[sologoub]

The growth is unsustainable argument is very strange to me. We absolutely have the technology to make growth sustainable, but societies choose to go for other things because overall growth and advancement of humanity is not generally a goal at mass individual level.

For example, currently society is busy transitioning to electrified transport. Los Angeles had a vast network of that 80+ years ago (red car light rail system). We also have had nuclear power as an option for a very long time. And yet, red cars were scrapped, rail removed, freeways built, we still burn gas and what not for power, and California has a ban on new nuclear… It’s not that we can’t do all this, it’s that for various reasons we choose not to.

It’s quite human-centric to assume that all other possible civilizations will make the same choices. It seems more likely that there will be as many choices and value systems as there are possible life sustaining planets out there. This doesn’t answer the paradox of course.

[patcon]

> We absolutely have the technology to make growth sustainable

No, respectfully, we don't.

Every organism that succeeds in doing what you advocate for (growing "sustainably") is swept from the record. If life doesn't cycle (grow/shrink) or otherwise live in equilibria, life exhausts its niche on any meaningful timescale, and the universe sends it into oblivion.

Perhaps interestingly, even records of "successfully" growing are purged, because the most effective thing that persists records of life on long timescales is the descendant path of the life itself (whether that's specific DNA sequences maintained as mutational clocks by cellular machinery, or libraries of books and concepts maintained by specific civilisations), and uncapped growth collapses the informational diversity required for life to thrive and persist -- by which I mean that we, as continuously persisting living biological and cultural structures, are the best evidence of living things like us existing a million or a thousand years ago.

When the lineage dies, evidence of the experiment rapidly decays, compared to actually successful experiments that refrain from growth and collapse of their ecology. Only DNA/culture that doesn't "succeed" in growing beyond its resources survives on a significant timescale. When an overly zealous strain of life grows too much and fails, evidence of that life is swiftly and rapidly purged as well, for any later life that cares to try to look.

[theamk]

I don't why biological limitations restrict humanity's long-term future.

We are already ignoring them - right now it's freezing outside, and no human could not survive in such weather using biology alone. I am also living in a city which is way too dense to sustain natural human society.

There is always a risk of entire species dying out, for example via global war, or everyone suddenly deciding they don't want technology and then freezing to death in the winter; but there are no universal long-term limitations. At some moment there will be independent colonies at other worlds, and then humanity will be eternal.

[foxglacier]

The idea that we should use finite natural resources more slowly or not at all to be sustainable doesn't make sense. What are we saving them for? Future people who would also uses them unsustainably? If we're sustainable forever, then future people won't need them. If future people do need them, they won't be sustainable and won't last. So why don't we just use them up as fast as we like?

Perhaps future people will have some important but finite need for them. So we save them for that one big moment when they're used for the really important purpose that will never be important anymore in the future of the human race? Seems unlikely such a use will appear, at least not one more important than what we've already done in building our industrialized society.

[sologoub]

If the finite resources here are fossil fuels then the idea is to never use them again. It was a bad idea to continue using these a long time ago and it will still be a bad idea in the future. Sustainable energy production is not about deferring something, it’s about not poisoning where you live. That does not mean giving up on useful technologies. For example, synthetic hydrocarbon fuels can be made in a carbon neutral way, it’s just very expensive today. These would solve for some applications where EVs are not yet practical, etc.

[foxglacier]

Yes but that's a separate issue from conserving non-renewable resources.

[adrianN]

Using finite resources more slowly gives you more time to invent alternatives. Imagine what would've happened if we used up all fossil fuels we had alternatives.

[palmfacehn]

Peak oil is a good example of scarcity theories diverging from our observations. What happened when the known, easily exploitable oil fields were exploited? Additional exploration was incentivized. New techniques were developed for accessing petroleum resources which were previously unknown or unprofitable.

"But scarcity", as an argument should not be deployed where it will hamper further innovation and value creation. Consuming petroleum fuels increases our standard of living and productivity. It is from this comfortable perch of increased productivity that we are able to apply our resources towards finding additional energy sources.

Thus far there have not been "Limits to Growth" along this path of natural market incentives. Yet, it is easy to see how fears of scarcity could hamstring the process. The actions driven by these fears could potentially limit growth and manifest the fears into a reality.

Scarcity arguments typically have powerful political incentives. Central planners are tasked with determining which uses of energy are 'righteous' or acceptable. Some have even suggested that carbon credits be issued as a new form of currency. Move over petro-dollar, there's a new sheriff in town. Permission slips to consume energy, gatekept by our betters, the benevolent central planners.

https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/

[BriggyDwiggs42]

The motivation against freely consuming fossil fuels is climate change. These central planners are usually cynical actors, but they respond to and take advantage of the work of quite intelligent scientists who point out that if we continue to do this much longer, we will likely destabilize global agriculture, especially in less developed areas. This will cause our economy to collapse and global tensions to escalate dramatically alongside the deaths of many millions if not billions of people. Artificially introduced incentives may be a decent way for us to use the market to evolve ways out of this problem, since without those incentives the market appears to be a relatively short-term thinker.

