6 ms·

In closed systems, e.g. bacteria in an agar medium petri dish, the classic population size goes through exponential growth, steady state, and finally the death

by jocoda 2y ago

In closed systems, e.g. bacteria in an agar medium petri dish, the classic population size goes through exponential growth, steady state, and finally the death phase as the medium is depleted and waste products accumulate. If we map humanity on to a similar system with the earth as the closed system there are some high level similarities that would suggest a similar end result. Exactly where we are on that curve is something that we will only be able to determine with hindsight. What's different with humanity is that we have opportunities and the ability to re-engineer the system. Opportunities that bacteria don't have, so they die. What we lack is desire for a long term steady state. Maybe we'll need to mutate into something else to get there.

foxglacier 2y ago
The Earth regenerates food with input of solar energy, unlike a petri dish, so that model doesn't apply at all. Animals still exist, after-all. We may reach steady state like they did, or oscillate perhaps.
- wruza 2y ago
  We’ll oscillate likely, not perhaps. The whole-world has shown no ability to solve critical issues without “oscillations”, yet, not unlike animals.
- ycombinete 2y ago
  Yes. A terrarium is a far better example, than a petridish.
estsauver 2y ago
This idea is extremely old, but also has a very bad record of being wrong for hundreds of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_P... It’s worth knowing if you’re proposing an idea that’s been continuously proposed, and has been continuously proven wrong by time and history, that you might want to consider if there are other drivers that continually oppose your thesis. I think technology is sufficiently powerful we’ll be able to power our needs for another hundred years at a minimum if we try.
- frabcus 2y ago
  I didn't know before reading the Wikipedia article you linked that Malthus's essay led directly to the creation of the UK census. Which is one of the mechanisms by which we cope with population growth! Perhaps both things can be truth - the criticism is right with no intervention, AND the interventions it hopefully causes make everything alright.
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  The wiki article you link cites some "critics" but I don’t see proofs. How would you "prove" the future of humanity anyway? Moreover that idea has taken different forms between time and individual formulating it, we can’t reject all of them because some includes fallacies. > Despite use of the term "Malthusian catastrophe" by detractors such as economist Julian Simon (1932–1998), Malthus himself did not write that mankind faced an inevitable future catastrophe. Rather, he offered an evolutionary social theory […] 1. subsistence severely limits population-level 2. when the means of subsistence increases, population increases 3. population-pressures stimulate increases in productivity 4. increases in productivity stimulate further population-growth 5. because productivity increases cannot maintain the potential rate of population growth, population requires strong checks to keep parity with the carrying-capacity 6. individual cost/benefit decisions regarding sex, work, and children determine the expansion or contraction of population and production 7. checks will come into operation as population exceeds subsistence-level 8. the nature of these checks will have significant effect on the larger sociocultural system—Malthus points specifically to misery, vice, and poverty
- zktruth 2y ago
  Lol what? Since when is asserting "finite resources will eventually be unable to sustain exponential growth" disproven by observing that "Yeah, well, they haven't yet"? 100 years is virtually no time at all, I'm having a hard time believing you're not making a joke with your optimism being that you think we have at least that long.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Zoomers call it "copium". Believing whatever has to be believed for peace of mind, even though it's logically not true.
ekianjo 2y ago
> we map humanity on to a similar system with the earth as the closed system That's why bad analogies are bad.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  all analogies are bad to some extent.
amanaplanacanal 2y ago
The earth is not a closed system. We get 175 quadrillion watts of energy from the sun.
- Tepix 2y ago
  We also radiate a lot of energy back into space
  - adrianN 2y ago
    We're working on fixing that part though.
    - grumbelbart 2y ago
      That's a misconception. Earth is still pretty much in an equilibrium and emits as much as it gets from the sun. Global warming is due to the heat staying a bit longer in the system, not due to emitting less.
      - adrianN 2y ago
        If the world is warming up it is not in equilibrium, or an I missing something?
        XorNot 2y ago
        If I have a tap flowing into a bucket, then once the bucket is full the amount of water flowing over the top will exactly equal the amount of water flowing in from the tap. If I increase the size of the bucket, the the amount of water flowing over the top will also exactly equal the amount flowing from the tap. There's also scale to consider: global warming is more like if my bucket was very soft, and I've stretched the plastic a little bit to give it slightly more volume (the analogy breaks down beyond this point).
        adrianN 2y ago
thrance 2y ago
There is no exponential growth though, most people don't have 4+ kids. Everything indicates that World population should stabilize this century and then slowly decline, through demographic transition [1]. No resource pressure here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
FalseNutrition 2y ago
We have the exactly opposite problem. We can produce so much that there are no markets to consume it all. There is an excess and we get assaulted by ads to consume some of it. Shortages are almost absent.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hnbad 2y ago
  Arguably, the real problem with humanity's resource use today is not consumerism - not overconsumption - but overproduction. We produce vast amounts of food only to let it go to waste. We produce vast amounts of consumer goods only to shred the unsold (or returned) surplus to maintain their price points. It's cheaper to destroy what we overproduce than to discount it or decrease production output. From an economic point of view it becomes a problem of optimizing the waste disposal costs, not the resource use (especially not resources that can be externalized) - turning food waste into animal feed or biofuels, which in turn incentivizes overproduction when those uses become too profitable. The entrepreneurial spirit is a perfect example for this. We can talk about disruption all we want as if it means making the world better but ultimately we're looking at existing systems and seemingly saturated markets and asking "how can we add to this in a way that makes us money?". We are explicitly opposed to notions of zero-sum markets but the only way to have a non-zero sum is to add more to it and that extra something has to come from somewhere, even if it's an externality to the balance sheets. For the past century marketing has been defined by creating needs rather than addressing existing ones, selling more rather than just providing another option. This fuels the economy but it's a horrible waste if you look at it from a detached impersonal global resource use perspective. Even trying to go against this system has been productized and can be bought as a subscription model at this point. We've unlearned any other way to do things because everything has been recuperated by the system we've built. It is indeed easier for most people nowadays to imagine the end of the world than the end of the current system and it being replaced by something better, fairer or more resource-friendly.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    You could easily spend far more trying to distribute overproduced items to someone who needs them, or trying to match supply too precisely too production and the consequences of that are not symmetric either. For example, we can survive an oversupply of food just fine. We absolutely cannot survive an undersupply of food: if you have a population needing a certain number of calories and you don't have it, then in about 3 weeks you no longer have a problem because they've died.

