6 ms·
Limits to Growth (1972)
- phtrivier 2y agoI would be an interesting addition to clarify what "resources" mean here. A common rebuttal of the Meadows report that I keep reading is "they predicted we would run out of resources, and we never ran out of anything." Do they mean metals ? Coal ? Oil ? (As I understand it, we _kinda_ ran out of conventional oil, but were able to replace it with shale oil et al... so it's unclear [1]) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
- trod1234 2y agoThey clarified what resources mean in the updates. They also used simplification models which don't account for many of the cascading problems that can't be directly quantified (i.e. dragon king events, debt defaults/ponzi failures, pollution (pfas). There was an austrian report that showed we are following the business as usual approach, and that we have dangerously overshot. Brittle systems lead to unexpected and chaotic failures. Failures in food production, or related logistics; would spell catastrophe since half the population is dependent on peacetime technological production methods.
- em500 2y agoBest to get this straight from the source[1,2]. Resources are detailed from p.54 onward. [1] https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth/page/n55/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth/page/n55/mode/... [2] https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~wggray/Teaching/His300/Illustrations/Limits-to-Growth.pdf https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~wggray/Teaching/His300/Illustrat...
- roenxi 2y ago> (As I understand it, we _kinda_ ran out of conventional oil, but were able to replace it with shale oil et al... so it's unclear [1]) That doesn't really change the math. It is a finite resource, the amount consumed keeps going up. There has to be a peak. Growth tends to be to a logarithmic or exponential curve, so adding a huge amount of extra resource doesn't change the date all that much on long timeframes.
- ttoinou 2y agoResources are infinite (Julian Simon). And exponential doesnt mean the peak will be in 20 years. It could be 500 years.
- roenxi 2y agoReal resources humanity can access are not infinite (scientists & engineers) and economists can get their assumptions wrong (everyone, including economists). And there is no way our current trend of oil use can be sustained for 500 years. By then our oil use will be negligible compared to what it is today unless something truly bizarre and unforseeable happens.
- jvanderbot 2y agoIf we make oil from nuclear or solar power using fuel synthesis, we can carry forward indefinitely.
- roenxi 2y agoYeah but we wouldn't do that. It doesn't make sense to pay the energy conversion costs; it is already more efficient to store power in non-oil batteries.
- Earw0rm 2y agoNot true for aviation, where weight and volume are both constraints.
- jvanderbot 2y agoFor me, scarcity arguments based on "preferences" don't make a ton of sense, but I see your point. I'd give even odds there will always be use cases for burnable fuels, and almost all vehicles use burnable fuels currently. Sure seems a shorter path to just pull CO2 out of the air and keep moving along as we always have, vs electrifying everything.
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- spacebanana7 2y agoThere’s still plenty of conventional oil capacity in West Africa, Iran and Venezuela. None of those places are producing at anything close to max capacity. Nobody really cares (other than the people who live there) because the world has enough shale.
- Iridescent_ 2y agoShale oil is extremely unreliable, and its producers have barely ever been able to make any margins out of it because the required investments are heavy and constants. Wells reach maturity after months or weeks, and then they need to be replaced. If we have not yet reached peak all oils, then it will probably happen in the coming years.
- palmfacehn 2y agoA good example is the claim that land is an inelastic resource. The counter point is the supply of accessible land worth utilizing is elastic. Improvements in transportation technology open up more land for utilization.
- d_silin 2y agoIf you run it on defaults for longest possible time (500 years), the outputs will reach the equilibrium state. It is very simplified simulation, of course. But seems to indicate that even in the absence of expansion beyond our home planet, humanity will not go extinct, but rather settle into some ground state .
- vouaobrasil 2y agoIt seems unlikely that humanity will go extinct. Even in the case of a massive population crash, there would be many "islands" of communities and all of them would still have quite a few local technologies such as knives and whatever else they can make like basic wheels.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- psychoslave 2y ago>It seems unlikely that humanity will go extinct. From what our geological archives tell us, this seems rather the most likely scenario, even if we all managed to transform ourselves into wise people whose main trait would be temperance and judicious anticipation driven by efficient peaceful communication leading to the whole humanity living in harmony. Having a species that reach a stable form over million of years is not that easy.
- cryptonector 2y agoAt some point the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will irreparably drop below plant starvation levels, then humans on Earth will go extinct. Even if not, at some point the atmosphere will thin too much, then humans on Earth will go extinct. Even if not, at some point the Sun will go red giant, and then for sure humans on Earth will go extinct.
- vouaobrasil 2y agoOf course, all creatures will eventually. I just meant in the next 10,000 years.
- empiricus 2y agoA couple of years ago I learned it is possible to create glucose directly from solar power. The estimates from the authors of the paper were that earth could feed 1 trillion ppl this way.
- gooseus 2y agoTrue, but the systems that do this most effectively require a lot of other limited resources besides solar power - most notably arable soil, fresh water, time, and usually also some additional processing to render that glucose ingestible for one of those people. So maybe the Earth could supply 1 trillion people with food if it was turned into a farm planet devoid of any other biodiversity but those required to support human life, assuming those 1 trillion people were living and doing all their non-agricultural industry somewhere else.
- pfdietz 2y agoSounds about right. That's the limit from direct thermal pollution. It involves basically turning the Earth into a space station, with air and water cleaned and recycled.
- buescher 2y agoNow if we could just find a way to iterate on methods of doing that, maybe use evolutionary methods, eventually we’d have practical, efficient methods of using solar power to make food!
