Before someone says something like, "This is why we need to colonize Mars" remember: the laws of physics do not permit sustained exponential growth, full stop. Even with arbitrarily advanced technology that allows you to freely colonize the universe at the speed of light that only buys you polynomial growth (indeed, only O(n^2) growth) in the absolute best case.
Sooner or later mankind is going to run up against the limits of exponential growth. We can make conscious decisions about how to deal with it, or we can let the laws of physics decide for us. IMHO things will go better for us if we take the bull by the horns, but very few people seem to be on board with that even here on HN where gloomy Malthusian prophecies are rarely received with much enthusiasm.
Happily, I'm now old enough (and childless) so I can afford not to give much of a fuck. But sooner or later someone is going to have to. If it's not you, it will be your children, or their children. The sooner someone starts to give a fuck, the less painful it will be when -- not if -- we finally discover what the limiting factor to growth actually is.
Most likely these issues will get resolved the old fashioned way by violence. Climate change issues will get resolved the same way. Humanity has never made collective decisions for the whole planet and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
> Humanity has never made collective decisions for the whole planet ...
League of Nations, later becoming the United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights ... hopefully you will have heard of those.
Within the UN there are not that many members that complain much about the organization being dysfunctional or even useless. Unsurprisingly, all those who do are the USA and ones that are extremely dependent on the USA. One could argue that the USA is indeed an exceptional country, but not in a good way. The UN was explicitly set up with the goal of collectively solving global problems. The current status quo within the UN, where the USA regularly flaunts the treaties they signed/ratified or falsely accusing others of violations (without sufficient proof) just as justification for ditching their own commitments, says little about humanity and everything about the USA.
I have no doubt that the USA will indeed do everything to "resolve" these issues rather the old fashioned way by violence. Hopefully the rest of mankind will be a bit smarter than that.
”League of Nations, later becoming the United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights ... hopefully you will have heard of those.”
These organizations are/were a good thing but they haven’t been able to stop violence so far. The League of Nations couldn’t prevent WW2 and the UN couldn’t prevent a lot of atrocities and war since its creation. I wish they could. I also don’t think international collaboration will work once we have tens of millions of people having to move due to climate change or if overpopulation causes severe resource shortages.
I can follow that line of reasoning, but I think it is biased (maybe unintentionally) to the point where its conclusion is inaccurate.
Indeed, the League of Nations couldn't prevent WW2, neither did the UN prevent a lot of atrocities from happening. That is, aside from all the atrocities that it did actually prevent (probably numerously, but we will never know for they didn't happen). If not from starting, than at least from expanding to the point that they otherwise would have. As for WW2, besides its roots in the settlement of WW1, it was also the opportunistic selfish advantages that some particular countries (not talking about Germany) saw in it's unfolding, while pretending otherwise to the public, that made WW2 to unfold as it did (reminder: it was the USA who continued doing good business with Germany, until it was Hitler who declared war on the USA).
The real question to ask is: what would we have without the UN? All there would be is bilateral agreements between individual countries. It is well known from history how easily those create extremely complex situations where a local conflict can often quickly spiral out into global conflicts (because of conflicting agreements between allies of the involved parties). WW1 probably being a good example of that, and in fact a primary motivator behind the creation of what eventually became the UN.
Climate change will indeed cause all sorts of problems, violence no doubt among them. One thing is sure though, with only bilateral agreements between countries, it will be only more bloody and inhumane than with the UN at least striving for a global consensus approach. It's only with collective agreement that the effects of these challenges can be limited to their least worst outcomes. It will be bad either way, but that's no valid argument to fatalistically argue that nothing will matter. Of course, the USA could choose that none of this is their problem, and only look at their own self-interests. But that will rather sooner than later pave the way of their own inevitable demise (which in that case would probably be a very unpleasant one).
