43 ms·

Are we running out of resources?

51 points by randomperson_24 5y ago

k8sToGo 5y ago
What's with the weird url?
- 0des 5y ago
  What's with the weird username?
  - ge96 5y ago
    Pretty cool don't know the term about the numbers and name eg. i18n
    - ytjohn 5y ago
      Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words. Software Engineers are prone to this. @lunasorcery has a talk on this subject. https://twitter.com/lunasorcery/status/1278984875190689798 https://twitter.com/lunasorcery/status/1278984875190689798
- netsharc 4y ago
  Netlify deploys your site under such a URL when you hit "Preview", so you can check the modificatons before you deploy them on your live site. But these preview subdomains are seemingly not deletable (at least that's what I found a few years ago) so it feels like polluting the Internet, as well as leaving draft versions of your content permanently online. Edit: To correct myself, the docs https://docs.netlify.com/site-deploys/deploy-previews/ https://docs.netlify.com/site-deploys/deploy-previews/ do say the URLs of such preview sites are different (they begin with "deploy-preview"), so I'm not sure why the URL of this submission is like that.
anemoiac 5y ago
There will always be enough until one day there isn't...
- namecheapTA 5y ago
  You never just run out of something one day. Demand goes up, supply goes down, and as you realize that, prices go up. As prices go up, alternatives are used and adjustments are made. As an example, I've heard people say that if Russia shut off the gas supply, Europe would freeze to death. Maybe that's true at first glance, but it ignores that gas is used because it is the best option. But it's not like freezing to death is the second best option. Heated blankets that run on a fraction of the electricity of electric heaters, still exist. Wood stoves exist in older homes. Adults moving back to their parents homes with wood stoves exists. On and on. Most people aren't just going to give up because one resource dies out. Theyll just move to the second best option, that's more expensive. And that's ignoring innovation even.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    Wood stoves aren't just a relic of old homes. They are becoming increasingly trendy in the UK again now.
    - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
      They were really, erm, hot over a decade ago. I've always wanted one having grown up in a house (UK) with log fires. But the particulate pollution is really bad and that sadly killed the dream for me. Many areas ("smoke control areas" under the Clean Air Act) don't allow them any more as they were bringing down air quality considerably. https://www.gov.uk/smoke-control-area-rules https://www.gov.uk/smoke-control-area-rules
      - hnlmorg 5y ago
        There’s a considerable amount of the U.K. that are not inside the smoke control areas. My friend runs a shop that sells indoor and outdoor wood burners. I picked up a rather nice Belgian made outdoor heater from him too. It’s got a super tall chimney and is surrounded by glass panelling. Looks amazing.
rob74 5y ago
> Everyone should be living much more like the most wealthy people in the most wealthy nations are living now. It should be considered a moral abomination that billions of people are not living in multiple story homes with robotic assistants to control their lights, security, doors, air-conditioning and the temperature of their pools. As with the rest of the article, I'm really not sure if this is irony or hubris? If everybody had these conditions of living, we would either need a larger planet or a lot less people on it.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  The multistory rather than merely spacious homes and 'pool' with the implication of a private pool, which are both very space inefficient make this seem foolish to me, but I see no issue with billions of people living in cities with easy access to pools, parks, schooling, jobs, and comfortable safe, warm/cool housing and living standards that are science fiction to their immediate ancestors.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    This is one of the reasons we need to be expanding the space for collective resources - it's not likely we can sustain a world where everyone on earth lives in a single family detached home in the suburbs with a car, private heated pool, private air conditioning etc that the author advocates for. However, if we're a little more clever with how we allocate and share our resources, we can scale up standards of living in a sustainable way - urban transit and a fleet of automated electric taxis, community pools, zero energy building techniques and mixed developments, and so on. This just requires that we head back in the direction of sharing things (social democracy) and away from economic individualism (neoliberalism).
    - rmah 5y ago
      4 bil households (8 bil people) with each household living on a detached 500 sq m lot (20m x 25m or apx 1/8th acre) => 4,000,000,000 hh * 500 sq m => 2mil sq km. The earth has 149mil sq km of land area so those suburbs would take up about 1.7% of the land. If you subtract out antarctica (14 mil sq km), siberia (13 mil sq km) and 3/4 of canada (7 mil sq km), the sahara desert (9mil sq km)... you're still left with about 106 mil sq km so we're using about 1.8% of the land. Density isn't evenly distributed you say? Well, let's look at only china then... Some 1.4 bil people in 9.6mil sq km. Everyone living on in 500 sq m lots means 350,000 sq km, or about 5% of the land. Lots of western china is too inhospitable you say? Fine, subtract out Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xining (forget the fact that 60mil+ people live there). That's half of china's land area! You're still left with around 4.860 mil sq km. So everyone's suburban lots would fit in about 7% of the land. My point here is that the earth is not really as crowded as many people seem to believe. It only seems crowded if you spend the majority of your life in or near dense urban areas. Which most people do these days. So most see it that way. There are still vast tracts of nearly uninhabited land and even vaster expanses of sparsely inhabited land. Sure, these are typically not the really nice bits of the earth (from a human perspective), but we do have central heating and A/C now, right? :-)
