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Yet another Malthusian paper. Why would a planet’s boundary be the civilization’s boundary? This could be an issue on a super-earth and an inability to leave th

Yet another Malthusian paper. Why would a planet’s boundary be the civilization’s boundary? This could be an issue on a super-earth and an inability to leave the rock with chemical rockets but even then… or, as Dr Zubrin would say ‘most dangerous are the people who believe a limit in resources is the reason that we must fight each other’

dreen 4y ago
That's what I've been thinking about for a while as well. Why live down the gravity well if you don't have to? Some might still choose it, much like some modern people choose to live in the forest. And in space, there is plenty of space for everyone.
- trgn 4y ago
  Space is an unfathomably unpleasant place to move to. Maybe advanced extra terrestrials understand that better than we do.
  - dreen 4y ago
    You mean unpleasant to our current biology and with our current ability to build space habitats. Give it a few hundred years and things may look different.
  - Nomentatus 4y ago
    I think they said that about Las Vegas, once upon a time (before the dam was built, and before air conditioning.)
- somenameforme 4y ago
  Abstractly, a planet is just a really really big starship. With technological advances, we could even eventually theoretically move planets. So phrased in another way, why would one choose to live their entire life in a small starship instead of a big one?
  - Sharlin 4y ago
    Because of the square–cube law. Planets are an unfathomably inefficient form factor in terms of material use to available surface area/volume ratio.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Counterpoint I’ve been thinking about recently: Imagine you have a fancy self-repairing spaceship, so good that even accounting for the slow wear and tear of micrometeorites, outgassing, and the motion of feet slowly polishing grooves into walkways, it still only looses 1% of its mass to the outside vacuum every thousand years. A Dyson swarm of those still becomes a mysterious cloud slowly puffing away from its parent star, and after just 2150 millennia, it’s declined from a Kardashev II to a Kardashev I civilisation. A planet-based civilisation may live or die, but it won’t burn out quite like that.
  - chongli 4y ago
    The usual definition of starship is a ship that travels between the stars. Earth is stuck orbiting one star so I wouldn’t classify it as a starship. Maybe the label would better suit a rogue planet?
    - Qem 4y ago
      The sun moves relative to the neighboring stars. That means we have periodic close encounters (d < 1ly) with other stars, and effectively the Earth starship argument holds. The lazy way to travel the stars is to figure how to avoid killing ourselves for tens of thousands of years, while the stars come to us. See the list of future close encounters at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_br...
- echelon 4y ago
  By the time we reach space, we won't need these bodies anymore. Earth biology acutely fits to the gasses, minerals, and temperatures found here. It's not a great solution for space, but it's fantastic for exploiting Earth's energy. Space distances are also not very compatible with human lifespan. The death thing is bad all around: spend a fourth of life learning and a fourth of life in decline, with no ability to share information directly outside of our slow communication and learning protocol. The obvious answer is that AI and machines will take over from us and leave our planet in our stead. They won't have our limitations on lifespan and complex biological inputs. They won't take up space or get tired. They can copy and paste their knowledge and not need parents or growing up. Without the limitations of biology, it won't be hard for them to expand to all corners of the galaxy. Despite Hollywood and Asimov trying to paint the picture of humans living amongst the stars, that's more of a fantasy than Middle Earth. Where we're going we don't need humans or bodies.
  - gnz11 4y ago
    Still doesn’t resolve why we have not come across any signatures of beeping and blipping electronic entities that are not our own in the galaxy.
    - echelon 4y ago
      Maybe they're all around us. Or maybe we're their historical simulation. Not readily falsifiable, but interesting to ponder.
      - taylodl 4y ago
        Or maybe we're their historical simulation I’ve thought the same - intelligent machines are going to be mankind’s legacy. Yet I never once thought of us being developed by another civilization’s machines to better understand their origins. Brilliant!
