5 ms·

> he just didn't anticipate the Haber process, nor the on-going improvements afforded by foodstuffs from the new world. ... which is why historically Malthusia

by api 3y ago

> he just didn't anticipate the Haber process, nor the on-going improvements afforded by foodstuffs from the new world. ... which is why historically Malthusians have been wrong. A Malthusian bacterium writing at the time before photosynthesis would have concluded that life on Earth was doomed. Chemotrophic bacteria were gradually consuming all the left over high energy compounds from the Earth's formation and eventually this would run out, leading to a population crash and the end of organic life. Their math would have been correct. The thing they are leaving out of their models is adaptation and intelligence. Life isn't guaranteed to always find a way, which is why shorter term stagnations and die-offs do occasionally happen, but given time and resources it eventually will. Life will probably keep finding a way until the heat death of the universe. The bumps in the road are part of the process. In evolution they provide the constraint that stimulates learning through natural selection. In post-evolutionary cognitive intelligence (humans and eventually AI) constraints give rise to signals such as price signals that tell the system that it needs to learn, change, and adapt. This isn't a justification for total rose colored glasses woo-woo utopianism because as I said bumps in the road do occur. But it shows why simple Malthusian reasoning hasn't historically been accurate and probably will continue to be mostly inaccurate. Malthusians are like perma-bears that are always calling for a recession in the market. Occasionally they're right, but there's a joke in finance that these are people who have "predicted 54 of the last 3 recessions." A prediction method that's wrong that often isn't actually worth very much.

baq 3y ago
There's predicting short-term fluctuations and then there's predicting thermodynamic limits. You can blame Malthus for not predicting an efficient way of getting nitrogen out of the atmosphere; this was theoretically possible, the nitrogen was always there, etc. You can't blame a physicist for computing that 2.3% yoy energy production growth boils off Earth's oceans in 400 years. Thermodynamics is a bitch. Unless a magic future technology turns Earth into a heat pump which can push heat back into the Sun.
- m_mueller 3y ago
  Maybe the growth is just going to happen off-planet soon?
- stale2002 3y ago
  > You can't blame a physicist for computing that 2.3% yoy energy production growth boils off Earth's oceans in 400 Yes you can. Because baked into this statement is the false premise that energy use (on earth or otherwise. Maybe the concept of energy itself is wrong) would be the limiting factor on economic growth. Just like how if someone did a simple mathematical calculation on horses would be wrong to predict transportation doomsday, so too wrong the physicist may be for predicting energy doomsday.
  - baq 3y ago
    There's literally nothing about economics in what I wrote/quoted. That said, if you can figure out how to decouple planetary economic growth - as in, people's lives on the planet getting better, which is the point of having an economy at all, I guess - from planetary energy production growth, I'm listening. I've yet to see an economy-rich energy-poor country; I know that past performance does not predict future results, but we can comfortably say that people need to consume energy in advanced economies to move themselves and goods around, to heat homes and to run their factories and there are certain theoretical thermodynamic efficiency limits to all those things. In some cases, we already have technology operating close to those limits.
    - api 3y ago
      > I've yet to see an economy-rich energy-poor country Past performance usually doesn't predict future results. I'm not aware of any good or service that is not subject to diminishing returns from increased consumption. Keep increasing energy consumption and you start hitting other limiting factors like the availability of other resources, labor, population growth, food, etc. Energy can help with some of those but not all of them and not in a linear relationship. Eventually you hit the ultimate limiter: diminishing marginal utility of wealth itself. At some point you start to max out as a human. There are countries that consume more energy than the USA that are actually poorer and their higher consumption is a function of either climate (lots of HVAC) or the use of old inefficient technology (in which case poverty actually increases consumption). It really looks like the ultimate limits to growth (on Earth) are demand side limits to growth due to leveling off of population. Humans have fewer kids when they have more wealth and/or see more humans around.
hotpotamus 3y ago
Interestingly, I'd say that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that life is almost guaranteed not to find a way.
- baq 3y ago
  Life's quite good at that. Civilisations though...
  - api 3y ago
    Hundreds of civilizations have failed in human history, yet we are still here and the general curve is upward as it has been since the first self-replicating cells were born on Earth. The Fermi Paradox explodes into a massive tree of possibilities. The truth is we just don't know. We haven't been looking very long or very far, and space is called space for a reason. Space could be "full" of complex intelligent life, but the definition of "full" for space could be an overall average of one intelligent artifact per cubic light year per million years. We haven't looked around enough to have any chance of spotting that. Radio SETI is kind of a joke; radiation diminishes with the square of distance so for us to detect a signal from another star it would have to be both intentionally beamed in our direction and incredibly powerful. They'd have to be screaming at us. Anything less than megawatts melts into cosmic microwave background before it reaches even the Centauri system, and anything with complex modulation just sounds like noise anyway. Long range detection of technosignatures is riddled with assumptions around what to look for. Dyson swarms? If you tame fusion you don't need a Dyson swarm. Megastructures? Those are fragile and unwieldy and lots of small objects might be better. Powerful propulsion systems on spacecraft? It would have to be aimed right at us. Etc. XKCD has the best Fermi paradox take: https://xkcd.com/638/ https://xkcd.com/638/