by jocoda 2y ago

foxglacier 2y ago

The Earth regenerates food with input of solar energy, unlike a petri dish, so that model doesn't apply at all. Animals still exist, after-all. We may reach steady state like they did, or oscillate perhaps.

wruza 2y ago
We’ll oscillate likely, not perhaps. The whole-world has shown no ability to solve critical issues without “oscillations”, yet, not unlike animals.
ycombinete 2y ago
Yes. A terrarium is a far better example, than a petridish.

estsauver 2y ago

This idea is extremely old, but also has a very bad record of being wrong for hundreds of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_P... It’s worth knowing if you’re proposing an idea that’s been continuously proposed, and has been continuously proven wrong by time and history, that you might want to consider if there are other drivers that continually oppose your thesis. I think technology is sufficiently powerful we’ll be able to power our needs for another hundred years at a minimum if we try.

frabcus 2y ago
I didn't know before reading the Wikipedia article you linked that Malthus's essay led directly to the creation of the UK census. Which is one of the mechanisms by which we cope with population growth! Perhaps both things can be truth - the criticism is right with no intervention, AND the interventions it hopefully causes make everything alright.
aziaziazi 2y ago
The wiki article you link cites some "critics" but I don’t see proofs. How would you "prove" the future of humanity anyway? Moreover that idea has taken different forms between time and individual formulating it, we can’t reject all of them because some includes fallacies. > Despite use of the term "Malthusian catastrophe" by detractors such as economist Julian Simon (1932–1998), Malthus himself did not write that mankind faced an inevitable future catastrophe. Rather, he offered an evolutionary social theory […] 1. subsistence severely limits population-level 2. when the means of subsistence increases, population increases 3. population-pressures stimulate increases in productivity 4. increases in productivity stimulate further population-growth 5. because productivity increases cannot maintain the potential rate of population growth, population requires strong checks to keep parity with the carrying-capacity 6. individual cost/benefit decisions regarding sex, work, and children determine the expansion or contraction of population and production 7. checks will come into operation as population exceeds subsistence-level 8. the nature of these checks will have significant effect on the larger sociocultural system—Malthus points specifically to misery, vice, and poverty
zktruth 2y ago
Lol what? Since when is asserting "finite resources will eventually be unable to sustain exponential growth" disproven by observing that "Yeah, well, they haven't yet"? 100 years is virtually no time at all, I'm having a hard time believing you're not making a joke with your optimism being that you think we have at least that long.
- immibis 2y ago
  Zoomers call it "copium". Believing whatever has to be believed for peace of mind, even though it's logically not true.

