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Explain to me like an five year old how you expect the end game of those exponentially increasing resources on a finite planet. Maybe I am not seeing a thing t

by atoav 1y ago

Explain to me like an five year old how you expect the end game of those exponentially increasing resources on a finite planet. Maybe I am not seeing a thing that I am seeing, but the logistical function is pretty well explored. If you want infinite growth you need infinite resources and thus an infinite world. Our world is not infinite last time I checked. I haven't checked their precise model and whether the timelines it predicts are sound, but the general idea of a logistic function describing the general dynamics as a rough ballpark model still stands. In reality of course we will have more stepped saturation effects, until a new resource pool is found, maybe outside of planet earth etc. But the saturation region of that more complicated stepped function would still translate to untold suffering. Unless you see a different end game.

flyinglizard 1y ago
The world’s population growth is slowing (from 2% annually in the 70’s to about 0.9% today), and it seems to me like we are very far from exhausting planetary resources. It’s like the predictions about “Peak Oil” being wrong time and time again, and in fact today we have larger reserves than ever before despite a century of extraction (3x what we had in 1970). We’ll be off oil (as an energy source) long before it runs out.
- pjerem 1y ago
  It depends of your definition of exhausting a resource. If using a resource makes your environment inhabitable, it’s practically the same : the ressource is there but you shouldn’t use it. Or you continue to hope that you’ll be able to clean the environment while still using the resources but as of today, that’s still a big gamble on everyone’s lives.
- atoav 1y ago
  I wasn't arguing about the timeline (and specifically mentioned this), I argued that resource = 1000 resource_use = 0.1 # per year resource_use_growth_factor = 1.01 # per year resource_regrowth = 0.0001 # per year loop { resource += resource_regrowth resource -= resource_use resource_use *= resource_use_growth_factor if (resource <= 0) { print("Resources depleted") exit(1) } } Fiddle with the numbers any way you like, if you use more of a resource than regrows per year you will eventually have used all of it up at some point. Then you will be able to just use the amount that regrows from one moment to another. The timeline could be 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years, but humanity needs to 1. Know when that resource is likely going to be depleted, ideally decades or longer before it happens 2. Develope workarounds, alternative resources etc. to eventually just use the regrowth rate 3. Use resources that have higher regrow rates (aka "sustainable" ones) and stay within the limits 4. Don't forget to price in the externalities into resource use during its whole life cycle (this can be many millenia for some materials) Right now the level is that some people even seem to grok the extremely simple reality of growing resource use with a limited resource eventually hitting a cutoff point. Granted my model here is extremely simplistic, but even if you factor in stuff like undiscovered resource sources and a rate of new discoveres, eventually on a planet with finite resources you will run out of them unless you just use the amount you can sustainably use.
  - flyinglizard 1y ago
    There's a feedback process that happens on its own without anyone intervening, which is how scarce resources increase in price which encourages finding more cost effective replacements, or reducing waste by recycling (can be energy, land, rare earth metals, whatever). I'm not aware of any single industrial item that we stopped producing for the lack of raw resources.
adastra22 1y ago
We aren't even using 0.000000001% of the atoms in the Earth's crust, and the Universe is a lot larger than just the Earth.
- ben_w 1y ago
  Most of the atoms in our crust are, in order, oxygen (46.1%), silicon (28.2%), aluminium (8.23%), and iron (5.63%). Getting at the metal would leave a dangerous excess of oxygen. Lots of important industrial elements are in the parts per thousand to parts per million range: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... The majority of the universe is hydrogen and helium; most of what we see is now inaccessible due to the expansion of the universe and the speed of light; and even the stuff we can reach, because of the speed of light, requires a slow down to cubic growth at best (closer than galactic disk thickness or further than galactic isotropy); and even then that's for the species as a whole, as the speed of light eventually stops and single thing from growing at all. Exponential growth has a way of reaching big numbers quickly. Now sure, it's still a while for the stuff we can access — I don't know if your percentage is correct, but looks about right, and at 2% annual growth (so: no VN replication ever) that's 1163 years for the crust, then another 233 for the rest of the planet — but that assumes we can use the whole thing and aren't reliant on some trace elements, e.g. carbon (which is 200ppm) or tin (2.3ppm) or selenium (0.05ppm of the crust, and if Wikipedia is right about five times higher, 0.25ppm, in a human body).
- atoav 1y ago
  Yeah, but infinite is kinda a big number. And the universe has less than 0.0000000001% useful stuff in it and the rest kills us. My argument wasn't about how long it takes to deplete our resources, my argument was that eventually they will be deleted. And we are in a small emergeny raft on a wide ocean. Right now everybody is eating as if we are on vaction. We are not.
rich_sasha 1y ago
It is often stated that exponential growth in the economic sense necessarily requires exponential resource use. But I don't see why. Our use of resources changes. We used to care about coal production - it is now niche and in no way a choke point. We're on our way off oil, in fact if you believe green transformation maximalists, we may soon have a abundance of energy. Alongside population growth, we had a huge increase in farm yields, so that eg in Europe the use of agricultural land is actually decreasing. In 1890s, IIRC, it was predicted that Paris' growth will inevitably stagnate around 1920s as the capacity to remove horse dung (from carriages etc) will reach a critical point. Turns out we just obsoleted horses instead.
- pjerem 1y ago
  > We're on our way off oil Last time I checked, oil consumption is still raising year after year except for the covid years. Same for CO2 emissions we entered the era of irreversible natural disasters but we are still emitting more and more tears after years. I may be too optimistic, I can _feel_ the trend will change. But even being optimistic, the data isn’t there to show anything positive and even if we started decreasing oil production / consumption today, we are so late that even the declining trend would have to be pretty strong. I also think (and that’s just an opinion) that making the needed transition requires huge reform of the global economy and that the powerful know it very well. We are not getting fascism return for no reasons.
- atoav 1y ago
  I did not question that the varying story of how resource use shifted throughout history. As you correctly pointed out these shifts are extremely relevant for accurate projections though. It however changes nothing of the fact that exponential growth in a finite system will eventually run into saturation. If you want to grow your corps revenue by X% each year you will have to sell more. Selling more means making more, making more means using more resources. Now you can reduce the resource use per part with clever designs, different materials or by seeing planned obsolescence as a feature (which will mean customers have to buy a replacement earlier and thus the actual resource use of the product over its lifecycle gets in fact worse). So you optimize and optimize and then you have reached the moment where there is nothing left to remove, but you still need to grow, so you just keep using more resources. Or if you are lucky eventually a new material or design innovation comes around, that again allows you to improve resource use. But your resource use is not going to be zero and you deplete something else on the finite planet. And you need to grow and use more of it each year. If you're lost on a raft in the ocean and first eat the bread and once the bread is gone switch to cookies that does not mean you won't eventually run out of stuff to eat. The solution is to tap into resources that regrow and not use more than is regrowing, but that doesn't jive well with infinite growth. I am an electical engineer and I know pretty well how exponential resource use works in complex systems. If a part of my system would like to exponentially grow its resource use infinitly I'd either consider it defective or use the fact that it can't grow infinitly by bounds I set on purpose.
HDThoreaun 1y ago
The only true limiter to growth is energy. We are nowhere close to utilizing all the energy we can get our hands on. No one is saying there are no limits to growth on earth, the question is just when those limits will appear.
- atoav 1y ago
  Sure but last time I checked infinity was quite a large number, so infinite growth requires infinite energy. We are not talking about "could things grow a bit more during my lifetime", we are talking about our systemic demand for infinite growth. In a capitalist system a society that manages its resources perfectly in a sustainable way has less potential for short term growth than one that just thinks about the next quarter.
  - HDThoreaun 1y ago
    On a multi thousand year timescale I think you have a point, but even on the multi hundred year time scale we will not run out of opportunities to grow our energy production and therefore we will not run out of opportunities for economic growth.

