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Are we running out of resources?

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Re: Are we running out of resources?

#171

Post by throwaway6532 »

taylodl wrote: post #99

The 19th & 20th centuries have taught us how transformative knowledge is. Prior to these centuries humanity more or less haphazardly acquired new knowledge. Now we're much more principled in our acquisition and management of knowledge - in fact we've come to see that knowledge itself is a resource. What do we know about knowledge resources? For starters we know they're finite. There's only so much knowledge available…

>We closed a remarkable bit of that gap in the 19th and 20th centuries - the gaps remaining are getting really difficult to fill. This is the counterargument to innovation will solve all our problems.

When you combine this with birth rates below replacement level that leads society in the direction where it's a) harder to fill those gaps, and b) much less people to fill them. So, having far less bandwidth available to do that discovery/work seems to be in general a trend people don't seem to acknowledge.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#172

Post by throwaway6532 »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #141
jacknews wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we have the power to transform the universe, we have the power to transform ourselves. Why would we make the universe ape our biologically-inspired needs and desires, when we could transcend them and become so much more?

I think we are plenty as is, and as for why bother to make the universe do our bidding - because there's great pleasure satisfaction and fulfillment in bending cold indifferent nature to our will...not to mention in enjoying a hot cup of cocoa, a good book, and a long slow blowjob by the fireplace on a dark wintry night If you have not seen the Les Blank documentary Always For Pleasure, I highly recommend it

>I think we are plenty as is, and as for why bother to make the universe do our bidding - because there's great pleasure satisfaction and fulfillment in bending cold indifferent nature to our will...

We're starting to wake up to the reality that all we're really doing is bending it out of shape and when we push it beyond the yield strength it will snap.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#173

Post by throwaway6532 »

standardUser wrote: post #32

"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?

Good luck replacing water.

This perspective also assumes enough creativity and capital available to do this will always there. If you're going to need to develop potentially more complex and expensive technology it's going to need a certain level of complexity and population to support that complexity available. With birth rates being below replacement level it seems population of young people is heading down generation after generation. So... I'm not so convinced this assumption will always hold. In fact, it's a concrete example of a negative feedback loop kicking in and correcting the status quo for us as in order to have a society capable of such a level of innovation it has to be structured such that it's population refuses to reproduce in sufficient numbers.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#174

Post by bmitc »

throwaway6532 wrote: post #164
bmitc wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the argument that technological growth and developments are the cause , or at least a catalyst, of all our problems rather than some part of the solution?

Looks like you're getting downvoted, but it seems kind of obvious this is the case. Technology has allowed more people to exist, and more people are using more energy and more resources. I think it causes cognitive dissonance in that people want the current world and lifestyle to be sustainable because they like it due to it having a lot of fun and comfortable things, and don't wish to consider the idea that it may j…

Nail on the head.

It's an uncomfortable feeling realizing we're basically doing it wrong.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#175

Post by toss1 »

>>We can make all of the Earth rather like the best parts of New York, or Paris or Sydney: picturesque, clean and comfortable. We can then set about to make the rest of the solar system rather like the Earth.

If we make even 10% of the entire earth's surface at that density, it will be an environmental catastrophe that would likely collapse the food web.

Over half the world's population lives on less than 1% of the land [0]. Only 14% of the land has been modified in any way.

Long before we turn the whole thing into a cityscape, the natural world on which we depend, from the soil biology, to the pollinators, to the apex predators, will all collapse.

Sure the author has a point about the transformative ability of knowledge, but he's also basically an idiot about system dynamics.

[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3389041/Wher... [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/human-impact-earth-pl...

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#176

Post by hnlmorg »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #150
hnlmorg wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that some of the accounts do report trees. While the stories of deforestation are true it’s a far cry from the island being baron and inhabitants turning into savage cannibals. That’s the subjective part. Yet we do know with certainty that hundreds, if not thousands, of inhabitants were taken as slaves and the remaining suffered from rampant diseases that were introduced to that island. So what killed the…

Well this is a discussion about trees. The post I replied to suggested we start chopping down trees when we run out of other resources. Hence my suggestion that this may not be a good idea. I don't understand where you're getting the cannibalism from.

