5 ms·

In essence, all these dire forecasts are little more than fancy versions of Malthus's predictions, which assume that natural and other resources cannot be impro

by cs702 5y ago

In essence, all these dire forecasts are little more than fancy versions of Malthus's predictions, which assume that natural and other resources cannot be improved/increased or more efficiently used as necessary by human ingenuity to support and promote societal well-being.[a][b] Given how large the universe is, I'd bet there's a good chance that scientists, engineers, and enterprising people will find ways to make all these dire predictions wrong. -- [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism [b] See also bmmayer1's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27836077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27836077

eruleman 5y ago
The beginning of infinity — knowledge created ex-nihilo.
minikites 5y ago
Human ingenuity is irrelevant if there isn't popular support for solving the problem. Look at climate change, there's plenty of evidence for its dire effects and plenty of ways we could be addressing it, but we're doing nothing because enough people believe it's a leftist conspiracy. Human ingenuity will always lose to human selfishness.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Human ingenuity can be applied to adaptation. Growing almonds in the desert beside golf courses in the desert doesn't really make sense, but engineering found a way.
  - revscat 5y ago
    There are limits. If rainfall stops no amount of engineering will make the rivers flow or crops grow. If the ocean acidifies and fish stocks plummet, there is no engineering solution for that. This faith people have in engineering just boggles my mind. Look to Venus. That is where our atmosphere is headed.
  - iiggyy 5y ago
    Nobody doubts there will probably be some planning of climate doom mitigation, but the reason we're in this mess is because of misplaced human ingenuity. We can grow almonds in deserts beside golf courses, yes. But should we have been doing it in the first place? All of our terraforming for the present world we live in today is at the expense of future generations prosperity.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Human ingenuity is incredibly relevant because it can bring the price point of solving the problem down to somewhere where popular support can be found.
revscat 5y ago
Your positivism is anachronistic. Humanity is incapable of putting ego aside for long-term survival. Look at the COVID epidemic, and how vast swaths of humanity has responded to it: denial, offense, pride in ignoring vaccines. Stupidity and narcissism.
- minikites 5y ago
  I agree with this and I would add that many people misunderstand history as a linear function of progress. History is filled with examples of things getting worse, sometimes for centuries. The future is not guaranteed to be bright.
- pelasaco 5y ago
  Well part of the society. The other part, kept distance, helped those in need and found a vaccine in a record time and are rolling out this in an incredible speed. So maybe your negativism is anachronistic too?
- koonsolo 5y ago
  I would say it's a vocal minority. When I look at my Facebook, I see people like this posting things like this, and then they get 0 likes, or maybe 3 best case. Most of us know better, and we keep our mouth shut.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
When you brush this type of argument aside with "oh, this is just Malthusianism," you ignore the fact that, ultimately, Malthus was right! Let me explain: the sum total of all human economic activity is limited by the available energy we have to put toward it. We only have a finite amount of energy resources available on earth, and we only receive a finite amount more per unit time from the Sun. Earth's pitiful reserves of energy (fossil fuel and nuclear) essentially don't count in terms of measuring sustainability. In the long run, we either use them up or not, and it's just a blip on the energy meter. Thus, the maximum, long-term sustainable pace of energy consumption is equal to what we can extract from the Sun. And, yet, we consume that much every year by August 1! While the trend has flattened out in recent years, it shows no sign of declining [0]. In short, we can't continue to consume the resources of 1.7 earths per year for very long, and that is what makes Malthus right. Now, given the time frames of these "dire predictions," this all implies we need to cut our total energy usage as a species in half in much less than 20 years. Considering how the trend so far has been to increase energy consumption by 50% every 20 years, now you see why these predictions are so dire. [1] It's really simple math. We need to dial back to 1970s levels of consumption even to make things sustainable. But, it took us nearly 50 years to get here from there, and now we have at most 10-20 years to get back. Those don't sound like really good odds to me. --- [0]: https://theconversation.com/yes-humans-are-depleting-earths-resources-but-footprint-estimates-dont-tell-the-full-story-100705 https://theconversation.com/yes-humans-are-depleting-earths-... [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
- cs702 5y ago
  It's not that hard to imagine scenarios over the next few decades in which we find ways to use resources far more efficiently (e.g., improved battery technology, improved factory-made meats/foods), find ways to extract far greater resources from space (e.g., improved solar technology, asteroid mining), and/or find ways to expand the resources available to us (e.g., establishing colonies on Mars, or in space).
  - esailija 5y ago