daedlanth 5y ago
verisimi 5y ago
I don't think we are running out of resources. I think we are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment - in a good way! But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured. In the name of protecting us and the environment, the governance structure creates artificial rules on behalf of their stakeholders (corporations) that stops innovation and pushes the costs and risks on to the population at large.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  > I think we are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment - in a good way! > But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured. The second sentence contradicts the first one.
  - verisimi 5y ago
    It doesn't. If you leave people to it, and people need something, someone will come along and offer a solution for a price. But if you have a vested interest, they will want government legislation to prevent alternative solutions. Now people who have an idea face legal repercussions fines, jail, etc if they try to offer a solution. This is the case in many industries, from taxis, to rubbish collection, to banking, to medicine. There are artificial barriers to entry that support rent-seeking by those industries already in place.
    - TuringTest 5y ago
      So you're saying that we're are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment, were it not for other people who can prevent it? Where's the infinite resourcefulness and infinite capability in that?
      - verisimi 4y ago
        Force kills resourcefulness. Good ideas are prohibited. To resolve this, you would have to have a good idea and the capability to take governmental force (police, law). Do you feel lucky?
volatilecarbon 5y ago
There were a lot of words here to simply fall back on the argument that innovation will solve every problem and do so before there is significant suffering. I agree that life will always go on, but this idea that consumption and quality of life can do nothing but rise when it is so dependent on the limited cheap energy and resources that we only learned to exploit a century ago is insanity to me. Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked. It won't be the end of the world, but we will all be poorer and there will be suffering while we adjust. I too hope for some near free energy and material source to appear somehow and prevent this, but I struggle to see how you could blindly expect this to occur, not even entertaining the thought that even if such an innovation exists, we might not be able to discover it before the consequences of our current behavior sets in.
- verisimi 5y ago
  Perhaps we should petition the governance structure to create a maximum threshold of 10 million dollars per person. Sure, billionares will lose much of their wealth, and will try to hide in off shore funds (even more so than they do at present) but we can legislate for this and de-anonymise the wealth. We would then collapse those off shore legal structures, allocate the wealth to individuals, and apply the 10m limit. It wouldn't be that difficult, it would leave everyone with plenty of wealth, and is a simple answer. PS - I don't think this is the right answer. But then how can the answer to the environmental issues be to socialise the risks and expenses across all the population, while allowing the owners of the corporations that have exploited the world's resources for profit get keep and hide their immorally-gained wealth?
  - skywal_l 5y ago
    Over-utilization of resources and inequalities are two related but distinct problems. Reducing inequalities will typically means more consumption and resources utilization. Those two problems must be solved but solving one will probably amplify the other.
    - 5y ago
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I had to check if this submarine advertisement for fossil fuels was written in the 90s (century optional). > But only because no resource has yet been discovered that is objectively better at producing electricity more cheaply. Um, no. Only if you hide most of the deaths it causes off the balance sheet and pretend they don't exist.
jacknews 5y ago
I don't think we should strive to remake the galaxy for human comfort and desires, but instead strive to remake ourselves, to be better suited to the environments we inhabit.
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  I disagree. I think we should definitely try to remake not just our galaxy but the universe for our comfort and desires
  - jacknews 5y ago
    If we have the power to transform the universe, we have the power to transform ourselves. Why would we make the universe ape our biologically-inspired needs and desires, when we could transcend them and become so much more?
    - jotm 5y ago
      Why not? It's a huge place. Why don't you transcend and stop using electricity? Needs and desires.
    - wly_cdgr 5y ago