by api 3y ago

baq 3y ago

There's predicting short-term fluctuations and then there's predicting thermodynamic limits. You can blame Malthus for not predicting an efficient way of getting nitrogen out of the atmosphere; this was theoretically possible, the nitrogen was always there, etc. You can't blame a physicist for computing that 2.3% yoy energy production growth boils off Earth's oceans in 400 years. Thermodynamics is a bitch. Unless a magic future technology turns Earth into a heat pump which can push heat back into the Sun.

m_mueller 3y ago
Maybe the growth is just going to happen off-planet soon?
stale2002 3y ago
> You can't blame a physicist for computing that 2.3% yoy energy production growth boils off Earth's oceans in 400 Yes you can. Because baked into this statement is the false premise that energy use (on earth or otherwise. Maybe the concept of energy itself is wrong) would be the limiting factor on economic growth. Just like how if someone did a simple mathematical calculation on horses would be wrong to predict transportation doomsday, so too wrong the physicist may be for predicting energy doomsday.
- baq 3y ago
  There's literally nothing about economics in what I wrote/quoted. That said, if you can figure out how to decouple planetary economic growth - as in, people's lives on the planet getting better, which is the point of having an economy at all, I guess - from planetary energy production growth, I'm listening. I've yet to see an economy-rich energy-poor country; I know that past performance does not predict future results, but we can comfortably say that people need to consume energy in advanced economies to move themselves and goods around, to heat homes and to run their factories and there are certain theoretical thermodynamic efficiency limits to all those things. In some cases, we already have technology operating close to those limits.
  - api 3y ago
    > I've yet to see an economy-rich energy-poor country Past performance usually doesn't predict future results. I'm not aware of any good or service that is not subject to diminishing returns from increased consumption. Keep increasing energy consumption and you start hitting other limiting factors like the availability of other resources, labor, population growth, food, etc. Energy can help with some of those but not all of them and not in a linear relationship. Eventually you hit the ultimate limiter: diminishing marginal utility of wealth itself. At some point you start to max out as a human. There are countries that consume more energy than the USA that are actually poorer and their higher consumption is a function of either climate (lots of HVAC) or the use of old inefficient technology (in which case poverty actually increases consumption). It really looks like the ultimate limits to growth (on Earth) are demand side limits to growth due to leveling off of population. Humans have fewer kids when they have more wealth and/or see more humans around.

hotpotamus 3y ago

Interestingly, I'd say that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that life is almost guaranteed not to find a way.

baq 3y ago
Life's quite good at that. Civilisations though...
- api 3y ago
  Hundreds of civilizations have failed in human history, yet we are still here and the general curve is upward as it has been since the first self-replicating cells were born on Earth. The Fermi Paradox explodes into a massive tree of possibilities. The truth is we just don't know. We haven't been looking very long or very far, and space is called space for a reason. Space could be "full" of complex intelligent life, but the definition of "full" for space could be an overall average of one intelligent artifact per cubic light year per million years. We haven't looked around enough to have any chance of spotting that. Radio SETI is kind of a joke; radiation diminishes with the square of distance so for us to detect a signal from another star it would have to be both intentionally beamed in our direction and incredibly powerful. They'd have to be screaming at us. Anything less than megawatts melts into cosmic microwave background before it reaches even the Centauri system, and anything with complex modulation just sounds like noise anyway. Long range detection of technosignatures is riddled with assumptions around what to look for. Dyson swarms? If you tame fusion you don't need a Dyson swarm. Megastructures? Those are fragile and unwieldy and lots of small objects might be better. Powerful propulsion systems on spacecraft? It would have to be aimed right at us. Etc. XKCD has the best Fermi paradox take: https://xkcd.com/638/ https://xkcd.com/638/