[the8472]

As far as humans are concerned overall progress has been linked to climbing up fractions of the kardashev scale since fire was invented.

And even before fire, organisms could only become more complex as the energy available to them increased. You can't run a hummingbird or mammalian brains on photosynthesis directly, it's just not energy-dense enough.

[dmos62]

> overall progress

This thread is becoming recursive. Is organism complexity progress? Everyone might agree with you, or not. That's because progress is whatever we say it is. It's subjective, in that everyone can have a different view of it, and it's non-constant, in that you can change your mind whenever. Progress is such a loaded word today. I'm hardpressed to find more than a few words with so much cultural baggage. Even someone who agrees that good and evil are in the eyes of the observer, can often say that the definition of Progress is self-evident.

[wolfram74]

Most quality of life improvements do take energy, and yes, quality of life is subjective, it is conceivable to imagine a mind that takes joy in their child dieing of a preventable disease, some vertebrates eat their young, but overwhelmingly, humans like to see their child get old enough to play and talk as well as laugh and cry.

Things like reliable and easy access to clean water, refrigeration for medicine and food, shelter against the weather, clothing, cleaning mechanisms for the above, all of these are non-equilibrium phenomena and so take energy.

So we either need more sources of power or fewer people. I'm glad that birth rates are falling, but lots of people don't have those basic technological tools, so energy technology will need to be rolled out or our definition of empathy will need to change to allow for lots of people to suffer.

[labawi]

While one would agree with your list of desirable non-equilibrium phenomena, the need for more power or less people is non con-sequitur, as you fail to show how the listed things require more energy than our current world consumption.

AFAIK, more than enough food and clothing for all people is currently produced, shelter and cleaning probably isn't far, refrigeration for medicine and required food wouldn't take much of industrial output and problems with access to clean water is often caused by "progress" and could be solved with more strategy rather than energy.

Either way, I think most of current energy consumption is for things like heating / cooling inefficient homes, manufacturing things people don't really need, inefficient transportation, brain-dead things like making oil from tar sands etc.

[the8472]

I am saying that for many or perhaps even almost all measures of progress we want to apply, i.e. the specific definition doesn't matter, that progress was either enabled by or directly required more energy being available.

[xtian]

Certainly individual conceptions of "progress" will vary, but only the most deranged practitioners of self-loathing would make the argument that gaining the freedom to exit a destiny of brute survival does not constitute advancement.

[stjohnswarts]

Progess is a human invention, without us it has no meaning. Complexity is a first order axiom; if you don't adhere to that philosophy then it is not. You are free to move to a remote area and live off the land.

[Symmetry]

even before fire, organisms could only become more complex as the energy available to them increased

Heck, look at how the complexity of life increased as soon as mitochondria were invented, going from genomes measured in millions of base pairs for bacteria to billions for amoebas once cells were no longer caught in the square/cube trap of respirating over the cell wall.