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "in space, there is plenty of space for everyone" We may not need more space if we live entirely in virtual reality. This I find a quite plausible solution to Fermi's paradox... after enough technological development the entire civilization just starts living in VR and loses the desire to travel through, communicate with, or affect the outer world. In fact, we may already be just such a civilization... though without realizing it.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    The thing is that unless there's some underlying fundamental principle of reality itself that guarantees that every intelligent civilization turns to VR to such an extent as to completely lose interest in reality, it's still very strange that we don't see the galaxy buzzing with life. There are just so many planets out there that even a 99.9999% chance of VR obsession taking over a civilization should mean having a very visibly living galaxy. Personally I think that one of the bigger explanations (I think there are likely to be several layers to the paradox) might be that as civilizations grow they naturally focus on becoming more efficient, which effectively makes them more stealthy. We see this with ourselves, where our radio emissions have gone down in transmission power over time and the switch to high frequencies and digital has made them more akin to noise which does not travel very far before becoming effectively impossible to detect. I think our gradual shift towards sources of energy that pollute less is more of the same. Similarly, while an early interstellar civilization might expend the vast amounts of energy needed to cross the gulf between stars in biological time scales, a more advanced interstellar civilization has very likely achieved some form of immortality (like giving up biology and becoming digital) and may have no reason to try to be much faster than a rock thrown out by its star (in part because when you're effectively immortal grey goo, even a galaxy worth of energy might be something to conserve to maximize your civilization's survival).
- klyrs 4y ago
  > And in space, there is plenty of space for everyone. Assuming that we can travel at the speed of light, humanity can expand into a spherical region of space where the radius grows at a constant rate. That is to say, under the most optimistic assumptions, expansion is limited by a cubic growth curve. That is fundamentally incompatible with exponential population growth. Of course, the constants elided in the analysis above are enormous, but it's a limitation that a galactic species would eventually butt up against.
smeagull 4y ago
Because its fucking impossible to escape the Suns Gravity well with all our stuff
- KineticLensman 4y ago
  > Because its fucking impossible to escape the Suns Gravity well with all our stuff It's hard but not impossible. Even using 1970s technology [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10
  - DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
    It’s the “with all our stuff” part that makes it virtually impossible. The amount of energy necessary to move that much mass out of stellar orbit is beyond anything we’ve even plausibly imagined might be posible. If it is doable, it’s going to need an energy source that we don’t even have theories of.
hdivider 4y ago
Exactly. And there is so much nonlinearity left to discover even here on Earth, once we get through a number of R&D and commercialization hurdles. Such as for commercial-grade fusion power. All that deuterium in the oceans represents extroardinarily transformative potential for society. And new pathways for technology. Once we learn how to unleash this energy, Malthusianism won't have the appeal it does today.
- willis936 4y ago
  We know how to unleash that energy. It just isn't proven to be profitable (yet). The reality of why we haven't done more to protect our habitat is far from idyllic.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Well, we know how to unleash it in a really dangerous way. We don't yet know how to get net power from fusion in a way that doesn't involve enormous explosions, though it appears we're getting close.
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      I'm guessing they phrased it slightly awkwardly and meant net positivity by profitability. Since technically we can release energy via fusion but we always have to spend more energy than we get out.
      - DennisP 4y ago
        It was the second paragraph that made me think they were referring to financial profit, but we could well be all in vehement agreement.
    - willis936 4y ago
      No. We know how to do it safely. It just requires a large (expensive) machine. The thing we're getting close to is making the machine small enough to make it economically viable.
littlestymaar 4y ago
Because space is really, really unhospitable. We haven't colonized the surface of the sea, the top of montains, nor the glaciers of the Antarctic or Greenland, yet all of them are much more suited to human life than space (and as such, humans have occasionally been there for ages). Living on Mars is pretty close living on the top of mount Everest, if mount Everest was in the middle of the Pacific and all you have to go there are sailboats that take months. It's not a place to settle. And deep space is even worse! There will likely be people working away from Earth's orbit in the next decades (like we have people working in boats in the middle of Pacific), before being eventually replaced by autonomous machines. But the idea of space colonization is pure fantasy that doesn't hold any water.
ben_w 4y ago