      I think we are plenty as is, and as for why bother to make the universe do our bidding - because there's great pleasure satisfaction and fulfillment in bending cold indifferent nature to our will...not to mention in enjoying a hot cup of cocoa, a good book, and a long slow blowjob by the fireplace on a dark wintry night If you have not seen the Les Blank documentary Always For Pleasure, I highly recommend it
      - throwaway6532 5y ago
        >I think we are plenty as is, and as for why bother to make the universe do our bidding - because there's great pleasure satisfaction and fulfillment in bending cold indifferent nature to our will... We're starting to wake up to the reality that all we're really doing is bending it out of shape and when we push it beyond the yield strength it will snap.
cheschire 5y ago
It was nice to read something optimistic again. Feels so rare these days. Seems like whenever optimism pokes its head out, everyone rushes to smash it back into its hole. There’s no room for your optimism in my reality! And so on. edit: Hmm. I get a negative score for celebrating some optimism. How dare I step out of line.
- lm28469 5y ago
  Optimism is fine but when everything points the opposite direction it's called wishful thinking
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    But everything does not point in the opposite direction.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Pet peeve: James Watt was the Bill Gates of his day, he held natural industrial progress made by thousands of talented individuals back with patents and connections to the wealthy, please stop crediting him personally with the steam engine.
standardUser 5y ago
"Should any particular resource begin to run short, our creativity will bring into being the knowledge of how to replace that resource from either some other source or by using some other means to accomplish what that resource did." The track record on this appears to be 100%. Are there any examples of a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?
- volatilecarbon 5y ago
  The only example I can think of is water. While it's not gone, the quality and cleanliness has decreased over time. There are many areas where you can no longer consume seafood due to high pollution levels. Same with swimming or drinking (boiling used to be sufficient to clean water, but it certainly isn't anymore). Even "safe" seafood is only recommended to be consumed 2 times a week now due to the build up of heavy metals. It's also true that we'll always been able to purify water for consumption/use, but there is a cost to that and I don't see that cost decreasing.
  - jotm 5y ago
    Not safe to consume seafood? As long as it's alive, you can eat it. Maybe it lowers your lifespan. That's not that big of a problem, humans have lived like that for the vast majority of their existence. As for water, it's everywhere. Obviously, some people can run out of it, but then again a minority is always fucked in this world.
    - cableshaft 5y ago
      > As for water, it's everywhere. The vast majority of it is seawater, which humans can't drink because of its salt content. There's still enough freshwater in most places, but the regions where drinkable water scarcity is a problem are growing larger every year. Desalination plants do exist, but it's up to 10x more expensive in most places (in California it's only about 2x more expensive because water is already pretty scarce there) and it's also not great for the environment either: "The problem is that the desalination of water requires a lot of energy. Salt dissolves very easily in water, forming strong chemical bonds, and those bonds are difficult to break. Energy and the technology to desalinate water are both expensive, and this means that desalinating water can be pretty costly...It can cost from just under $1 to well over $2 to produce one cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water from the ocean...But switch the source to a river or an aquifer, and the cost of a cubic meter of water can plummet to 10 to 20 cents, and farmers often pay far less." "There are environmental costs of desalination, as well. Sea life can get sucked into desalination plants, killing small ocean creatures like baby fish and plankton, upsetting the food chain. Also, there's the problem of what to do with the separated salt, which is left over as a very concentrated brine. Pumping this supersalty water back into the ocean can harm local aquatic life. Reducing these impacts is possible, but it adds to the costs.'" https://scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-get-our-drinking-water-from-the-ocean/ https://scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-get-our-d...
rmbyrro 5y ago
Is it just me or is it annoying that some articles take SEVERAL paragraphs to get to the point?
- bdefore 5y ago
  I'd agree this one takes too long to get to its thrust, but I'd argue the majority of articles I read gloss over nuance in an attempt to capture Twitter-soaked brains.
femto 5y ago
The finite resource is places to put the byproducts.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  This is really just CO2. Everything else is more easily controllable, recyclable, or avoidable. If you look at the mass of material extracted from the Earth, fossil fuels > all mineral resources. To first order, the resource problem is the fossil fuel problem, and we're on a trajectory to get off fossil fuels.
Shadonototra 5y ago
No we are not running out of resources Are we wasting resources? yes
retrac 5y ago
This is something I learned about iron recently. We're not running out of it, thankfully. The planet is mostly iron, after all. But it perhaps helps drive home the sheer scale of modern industrial civilization. More steel was manufactured per year [1] in the 2010s, than humanity produced in its entire history up to World War I. The whole century of the industrial revolution -- from the Eiffel Tower, to the steam ships, railways -- is but a drop in the ocean of material production by today's standards. Most basic resources have a similar looking chart. And not everything is as abundant as iron. [1] https://i.imgur.com/VBIN1RF.png https://i.imgur.com/VBIN1RF.png