    Improving efficiency doesn't address the problem at all. If you only improve efficiency then consumption grows to negate any gains.
bmitc 5y ago
> I'd bet there's a good chance that scientists, engineers, and enterprising people will find ways to make all these dire predictions wrong. I'm generally pretty tired of the argument that tech will save us. It's even arguable that tech is part of the problem since tech allows humanity to scale and thus consume more resources well beyond what it could before.
- loopz 5y ago
  The debt metaphor is good. The scientists have models that are pretty accurate, but what may end up happening is local acceleration beyond those models. What happens under the heat dome is one example, and similar effects throughout the entire weather system might also escalate. Together, with all the other bad news, people are going to feel real effects much faster than anticipated. Then they're going to vote in a narcissistic psychopath, and complain about everyone else, while blindly stepping the gas pedal through the floor. Those smart people buying countryside farms may end up seeing their land dried up after ravaging forestfires and subsequent drought. OR, people are going to wise up. Start to contribute wasting less resources, improve environment, support efforts of mitigation, taking out excess CO2, stop destruction of natural habitats, etc. OR we may be lucky, have an unexpected spell twarting the models and cooling off the land again. Just so that humanity can continue destruction of their own lands and wildlife that have stabilized the climate for 10K years. Nobody knows for sure, but the models are supposedly pretty accurate overall and there are not that many unknowns left.
aylmao 5y ago
> Given how large the universe is, I'd bet there's a good chance that scientists, engineers, and enterprising people will find ways to make all these dire predictions wrong. I want to be optimistic, but a couple of things are worth noting. First, is that civilization has fallen back before. It's definitely possible for systems, knowledge and progress built over the centuries to fall apart and it has happened before. There's the bronze-age collapse: ancient cities were destroyed, trade routes were lost, literacy declined and in general there was a big cultural decline— not in one civilization but thought all the "known world" at the time. Fast-forward to the end of the Hellenistic/Roman periods— there was a decline there too leading up to, during and after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Huge advances were made during that era in astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, architecture, art, etc. Alexandrian engineers were designing steam-powered automata in the centuries BCE [1], but like a lot of other classical knowledge this was lost sometime before the Dark Ages. The Renaissance was about new developments, but also largely about re-discovering what was developed in the Hellenistic/Roman periods. We can assume modern times are different because we have more advanced technology, better political systems, different ideologies and more experience, but our challenges are also bigger. We've made it past challenges that would've destroyed civilizations in the past: droughts, wars, turmoil, etc. But we've never faced global climate change, for example. Second— the fact that we've been able to invent our way out of possible crisis before doesn't mean this will keep being the case. The number of things that are possible in this universe is large, but not limitless— the universe still has its laws. For example: Moores law. We know there's a limit there because of how small atoms are. We will have to figure out other ways to make processing faster and more efficient, because once we reach the physical limit, there's little we can do. We've been able to figure out ways to scale agriculture, reduce our dependence in one resource by switching to another, etc. but there's no certainty that this will always be the case. It's very much possible that at some point either the physical limits to technological development will catch up to us, or we won't be able to figure out the next big breakthrough in time. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_robots#Automata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_robots#Automata [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Forecasts_and_roadmaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Forecasts_and_ro...
gmuslera 5y ago
It's like getting debt. You start spending, and never end doing so, because the future you will be rich and will be able to pay it. And you keep saying that you will get rich "any time soon" but expend your time spending even more and suffering the consequences of your debt. Maybe your future you will never be rich, because it won't be trivial, and worse, it will be even harder to become rich if you have to deal with the consequences of your ever-increasing spending. There was always a solution, or at least a mitigation, that was stop spending or limit how much you do. It will hurt, be harmful, will affect your life, but not as much as the consequences of becoming poor and with a gigantic debt. Predicting when unstable complex systems will fall is not easy, even more when those systems are very complex. You can perceive the instability, that some sections seems to be falling apart, but maybe you can't put an exact moment of when it will happen. But that it doesn't happen the next cycle doesn't mean that it never will.
philipov 5y ago
We might be able to find solutions, but there's no guarantee that we will find them, or that we'll find them in time to avert a systems collapse. It's not like it hasn't happened before. People did find solutions when civilization has collapsed in the past, but they were implemented by the survivors.