Many of our civilisations have ended because of resources running out/the environment being broken by their own acts. I’m optimistic about the potential for technology to, for example, disassemble the planet Mercury into a Dyson swarm and use it to power the direct transit of a fleet of von Neumann replicators to the closest 90% of galaxies in our future light cone; but until we’ve actually built ourselves a self-sustaining off-Earth colony, we can’t be sure we can get to the future I’ve just described before some random thing goes wrong here, including but not limited to a petro-state with nukes throwing a hissy fit and starting WW3.
- api 4y ago
  Which ones? I’ve read this argument for Easter Island most often but that has been questioned many times: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-easter-islands-historic-collapse/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-easter... One of the biggest fallacies in human thinking about complex things like civilization is the tendency to look for one cause for any one effect. In reality almost anything that happens in a civilization will have many causes, or even many layers of them. This makes it hard to reduce things like civilization collapse to cartoon morality tales or just so stories but it also makes it hard to reason about them generally. We seem to be bad at judging when things are actually in collapse. Case in point, I sometimes feel contrarian for thinking that the US is not in decline. Both the far right and far left push this for obvious reasons but I see a lot of counterarguments.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Indeed. Easter Island is the most iconic, though it's also harder to be sure, and you are correct both to say that this is disputed and to later say that a common cognitive failure is to try to attribute everything to a single cause. Based on what's in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse, I think many local collapses have this as a contributing factor. The Khmer Empire (of Angor Wat fame) likely collapsed for many reasons, and one of the possible contributors was ecological. As it's quite a long article, I'll quote: """ Periods of drought led to decreases in agricultural productivity, and violent floods due to monsoons damaged the infrastructure during this vulnerable time.[40] To adapt to the growing population, trees were cut down from the Kulen hills and cleared out for more rice fields. That created rain runoff carrying sediment to the canal network. Any damage to the water system would have enormous consequences.[42]""" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Empire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Empire IMO, the British political responses to the potato famine in Ireland and the many different famines in India are major contributors to their respective independence movements, and hence the fall of the British empire. Post-Empire, Zimbabwe was seen as the breadbasket of (southern) Africa, but the political choices of Mugabe severely reduced its productivity, and are probably a major contributor to the period of hyperinflation. Regional issues within nations, the Dust Bowl era of the USA was the intersection of natural drought with the failure of the farmers to adapt to dry farming; if the affected regions had been independent nations rather than states of the USA, I think that would have counted as a collapse. > We seem to be bad at judging when things are actually in collapse. Yes, absolutely. Even after the event — From what I've read, the Romans didn't think of themselves as collapsed even when (and thanks to the way it happened, where) we would say that it had; and I still witness British people speaking as though the UK is still nearly the equal of the USA, that "the commonwealth" is a major player, and so on.
cyanydeez 4y ago
The most obvious answer is the most boring: known physics prevents extra solar travel and communication.
- fsloth 4y ago
  No they don’t? Or am I misunderstanding what you meant?
  - pierrefermat1 4y ago
    I think cyanydeez is misguided, what he means to say is known economics prevents..... Of course there is no physics preventing it
    - naasking 4y ago
      > Of course there is no physics preventing it Physics arguably prevents this from being successful for journeys of any meaningful distance and carrying any meaningful payloads. PBS spacetime did a good video about this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdP_UDSsuro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdP_UDSsuro It's not impossible, but it's a lot harder than most people think.
      - fsloth 4y ago
        That's a very good video, thanks for sharing. I think it does a great job of highlighting why meat crew on a single vessel is perhaps a difficult proposition. I think we need anyway a colonizing swarm, not a single ship. I know this goes into scifi territory, but I can imagine a scenario where compute based caretakers could take the seeds of a human civilization (hibernating or embryos) to a system with human compatible worlds. I would guess we would populate asteroids before other solar systems, and experiences from asteroid based colonies could probably be replicatable in most hospitable systems. You need to scout the system pretty well. And send many, many ships with multiple redundancies.
        4y ago
picsao 4y ago
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dreen 4y ago