kkfx 5y ago
Few notes: - today "needed resources" might be different, at least partially, than tomorrow ones, as they are partially different than yesterday, but such differences are very hard to estimate since we know the past, but we can't really know the future, planning cover development with already or almost already known things, future scientific discovering are not predictable; - resource estimate is done and sold as a "tangible number" however I'm not sure how approximate it can be. So saying on earth we can source X gazillion tons of a certain mineral for me is "probably near truth but until extracted we can't really know" and that's similar for agriculture production vs climate change; - another issue is the meaning of "renewable" and "circular", wood is renewable at a certain rate of usage, recyclable one ore two time for different usage in a more or less significant percentage, Al is formally 100% renewable ad infinitum, glass the same, but the scale and the cost of such supply chains are not immediately measurable on scale etc. Long story short my own personal opinion is: for actual technology, actual number of people, actual human development, we probably have significant resource issues witch does not means "we run out" in the broad sense, but we still are in a very bad situation. Planning moves to evolve is mandatory, but must be done at both scientific and social level, certainly not at economical level as is done today.
taylodl 5y ago
The 19th & 20th centuries have taught us how transformative knowledge is. Prior to these centuries humanity more or less haphazardly acquired new knowledge. Now we're much more principled in our acquisition and management of knowledge - in fact we've come to see that knowledge itself is a resource. What do we know about knowledge resources? For starters we know they're finite. There's only so much knowledge available to any computing node (or person). Then there's the issue of it takes energy to store, transfer, and synthesize that knowledge and those energy costs are skyrocketing. Finally, there's the very real fact that knowledge synthesis is asymptotic - there's a finite amount of knowledge to be had in total, and while quick strides can be made in getting close to that totality to close the remaining knowledge gap will require increasing amounts of energy. We closed a remarkable bit of that gap in the 19th and 20th centuries - the gaps remaining are getting really difficult to fill. This is the counterargument to innovation will solve all our problems.
- throwaway6532 5y ago
  >We closed a remarkable bit of that gap in the 19th and 20th centuries - the gaps remaining are getting really difficult to fill. This is the counterargument to innovation will solve all our problems. When you combine this with birth rates below replacement level that leads society in the direction where it's a) harder to fill those gaps, and b) much less people to fill them. So, having far less bandwidth available to do that discovery/work seems to be in general a trend people don't seem to acknowledge.
wishawa 5y ago
At the start a sigmoid does look like an exponential doesn’t it?
thissiteb1lows 5y ago
toss1 5y ago
>>We can make all of the Earth rather like the best parts of New York, or Paris or Sydney: picturesque, clean and comfortable. We can then set about to make the rest of the solar system rather like the Earth. If we make even 10% of the entire earth's surface at that density, it will be an environmental catastrophe that would likely collapse the food web. Over half the world's population lives on less than 1% of the land [0]. Only 14% of the land has been modified in any way. Long before we turn the whole thing into a cityscape, the natural world on which we depend, from the soil biology, to the pollinators, to the apex predators, will all collapse. Sure the author has a point about the transformative ability of knowledge, but he's also basically an idiot about system dynamics. [0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3389041/Where-world-lives-Map-shows-half-planet-s-population-lives-just-1-land.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3389041/Wher... [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/human-impact-earth-planet-change-development/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/human-impact-earth-pl...
nuvious 4y ago
I would say no, we just need to change what we focus on. If you're worried about lithium-ion batteries running out, check out Aluminum ion batteries (AL is the mos t abundant metal in the Earth's crust). Worried about farmland? Check out advances in vertical farming. Worried about space to live? Just wait for a housing price correction. Worried about energy? Check out the advances in Solar, Small modular reactors, and grid storage possibilities. The better question isn't "are we running out of resources?" it's "should we be using different resources or the same resources differently?" to which the answer is yes and being explored by scientists and engineers
fold3 4y ago
I think we know now that issue is not about lack of resources[1], it is more about the destruction of the environment[2]. If we want to keep coexisting with other forms of living. [1] Once generation IV nuclear powered is mastered, that is. [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/04/ipcc-report-now-or-never-if-world-stave-off-climate-disaster https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/04/ipcc-rep...

