't slowing down. By any metric you choose to look at it is. GDP growth, life expectancy, etc. A modern person would be basically familiar with the household and lifestyle of 1940. A few differences, but most of the technology that we use today was already in place by then. Cars, electricity, washing machines, indoor plumbing, etc. A person from 1940 going back 77 years would be entering a different world. The only real exception is computers, information processing technology. One exception doesn't disprove a trend. And even those have begun to slow down now that we are approaching the physical and economic limits. I strongly recommend The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War which pounds this point home with example after example of just how much the world changed during the second industrial revolution.