As long as a substantial part of the US economy and international political dominance comes directly from how the country profits from conflict elsewhere on the globe, little chance that the USA will ever sincerely contribute to making this world a better place. This is not to say that other countries are benevolent or sincere, but it is the USA who openly advocates breaking down whatever instruments we still have to resolve issues by consensus instead of violence.
The UN is by no means a perfect solution, but without it this world would likely be a far worse place. The world before it existed sure was. Something apparently only the USA (and a few vassals) seems to openly disagree with. I remember only a few other countries that did; mostly totalitarian ones and responsible for some of those atrocities that that the UN failed to prevent.
Colonizing Mars doesn't really make the problem go away even temporarily.
It's still the case that at the local teashop I frequented, I see endless row of empty parking lot and empty storefronts not being used by anybody. We have a sedentary lifestyle because we built our urban area around not walking.
If we can modify our desires for growth to be oriented toward metrics that don’t scale with physical resource consumption, we can solve this problem. Such sustainable growth metrics could include miniaturization or quality increases in physical goods, or even changes in some information good. And the happy news is many parts of the economy are already undergoing this transformation. You can read about the decoupling of GDP and carbon emissions for some interesting research on this topic.
No, that won't help (except, as with every other technological innovation, to delay the day of ultimate reckoning). Quantum mechanics imposes fundamental limits on miniaturization, and the second law of thermodynamics (and the Landauer limit) imposes fundamental limits on efficiency gains.
What about information and quality? I see no reason why a species couldn’t sit around coming up with increasingly fashionable jokes until the heat death of the universe. I think that’s where we are headed.
It is entirely possible that what you are suggesting is the beginning of an answer to the problem. But it is not immediately obvious to me that our current social structures will support an economy based on people inventing good jokes. I think that will take some kind of radical change, and thinking about what shape that kind of radical change might take is exactly what I'm hoping to encourage people to start doing. So kudos to you for thinking along these lines, but I don't think that actually solving the problem will be quite as simple as writing a good one-liner.
Nothing would make me happier than to be proven wrong about this.
What I hope for, is that as the information economy continues to grow, its political power will eventually exceed that of physical industry. At that point, it will be possible to put in place policies like a carbon tax that will reduce environmental harms while further weakening the political power of the harmful industries. Ultimately we could cap and tax or cap and trade all sorts of environmental harms, not just carbon emissions. Wealth would accrue to companies that generate economic value while society determines the total level of allowable environmental harm (which could be negative).
I think other approaches like “rise up and destroy capitalism” would protect the environment faster if successful but have less chance of success.
That sounds like an eminently sober assessment of the situation. My concern there is that the information economy seems to be growing its own set of harmful externalities, at least by my own quality metric, which places a high value on personal freedom. But one problem at a time I guess.
I don't even understand what life means without economic growth anymore.. no new companies, no new technologies, no new anything. Nothing to strive towards, no chance to escape the station of life you were born in. Its like growth is THE civilization level goal we've had since forever. We need to move from A to B. What do we even do without a place to go? What will happen to civilization without a goal we can all organize around in elaborate structures called societies and clubs and companies and move to? Maybe if i was younger i would have answers, or that question wouldn't even matter but not anymore.
(OP if you have any thoughts on it i'd love to hear them)
The main thing we need to get past is the assumption that is currently woven deeply into our financial system that debt is sustainable because the next generation will be more productive than the last. That kind of growth has to end somewhere. That does not mean that we can't keep inventing new stuff.
Not OP, but read your comment and felt inspired to respond.
I understand your mindset - in a sense, the absence of growth implies death, all life needs growth, etc.
However, growth is not a purely-quantitative, 1-dimensional value. There are an infinite number of possible futures that all constitute growth relative to here and now. Which aspects will do most of the growth? Will there be more humans? more relationships? more industry? more data? more meaning? There are an infinite number of things that can grow, and even within a single vertical, multiple ways to grow.
Therefore, any specific growth we undergo has an "opportunity cost" of whatever other ways we could have grown. Not to mention, most kinds of growth require some destruction, so in addition to potential value, you lose the immediate value of whatever you destroy.