k8sToGo 5y ago

What's with the weird url?

0des 5y ago
What's with the weird username?
- ge96 5y ago
  Pretty cool don't know the term about the numbers and name eg. i18n
  - ytjohn 5y ago
    Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words. Software Engineers are prone to this. @lunasorcery has a talk on this subject. https://twitter.com/lunasorcery/status/1278984875190689798 https://twitter.com/lunasorcery/status/1278984875190689798
netsharc 4y ago
Netlify deploys your site under such a URL when you hit "Preview", so you can check the modificatons before you deploy them on your live site. But these preview subdomains are seemingly not deletable (at least that's what I found a few years ago) so it feels like polluting the Internet, as well as leaving draft versions of your content permanently online. Edit: To correct myself, the docs https://docs.netlify.com/site-deploys/deploy-previews/ https://docs.netlify.com/site-deploys/deploy-previews/ do say the URLs of such preview sites are different (they begin with "deploy-preview"), so I'm not sure why the URL of this submission is like that.

anemoiac 5y ago

There will always be enough until one day there isn't...

namecheapTA 5y ago
You never just run out of something one day. Demand goes up, supply goes down, and as you realize that, prices go up. As prices go up, alternatives are used and adjustments are made. As an example, I've heard people say that if Russia shut off the gas supply, Europe would freeze to death. Maybe that's true at first glance, but it ignores that gas is used because it is the best option. But it's not like freezing to death is the second best option. Heated blankets that run on a fraction of the electricity of electric heaters, still exist. Wood stoves exist in older homes. Adults moving back to their parents homes with wood stoves exists. On and on. Most people aren't just going to give up because one resource dies out. Theyll just move to the second best option, that's more expensive. And that's ignoring innovation even.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  Wood stoves aren't just a relic of old homes. They are becoming increasingly trendy in the UK again now.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    They were really, erm, hot over a decade ago. I've always wanted one having grown up in a house (UK) with log fires. But the particulate pollution is really bad and that sadly killed the dream for me. Many areas ("smoke control areas" under the Clean Air Act) don't allow them any more as they were bringing down air quality considerably. https://www.gov.uk/smoke-control-area-rules https://www.gov.uk/smoke-control-area-rules
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      There’s a considerable amount of the U.K. that are not inside the smoke control areas. My friend runs a shop that sells indoor and outdoor wood burners. I picked up a rather nice Belgian made outdoor heater from him too. It’s got a super tall chimney and is surrounded by glass panelling. Looks amazing.

rob74 5y ago

> Everyone should be living much more like the most wealthy people in the most wealthy nations are living now. It should be considered a moral abomination that billions of people are not living in multiple story homes with robotic assistants to control their lights, security, doors, air-conditioning and the temperature of their pools. As with the rest of the article, I'm really not sure if this is irony or hubris? If everybody had these conditions of living, we would either need a larger planet or a lot less people on it.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
The multistory rather than merely spacious homes and 'pool' with the implication of a private pool, which are both very space inefficient make this seem foolish to me, but I see no issue with billions of people living in cities with easy access to pools, parks, schooling, jobs, and comfortable safe, warm/cool housing and living standards that are science fiction to their immediate ancestors.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  This is one of the reasons we need to be expanding the space for collective resources - it's not likely we can sustain a world where everyone on earth lives in a single family detached home in the suburbs with a car, private heated pool, private air conditioning etc that the author advocates for. However, if we're a little more clever with how we allocate and share our resources, we can scale up standards of living in a sustainable way - urban transit and a fleet of automated electric taxis, community pools, zero energy building techniques and mixed developments, and so on. This just requires that we head back in the direction of sharing things (social democracy) and away from economic individualism (neoliberalism).
  - rmah 5y ago
    4 bil households (8 bil people) with each household living on a detached 500 sq m lot (20m x 25m or apx 1/8th acre) => 4,000,000,000 hh * 500 sq m => 2mil sq km. The earth has 149mil sq km of land area so those suburbs would take up about 1.7% of the land. If you subtract out antarctica (14 mil sq km), siberia (13 mil sq km) and 3/4 of canada (7 mil sq km), the sahara desert (9mil sq km)... you're still left with about 106 mil sq km so we're using about 1.8% of the land. Density isn't evenly distributed you say? Well, let's look at only china then... Some 1.4 bil people in 9.6mil sq km. Everyone living on in 500 sq m lots means 350,000 sq km, or about 5% of the land. Lots of western china is too inhospitable you say? Fine, subtract out Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xining (forget the fact that 60mil+ people live there). That's half of china's land area! You're still left with around 4.860 mil sq km. So everyone's suburban lots would fit in about 7% of the land. My point here is that the earth is not really as crowded as many people seem to believe. It only seems crowded if you spend the majority of your life in or near dense urban areas. Which most people do these days. So most see it that way. There are still vast tracts of nearly uninhabited land and even vaster expanses of sparsely inhabited land. Sure, these are typically not the really nice bits of the earth (from a human perspective), but we do have central heating and A/C now, right? :-)

