[Loquebantur]

You are engaging in self-delusion here.

The point of these papers isn't to make precise predictions of "the day civilizational collapse occurs" nor does it merely "illustrate some complex relationships".

It is to show every closed system, even only remotely resembling our own, is bound to end in overshoot&collapse unless you change central tenets of the driving economic paradigm. Namely abandon exponential growth for a steady (or oscillatory) state approach.

Individuals aren't helpless bystanders either. As adults in a democracy, it isn't only your right but your responsibility to bring about the necessary change.

[lalaithion]

We don’t live in a closed system though.

[mempko]

Since we aren't able to export our pollution out into space, or mine food on mars, yes, we live in a closed system. We live on a round spaceship known as Spaceship Earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth)

[fluoridation]

Strictly speaking, even if we were able to do that we'd still live in a closed system, just a much, much larger one. :)

[Loquebantur]

Yes, we do.

For all practical purposes, earth's gravity well serves as a boundary for material resources at scale.

More importantly, the input of polluting material into earth's obviously very limited ecological system is limited. You simply cannot pollute as much as you want, so getting more stuff from the asteroid belt or whatever doesn't help.

[westcort]

Looks pretty closed to me: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144427/all-of-you-o...

How many thousands of dollars does it cost to launch a kilogram of mass into orbit again? Out of orbit?

Do we even have a closed system that can support a small group of people indefinitely to launch? Unfortunately, we do not yet have such a system outside of the earth itself.

[jackcosgrove]

Earth's biome gets most of its energy from the sun. I think that's what the GP was getting at.

[js8]

The physics definition of closed system allows exchange of energy. If neither matter nor energy can be exchanged, that's called an isolated system.

[jackcosgrove]

Thanks for the clarification. I'm not sure in what sense the others are using the term. The mechanism of collapse in the paper, exhaustion of fossil fuels, relies on not enough energy in the system, so I assumed energy was part of the calculation.

[bartimus]

That is assuming exponential growth inevitably leads to overshoot & collapse, which is a flawed zero-sum perspective. Growth (adding value) doesn't necessarily have to come at the cost of resources.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

You didn’t address that I already participate in democracy. I’m just realistic in my actual capacity to execute change, which is inherently largely local, so I focus on local change.

[peyton]

The whole point of voting in my country is to serve as a check on the legislature against using the government to do things to its citizens. The ballot box isn’t a tool for societal change.

A dictatorship is a much better system for changing society, if that’s your goal for government.

[xg15]

> The ballot box isn’t a tool for societal change.

Then what is?

[fluoridation]

I mean, to a degree I agree with the GP. You can't fundamentally change a system from within the system itself. No democracy has ever turned via a series of elections into, say, a monarchy. The only way that happens is either by violent collapse (e.g. a coup or a revolution) or by gradual erosion of bureaucracy (where increasing corruption enables a few powerful individuals to seize control regardless of what the law says). The point of elections are not to make dramatic changes, but to make tweaks.

[drewcoo]

> The point of elections are not to make dramatic changes, but to make tweaks.

The point of bureaucracy is to limit change, to not allow dramatic change.

The point of democracy is to make decisions. And the larger the groups of people and the less frequently voting happens, the larger the granularity of those decisions.

Decisions should be able to change bureaucracy, add to it or subtract or realign or whatever.

When bureaucracy is used to gate-keep decisions that can be made in a democracy, it's not really democracy any more. And I think a lot of people, regardless of their political beliefs, believe that has happened: nominal democracy where votes don't really matter because they can't affect the bureaucracy.

[fluoridation]

I would say the point of bureaucracy is to make the functioning of a system consistent with some set of rules. The preservation of those rules in some specific form does not have to be part of the rules, and so does not need to be a goal of a given bureaucracy. However, a self-preserving bureaucracy can arise, either by design or accident. I would say every government that has ever existed fits that description. Can you think of a single one that has not been fundamentally conservative? "Conservative" meaning seeking to maintain the status quo that allows it to exist in its present form at any given time.