[WalterBright]

> I love that the answer is always more technology will save us.

The solution to extincting the whales for whale oil was petroleum. The solution to denuding the landscape of trees was coal. The solution to coal is natural gas, solar, nuclear power.

The only alternative to technology is to shrink the human population by about 95%.

[titzer]

You do realize that the switch from whale oil to petroleum caused a massive, orders of magnitude increase in human footprint and ecological destruction? Had we not discovered petroleum, or had it not been there, human civilization would have plateaued or even declined, right after the extinction of these beautiful animals, because we would have absolutely hunted them to extinction unless they were protected. We would have been forced to live in balance with available resources.

The arc of whales would have followed the arc of so many other natural "resources" that are produced or even consist of living beings. There are several native hardwoods that are either effectively extinct or impossible to obtain because they were mined out.

No, we stumbled on a vast reservoir of energy buried under the ground and we've been draining that reservoir as fast as possible. We'll transition off petroleum about the time it becomes economically infeasible to extract and burn it, and not a second sooner.

By all means, bring on solar, nuclear, wind, whatever. They are just more reservoirs to tap to run this machine. Just so we can dig up, slice up, chop up, burn down, and chew up another order of magnitude of the biosphere. Because money and grandkids and ice cream.

We are too many and too greedy, and this planet has finite resources. "Technology". Always magical technology. Well until technology can grow a watermelon in a lightbulb, we are gonna keep munching away at this planet until the biosphere collapses around our ears.

[WalterBright]

The extinction of animals caused by humans has been ongoing and increasing since the stone age. There's no way that not having petroleum would have stopped it.

> this planet has finite resources

No matter is being destroyed or is escaping the planet, aside from a solar system probe now and then. Energy can repurpose and reconfigure existing resources.

[voldacar]

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this planet has finite entropy

[mhh__]

Helium is a counterexample to that notion even if it is vaguely true for most other things.

[jjk166]

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, and no industrial process we have destroys it. If released into the atmosphere it will escape into space, but it still exists. Right now we have no reason to venture out into space to acquire helium because we still have vast reserves here, but if we had sufficient demand to justify the expense then we could.

When you hear about a helium shortage, that's not a shortage of Helium on Earth, that's a shortage of Helium in the strategic helium reserve, which has been a source of extremely cheap helium for decades and made helium extraction uneconomical. When the reserve eventually runs out, and the price of helium subsequently increases, helium extraction will resume.

[WalterBright]

Naturally occurring helium is the result of nuclear processes. Those can be done artificially.