daedlanth 5y ago

verisimi 5y ago

I don't think we are running out of resources. I think we are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment - in a good way! But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured. In the name of protecting us and the environment, the governance structure creates artificial rules on behalf of their stakeholders (corporations) that stops innovation and pushes the costs and risks on to the population at large.

TuringTest 5y ago
> I think we are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment - in a good way! > But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured. The second sentence contradicts the first one.
- verisimi 5y ago
  It doesn't. If you leave people to it, and people need something, someone will come along and offer a solution for a price. But if you have a vested interest, they will want government legislation to prevent alternative solutions. Now people who have an idea face legal repercussions fines, jail, etc if they try to offer a solution. This is the case in many industries, from taxis, to rubbish collection, to banking, to medicine. There are artificial barriers to entry that support rent-seeking by those industries already in place.
  - TuringTest 5y ago
    So you're saying that we're are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment, were it not for other people who can prevent it? Where's the infinite resourcefulness and infinite capability in that?
    - verisimi 4y ago
      Force kills resourcefulness. Good ideas are prohibited. To resolve this, you would have to have a good idea and the capability to take governmental force (police, law). Do you feel lucky?

volatilecarbon 5y ago

There were a lot of words here to simply fall back on the argument that innovation will solve every problem and do so before there is significant suffering. I agree that life will always go on, but this idea that consumption and quality of life can do nothing but rise when it is so dependent on the limited cheap energy and resources that we only learned to exploit a century ago is insanity to me. Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked. It won't be the end of the world, but we will all be poorer and there will be suffering while we adjust. I too hope for some near free energy and material source to appear somehow and prevent this, but I struggle to see how you could blindly expect this to occur, not even entertaining the thought that even if such an innovation exists, we might not be able to discover it before the consequences of our current behavior sets in.

verisimi 5y ago
Perhaps we should petition the governance structure to create a maximum threshold of 10 million dollars per person. Sure, billionares will lose much of their wealth, and will try to hide in off shore funds (even more so than they do at present) but we can legislate for this and de-anonymise the wealth. We would then collapse those off shore legal structures, allocate the wealth to individuals, and apply the 10m limit. It wouldn't be that difficult, it would leave everyone with plenty of wealth, and is a simple answer. PS - I don't think this is the right answer. But then how can the answer to the environmental issues be to socialise the risks and expenses across all the population, while allowing the owners of the corporations that have exploited the world's resources for profit get keep and hide their immorally-gained wealth?
- skywal_l 5y ago
  Over-utilization of resources and inequalities are two related but distinct problems. Reducing inequalities will typically means more consumption and resources utilization. Those two problems must be solved but solving one will probably amplify the other.
  - 5y ago

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

I had to check if this submarine advertisement for fossil fuels was written in the 90s (century optional). > But only because no resource has yet been discovered that is objectively better at producing electricity more cheaply. Um, no. Only if you hide most of the deaths it causes off the balance sheet and pretend they don't exist.

jacknews 5y ago

I don't think we should strive to remake the galaxy for human comfort and desires, but instead strive to remake ourselves, to be better suited to the environments we inhabit.

wly_cdgr 5y ago
I disagree. I think we should definitely try to remake not just our galaxy but the universe for our comfort and desires
- jacknews 5y ago
  If we have the power to transform the universe, we have the power to transform ourselves. Why would we make the universe ape our biologically-inspired needs and desires, when we could transcend them and become so much more?
  - jotm 5y ago
    Why not? It's a huge place. Why don't you transcend and stop using electricity? Needs and desires.
  - wly_cdgr 5y ago
    I think we are plenty as is, and as for why bother to make the universe do our bidding - because there's great pleasure satisfaction and fulfillment in bending cold indifferent nature to our will...not to mention in enjoying a hot cup of cocoa, a good book, and a long slow blowjob by the fireplace on a dark wintry night If you have not seen the Les Blank documentary Always For Pleasure, I highly recommend it
    - throwaway6532 5y ago
      >I think we are plenty as is, and as for why bother to make the universe do our bidding - because there's great pleasure satisfaction and fulfillment in bending cold indifferent nature to our will... We're starting to wake up to the reality that all we're really doing is bending it out of shape and when we push it beyond the yield strength it will snap.

