301–310 of 350 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other way of doing this is just pushing the earth a bit off its orbit. Better to do it in the other direction though to stop global warming. Let's make it 400 days instead.
360 is much nicer than 400 though. 12 months of 30 days each versus 10 40-day months or 16 25-day months.
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If that's "wealth", then "wealth" is worthless. When you have a capped number of humans, and every last one of them is jacked into the Matrix and has everything they could possibly want - what is there left to grow? If the growth in "wealth" doesn't actually reflect an improvement in human experience, then it's a pointless term. Sure you can have two computers trade virtual tokens at an ever-increasing rate until you…
I think you're arguing at cross-purposes with me. Nobody has argued that bouncing virtual tokens around creates wealth. That's the "wealth is money" fallacy that I just criticized. Wealth as used by economists just means all the goods and services that we provide to one another, sometimes with the addition of "services" like a clean environment. It's very broad and includes things like cultural wealth, and doesn't ev…
The economist's position - and yours, apparently - is that "growth", whatever it is, can be sustained literally infinitely, on a finite rock amongst a finite group of hairless apes where nothing about the actual situation is infinite. So you can either have a highly abstract definition of "growth" that allows this to be true, or a definition that most people would recognize as meaningful or positive, but not both.
The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand. Energy consumption has decoupled from population growth rates and economic growth. How much energy will we consume in 1,000 years? Most projections of the population have it stabilizing at arou…
For that to happen we need almost complete automation, which would provide cheap food, cheap housing, cheap healthcare, and lack of worry about the immediate future.
Even if you can sustain 1% increase in population per year, 1000 years of prosperity will result in
(8 billion)*(1.01^1000) = 167673 billion = 167 trillion people
(1% is roughly the current population growth, but it's slowing down)
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It's a bit absurd the idea that humans living on earth are going to produce more energy than the Sun. Maybe I'm naive and simple minded. But that just seems insane. If I'm doing the math right, at 2.3% growth = we produce more energy than the Sun in 4500 years. It doesn't matter how many years it is. It's never happening. Just look at how damn hot and inhospitable the sun is. We're not producing more energy here! It'…
Not a Dyson sphere, a Dyson swarm makes more sense and its doable since it can be very sparse at the beginning and grow denser with time.
In a far-future where a TNG-inspired Dyson structure were somehow feasible (1AU size, habitable surface on interior, etc.), it’d be incredibly disappointing if we applied the (unrealistic) science and (unrealistic) resources towards building such a thing, rather than interstellar efforts. Buuuut maybe I’m just projecting my disappointment with our planet’s current approach to science and resource utilization.
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> Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most current orthodox economics and economic policy. Whether it is or isn't, the optimal strategy for a nation is likely exponential growth until it can't, and then switch as quickly as can be done with the least problems. Since nations are competing, and we're talking about exponentials here, the cost for cutting off exponential…
One problem with "grow quickly, then switch", is that it often leads to high-growth institutions, factions, ideologies, and infrastructure. Countries which grow quickly bake those assumptions into financial, industrial, economic, and political policies. They create companies, regulatory bodies, and financial systems which are predicated on growth. They create economic ideology and the mechanisms for promulgating it w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're arguing at cross-purposes with me. Nobody has argued that bouncing virtual tokens around creates wealth. That's the "wealth is money" fallacy that I just criticized. Wealth as used by economists just means all the goods and services that we provide to one another, sometimes with the addition of "services" like a clean environment. It's very broad and includes things like cultural wealth, and doesn't ev…
The point is that there's no such thing as a (meaningful) good or service that doesn't require some amount of a tangible and finite physical resource - human time, if nothing else. The economist's position - and yours, apparently - is that "growth", whatever it is, can be sustained literally infinitely , on a finite rock amongst a finite group of hairless apes where nothing about the actual situation is infinite. So…
But let's make the same assumption for a moment. For economic growth [of wealth] to stop requires two things to stop: population growth and productivity growth. As GDP is roughly population * productivity.
Clearly, populations can stop growing or shrink. We can also assume a finite population limit. So this is an argument that productivity growth is also finite. But, why should that be the case? Take the example of computers. Modern computers are much more productivity enhancing than older computers, but they are also smaller (i.e. less physical resources needed) and more energy efficient. Even if the Earth had reached carrying capacity, smarter chips would continue to be designed and the productivity boost of computers would keep increasing. That's just one example, there are many others.
But again, the finite world assumption doesn't hold. So the whole debate is a bit of ivory tower silliness anyway.
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> Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most current orthodox economics and economic policy. Whether it is or isn't, the optimal strategy for a nation is likely exponential growth until it can't, and then switch as quickly as can be done with the least problems. Since nations are competing, and we're talking about exponentials here, the cost for cutting off exponential…
> Since nations are competing, and we're talking about exponentials here, the cost for cutting off exponential economic growth too soon is likely to become irrelevant to the future, which every nation is going to strive to avoid. I question this definition of relevance. To me, relevance is having a healthy, happy, sustainable society and culture. It's not accumulating goods and energy consumption in a self-destructiv…
A well regulated and lawful country where your rights are respected both internally and internationally is a luxury of a powerful nation and a stable system of narions. The former is what I'm saying is is important with regard to growth, because the latter can't be assumed to always exist in the future.
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we can (and do) radiate heat into space already. there's a specific infrared wavelength that passes out of our atmosphere unimpeded. building things which receive sunlight but which emit IR at this wavelength would have a cooling effect, though I don't know to what scale. no need to pump anything up to space, lol. just put hot stuff inside vessels which are painted with a material which radiates heat at this specific…
Uh, paint doesn't radiate heat not does it convert IR frequencies. (except for very unusual, usually fluorescent materials) It reflects incident IR.
thanks for nitpicking; always appreciated
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most current orthodox economics and economic policy. Whether it is or isn't, the optimal strategy for a nation is likely exponential growth until it can't, and then switch as quickly as can be done with the least problems. Since nations are competing, and we're talking about exponentials here, the cost for cutting off exponential…
One problem with "grow quickly, then switch", is that it often leads to high-growth institutions, factions, ideologies, and infrastructure. Countries which grow quickly bake those assumptions into financial, industrial, economic, and political policies. They create companies, regulatory bodies, and financial systems which are predicated on growth. They create economic ideology and the mechanisms for promulgating it w…
I think it's a mistake to assume stability in nations and a strong self governing community between them can be assumed at all points in the future, especially if there is some stop to exponential growth at some point (but not only because of that). Economic power is somewhat fungible with mitary power, and lack of power in a possible future less stable system of nations could be very problematic.
In short I think the safest and most conservative path for any nation to protect it's future is to take advantage of as much growth as it safely can for as long as it lasts.
Another way to look at is that is the U.S. was to opt out of growth right now, how long would it take for us to become irrelevant on the world stage, and how long after that before we were (and our citizens) negatively impacted by trade deals because of lack of leverage (which is probably a best case scenario of negative possibilities IMO). It's the job of a government to avoid that scenario.
Transitioning is hard, but I'm not sure it's harder than the alternative, depending on how far out we are to it being forced on everyone.
That said, I'd be happy to read whatever info you have on the topic to expand my thinking.
Hmm so if we pump water to amplify the tides we can speed up the Earth's spin and get rid of the leap second.