by cs702 5y ago

eruleman 5y ago

The beginning of infinity — knowledge created ex-nihilo.

minikites 5y ago

Human ingenuity is irrelevant if there isn't popular support for solving the problem. Look at climate change, there's plenty of evidence for its dire effects and plenty of ways we could be addressing it, but we're doing nothing because enough people believe it's a leftist conspiracy. Human ingenuity will always lose to human selfishness.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Human ingenuity can be applied to adaptation. Growing almonds in the desert beside golf courses in the desert doesn't really make sense, but engineering found a way.
- revscat 5y ago
  There are limits. If rainfall stops no amount of engineering will make the rivers flow or crops grow. If the ocean acidifies and fish stocks plummet, there is no engineering solution for that. This faith people have in engineering just boggles my mind. Look to Venus. That is where our atmosphere is headed.
- iiggyy 5y ago
  Nobody doubts there will probably be some planning of climate doom mitigation, but the reason we're in this mess is because of misplaced human ingenuity. We can grow almonds in deserts beside golf courses, yes. But should we have been doing it in the first place? All of our terraforming for the present world we live in today is at the expense of future generations prosperity.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Human ingenuity is incredibly relevant because it can bring the price point of solving the problem down to somewhere where popular support can be found.

revscat 5y ago

Your positivism is anachronistic. Humanity is incapable of putting ego aside for long-term survival. Look at the COVID epidemic, and how vast swaths of humanity has responded to it: denial, offense, pride in ignoring vaccines. Stupidity and narcissism.

minikites 5y ago
I agree with this and I would add that many people misunderstand history as a linear function of progress. History is filled with examples of things getting worse, sometimes for centuries. The future is not guaranteed to be bright.
pelasaco 5y ago
Well part of the society. The other part, kept distance, helped those in need and found a vaccine in a record time and are rolling out this in an incredible speed. So maybe your negativism is anachronistic too?
koonsolo 5y ago
I would say it's a vocal minority. When I look at my Facebook, I see people like this posting things like this, and then they get 0 likes, or maybe 3 best case. Most of us know better, and we keep our mouth shut.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

When you brush this type of argument aside with "oh, this is just Malthusianism," you ignore the fact that, ultimately, Malthus was right! Let me explain: the sum total of all human economic activity is limited by the available energy we have to put toward it. We only have a finite amount of energy resources available on earth, and we only receive a finite amount more per unit time from the Sun. Earth's pitiful reserves of energy (fossil fuel and nuclear) essentially don't count in terms of measuring sustainability. In the long run, we either use them up or not, and it's just a blip on the energy meter. Thus, the maximum, long-term sustainable pace of energy consumption is equal to what we can extract from the Sun. And, yet, we consume that much every year by August 1! While the trend has flattened out in recent years, it shows no sign of declining [0]. In short, we can't continue to consume the resources of 1.7 earths per year for very long, and that is what makes Malthus right. Now, given the time frames of these "dire predictions," this all implies we need to cut our total energy usage as a species in half in much less than 20 years. Considering how the trend so far has been to increase energy consumption by 50% every 20 years, now you see why these predictions are so dire. [1] It's really simple math. We need to dial back to 1970s levels of consumption even to make things sustainable. But, it took us nearly 50 years to get here from there, and now we have at most 10-20 years to get back. Those don't sound like really good odds to me. --- [0]: https://theconversation.com/yes-humans-are-depleting-earths-resources-but-footprint-estimates-dont-tell-the-full-story-100705 https://theconversation.com/yes-humans-are-depleting-earths-... [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

cs702 5y ago
It's not that hard to imagine scenarios over the next few decades in which we find ways to use resources far more efficiently (e.g., improved battery technology, improved factory-made meats/foods), find ways to extract far greater resources from space (e.g., improved solar technology, asteroid mining), and/or find ways to expand the resources available to us (e.g., establishing colonies on Mars, or in space).
- esailija 5y ago
  Improving efficiency doesn't address the problem at all. If you only improve efficiency then consumption grows to negate any gains.