cheschire 5y ago

It was nice to read something optimistic again. Feels so rare these days. Seems like whenever optimism pokes its head out, everyone rushes to smash it back into its hole. There’s no room for your optimism in my reality! And so on. edit: Hmm. I get a negative score for celebrating some optimism. How dare I step out of line.

lm28469 5y ago
Optimism is fine but when everything points the opposite direction it's called wishful thinking
- pfdietz 5y ago
  But everything does not point in the opposite direction.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Pet peeve: James Watt was the Bill Gates of his day, he held natural industrial progress made by thousands of talented individuals back with patents and connections to the wealthy, please stop crediting him personally with the steam engine.

standardUser 5y ago

"Should any particular resource begin to run short, our creativity will bring into being the knowledge of how to replace that resource from either some other source or by using some other means to accomplish what that resource did." The track record on this appears to be 100%. Are there any examples of a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?

volatilecarbon 5y ago
The only example I can think of is water. While it's not gone, the quality and cleanliness has decreased over time. There are many areas where you can no longer consume seafood due to high pollution levels. Same with swimming or drinking (boiling used to be sufficient to clean water, but it certainly isn't anymore). Even "safe" seafood is only recommended to be consumed 2 times a week now due to the build up of heavy metals. It's also true that we'll always been able to purify water for consumption/use, but there is a cost to that and I don't see that cost decreasing.
- jotm 5y ago
  Not safe to consume seafood? As long as it's alive, you can eat it. Maybe it lowers your lifespan. That's not that big of a problem, humans have lived like that for the vast majority of their existence. As for water, it's everywhere. Obviously, some people can run out of it, but then again a minority is always fucked in this world.
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    > As for water, it's everywhere. The vast majority of it is seawater, which humans can't drink because of its salt content. There's still enough freshwater in most places, but the regions where drinkable water scarcity is a problem are growing larger every year. Desalination plants do exist, but it's up to 10x more expensive in most places (in California it's only about 2x more expensive because water is already pretty scarce there) and it's also not great for the environment either: "The problem is that the desalination of water requires a lot of energy. Salt dissolves very easily in water, forming strong chemical bonds, and those bonds are difficult to break. Energy and the technology to desalinate water are both expensive, and this means that desalinating water can be pretty costly...It can cost from just under $1 to well over $2 to produce one cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water from the ocean...But switch the source to a river or an aquifer, and the cost of a cubic meter of water can plummet to 10 to 20 cents, and farmers often pay far less." "There are environmental costs of desalination, as well. Sea life can get sucked into desalination plants, killing small ocean creatures like baby fish and plankton, upsetting the food chain. Also, there's the problem of what to do with the separated salt, which is left over as a very concentrated brine. Pumping this supersalty water back into the ocean can harm local aquatic life. Reducing these impacts is possible, but it adds to the costs.'" https://scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-get-our-drinking-water-from-the-ocean/ https://scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-get-our-d...

rmbyrro 5y ago

Is it just me or is it annoying that some articles take SEVERAL paragraphs to get to the point?

bdefore 5y ago
I'd agree this one takes too long to get to its thrust, but I'd argue the majority of articles I read gloss over nuance in an attempt to capture Twitter-soaked brains.

femto 5y ago

The finite resource is places to put the byproducts.

pfdietz 5y ago
This is really just CO2. Everything else is more easily controllable, recyclable, or avoidable. If you look at the mass of material extracted from the Earth, fossil fuels > all mineral resources. To first order, the resource problem is the fossil fuel problem, and we're on a trajectory to get off fossil fuels.