That's what I've been thinking about for a while as well. Why live down the gravity well if you don't have to? Some might still choose it, much like some modern people choose to live in the forest. And in space, there is plenty of space for everyone.

trgn 4y ago
Space is an unfathomably unpleasant place to move to. Maybe advanced extra terrestrials understand that better than we do.
- dreen 4y ago
  You mean unpleasant to our current biology and with our current ability to build space habitats. Give it a few hundred years and things may look different.
- Nomentatus 4y ago
  I think they said that about Las Vegas, once upon a time (before the dam was built, and before air conditioning.)
somenameforme 4y ago
Abstractly, a planet is just a really really big starship. With technological advances, we could even eventually theoretically move planets. So phrased in another way, why would one choose to live their entire life in a small starship instead of a big one?
- Sharlin 4y ago
  Because of the square–cube law. Planets are an unfathomably inefficient form factor in terms of material use to available surface area/volume ratio.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Counterpoint I’ve been thinking about recently: Imagine you have a fancy self-repairing spaceship, so good that even accounting for the slow wear and tear of micrometeorites, outgassing, and the motion of feet slowly polishing grooves into walkways, it still only looses 1% of its mass to the outside vacuum every thousand years. A Dyson swarm of those still becomes a mysterious cloud slowly puffing away from its parent star, and after just 2150 millennia, it’s declined from a Kardashev II to a Kardashev I civilisation. A planet-based civilisation may live or die, but it won’t burn out quite like that.
- chongli 4y ago
  The usual definition of starship is a ship that travels between the stars. Earth is stuck orbiting one star so I wouldn’t classify it as a starship. Maybe the label would better suit a rogue planet?
  - Qem 4y ago
    The sun moves relative to the neighboring stars. That means we have periodic close encounters (d < 1ly) with other stars, and effectively the Earth starship argument holds. The lazy way to travel the stars is to figure how to avoid killing ourselves for tens of thousands of years, while the stars come to us. See the list of future close encounters at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_br...
echelon 4y ago
By the time we reach space, we won't need these bodies anymore. Earth biology acutely fits to the gasses, minerals, and temperatures found here. It's not a great solution for space, but it's fantastic for exploiting Earth's energy. Space distances are also not very compatible with human lifespan. The death thing is bad all around: spend a fourth of life learning and a fourth of life in decline, with no ability to share information directly outside of our slow communication and learning protocol. The obvious answer is that AI and machines will take over from us and leave our planet in our stead. They won't have our limitations on lifespan and complex biological inputs. They won't take up space or get tired. They can copy and paste their knowledge and not need parents or growing up. Without the limitations of biology, it won't be hard for them to expand to all corners of the galaxy. Despite Hollywood and Asimov trying to paint the picture of humans living amongst the stars, that's more of a fantasy than Middle Earth. Where we're going we don't need humans or bodies.
- gnz11 4y ago
  Still doesn’t resolve why we have not come across any signatures of beeping and blipping electronic entities that are not our own in the galaxy.
  - echelon 4y ago
    Maybe they're all around us. Or maybe we're their historical simulation. Not readily falsifiable, but interesting to ponder.
    - taylodl 4y ago
      Or maybe we're their historical simulation I’ve thought the same - intelligent machines are going to be mankind’s legacy. Yet I never once thought of us being developed by another civilization’s machines to better understand their origins. Brilliant!
pmoriarty 4y ago
"in space, there is plenty of space for everyone" We may not need more space if we live entirely in virtual reality. This I find a quite plausible solution to Fermi's paradox... after enough technological development the entire civilization just starts living in VR and loses the desire to travel through, communicate with, or affect the outer world. In fact, we may already be just such a civilization... though without realizing it.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  The thing is that unless there's some underlying fundamental principle of reality itself that guarantees that every intelligent civilization turns to VR to such an extent as to completely lose interest in reality, it's still very strange that we don't see the galaxy buzzing with life. There are just so many planets out there that even a 99.9999% chance of VR obsession taking over a civilization should mean having a very visibly living galaxy. Personally I think that one of the bigger explanations (I think there are likely to be several layers to the paradox) might be that as civilizations grow they naturally focus on becoming more efficient, which effectively makes them more stealthy. We see this with ourselves, where our radio emissions have gone down in transmission power over time and the switch to high frequencies and digital has made them more akin to noise which does not travel very far before becoming effectively impossible to detect. I think our gradual shift towards sources of energy that pollute less is more of the same. Similarly, while an early interstellar civilization might expend the vast amounts of energy needed to cross the gulf between stars in biological time scales, a more advanced interstellar civilization has very likely achieved some form of immortality (like giving up biology and becoming digital) and may have no reason to try to be much faster than a rock thrown out by its star (in part because when you're effectively immortal grey goo, even a galaxy worth of energy might be something to conserve to maximize your civilization's survival).
klyrs 4y ago
> And in space, there is plenty of space for everyone. Assuming that we can travel at the speed of light, humanity can expand into a spherical region of space where the radius grows at a constant rate. That is to say, under the most optimistic assumptions, expansion is limited by a cubic growth curve. That is fundamentally incompatible with exponential population growth. Of course, the constants elided in the analysis above are enormous, but it's a limitation that a galactic species would eventually butt up against.

