6 ms·

There is absolutely no guarantee of collapse. Per capita, people live cleaner year by year whether they make "ecologically sound" signalling choices or not. Wit

There is absolutely no guarantee of collapse. Per capita, people live cleaner year by year whether they make "ecologically sound" signalling choices or not. Within the last 50 years, this has been very profound. It's too early to say, but my money's on population crashing first. 100 years ago, you could see nearly anyplace a large population at something approaching the Malthusian limit; that's much reduced now. The sore spots are worse but there are fewer of them. And something like a Haiti is extremely path dependent - it takes several improbable events conspiring to make one; so they can be unmade. Jared Diamond's "Collapse" pretty much convinced me he was not just wrong but flat and 100% wrong. Through his writing , I learned to not only disapprove of apocolyptic narrative but how to counter it. I would not be surprised of there were big, resource-oriented wars on the horizon but I doubt that'll lead to collapse, and I attribute those more to things like monetary policy and the odious politics of debt than human nature in the raw. It's difficult to explain just how violently wrong-headed people were in the 20th Century to create the big disasters.

api 12y ago
"people live cleaner year by year" I'm not talking about cleanliness. That's a quality of life factor but ultimately it's not what's important. The important thing is supply, mostly of energy. (It's also important to note that to a great extent the West has cleaned up its environment by outsourcing polluting industries to Asia, Africa, and South America.) Last I checked we still got more than 80% of our energy from fossil fuels. That has changed very, very little in the past 50 years. My grandparents drove a gasoline car, my parents drove a gasoline car, and I drive a gasoline car, and the power grid where I live is powered by 60% natural gas and 15% coal. Where I grew up it was almost 100% coal, same as it was three generations ago. We were supposed to be driving EVs powered by fusion reactors by now. If you're rich you can buy solar panels and an EV and convince yourself there is no problem, but until that stuff falls geometrically in price to the point that it achieves mass adoption it's a luxury toy that will make no impact. Either that or the future will require that 90% of humanity be reduced to medieval subsistence-level poverty. That's not quite the collapse some have predicted, but I highly doubt that sort of neo-feudal civilization is going to go to the stars. So it counts for the Fermi Paradox. The universe may be filled with such small, limited, planet-bound intelligences. I'm slightly encouraged by an apparent Moore's Law in solar, but storage is now the bottleneck. I'm also very cynical about technological advancement outside of IT and a few other narrow areas. I agree with Peter Thiel that basically all major technological advancement outside of computers and some biotech stopped around 1970. Cars, planes, power plants, etc. are all basically the same today as they were then.
- ArkyBeagle 12y ago
  Fusion isn't something that we can simply order. People are working on it. I'm far from even ... ignorance on the state of the art there, but my guess would be that investing more would probably not produce it any faster. Cleanliness - basic control of waterborne disease, the level of schmutz from power, control of pernicious trash - is huge. Queen Victoria's husband Albert died of this sort of disease 150ish years ago. This is vanishingly rare now if it exists at all. I don't buy "90% in medieval subsistence level poverty" because medieval subsistence level poverty doesn't scale. It went obsolete even with the potato as a base food crop in the early 19th Century - I'd accuse the Irish potato famine of ending anything remotely like it. If there's feudalism again, then it's because we can't organize ourselves in anything more efficient than that. I can't say that some sort of Malthusian equilibrium is impossible, only that it seems unlikely. Historically, we had two notable examples in the 20th Century - the Ukrainian famine post the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Great Leap Forward. Both were, paradoxically, caused by belief systems grounded in Malthusian predictions. Now that's largely inductive predicting on my part, but we just know better now. There's a heck of a lot of muddling through between going to the stars and a continuous Malthusian crisis. I'd say "going to the stars" has more than anything else failed to capture at least the popular imagination.

api 12y ago

"people live cleaner year by year" I'm not talking about cleanliness. That's a quality of life factor but ultimately it's not what's important. The important thing is supply, mostly of energy. (It's also important to note that to a great extent the West has cleaned up its environment by outsourcing polluting industries to Asia, Africa, and South America.) Last I checked we still got more than 80% of our energy from fossil fuels. That has changed very, very little in the past 50 years. My grandparents drove a gasoline car, my parents drove a gasoline car, and I drive a gasoline car, and the power grid where I live is powered by 60% natural gas and 15% coal. Where I grew up it was almost 100% coal, same as it was three generations ago. We were supposed to be driving EVs powered by fusion reactors by now. If you're rich you can buy solar panels and an EV and convince yourself there is no problem, but until that stuff falls geometrically in price to the point that it achieves mass adoption it's a luxury toy that will make no impact. Either that or the future will require that 90% of humanity be reduced to medieval subsistence-level poverty. That's not quite the collapse some have predicted, but I highly doubt that sort of neo-feudal civilization is going to go to the stars. So it counts for the Fermi Paradox. The universe may be filled with such small, limited, planet-bound intelligences. I'm slightly encouraged by an apparent Moore's Law in solar, but storage is now the bottleneck. I'm also very cynical about technological advancement outside of IT and a few other narrow areas. I agree with Peter Thiel that basically all major technological advancement outside of computers and some biotech stopped around 1970. Cars, planes, power plants, etc. are all basically the same today as they were then.

ArkyBeagle 12y ago
Fusion isn't something that we can simply order. People are working on it. I'm far from even ... ignorance on the state of the art there, but my guess would be that investing more would probably not produce it any faster. Cleanliness - basic control of waterborne disease, the level of schmutz from power, control of pernicious trash - is huge. Queen Victoria's husband Albert died of this sort of disease 150ish years ago. This is vanishingly rare now if it exists at all. I don't buy "90% in medieval subsistence level poverty" because medieval subsistence level poverty doesn't scale. It went obsolete even with the potato as a base food crop in the early 19th Century - I'd accuse the Irish potato famine of ending anything remotely like it. If there's feudalism again, then it's because we can't organize ourselves in anything more efficient than that. I can't say that some sort of Malthusian equilibrium is impossible, only that it seems unlikely. Historically, we had two notable examples in the 20th Century - the Ukrainian famine post the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Great Leap Forward. Both were, paradoxically, caused by belief systems grounded in Malthusian predictions. Now that's largely inductive predicting on my part, but we just know better now. There's a heck of a lot of muddling through between going to the stars and a continuous Malthusian crisis. I'd say "going to the stars" has more than anything else failed to capture at least the popular imagination.