by atoav 1y ago

flyinglizard 1y ago

The world’s population growth is slowing (from 2% annually in the 70’s to about 0.9% today), and it seems to me like we are very far from exhausting planetary resources. It’s like the predictions about “Peak Oil” being wrong time and time again, and in fact today we have larger reserves than ever before despite a century of extraction (3x what we had in 1970). We’ll be off oil (as an energy source) long before it runs out.

pjerem 1y ago
It depends of your definition of exhausting a resource. If using a resource makes your environment inhabitable, it’s practically the same : the ressource is there but you shouldn’t use it. Or you continue to hope that you’ll be able to clean the environment while still using the resources but as of today, that’s still a big gamble on everyone’s lives.
atoav 1y ago
I wasn't arguing about the timeline (and specifically mentioned this), I argued that resource = 1000 resource_use = 0.1 # per year resource_use_growth_factor = 1.01 # per year resource_regrowth = 0.0001 # per year loop { resource += resource_regrowth resource -= resource_use resource_use *= resource_use_growth_factor if (resource <= 0) { print("Resources depleted") exit(1) } } Fiddle with the numbers any way you like, if you use more of a resource than regrows per year you will eventually have used all of it up at some point. Then you will be able to just use the amount that regrows from one moment to another. The timeline could be 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years, but humanity needs to 1. Know when that resource is likely going to be depleted, ideally decades or longer before it happens 2. Develope workarounds, alternative resources etc. to eventually just use the regrowth rate 3. Use resources that have higher regrow rates (aka "sustainable" ones) and stay within the limits 4. Don't forget to price in the externalities into resource use during its whole life cycle (this can be many millenia for some materials) Right now the level is that some people even seem to grok the extremely simple reality of growing resource use with a limited resource eventually hitting a cutoff point. Granted my model here is extremely simplistic, but even if you factor in stuff like undiscovered resource sources and a rate of new discoveres, eventually on a planet with finite resources you will run out of them unless you just use the amount you can sustainably use.
- flyinglizard 1y ago
  There's a feedback process that happens on its own without anyone intervening, which is how scarce resources increase in price which encourages finding more cost effective replacements, or reducing waste by recycling (can be energy, land, rare earth metals, whatever). I'm not aware of any single industrial item that we stopped producing for the lack of raw resources.

