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Industrial society is itself rapidly approaching overshoot of the habitability of this planet. Without being able to fully, artificially generate everything fro

Industrial society is itself rapidly approaching overshoot of the habitability of this planet. Without being able to fully, artificially generate everything from food to atmosphere without it being subsidized by natural resources that are not renewable at the rate at which we're exhausting them, industrial civilization will collapse in all its complexity. To take a natural ecological example: just because a predator figures out a very efficient way to eat all of the available prey does not protect it from when the food is exhausted. Just because an invasive herbivore is better at stripping the landscape bare of vegetation does not protect it from the consequences of its success. Just because agricultural and industrial civilizations supplanted the hunter gatherers does not mean that they are sustainable long term. If society manages to completely replace its habitat and resource inputs with technological prowess, then it will survive. We are not even close to that point yet given our current dependencies. We depend on a finite amount of energy, sunlight stored in an efficient chemical form millions of years ago, and predictable weather in order to grow crops in the ground outdoors. Oceans with a limited regenerative capacity needed to feed the world that are being overexploited. Soil phosphate and other minerals that we already must add back artificially, also using non-renewable inputs. We are not separate or dominant over natural ecology until we are no longer dependent on it for survival, and until that point we're like college students living on loans and our parents' money and calling ourselves wealthy and independent.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
This is just moving the goalpost. What you're saying is that modern humans are too good for their own good :). Anyway, I don't understand the religion of distribution (especially in context of finite resources). Yes, distributed systems are more robust. But they pay for this by being massively less efficient than equivalent centralized ones. It's a fair tradeoff, but a tradeoff. It's like 5 people in a (single) car vs. 5 people on bicycles. Which setup is better depends on where those people want to go.
- zeth___ 8y ago
  That is abterrible analogy. What we have is either ten people walking or 10,000 people strapped in the space shuttle cargo bay. That it takes the ten people 30 years to walk from Lisbon to Singapore vs 45 minutes with the shuttle isn't the right comparison. It's that the shuttle explodes 2% of the time. That you are forcing me to be with you on the shuttle because you don't understand the risks should be all the reasons we need for walking instead.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

This is just moving the goalpost. What you're saying is that modern humans are too good for their own good :). Anyway, I don't understand the religion of distribution (especially in context of finite resources). Yes, distributed systems are more robust. But they pay for this by being massively less efficient than equivalent centralized ones. It's a fair tradeoff, but a tradeoff. It's like 5 people in a (single) car vs. 5 people on bicycles. Which setup is better depends on where those people want to go.

zeth___ 8y ago
That is abterrible analogy. What we have is either ten people walking or 10,000 people strapped in the space shuttle cargo bay. That it takes the ten people 30 years to walk from Lisbon to Singapore vs 45 minutes with the shuttle isn't the right comparison. It's that the shuttle explodes 2% of the time. That you are forcing me to be with you on the shuttle because you don't understand the risks should be all the reasons we need for walking instead.