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The Earth has finite resources: finite land, finite minerals, finite water, finite energy. When people accumulate vast amounts of wealth, they place a large por

The Earth has finite resources: finite land, finite minerals, finite water, finite energy. When people accumulate vast amounts of wealth, they place a large portion of these finite resources under their own control. If we allow people and families to accumulate wealth indefinitely, it’s not hard to imagine a future whereby a very small elite control a vast majority of the resources. In this future, people can still create wealth by mixing their labour with raw resources... as long as they can afford to pay the rent to the rentier class.

pasquinelli 7y ago
That's a fair description of the past too.
- chongli 7y ago
  At no time in the past were we in danger of reaching the limits of our planetary resources. There was always somewhere else to go, some other resources untapped. In the future that will no longer be the case, unless we manage to settle among the stars. Past performance does not guarantee future results. The story of our society was not written with a fairytale ending. Whether we succeed and create a better future for all or destroy ourselves or create a hellish dystopia, there are no guarantees.
  - jlawson 7y ago
    Medieval and previous people were always at the limits of the resources they had the technology to access. The past was a Malthusian world. No economic growth and no population growth for thousands of years, in a world without birth control. The difference was paid by death. This is life when you're at ecological carrying capacity. We managed to find new ways to tap resources better, more efficiently, deeper, and so on, so we revealed new carrying capacity which we haven't reached yet. If we don't advance again the way we did before, a return the Malthusianism is possible. That should be your null hypothesis. However, spreading past Earth or transcending to entirely new ways of existing (e.g. computational life) are also possible. The future resists past-based analysis because the rules are always changing. But there's no reason in principle that we can't tap extraplanetary resources, any more than a Roman-era tribe in Britain couldn't pump for oil in Texas. It just took a lot of steps to get there.
    - chongli 7y ago
      However, spreading past Earth or transcending to entirely new ways of existing (e.g. computational life) are also possible The leap to another planet is far, far greater than to a new continent. It is an open question whether or not we could achieve it at all before a crisis destroys our civilization to an extent we may never recover from. There can be no second fossil fuel revolution, that was a onetime event in Earth’s history. But setting aside the challenge, with new possibilities come new opportunities for inequality. In the case of the former, it’s not difficult to imagine a wealthy person owning an entire planet. In the case of the latter, might I suggest the short story Incarnation Day [1] by Walter Jon Williams. In a world of finite resources and computational life, perhaps only the wealthy and privileged can afford to be incarnated. [1] http://www.sfsfss.com/stories/incarnation-day.html http://www.sfsfss.com/stories/incarnation-day.html
      - imtringued 7y ago
        Space travel requires energy. On earth we obtain most of our energy from the sun. During interstellar travel there is no sun that we can depend on. Therefore space travel is impossible without creating our own sun with fusion power.
BurningFrog 7y ago
Economic growth is the art of producing more value using the same amount of finite resources.
- akiselev 7y ago
  ...by extracting more and more of those resources until they're gone.
  - reilly3000 7y ago
    more like until they are no longer profitable to exploit, which of course is a function of global state. That is what underlies the fallacy of peak oil, which I was personally susceptible to. Resources don't vanish, they become incrementally more expensive to extract until the marginal benefit of doing so becomes negative.
    - shanhaiguan 7y ago
      I was under the impression that this is exactly what peak oil is: the end of our current levels of oil production, not (necessarily) the disappearance of the oil itself.
    - chongli 7y ago
      Peak oil is not about cash profits, it's about EROEI [1]. At some point all of the oil still in the ground will become useless because it'll take more energy to extract than you get out of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inve...
      - kortilla 7y ago
        That stupidly assumes all energy sources are equal. Oil has an extremely high energy density that makes it useful for travel where battery isn’t even close (heavy industry, air travel, long distance trucking/travel). There is an article on the front page about solar companies in Australia shutting down every other day because of negative energy prices. Burning 100MW for 10MW of oil makes perfect sense under these conditions. Here’s a thought experiment for you: why do you think we have batteries given they take more energy to create than they will produce?

pasquinelli 7y ago

That's a fair description of the past too.

chongli 7y ago
At no time in the past were we in danger of reaching the limits of our planetary resources. There was always somewhere else to go, some other resources untapped. In the future that will no longer be the case, unless we manage to settle among the stars. Past performance does not guarantee future results. The story of our society was not written with a fairytale ending. Whether we succeed and create a better future for all or destroy ourselves or create a hellish dystopia, there are no guarantees.
- jlawson 7y ago
  Medieval and previous people were always at the limits of the resources they had the technology to access. The past was a Malthusian world. No economic growth and no population growth for thousands of years, in a world without birth control. The difference was paid by death. This is life when you're at ecological carrying capacity. We managed to find new ways to tap resources better, more efficiently, deeper, and so on, so we revealed new carrying capacity which we haven't reached yet. If we don't advance again the way we did before, a return the Malthusianism is possible. That should be your null hypothesis. However, spreading past Earth or transcending to entirely new ways of existing (e.g. computational life) are also possible. The future resists past-based analysis because the rules are always changing. But there's no reason in principle that we can't tap extraplanetary resources, any more than a Roman-era tribe in Britain couldn't pump for oil in Texas. It just took a lot of steps to get there.
  - chongli 7y ago
    However, spreading past Earth or transcending to entirely new ways of existing (e.g. computational life) are also possible The leap to another planet is far, far greater than to a new continent. It is an open question whether or not we could achieve it at all before a crisis destroys our civilization to an extent we may never recover from. There can be no second fossil fuel revolution, that was a onetime event in Earth’s history. But setting aside the challenge, with new possibilities come new opportunities for inequality. In the case of the former, it’s not difficult to imagine a wealthy person owning an entire planet. In the case of the latter, might I suggest the short story Incarnation Day [1] by Walter Jon Williams. In a world of finite resources and computational life, perhaps only the wealthy and privileged can afford to be incarnated. [1] http://www.sfsfss.com/stories/incarnation-day.html http://www.sfsfss.com/stories/incarnation-day.html
    - imtringued 7y ago
      Space travel requires energy. On earth we obtain most of our energy from the sun. During interstellar travel there is no sun that we can depend on. Therefore space travel is impossible without creating our own sun with fusion power.

BurningFrog 7y ago

Economic growth is the art of producing more value using the same amount of finite resources.

akiselev 7y ago
...by extracting more and more of those resources until they're gone.
- reilly3000 7y ago
  more like until they are no longer profitable to exploit, which of course is a function of global state. That is what underlies the fallacy of peak oil, which I was personally susceptible to. Resources don't vanish, they become incrementally more expensive to extract until the marginal benefit of doing so becomes negative.
  - shanhaiguan 7y ago
    I was under the impression that this is exactly what peak oil is: the end of our current levels of oil production, not (necessarily) the disappearance of the oil itself.
  - chongli 7y ago
    Peak oil is not about cash profits, it's about EROEI [1]. At some point all of the oil still in the ground will become useless because it'll take more energy to extract than you get out of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inve...
    - kortilla 7y ago
      That stupidly assumes all energy sources are equal. Oil has an extremely high energy density that makes it useful for travel where battery isn’t even close (heavy industry, air travel, long distance trucking/travel). There is an article on the front page about solar companies in Australia shutting down every other day because of negative energy prices. Burning 100MW for 10MW of oil makes perfect sense under these conditions. Here’s a thought experiment for you: why do you think we have batteries given they take more energy to create than they will produce?