Therefore, in my view, the 2 ways we need to grow the most are:
- Get smarter in the ways that would enable us to accurately predict good ways to grow. This helps us do the following better:
- Build up the -potential- to grow, or at least remain alive, in dimensions that, right now, to us, seem good or necessary.
- Learn how to know when, and how, to unleash that -potential-.
How come? The amount of 3D space grows as r³ if r is the expansion radius. Even though planet surfaces are 2D, the number of planets grows as r³, too, given a reasonably isotropic universe.
Because the limit to growth is the derivative of the available volume. If the volume grows as r^3 then the available growth rate is r^2.
But this really is a minor detail. Our current economic models (and in particular our assessments of the risk of debt default) assume long-term growth of k^r for some k>1. That is not sustainable under any circumstances.
The main premise of this article is that suburbanization led to increased long-term infrastructure costs (because sparse populations require more per-capita spending to deliver power, plumbing, roads, etc.), but failed to generate a commensurate increase in tax revenue. This is much less of a problem than it it seems because:
1. The population is becoming increasingly urban. The trend of suburbanization has not only stopped, it has been reversing for several decades now.
2. When infrastructure fails, there's a very strong incentive to raise money to improve infrastructure. Admittedly this is less effective than preventing failures in the first place, but the challenge of raising tax dollars to fix a bridge becomes much easier when residents can no longer use said bridge to commute and thus have a much larger incentive to pay the necessary taxes.
w/r/t #2 you're not arguing the point you're just re-phrasing it. That money has to come from somewhere, so it comes from the schools and the spending power of the residents via higher property taxes. That's why all the "old burb" areas like mass/ct/nj/long-island have very high property taxes. People think they can flee it by moving to burbs in delaware/florida/rdc/whatever but its just moving the problem and kicking the can a generation, not solving it.
If you like the article, his book is good too, it distills a lot of the thinking (that site has a lot of articles) into one source: https://www.strongtowns.org/book
Something I've noticed that came to mind as I happen to be vacationing in Playa Del Carmen (Mexico) while reading this. I'm from Canada; visiting here, and walking through the town, I obviously notice many buildings, vehicles, roads, etc. are in much more of a state of disrepair than I'm used to at home. This includes downtown areas, so it's not a sprawl issue, but (I assume) just that there isn't the same amount of capital invested into maintaining infrastructure, updating vehicles, etc. that we see at home. (On average; obviously there are plenty of exceptions.) Now, this isn't surprising since GDP per capita in Mexico is much lower than in Canada or the United States. However, in most visits I've made to the US, I've noticed the same thing to a lesser extent. Almost anywhere roads are in worse condition that what I'm used to. Outside of large cities, infrastructure in general seems more run-down than in similar places in Canada. But this is all just in my limited personal experience.
So first of all, I'm curious whether this is actually the case, or just my own biased personal experience. Have other cross-border travelers noticed this? And if it is a real thing, then I'm curious what the reasons are, given that the US has somewhat higher GDP per capita than Canada.
Some possibilities I've considered are 1) wealth in the US is more concentrated in large cities than in Canada. I'm sure this is the case in both countries, but perhaps the effect is greater in the US? 2) The spending priorities in the two countries are different. For instance, US spending on healthcare and on military are both higher per capita than Canadian. Perhaps Canada just spends more (publicly and/or privately) on infrastructure and less on other things? If so, is this the result of intentional priorities to some extent? Or is it just an artifact of history or of governmental structures?
I'm not trying to argue that one approach is better than another, or even that my observations are generalize-able. Just curious if others have noticed the same and have thoughts.
All equipment on Earth is run off fossil fuels: gasoline cars, diesel trucks, jet engines, helicopters, busses, etc. Tesla electric cars barely make a dent, and rely on electricity produced by natural gas.
