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> However, I do think it ignores the elephant in the room which is that Earth only has finite resources. Are you sure about that? Without question, the Earth h

> However, I do think it ignores the elephant in the room which is that Earth only has finite resources. Are you sure about that? Without question, the Earth has a finite mass. But 'resource' in the sense you are using the term pertains to the various ways humans can utilize the various finite components comprising the Earth. And that may well indeed be infinite.

praptak 7y ago
That's a huge bet, especially given that we have currently no way around the finite capacity of the atmosphere to absorb CO2.
- lurquer 7y ago
  Why would you want to get around your presumed 'finite capacity of the atmosphere to absorb CO2'? What does your comment even mean? Seriously... Is there some problem with the atmosphere being unable to 'absorb' CO2? Sometimes I think there are bots populating this site that randomly blurt out something about CO2 every few minutes even when the comment makes no sense.
Asooka 7y ago
I'm absolutely certain that the Earth has space for a finite number of humans. I don't want to live in a pod and eat a protein slurry of crushed bugs. Note also that human population was more or less flat for a long time of our existence - explosive growth happened over the last 200 or so years. That has been long enough that we structured our economy around it, but it's coming to an end. The free lunch can't last forever. Quite similar to the end of Moore's law and for much the same reason - people don't want to be packed too close together and transistors can't really get much smaller. I see it as more of a return to a norm than some catastrophic event. With proper sustainable resource usage humanity, should last on Earth until the Sun kills us. Which is a sort of tautological statement if you think about it - if our resource usage is not sustainable, our population will shrink eventually to the point where it is.
- loeg 7y ago
  Do you know how much empty space there is in the western US? Not to mention the midwest? We're not remotely close to human population maximum density and this "pods and bugs" dystopia you envision.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >Do you know how much empty space there is in the western US? Not to mention the midwest? Have you ever been to those places? There's a severe limit to the amount of freshwater available in those places, and the weather is pretty lousy in many parts. Not many people want to live in a place where the summer temperatures are over 110F, or where the winter temperatures are around -40. There's lots of unused space on this planet, sure. Antarctica is the prime example of this: an entire continent with almost no humans living there. Would you like to live there? And finally, and time humans build and live on land that's in a nice, temperate location, that means there's that much land that's now unavailable for agriculture. We can't grow food in Antarctica.
chasingthewind 7y ago
You make a good point. Economist Russ Roberts of Staford recently interviewed Andrew McAfee of MIT on Econtalk [0] and they discussed McAfee's thesis that we're getting radically better at doing more with less via miniaturization etc. I think it's very reasonable to imagine that a pessimistic view about resource management is overstated. [0] https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/ https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/
jbay808 7y ago
Thermodynamics has something to say about this. Reconfiguring atoms into a preferred configuration subset means a reduction in system entropy, which requires venting entropy elsewhere. That means shedding heat from the Earth. The rate at which you can do that goes with the fourth power of the planet's surface temperature. There's a maximum temperature beyond which the planet's molecules will start reconfiguring themselves into configurations you don't prefer. So there's a maximum rate at which you can rearrange the system to make it better. There's also, presumably, a maximally preferred arrangement of Earth's molecules, beyond which any further reconfiguration would be a backward step. The alternative would imply a cycle of configurations that are each preferable to one another. Remember, "infinite" does not mean "a really big finite amount that's just too big for me to imagine".

praptak 7y ago

That's a huge bet, especially given that we have currently no way around the finite capacity of the atmosphere to absorb CO2.

lurquer 7y ago
Why would you want to get around your presumed 'finite capacity of the atmosphere to absorb CO2'? What does your comment even mean? Seriously... Is there some problem with the atmosphere being unable to 'absorb' CO2? Sometimes I think there are bots populating this site that randomly blurt out something about CO2 every few minutes even when the comment makes no sense.

Asooka 7y ago

I'm absolutely certain that the Earth has space for a finite number of humans. I don't want to live in a pod and eat a protein slurry of crushed bugs. Note also that human population was more or less flat for a long time of our existence - explosive growth happened over the last 200 or so years. That has been long enough that we structured our economy around it, but it's coming to an end. The free lunch can't last forever. Quite similar to the end of Moore's law and for much the same reason - people don't want to be packed too close together and transistors can't really get much smaller. I see it as more of a return to a norm than some catastrophic event. With proper sustainable resource usage humanity, should last on Earth until the Sun kills us. Which is a sort of tautological statement if you think about it - if our resource usage is not sustainable, our population will shrink eventually to the point where it is.

loeg 7y ago
Do you know how much empty space there is in the western US? Not to mention the midwest? We're not remotely close to human population maximum density and this "pods and bugs" dystopia you envision.
- magduf 7y ago
  >Do you know how much empty space there is in the western US? Not to mention the midwest? Have you ever been to those places? There's a severe limit to the amount of freshwater available in those places, and the weather is pretty lousy in many parts. Not many people want to live in a place where the summer temperatures are over 110F, or where the winter temperatures are around -40. There's lots of unused space on this planet, sure. Antarctica is the prime example of this: an entire continent with almost no humans living there. Would you like to live there? And finally, and time humans build and live on land that's in a nice, temperate location, that means there's that much land that's now unavailable for agriculture. We can't grow food in Antarctica.

chasingthewind 7y ago

You make a good point. Economist Russ Roberts of Staford recently interviewed Andrew McAfee of MIT on Econtalk [0] and they discussed McAfee's thesis that we're getting radically better at doing more with less via miniaturization etc. I think it's very reasonable to imagine that a pessimistic view about resource management is overstated. [0] https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/ https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/

jbay808 7y ago

Thermodynamics has something to say about this. Reconfiguring atoms into a preferred configuration subset means a reduction in system entropy, which requires venting entropy elsewhere. That means shedding heat from the Earth. The rate at which you can do that goes with the fourth power of the planet's surface temperature. There's a maximum temperature beyond which the planet's molecules will start reconfiguring themselves into configurations you don't prefer. So there's a maximum rate at which you can rearrange the system to make it better. There's also, presumably, a maximally preferred arrangement of Earth's molecules, beyond which any further reconfiguration would be a backward step. The alternative would imply a cycle of configurations that are each preferable to one another. Remember, "infinite" does not mean "a really big finite amount that's just too big for me to imagine".