Your opening comment was terse enough to be ambiguous and cannibalism is often (subjectively) cited as the end game of Easter Island. That’s how.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#177

Post by netsharc »

k8sToGo wrote: post #2

What's with the weird url?

Netlify deploys your site under such a URL when you hit "Preview", so you can check the modificatons before you deploy them on your live site. But these preview subdomains are seemingly not deletable (at least that's what I found a few years ago) so it feels like polluting the Internet, as well as leaving draft versions of your content permanently online.

Edit: To correct myself, the docs https://docs.netlify.com/site-deploys/deploy-previews/ do say the URLs of such preview sites are different (they begin with "deploy-preview"), so I'm not sure why the URL of this submission is like that.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#178

Post by wiz21c »

marcosdumay wrote: post #116
wiz21c wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Define "catastrophe". Are we already in one? I do expect our emissions to get almost halved during this decade, and for carbon capture to become a practical thing on the next one. But depending on what you want, even this isn't enough.

I won't define catastrophe, but :

> I do expect our emissions to get almost halved during this decade

That's really good news ! I mean it's so far away from what I know that I sure have missed something. Could you give a few pointers that illustrate your expectation ? (honest question)

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#179

Post by wiz21c »

pfdietz wrote: post #55
wiz21c wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

We're almost surely going to have substantial warming. But it's a stretch to go from that to doom. We may end up seeing albedo modification as a stopgap.

Climate change is real for me. Heat wave + asthma are sometimes really tough to endure; big winds and more frequent floods (and more extreme) have destroyed the budget of the some parts of the state I live in for a very long time: it means no more budget for other things such as helping those who need it, maintaining infrastructures for schools, sports, etc.

Sure, it's not your Hollywood catastrophe, but the burden will become heavier on all of us. And if the rich (which I'm part of, sort of) can get out of it, they'll have to live with more social unrest...

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#180

Post by helloworld11 »

verisimi wrote: post #33
simonh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the wealth of billionaires is not cash, it’s locked up in their ownership of the companies they control. Elon Musk for example has 99% of his wealth in shares in Tesla, SpaceX etc. The only way to take that off him is to take those companies away and give control of them to someone else. It’s the same for Warren Buffett, the vast majority of his wealth is in ownership and control via BH. He sells some of that…

> Most of the wealth of billionaires is not cash, it’s locked up in their ownership of the companies they control. Elon Musk for example has 99% of his wealth in shares in Tesla, SpaceX etc. Yes. But its possible to allocate a value to these assets. The point I'm making is that it if we are trying to find a solution to these problems, the easiest one would be to take the billions in wealth - more wealth that can be s…

Aside from other complexities and negative consequences of your hypothetically proposed wealth cap, you forget that the world isn't a pie from which wealth is taken by some at the expense of others, at least not in many of the ways that create wealth on the market.

These billioniares and many more millioniares worth more than 10 million dollars by and large create their fortunes through certain lucky or careful investments and in the case of many of them, their wealth is locked up directly in stock that the public values highly enough for them to be worth that much. As many here have pointed out better than I will now, creating confiscatory policies on this would lead to the wealth itself mostly evaporating as if it never were. What you propose is in this sense a tired, economically irrational and self-defeating idea that tries to be the real world equivalent of the proverbial farmer and his golden goose.

Also worth mentioning that the total wealth of all the world's billioniares today amounts to 13.1 trillion dollars, give or take. The U.S. government alone spend 8 trillion just on its wars in the middle east and Asia between 2001 and and now.

This is only one example out of many of government funds being spent rampantly, in amounts that dwarf the wealth or annual income of the world's billionaires but with little or sometimes even negative productive results. And you'd like to confiscate these very often useful private sources of productive wealth to government bureaucrats that already receive trillions in tax revenues annually but somehow can't seem to make them definitively improve the world?

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