Solar intensity on Mars is much weaker than on Earth. I assume this would require huge acres of land to capture as much energy from the sun via solar panels, as compared to Earth. Fortunately Mars has electric dust storms that can scrub the solar panels for us, which would reduce the need to send human labor out to clean them.
So that leaves hydrogen and nuclear. Hydrogen can be split via electrolysis, but this requires a lot of electricity. See problem #1. And it requires expensive fuel cells to convert it back into electricity, so that it can be used on demand. But we haven’t yet mastered the mass production of fuel cells here on Earth, in order to produce it cheaply enough. Fuel cells requires platinum, gold, and a bunch of other precious metals. So this would add to an already very expensive camping trip to Mars.
It’s possible wind turbines might be used, but Mars has a thin atmosphere, which already presents problem for spacecraft trying to land. But this may work for wind turbines.
Or geothermal, but his assumes the core of Mars is hot. But from all satellite reconnaissance so far, Mars doesn’t seem to have any hot springs.
Then nuclear, this is likely the most viable technology. Possibly by RTG, which seems to be the most portable, as we can build that on Earth, and launch it to Mars. You would need to launch a lot of them from Earth to ship to Mars, which further reduces the affordability, and kills the possibility of living off the land. And if uranium exists on Mars, which I’m sure it does, then you’d need a huge industrial base just to mine and process it. But first, you’d have to find it, which would require expensive human and robotic exploration outside in Martian excursion suits.
Fission based nuclear plants as we know it on Earth seems overly complex to use on Mars. It’s just a giant water boiler, used to produce steam, to spin a generator, to create electricity. And I doubt the technology as it is used on Earth, can function correctly in the cold winters of Mars. You’d have to prevent your radioactive water coolant from freezing on you. So you’d need to redesign it in order to be used safely on Mars.
Fusion reactors, well, we still haven’t invented that yet, and they keep saying that it’s only 50 years away.
So that brings us back to fossil fuels. If they’re correct in assuming that Mars used to be a tropical paradise, billions of years ago, and full of lush vegetation and flowing rivers, before it froze over, then, I’m certain that there is oil buried somewhere in the dirt. It may be frozen, but we can bring in our fracking technology to extract it. Or maybe it’s frozen in tar sands, in which case we can excavate it.
So there you have it. Mars has oil! Possibly..
Now, it’s time to go plant a flag. Every man (or nation) for himself!
29 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 82.7 ms ] threadSooner or later mankind is going to run up against the limits of exponential growth. We can make conscious decisions about how to deal with it, or we can let the laws of physics decide for us. IMHO things will go better for us if we take the bull by the horns, but very few people seem to be on board with that even here on HN where gloomy Malthusian prophecies are rarely received with much enthusiasm.
Happily, I'm now old enough (and childless) so I can afford not to give much of a fuck. But sooner or later someone is going to have to. If it's not you, it will be your children, or their children. The sooner someone starts to give a fuck, the less painful it will be when -- not if -- we finally discover what the limiting factor to growth actually is.
League of Nations, later becoming the United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights ... hopefully you will have heard of those.
Within the UN there are not that many members that complain much about the organization being dysfunctional or even useless. Unsurprisingly, all those who do are the USA and ones that are extremely dependent on the USA. One could argue that the USA is indeed an exceptional country, but not in a good way. The UN was explicitly set up with the goal of collectively solving global problems. The current status quo within the UN, where the USA regularly flaunts the treaties they signed/ratified or falsely accusing others of violations (without sufficient proof) just as justification for ditching their own commitments, says little about humanity and everything about the USA.
I have no doubt that the USA will indeed do everything to "resolve" these issues rather the old fashioned way by violence. Hopefully the rest of mankind will be a bit smarter than that.
These organizations are/were a good thing but they haven’t been able to stop violence so far. The League of Nations couldn’t prevent WW2 and the UN couldn’t prevent a lot of atrocities and war since its creation. I wish they could. I also don’t think international collaboration will work once we have tens of millions of people having to move due to climate change or if overpopulation causes severe resource shortages.