smeagull 4y ago

Because its fucking impossible to escape the Suns Gravity well with all our stuff

KineticLensman 4y ago
> Because its fucking impossible to escape the Suns Gravity well with all our stuff It's hard but not impossible. Even using 1970s technology [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10
- DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
  It’s the “with all our stuff” part that makes it virtually impossible. The amount of energy necessary to move that much mass out of stellar orbit is beyond anything we’ve even plausibly imagined might be posible. If it is doable, it’s going to need an energy source that we don’t even have theories of.

hdivider 4y ago

Exactly. And there is so much nonlinearity left to discover even here on Earth, once we get through a number of R&D and commercialization hurdles. Such as for commercial-grade fusion power. All that deuterium in the oceans represents extroardinarily transformative potential for society. And new pathways for technology. Once we learn how to unleash this energy, Malthusianism won't have the appeal it does today.

willis936 4y ago
We know how to unleash that energy. It just isn't proven to be profitable (yet). The reality of why we haven't done more to protect our habitat is far from idyllic.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Well, we know how to unleash it in a really dangerous way. We don't yet know how to get net power from fusion in a way that doesn't involve enormous explosions, though it appears we're getting close.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    I'm guessing they phrased it slightly awkwardly and meant net positivity by profitability. Since technically we can release energy via fusion but we always have to spend more energy than we get out.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      It was the second paragraph that made me think they were referring to financial profit, but we could well be all in vehement agreement.
  - willis936 4y ago
    No. We know how to do it safely. It just requires a large (expensive) machine. The thing we're getting close to is making the machine small enough to make it economically viable.

littlestymaar 4y ago

Because space is really, really unhospitable. We haven't colonized the surface of the sea, the top of montains, nor the glaciers of the Antarctic or Greenland, yet all of them are much more suited to human life than space (and as such, humans have occasionally been there for ages). Living on Mars is pretty close living on the top of mount Everest, if mount Everest was in the middle of the Pacific and all you have to go there are sailboats that take months. It's not a place to settle. And deep space is even worse! There will likely be people working away from Earth's orbit in the next decades (like we have people working in boats in the middle of Pacific), before being eventually replaced by autonomous machines. But the idea of space colonization is pure fantasy that doesn't hold any water.