ekianjo 2y ago

> we map humanity on to a similar system with the earth as the closed system That's why bad analogies are bad.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
all analogies are bad to some extent.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago

The earth is not a closed system. We get 175 quadrillion watts of energy from the sun.

Tepix 2y ago
We also radiate a lot of energy back into space
- adrianN 2y ago
  We're working on fixing that part though.
  - grumbelbart 2y ago
    That's a misconception. Earth is still pretty much in an equilibrium and emits as much as it gets from the sun. Global warming is due to the heat staying a bit longer in the system, not due to emitting less.
    - adrianN 2y ago
      If the world is warming up it is not in equilibrium, or an I missing something?
      - XorNot 2y ago
        If I have a tap flowing into a bucket, then once the bucket is full the amount of water flowing over the top will exactly equal the amount of water flowing in from the tap. If I increase the size of the bucket, the the amount of water flowing over the top will also exactly equal the amount flowing from the tap. There's also scale to consider: global warming is more like if my bucket was very soft, and I've stretched the plastic a little bit to give it slightly more volume (the analogy breaks down beyond this point).
        adrianN 2y ago

thrance 2y ago

There is no exponential growth though, most people don't have 4+ kids. Everything indicates that World population should stabilize this century and then slowly decline, through demographic transition [1]. No resource pressure here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

FalseNutrition 2y ago

We have the exactly opposite problem. We can produce so much that there are no markets to consume it all. There is an excess and we get assaulted by ads to consume some of it. Shortages are almost absent.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hnbad 2y ago
Arguably, the real problem with humanity's resource use today is not consumerism - not overconsumption - but overproduction. We produce vast amounts of food only to let it go to waste. We produce vast amounts of consumer goods only to shred the unsold (or returned) surplus to maintain their price points. It's cheaper to destroy what we overproduce than to discount it or decrease production output. From an economic point of view it becomes a problem of optimizing the waste disposal costs, not the resource use (especially not resources that can be externalized) - turning food waste into animal feed or biofuels, which in turn incentivizes overproduction when those uses become too profitable. The entrepreneurial spirit is a perfect example for this. We can talk about disruption all we want as if it means making the world better but ultimately we're looking at existing systems and seemingly saturated markets and asking "how can we add to this in a way that makes us money?". We are explicitly opposed to notions of zero-sum markets but the only way to have a non-zero sum is to add more to it and that extra something has to come from somewhere, even if it's an externality to the balance sheets. For the past century marketing has been defined by creating needs rather than addressing existing ones, selling more rather than just providing another option. This fuels the economy but it's a horrible waste if you look at it from a detached impersonal global resource use perspective. Even trying to go against this system has been productized and can be bought as a subscription model at this point. We've unlearned any other way to do things because everything has been recuperated by the system we've built. It is indeed easier for most people nowadays to imagine the end of the world than the end of the current system and it being replaced by something better, fairer or more resource-friendly.
- XorNot 2y ago
  You could easily spend far more trying to distribute overproduced items to someone who needs them, or trying to match supply too precisely too production and the consequences of that are not symmetric either. For example, we can survive an oversupply of food just fine. We absolutely cannot survive an undersupply of food: if you have a population needing a certain number of calories and you don't have it, then in about 3 weeks you no longer have a problem because they've died.