Shadonototra 5y ago

No we are not running out of resources Are we wasting resources? yes

retrac 5y ago

This is something I learned about iron recently. We're not running out of it, thankfully. The planet is mostly iron, after all. But it perhaps helps drive home the sheer scale of modern industrial civilization. More steel was manufactured per year [1] in the 2010s, than humanity produced in its entire history up to World War I. The whole century of the industrial revolution -- from the Eiffel Tower, to the steam ships, railways -- is but a drop in the ocean of material production by today's standards. Most basic resources have a similar looking chart. And not everything is as abundant as iron. [1] https://i.imgur.com/VBIN1RF.png https://i.imgur.com/VBIN1RF.png

kkfx 5y ago

Few notes: - today "needed resources" might be different, at least partially, than tomorrow ones, as they are partially different than yesterday, but such differences are very hard to estimate since we know the past, but we can't really know the future, planning cover development with already or almost already known things, future scientific discovering are not predictable; - resource estimate is done and sold as a "tangible number" however I'm not sure how approximate it can be. So saying on earth we can source X gazillion tons of a certain mineral for me is "probably near truth but until extracted we can't really know" and that's similar for agriculture production vs climate change; - another issue is the meaning of "renewable" and "circular", wood is renewable at a certain rate of usage, recyclable one ore two time for different usage in a more or less significant percentage, Al is formally 100% renewable ad infinitum, glass the same, but the scale and the cost of such supply chains are not immediately measurable on scale etc. Long story short my own personal opinion is: for actual technology, actual number of people, actual human development, we probably have significant resource issues witch does not means "we run out" in the broad sense, but we still are in a very bad situation. Planning moves to evolve is mandatory, but must be done at both scientific and social level, certainly not at economical level as is done today.

taylodl 5y ago

The 19th & 20th centuries have taught us how transformative knowledge is. Prior to these centuries humanity more or less haphazardly acquired new knowledge. Now we're much more principled in our acquisition and management of knowledge - in fact we've come to see that knowledge itself is a resource. What do we know about knowledge resources? For starters we know they're finite. There's only so much knowledge available to any computing node (or person). Then there's the issue of it takes energy to store, transfer, and synthesize that knowledge and those energy costs are skyrocketing. Finally, there's the very real fact that knowledge synthesis is asymptotic - there's a finite amount of knowledge to be had in total, and while quick strides can be made in getting close to that totality to close the remaining knowledge gap will require increasing amounts of energy. We closed a remarkable bit of that gap in the 19th and 20th centuries - the gaps remaining are getting really difficult to fill. This is the counterargument to innovation will solve all our problems.

throwaway6532 5y ago
>We closed a remarkable bit of that gap in the 19th and 20th centuries - the gaps remaining are getting really difficult to fill. This is the counterargument to innovation will solve all our problems. When you combine this with birth rates below replacement level that leads society in the direction where it's a) harder to fill those gaps, and b) much less people to fill them. So, having far less bandwidth available to do that discovery/work seems to be in general a trend people don't seem to acknowledge.

wishawa 5y ago

At the start a sigmoid does look like an exponential doesn’t it?

thissiteb1lows 5y ago

toss1 5y ago

>>We can make all of the Earth rather like the best parts of New York, or Paris or Sydney: picturesque, clean and comfortable. We can then set about to make the rest of the solar system rather like the Earth. If we make even 10% of the entire earth's surface at that density, it will be an environmental catastrophe that would likely collapse the food web. Over half the world's population lives on less than 1% of the land [0]. Only 14% of the land has been modified in any way. Long before we turn the whole thing into a cityscape, the natural world on which we depend, from the soil biology, to the pollinators, to the apex predators, will all collapse. Sure the author has a point about the transformative ability of knowledge, but he's also basically an idiot about system dynamics. [0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3389041/Where-world-lives-Map-shows-half-planet-s-population-lives-just-1-land.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3389041/Wher... [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/human-impact-earth-planet-change-development/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/human-impact-earth-pl...

nuvious 4y ago

I would say no, we just need to change what we focus on. If you're worried about lithium-ion batteries running out, check out Aluminum ion batteries (AL is the mos t abundant metal in the Earth's crust). Worried about farmland? Check out advances in vertical farming. Worried about space to live? Just wait for a housing price correction. Worried about energy? Check out the advances in Solar, Small modular reactors, and grid storage possibilities. The better question isn't "are we running out of resources?" it's "should we be using different resources or the same resources differently?" to which the answer is yes and being explored by scientists and engineers

fold3 4y ago

I think we know now that issue is not about lack of resources[1], it is more about the destruction of the environment[2]. If we want to keep coexisting with other forms of living. [1] Once generation IV nuclear powered is mastered, that is. [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/04/ipcc-report-now-or-never-if-world-stave-off-climate-disaster https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/04/ipcc-rep...