adastra22 1y ago

We aren't even using 0.000000001% of the atoms in the Earth's crust, and the Universe is a lot larger than just the Earth.

ben_w 1y ago
Most of the atoms in our crust are, in order, oxygen (46.1%), silicon (28.2%), aluminium (8.23%), and iron (5.63%). Getting at the metal would leave a dangerous excess of oxygen. Lots of important industrial elements are in the parts per thousand to parts per million range: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... The majority of the universe is hydrogen and helium; most of what we see is now inaccessible due to the expansion of the universe and the speed of light; and even the stuff we can reach, because of the speed of light, requires a slow down to cubic growth at best (closer than galactic disk thickness or further than galactic isotropy); and even then that's for the species as a whole, as the speed of light eventually stops and single thing from growing at all. Exponential growth has a way of reaching big numbers quickly. Now sure, it's still a while for the stuff we can access — I don't know if your percentage is correct, but looks about right, and at 2% annual growth (so: no VN replication ever) that's 1163 years for the crust, then another 233 for the rest of the planet — but that assumes we can use the whole thing and aren't reliant on some trace elements, e.g. carbon (which is 200ppm) or tin (2.3ppm) or selenium (0.05ppm of the crust, and if Wikipedia is right about five times higher, 0.25ppm, in a human body).
atoav 1y ago
Yeah, but infinite is kinda a big number. And the universe has less than 0.0000000001% useful stuff in it and the rest kills us. My argument wasn't about how long it takes to deplete our resources, my argument was that eventually they will be deleted. And we are in a small emergeny raft on a wide ocean. Right now everybody is eating as if we are on vaction. We are not.

rich_sasha 1y ago

It is often stated that exponential growth in the economic sense necessarily requires exponential resource use. But I don't see why. Our use of resources changes. We used to care about coal production - it is now niche and in no way a choke point. We're on our way off oil, in fact if you believe green transformation maximalists, we may soon have a abundance of energy. Alongside population growth, we had a huge increase in farm yields, so that eg in Europe the use of agricultural land is actually decreasing. In 1890s, IIRC, it was predicted that Paris' growth will inevitably stagnate around 1920s as the capacity to remove horse dung (from carriages etc) will reach a critical point. Turns out we just obsoleted horses instead.

pjerem 1y ago
> We're on our way off oil Last time I checked, oil consumption is still raising year after year except for the covid years. Same for CO2 emissions we entered the era of irreversible natural disasters but we are still emitting more and more tears after years. I may be too optimistic, I can _feel_ the trend will change. But even being optimistic, the data isn’t there to show anything positive and even if we started decreasing oil production / consumption today, we are so late that even the declining trend would have to be pretty strong. I also think (and that’s just an opinion) that making the needed transition requires huge reform of the global economy and that the powerful know it very well. We are not getting fascism return for no reasons.
atoav 1y ago
I did not question that the varying story of how resource use shifted throughout history. As you correctly pointed out these shifts are extremely relevant for accurate projections though. It however changes nothing of the fact that exponential growth in a finite system will eventually run into saturation. If you want to grow your corps revenue by X% each year you will have to sell more. Selling more means making more, making more means using more resources. Now you can reduce the resource use per part with clever designs, different materials or by seeing planned obsolescence as a feature (which will mean customers have to buy a replacement earlier and thus the actual resource use of the product over its lifecycle gets in fact worse). So you optimize and optimize and then you have reached the moment where there is nothing left to remove, but you still need to grow, so you just keep using more resources. Or if you are lucky eventually a new material or design innovation comes around, that again allows you to improve resource use. But your resource use is not going to be zero and you deplete something else on the finite planet. And you need to grow and use more of it each year. If you're lost on a raft in the ocean and first eat the bread and once the bread is gone switch to cookies that does not mean you won't eventually run out of stuff to eat. The solution is to tap into resources that regrow and not use more than is regrowing, but that doesn't jive well with infinite growth. I am an electical engineer and I know pretty well how exponential resource use works in complex systems. If a part of my system would like to exponentially grow its resource use infinitly I'd either consider it defective or use the fact that it can't grow infinitly by bounds I set on purpose.

HDThoreaun 1y ago

The only true limiter to growth is energy. We are nowhere close to utilizing all the energy we can get our hands on. No one is saying there are no limits to growth on earth, the question is just when those limits will appear.

atoav 1y ago
Sure but last time I checked infinity was quite a large number, so infinite growth requires infinite energy. We are not talking about "could things grow a bit more during my lifetime", we are talking about our systemic demand for infinite growth. In a capitalist system a society that manages its resources perfectly in a sustainable way has less potential for short term growth than one that just thinks about the next quarter.
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  On a multi thousand year timescale I think you have a point, but even on the multi hundred year time scale we will not run out of opportunities to grow our energy production and therefore we will not run out of opportunities for economic growth.