| A good real-life parable is to read what happened on Easter Island [1]. In short, humans found a completely isolated island that could support a population of around 5000. Over a few centuries they damaged the environment (cut down all the trees, overfished the local waters, over-farmed the land, etc) to the point where it could only support a population of about 600; at which point their civilization descended into anarchy and cannibalism until "the market adjusted" the population to be equal to the available food. Ten years before the collapse of Easter Island, someone could have made the same argument: When we cut down all the trees so we couldn't hunt dolphins any more, we replaced that with clams. When the clams were gone, we began hunting birds. When the soil became so poor that we couldn't grow one crop, we replaced it with another one. Our track record is 100%; there's no reason to believe we can't go on replacing one resource with another forever. And then one day they couldn't. Or listen to Nassim Nicholas Taleb: "Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests,' as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief." [2] So far we've been able to replace wood with coal, coal with oil, and so on; so far there hasn't been anything critical to civilization that we've run out of. But it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that something like that could happen. [1] http://employees.oneonta.edu/allenth/Class-Readings-Password... [2] As quoted in https://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-talebs-black-swan-tha... |