bmitc 5y ago

> I'd bet there's a good chance that scientists, engineers, and enterprising people will find ways to make all these dire predictions wrong. I'm generally pretty tired of the argument that tech will save us. It's even arguable that tech is part of the problem since tech allows humanity to scale and thus consume more resources well beyond what it could before.

loopz 5y ago
The debt metaphor is good. The scientists have models that are pretty accurate, but what may end up happening is local acceleration beyond those models. What happens under the heat dome is one example, and similar effects throughout the entire weather system might also escalate. Together, with all the other bad news, people are going to feel real effects much faster than anticipated. Then they're going to vote in a narcissistic psychopath, and complain about everyone else, while blindly stepping the gas pedal through the floor. Those smart people buying countryside farms may end up seeing their land dried up after ravaging forestfires and subsequent drought. OR, people are going to wise up. Start to contribute wasting less resources, improve environment, support efforts of mitigation, taking out excess CO2, stop destruction of natural habitats, etc. OR we may be lucky, have an unexpected spell twarting the models and cooling off the land again. Just so that humanity can continue destruction of their own lands and wildlife that have stabilized the climate for 10K years. Nobody knows for sure, but the models are supposedly pretty accurate overall and there are not that many unknowns left.

aylmao 5y ago

> Given how large the universe is, I'd bet there's a good chance that scientists, engineers, and enterprising people will find ways to make all these dire predictions wrong. I want to be optimistic, but a couple of things are worth noting. First, is that civilization has fallen back before. It's definitely possible for systems, knowledge and progress built over the centuries to fall apart and it has happened before. There's the bronze-age collapse: ancient cities were destroyed, trade routes were lost, literacy declined and in general there was a big cultural decline— not in one civilization but thought all the "known world" at the time. Fast-forward to the end of the Hellenistic/Roman periods— there was a decline there too leading up to, during and after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Huge advances were made during that era in astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, architecture, art, etc. Alexandrian engineers were designing steam-powered automata in the centuries BCE [1], but like a lot of other classical knowledge this was lost sometime before the Dark Ages. The Renaissance was about new developments, but also largely about re-discovering what was developed in the Hellenistic/Roman periods. We can assume modern times are different because we have more advanced technology, better political systems, different ideologies and more experience, but our challenges are also bigger. We've made it past challenges that would've destroyed civilizations in the past: droughts, wars, turmoil, etc. But we've never faced global climate change, for example. Second— the fact that we've been able to invent our way out of possible crisis before doesn't mean this will keep being the case. The number of things that are possible in this universe is large, but not limitless— the universe still has its laws. For example: Moores law. We know there's a limit there because of how small atoms are. We will have to figure out other ways to make processing faster and more efficient, because once we reach the physical limit, there's little we can do. We've been able to figure out ways to scale agriculture, reduce our dependence in one resource by switching to another, etc. but there's no certainty that this will always be the case. It's very much possible that at some point either the physical limits to technological development will catch up to us, or we won't be able to figure out the next big breakthrough in time. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_robots#Automata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_robots#Automata [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Forecasts_and_roadmaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Forecasts_and_ro...

gmuslera 5y ago

It's like getting debt. You start spending, and never end doing so, because the future you will be rich and will be able to pay it. And you keep saying that you will get rich "any time soon" but expend your time spending even more and suffering the consequences of your debt. Maybe your future you will never be rich, because it won't be trivial, and worse, it will be even harder to become rich if you have to deal with the consequences of your ever-increasing spending. There was always a solution, or at least a mitigation, that was stop spending or limit how much you do. It will hurt, be harmful, will affect your life, but not as much as the consequences of becoming poor and with a gigantic debt. Predicting when unstable complex systems will fall is not easy, even more when those systems are very complex. You can perceive the instability, that some sections seems to be falling apart, but maybe you can't put an exact moment of when it will happen. But that it doesn't happen the next cycle doesn't mean that it never will.

philipov 5y ago

We might be able to find solutions, but there's no guarantee that we will find them, or that we'll find them in time to avert a systems collapse. It's not like it hasn't happened before. People did find solutions when civilization has collapsed in the past, but they were implemented by the survivors.