ben_w 4y ago

Many of our civilisations have ended because of resources running out/the environment being broken by their own acts. I’m optimistic about the potential for technology to, for example, disassemble the planet Mercury into a Dyson swarm and use it to power the direct transit of a fleet of von Neumann replicators to the closest 90% of galaxies in our future light cone; but until we’ve actually built ourselves a self-sustaining off-Earth colony, we can’t be sure we can get to the future I’ve just described before some random thing goes wrong here, including but not limited to a petro-state with nukes throwing a hissy fit and starting WW3.

api 4y ago
Which ones? I’ve read this argument for Easter Island most often but that has been questioned many times: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-easter-islands-historic-collapse/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-easter... One of the biggest fallacies in human thinking about complex things like civilization is the tendency to look for one cause for any one effect. In reality almost anything that happens in a civilization will have many causes, or even many layers of them. This makes it hard to reduce things like civilization collapse to cartoon morality tales or just so stories but it also makes it hard to reason about them generally. We seem to be bad at judging when things are actually in collapse. Case in point, I sometimes feel contrarian for thinking that the US is not in decline. Both the far right and far left push this for obvious reasons but I see a lot of counterarguments.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Indeed. Easter Island is the most iconic, though it's also harder to be sure, and you are correct both to say that this is disputed and to later say that a common cognitive failure is to try to attribute everything to a single cause. Based on what's in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse, I think many local collapses have this as a contributing factor. The Khmer Empire (of Angor Wat fame) likely collapsed for many reasons, and one of the possible contributors was ecological. As it's quite a long article, I'll quote: """ Periods of drought led to decreases in agricultural productivity, and violent floods due to monsoons damaged the infrastructure during this vulnerable time.[40] To adapt to the growing population, trees were cut down from the Kulen hills and cleared out for more rice fields. That created rain runoff carrying sediment to the canal network. Any damage to the water system would have enormous consequences.[42]""" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Empire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Empire IMO, the British political responses to the potato famine in Ireland and the many different famines in India are major contributors to their respective independence movements, and hence the fall of the British empire. Post-Empire, Zimbabwe was seen as the breadbasket of (southern) Africa, but the political choices of Mugabe severely reduced its productivity, and are probably a major contributor to the period of hyperinflation. Regional issues within nations, the Dust Bowl era of the USA was the intersection of natural drought with the failure of the farmers to adapt to dry farming; if the affected regions had been independent nations rather than states of the USA, I think that would have counted as a collapse. > We seem to be bad at judging when things are actually in collapse. Yes, absolutely. Even after the event — From what I've read, the Romans didn't think of themselves as collapsed even when (and thanks to the way it happened, where) we would say that it had; and I still witness British people speaking as though the UK is still nearly the equal of the USA, that "the commonwealth" is a major player, and so on.

cyanydeez 4y ago

The most obvious answer is the most boring: known physics prevents extra solar travel and communication.

fsloth 4y ago
No they don’t? Or am I misunderstanding what you meant?
- pierrefermat1 4y ago
  I think cyanydeez is misguided, what he means to say is known economics prevents..... Of course there is no physics preventing it
  - naasking 4y ago
    > Of course there is no physics preventing it Physics arguably prevents this from being successful for journeys of any meaningful distance and carrying any meaningful payloads. PBS spacetime did a good video about this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdP_UDSsuro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdP_UDSsuro It's not impossible, but it's a lot harder than most people think.
    - fsloth 4y ago
      That's a very good video, thanks for sharing. I think it does a great job of highlighting why meat crew on a single vessel is perhaps a difficult proposition. I think we need anyway a colonizing swarm, not a single ship. I know this goes into scifi territory, but I can imagine a scenario where compute based caretakers could take the seeds of a human civilization (hibernating or embryos) to a system with human compatible worlds. I would guess we would populate asteroids before other solar systems, and experiences from asteroid based colonies could probably be replicatable in most hospitable systems. You need to scout the system pretty well. And send many, many ships with multiple redundancies.
      - 4y ago

picsao 4y ago

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