81–90 of 343 posts
This all started with Wall Street. I want to make that ABSOLUTELY clear.
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why can humans not expand interplanetarily? Then, inter-stellarly, then finally, inter-galactically?
Because that's still science fiction. We have enough ressources to sustain current population/economic system for a few decades, a century at most (i'm thinking gas, rare earth, phosphore, etc). It's been 50 years since we got to the moon and we're still stuck on low-orbit earth. Even getting to Mars is still very very hard. Do you think we'll be technologically ready to colonize an earth-like planet by the end of th…
The original incentives for the space race were political during the Cold War - rockets, satellites, then landing on the moon. Since then, NASA has mostly stagnated without a clear vision to deliver. Likewise (until recently) the major aerospace providers were happy just doing well enough to make some dollars from their lobbying and ‘cost-plus’ contracts.
The only game-changer is SpaceX, set up to deliver the vision of a slightly eccentric multi-millionaire (now billionaire, of course). But I’d argue that SpaceX isn’t doing anything so revolutionary that it couldn’t have been done earlier by various others (including NASA itself) if they’d had the right vision and incentives. Sad, really - all of that money, time, effort, and human potential effectively wasted.
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And how is that a problem? As long as productivity grows at same rate as workers/pensioners ratio, the portion of gdp that should go towards retired ppl remains constant.
That productivity will have to come from automation, and a robot doesn't get a salary so doesn't have to pay income tax. So that'll have to change if you plan on using the productivity growth to fund pensions, no?
Can we have prosperity without growth? No. Can we have sustainability with growth? No. Then we can not have prosperity and sustainability. Can we afford not having sustainability? No. Then we can not afford prosperity.
We can have sustainability and prosperity. It's a triangle: prosperity, sustainability, population. Choose 2 (and obviously if you don't choose sustainability the sh*t is going to hit the fan at some point anyway). The key issue is the global population. (Edit: We're discussing life on this planet. Colonising space obviously means that human population may continue to grow, but not on Earth and not using Earth' resou…
Nomadic tribes intrinsically self regulate, what can't be carried can't be possesed beyond group boundaries and falls back to the environment automatically.
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1% growth difference over 100 years is the difference between the per capita income of the US vs Mexico. So yes, unless you arbitrarily limit the entire globe to some level of prosperity like a novel about a disutopian world ruled by an evil anti-science theocracy, people are going to look at countries growing faster than them and wonder why they have to slum it like peasants without their flying cars and vacations o…
> So yes, unless you arbitrarily limit the entire globe to some level of prosperity like a novel about a disutopian world ruled by an evil anti-science theocracy, I don't see much evil to that (limiting the "the entire globe to some level of prosperity"). Nor it has anything to do with being anti-science. You could be pro-science (pro understanding the world, physics, math, etc), and against continuous growth. Better…
Growth is an international arms race. I think the biggest problem is that economic growth gives countries a (military) advantage. If you opt out of growth-based economic system, your neighbors will have more army or resources or manpower. They will eventually invade you or dominate you economically. This is similar to the situation Africans were during Industrial Revolution. Europeans needed a lot of workers for fact…
Growth is an international arms race. I think the biggest problem is that economic growth gives countries a (military) advantage. If you opt out of growth-based economic system, your neighbors will have more army or resources or manpower. They will eventually invade you or dominate you economically. This is similar to the situation Africans were during Industrial Revolution. Europeans needed a lot of workers for fact…
You can't improve efficiency without creating growth. If you find a way to create widget X twice as efficiently using less resources, that will show up in GDP growth (or at least idealised GDP; obviously the actual number is subject to approximation error).
It’s fascinating how the reality of Earth being embedded in a vast ocean of resource is completely lost on so many. Human ingenuity is key. With every step we unlock another level of resource utilization driving prosperity. If anything social organization and financial frameworks need to support the unfolding of our technology tree. As humanity we just woke up. Enlightenment now.
We need to listen what the science is telling us for 40 years now with the report from the club of rome "limits of growth", and slow down our consuption levels.
Apply new techonologies as an excuse to keep growth (green growth) will accelerate the degradation of the environment.
Edit: typos
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> Increased population allows for greater specialization Can you elaborate on this point w.r.t the OP you’re discussing?
IMO, he puts forward a purely economic approach about how to produce enough to ensure a growing population remains materially prosperous. This blissfully ignores the key issue under discussion: Our impact on the planet in doing so.
It still baffles me that we choose to ignore externalities in part because we cannot attach any “rational” prices to them, it’s like they don’t even exist to us as long as we cannot put them in an exact Excel sheet with a well-defined value.