51–60 of 204 posts
It was nice to read something optimistic again. Feels so rare these days. Seems like whenever optimism pokes its head out, everyone rushes to smash it back into its hole. There’s no room for your optimism in my reality! And so on. edit: Hmm. I get a negative score for celebrating some optimism. How dare I step out of line.
The finite resource is places to put the byproducts.
If you look at the mass of material extracted from the Earth, fossil fuels > all mineral resources. To first order, the resource problem is the fossil fuel problem, and we're on a trajectory to get off fossil fuels.
There were a lot of words here to simply fall back on the argument that innovation will solve every problem and do so before there is significant suffering. I agree that life will always go on, but this idea that consumption and quality of life can do nothing but rise when it is so dependent on the limited cheap energy and resources that we only learned to exploit a century ago is insanity to me. Our ever increasing…
What he is pointing out is the long history of doomsaying being wrong, because it implicitly depends on the assumption that technology has reached its peak and cannot further improve. To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based…
There were a lot of words here to simply fall back on the argument that innovation will solve every problem and do so before there is significant suffering. I agree that life will always go on, but this idea that consumption and quality of life can do nothing but rise when it is so dependent on the limited cheap energy and resources that we only learned to exploit a century ago is insanity to me. Our ever increasing…
What he is pointing out is the long history of doomsaying being wrong, because it implicitly depends on the assumption that technology has reached its peak and cannot further improve. To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based…
I don't want to say "this time is different" (because I don't know that).
But we do find our self in a situation where technology hasn't peaked, but we aren't using the new tech we have
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What he is pointing out is the long history of doomsaying being wrong, because it implicitly depends on the assumption that technology has reached its peak and cannot further improve. To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based…
The question is not "if" but "when". Sure renewables are becoming bigger every day but will we have enough of them before getting into climate catastrophe ? That's the question...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What he is pointing out is the long history of doomsaying being wrong, because it implicitly depends on the assumption that technology has reached its peak and cannot further improve. To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based…
Is there a historical precedent for having a technology that can largely offset these risks (fission and fusion) but not using them? I don't want to say "this time is different" (because I don't know that). But we do find our self in a situation where technology hasn't peaked, but we aren't using the new tech we have
More steel was manufactured per year [1] in the 2010s, than humanity produced in its entire history up to World War I. The whole century of the industrial revolution -- from the Eiffel Tower, to the steam ships, railways -- is but a drop in the ocean of material production by today's standards.
Most basic resources have a similar looking chart. And not everything is as abundant as iron.
There were a lot of words here to simply fall back on the argument that innovation will solve every problem and do so before there is significant suffering. I agree that life will always go on, but this idea that consumption and quality of life can do nothing but rise when it is so dependent on the limited cheap energy and resources that we only learned to exploit a century ago is insanity to me. Our ever increasing…
What he is pointing out is the long history of doomsaying being wrong, because it implicitly depends on the assumption that technology has reached its peak and cannot further improve. To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based…
> This appears to be wrong. Population growth is inexorably declining, and with renewables charging hard energy prices are going to be declining, not increasing.
I don’t agree with all of the article’s premises but this is not wrong. Population is still increasing, even if population _growth_ (first derivative) is declining. And energy usage is skyrocketing, according to the EIA (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
10M dollars cash? No problem, rich folks will just buy other assets and use them to trade. If you mean 10M assets, then you will now have to estimate the value for a lot of things, including stocks. It will also take motivation away from founders and investors - why they take a big risk if they have an upper limit of roi? I agree that the current inequality is a big problem, but your solution is certainly not a "simp…
> why they take a big risk if they have an upper limit of roi? Power? Influence? Popularity?
Popularity, well maybe. But I think it's only a part of what motivates people today.
"Should any particular resource begin to run short, our creativity will bring into being the knowledge of how to replace that resource from either some other source or by using some other means to accomplish what that resource did." The track record on this appears to be 100%. Are there any examples of a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?
The only example I can think of is water. While it's not gone, the quality and cleanliness has decreased over time. There are many areas where you can no longer consume seafood due to high pollution levels. Same with swimming or drinking (boiling used to be sufficient to clean water, but it certainly isn't anymore). Even "safe" seafood is only recommended to be consumed 2 times a week now due to the build up of heavy…
Maybe it lowers your lifespan. That's not that big of a problem, humans have lived like that for the vast majority of their existence.
As for water, it's everywhere. Obviously, some people can run out of it, but then again a minority is always fucked in this world.