Indeed, the League of Nations couldn't prevent WW2, neither did the UN prevent a lot of atrocities from happening. That is, aside from all the atrocities that it did actually prevent (probably numerously, but we will never know for they didn't happen). If not from starting, than at least from expanding to the point that they otherwise would have. As for WW2, besides its roots in the settlement of WW1, it was also the opportunistic selfish advantages that some particular countries (not talking about Germany) saw in it's unfolding, while pretending otherwise to the public, that made WW2 to unfold as it did (reminder: it was the USA who continued doing good business with Germany, until it was Hitler who declared war on the USA).
The real question to ask is: what would we have without the UN? All there would be is bilateral agreements between individual countries. It is well known from history how easily those create extremely complex situations where a local conflict can often quickly spiral out into global conflicts (because of conflicting agreements between allies of the involved parties). WW1 probably being a good example of that, and in fact a primary motivator behind the creation of what eventually became the UN.
Climate change will indeed cause all sorts of problems, violence no doubt among them. One thing is sure though, with only bilateral agreements between countries, it will be only more bloody and inhumane than with the UN at least striving for a global consensus approach. It's only with collective agreement that the effects of these challenges can be limited to their least worst outcomes. It will be bad either way, but that's no valid argument to fatalistically argue that nothing will matter. Of course, the USA could choose that none of this is their problem, and only look at their own self-interests. But that will rather sooner than later pave the way of their own inevitable demise (which in that case would probably be a very unpleasant one).
As long as a substantial part of the US economy and international political dominance comes directly from how the country profits from conflict elsewhere on the globe, little chance that the USA will ever sincerely contribute to making this world a better place. This is not to say that other countries are benevolent or sincere, but it is the USA who openly advocates breaking down whatever instruments we still have to resolve issues by consensus instead of violence.
The UN is by no means a perfect solution, but without it this world would likely be a far worse place. The world before it existed sure was. Something apparently only the USA (and a few vassals) seems to openly disagree with. I remember only a few other countries that did; mostly totalitarian ones and responsible for some of those atrocities that that the UN failed to prevent.
We have the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty[1], and the Montreal Protocol[2], for example.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
It's still the case that at the local teashop I frequented, I see endless row of empty parking lot and empty storefronts not being used by anybody. We have a sedentary lifestyle because we built our urban area around not walking.
More from Less by Andrew McAfee points out that we're creating ever more wealth with fewer physical inputs.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43822733-more-from-less
McAfee is an MIT academic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McAfee
Nothing would make me happier than to be proven wrong about this.
I think other approaches like “rise up and destroy capitalism” would protect the environment faster if successful but have less chance of success.
(OP if you have any thoughts on it i'd love to hear them)
The main thing we need to get past is the assumption that is currently woven deeply into our financial system that debt is sustainable because the next generation will be more productive than the last. That kind of growth has to end somewhere. That does not mean that we can't keep inventing new stuff.
I understand your mindset - in a sense, the absence of growth implies death, all life needs growth, etc.
However, growth is not a purely-quantitative, 1-dimensional value. There are an infinite number of possible futures that all constitute growth relative to here and now. Which aspects will do most of the growth? Will there be more humans? more relationships? more industry? more data? more meaning? There are an infinite number of things that can grow, and even within a single vertical, multiple ways to grow.
Therefore, any specific growth we undergo has an "opportunity cost" of whatever other ways we could have grown. Not to mention, most kinds of growth require some destruction, so in addition to potential value, you lose the immediate value of whatever you destroy.
Therefore, in my view, the 2 ways we need to grow the most are:
- Get smarter in the ways that would enable us to accurately predict good ways to grow. This helps us do the following better:
- Build up the -potential- to grow, or at least remain alive, in dimensions that, right now, to us, seem good or necessary.
- Learn how to know when, and how, to unleash that -potential-.
Does that make sense? And does it relate?
