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As mentioned in the article, the relationship between most of the social goods and resource use is complicated. Education requires a certain percentage of the

As mentioned in the article, the relationship between most of the social goods and resource use is complicated. Education requires a certain percentage of the workforce to be teachers, the management of a sufficiently large organization, a bunch of buildings and moving of students around, etc, each of which in turn requires a set of other things. It would be incredibly difficult- and the authors don't try- to trace all of these all the way back and get a final accounting of the natural resources being used. But if you don't do that, neither can you say that they don't require a certain amount of natural resources. Education might turn out to be as resource-intensive as the airline industry, somehow. Tl;dr I guess, "no direct ties to environmental resources" != "no significant environmental resource requirements." On the other hand, of course, the whole article is observational based on existing societies with present-day technology; change society or the available technology, and resource requirements would presumably also change (also in ways we don't know.)

Retric 9y ago
When you say something must use X resource that's very hard to support. EX: Education does not actually need separate buildings and transportation. It could operate completely online. Further, most of we think of as nature exists in fairly narrow bands. We could for example have a city going 10 miles into the earth with a fairly normal ecosystem existing above it.
- maxander 9y ago
  That’s just more speculation. Could education operate entirely online? Some quirk of human psychology might make widespread remote education absolutely disastrous. All sorts of things could make udeground cities unworkable. Complex systems full of humans are have been often found to be surprising, to say the least. “X sounds roughly possible, so we can count on X”-type thinking doesn’t answer any questions or solve any problems, it just conceals how little humanity actually knows about this predicament we’re all in.
  - Retric 9y ago
    That's not my argument, if you say Education must take X resource then you need to demonstrate that's the only way it can possibly work. Everything from year round alternating days education (MWT,TH so 1/2 the teachers 1/2 the facilities), distance education, subliminal education, matrix style skill uploading, or simply allowing more people to test out are all counter points. You can make arguments that solar power must be lower than X efficiency from Quantum mechanics, but something as nebulous as education is more a goal than a specific approach. PS: As to your specific objection, Alaska already does a lot of distance education and it works fairly well though not necessarily cheaper.

Retric 9y ago

When you say something must use X resource that's very hard to support. EX: Education does not actually need separate buildings and transportation. It could operate completely online. Further, most of we think of as nature exists in fairly narrow bands. We could for example have a city going 10 miles into the earth with a fairly normal ecosystem existing above it.

maxander 9y ago
That’s just more speculation. Could education operate entirely online? Some quirk of human psychology might make widespread remote education absolutely disastrous. All sorts of things could make udeground cities unworkable. Complex systems full of humans are have been often found to be surprising, to say the least. “X sounds roughly possible, so we can count on X”-type thinking doesn’t answer any questions or solve any problems, it just conceals how little humanity actually knows about this predicament we’re all in.
- Retric 9y ago
  That's not my argument, if you say Education must take X resource then you need to demonstrate that's the only way it can possibly work. Everything from year round alternating days education (MWT,TH so 1/2 the teachers 1/2 the facilities), distance education, subliminal education, matrix style skill uploading, or simply allowing more people to test out are all counter points. You can make arguments that solar power must be lower than X efficiency from Quantum mechanics, but something as nebulous as education is more a goal than a specific approach. PS: As to your specific objection, Alaska already does a lot of distance education and it works fairly well though not necessarily cheaper.