- DoctorOetker 2y agoDo you have a reference to the paper? If the same could be done for amino acids, starting from feces, and if the electro-biological transducer could be mineaturized people could get it installed in their stomachs & bowels, with an extension cord coming out the exit orifice, like a vacuum cleaner...
- WillAdams 2y agoFor a discussion on this see: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... Isaac Asimov wrote a short story which touches on this (basically the last zookeeper/pet owner is confronted with the requirement that his ménagerie be exterminated) and also did some calculations --- if the earth's crust were converted to biomass, there would be a limiting element if memory serves, phosphorous.
- gooseus 2y agoAs an aside Meadow's primer Thinking in Systems[1] should be a required text in middle/high schools (imho). Donella Meadows died of cerebral meningitis at the age of 59 in 2001[2], I truly wish she was someone we could be hearing from today. [1] https://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf https://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donella_Meadows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donella_Meadows
- arthurjj 2y agoStrongly endorsed for middle/high schoolers introduction. I read it last year and thought it was a good introduction but will feel a little simple for the HN crowd. Most of the value is in The Appendix followed by Chapters 1, 2 and 6, so you could even shorten it more. My only caveat is there's a lot of degrowther propaganda in it that you would need to caution the kids against
- bmitc 2y ago> degrowther propaganda What do you mean by that?
- MarkusQ 2y agoThe whole book is an argument against growth (cf the title). More specifically, all the models implicitly assume that rising costs will never reduce demand (and thus consumption), drive the search for alternatives, or make increased efficiency economically viable. It like writing a book called "The limits to driving" and showing that pretty much every car on the road will quickly smash into something if the drivers are assumed to continue accelerating in their present direction, and no one is going to use their steering wheel or breaks effectively.
- Jtsummers 2y agoThis particular subthread is about the book Thinking in Systems, not The Limits to Growth. While related, they are not the same book.
- jl6 2y agoIronic that the model is all about how finite resources must eventually run out, and so production cannot grow without limit, whereas in the real world it’s consumption which seems a more pressing threat. We are probably capable of producing and burning more than enough fossil fuel to render the climate very human-unfriendly.
- wavemode 2y agoI remember when gasoline hit $3 per gallon and people were extrapolating that it was starting to run out, and would eventually reach $100/gallon, triggering global wars and a mass switchover to electric vehicles. 20 years later and I just filled up my car for $2.89 ...
- mike_hearn 2y agoLimits To Growth is kind of a test case for whether people got the memo about the academic research crisis or not (which incorporates the replication crisis, but is wider than it). The World3 model came out of social studies and isn't even really science, given that the authors never tried to obtain evidence for their hypothesis before publishing. World3 is a toy with no predictive value, which is why reimplementing it in HTML is possible: it's just a handful of equations. Such a thing never could make accurate predictions, which was extremely obvious at the time and pointed out by many (e.g. Nordhaus, Smil), but this didn't stop its authors being feted as great scientists regardless. There's a lot of similarities here with COVID modelling in the sense that these sorts of academic modelling exercises all seem to suffer the same kinds of problems and social failure modes: • Over-simplified to the point that laypeople can easily spot what's missing. • Guesses pulled out of thin air are treated as having equal value to measured data. • An implicit assumption that the population is purely static and doesn't react to changing circumstances in any way. When later the predictions turn out to be wrong it's argued that they would have been right if not for the modelling causing behavioral changes, making the entire exercise unfalsifiable pseudo-science by its own premise. • Either never validated against reality or actually falsified, but academics pretend otherwise. • Predictions phrased vaguely enough that what most people would consider to be falsification is later argued to be within the bounds of one of the many possible scenarios. The uselessness of such modelling exercises is evident in the fact that despite at least 50+ years of investment by academia and government into them, there are no academic computerized models widely being used to predict the course of the society or economy.
- api 2y agoThe assumption that human behavior and economic system behavior are static is to me the biggest flaw in virtually all of these models that I have seen. It also underlies adjacent panics that arise based on this kind of thinking, like the overpopulation panic. We can see how wrong that was in retrospect, though it may have been right if all behaviors and systems remained static. I wish the present day underpopulation panic people would get the memo. They are making the exact same errors around mindless extrapolation of present behaviors and trends. Instead of “with these birth rates we will be eating people in 50 years” it’s “with these birth rates we will go extinct!” There are things to be very concerned about. What happens when you take current behavior and trends and drag it forward on a spreadsheet is not one of them. “If our company continues this growth trajectory we will be worth more than the entire global economy in 25 years!” Every single one of these models and panics is a version of that thinking. I think a more useful question when faced with such predictions is “how will this not happen?”
- flocciput 2y agoWhat's with the weird jump in life expectancy around 47 years in or so? It's especially visible at higher values of the 4th slider.
- mhh__ 2y agoThere's a retort called "Models of doom" that I haven't read but can vaguely guess what it'll say. When was the world supposed to have ended by now?
- abetusk 2y agoFor the lazy, the blog post that accompanies it (2012): http://bit-player.org/2012/world3-the-public-beta http://bit-player.org/2012/world3-the-public-beta The source code: https://github.com/bit-player/limits https://github.com/bit-player/limits I haven't read "The Limits of Growth" but I assume it's from a "peak oil" perspective, predicting societal collapse once oil runs out. I think it's pretty clear we're past idea now, with solar energy and other renewable being deployed globally because of the exponentially decreasing economic costs. One thing I do find interesting is the cyclic nature of the booms and busts of population growth predicted by the model. Even if the assumptions of the model are invalid (short term finite supply of energy) it still might explain some gross level behavior.
- pyuser583 2y agoA lot of terrible things were done as a result of this, including China’s one-child policy.