But this really is a minor detail. Our current economic models (and in particular our assessments of the risk of debt default) assume long-term growth of k^r for some k>1. That is not sustainable under any circumstances.
1. The population is becoming increasingly urban. The trend of suburbanization has not only stopped, it has been reversing for several decades now.
2. When infrastructure fails, there's a very strong incentive to raise money to improve infrastructure. Admittedly this is less effective than preventing failures in the first place, but the challenge of raising tax dollars to fix a bridge becomes much easier when residents can no longer use said bridge to commute and thus have a much larger incentive to pay the necessary taxes.
So first of all, I'm curious whether this is actually the case, or just my own biased personal experience. Have other cross-border travelers noticed this? And if it is a real thing, then I'm curious what the reasons are, given that the US has somewhat higher GDP per capita than Canada.
Some possibilities I've considered are 1) wealth in the US is more concentrated in large cities than in Canada. I'm sure this is the case in both countries, but perhaps the effect is greater in the US? 2) The spending priorities in the two countries are different. For instance, US spending on healthcare and on military are both higher per capita than Canadian. Perhaps Canada just spends more (publicly and/or privately) on infrastructure and less on other things? If so, is this the result of intentional priorities to some extent? Or is it just an artifact of history or of governmental structures?
I'm not trying to argue that one approach is better than another, or even that my observations are generalize-able. Just curious if others have noticed the same and have thoughts.
All equipment on Earth is run off fossil fuels: gasoline cars, diesel trucks, jet engines, helicopters, busses, etc. Tesla electric cars barely make a dent, and rely on electricity produced by natural gas.
Solar intensity on Mars is much weaker than on Earth. I assume this would require huge acres of land to capture as much energy from the sun via solar panels, as compared to Earth. Fortunately Mars has electric dust storms that can scrub the solar panels for us, which would reduce the need to send human labor out to clean them.
So that leaves hydrogen and nuclear. Hydrogen can be split via electrolysis, but this requires a lot of electricity. See problem #1. And it requires expensive fuel cells to convert it back into electricity, so that it can be used on demand. But we haven’t yet mastered the mass production of fuel cells here on Earth, in order to produce it cheaply enough. Fuel cells requires platinum, gold, and a bunch of other precious metals. So this would add to an already very expensive camping trip to Mars.
It’s possible wind turbines might be used, but Mars has a thin atmosphere, which already presents problem for spacecraft trying to land. But this may work for wind turbines.
Or geothermal, but his assumes the core of Mars is hot. But from all satellite reconnaissance so far, Mars doesn’t seem to have any hot springs.
Then nuclear, this is likely the most viable technology. Possibly by RTG, which seems to be the most portable, as we can build that on Earth, and launch it to Mars. You would need to launch a lot of them from Earth to ship to Mars, which further reduces the affordability, and kills the possibility of living off the land. And if uranium exists on Mars, which I’m sure it does, then you’d need a huge industrial base just to mine and process it. But first, you’d have to find it, which would require expensive human and robotic exploration outside in Martian excursion suits.
Fission based nuclear plants as we know it on Earth seems overly complex to use on Mars. It’s just a giant water boiler, used to produce steam, to spin a generator, to create electricity. And I doubt the technology as it is used on Earth, can function correctly in the cold winters of Mars. You’d have to prevent your radioactive water coolant from freezing on you. So you’d need to redesign it in order to be used safely on Mars.
Fusion reactors, well, we still haven’t invented that yet, and they keep saying that it’s only 50 years away.
So that brings us back to fossil fuels. If they’re correct in assuming that Mars used to be a tropical paradise, billions of years ago, and full of lush vegetation and flowing rivers, before it froze over, then, I’m certain that there is oil buried somewhere in the dirt. It may be frozen, but we can bring in our fracking technology to extract it. Or maybe it’s frozen in tar sands, in which case we can excavate it.
So there you have it. Mars has oil! Possibly..
Now, it’s time to go plant a flag. Every man (or nation) for himself!