[adrianN]

If there had been a few thousand times less coal on the world but all of it readily accessible the Industrial Revolution had been over before we had time to move on from steam engines. We probably would have used all of it for heating in antiquity.

[palmfacehn]

Petroleum fuel oils eclipsed coal for transportation purposes, due to the ease of operation. Initially, readily accessible surface petroleum was viewed as a nuisance which devalued land. Oil exploration only became profitable because these readily accessible resources were exploited and monetized.

Similarly, tin mining developed during antiquity. As easily accessible surface deposits were exploited, new sources were tapped from Cornwall to Bactria.

Scarcity theorists overlook the human element. Humanity itself is our greatest resource. Increases to our standard of living drive productivity gains. Leisure time offers opportunities for our ingenuity to solve additional problems. When measured by the decentralized markets, these endeavors further increase human productivity. The cycle continues and we all benefit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_during_a...

[foxglacier]

Kind of like what we did with megafauna, big slow growing trees, forests, and I imagine a lot of dinosaur fossils. But if you're imagining such an impoverished world, what if there had been no fossil fuels at all? Or no humans or no Earth. It starts to get a bit silly going down that track.

[foxglacier]

But where are we at now? Have we already invented the alternatives so it doesn't matter how we use what's left? Or are we waiting for future people to consume those resources to invent some as-yet-not-invented alternatives? How will they even know they're on the path to inventing those alternatives and decide to consume the remaining resources for that goal instead of uselessly saving them forever like a hoarder?

Turns out we didn't use up fossil fuels before we invented at least some alternatives, so lucky us. But that's not because previous generations restricted their economic development to altruistically save some for us, which is what modern save-the-resources people want.

[thrance]

Economic growth, in our current paradigm, requires the production of ever more goods, which in turn requires ever more energy and natural resources. That is unsustainable, because nature is finite.

My personal theory is that any advanced civilization that is capable of interstellar travel must have conquered their animal instincts and realized that growth for the sake of growth is pointless.

[svara]

An important point to think about, but ultimately wrong I think.

The reason that the software industry is so valuable today is not just that it's innovative, it's also that it can grow in a way that isn't strongly constrained by material.

The material required to provide one dollar of value in digital goods or services is very little.

This leads to a virtuous circle, since business unconstrained by material attracts more capital.

Basically, we can shift the physical economy to a circular cradle-to-cradle economy, and then continue getting growth from digital goods and services.

Note that this does not simply mean we'll all be living in VR - digital goods and services are growing across all industries.

For example, back in the day, drugs were discovered by massive wet lab experimentation programs. Today, increasingly components of a drug discovery program can be done in silico.

[corimaith]

>growth for the sake of growth is pointless

Is "sustainability" for the sake of "sustainability" pointful? For all we know, everything may just be reduced back to energy in a Big Crunch in the future, so the outcome is the same regardless. Is a civilization that languished in stagnancy for millions of years have any more paticular meaning than one that burned brightly but briefly?

[oliv5900]

As long as Jensen can polish up some sand and sell it for 5 morbillion dollars, nature and economic growth is not finite.

[c22]

Or escaped into a nested zeno's paradox of temporally-halved simulated existences to provide the internal illusion of continued growth while externally emitting signatures of decline.

[sologoub]

These are only finite within Earth. Add even modest solar system travel capabilities and a lot more resources open up. Mining asteroids is just one idea there.

[baq]

Space is huge, but space is also empty. Mining asteroids is really energetically expensive if you want to get the material back to Earth. It’s a very reasonable thing to do if you want to build stuff in space, though.

[andsoitis]

> a lot more resources open up. Mining asteroids is just one idea there

We should certainly explore and hope to discover rich deposits of varied resources that are worth expending the time and energy to find, extract, and use. However, to our knowledge, asteroids probably consist of clay and silicate rocks, some containing nickel-iron[1]

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/facts/

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Hopefully we know more about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche by 2029.

[c22]

But not infinite resources. ..

If we accept the hypotheses of an expanding universe then we find ourselves in a pickle as our potentially infinite resources race out of our light cone faster than we can chase them.

[darkerside]

Perhaps what you view as unique, quirky human behavior is just one manifestation of a common pattern in advanced intelligence. In the long run, most J curves are S curves.

[Beijinger]

"The growth is unsustainable argument is very strange to me. We absolutely have the technology to make growth sustainable, but societies choose to go for other things because overall growth and advancement of humanity is not generally a goal at mass individual level."

Well, it is seventh grade mathematics. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

https://expatcircle.com/cms/why-the-future-might-hold-troubl...

The limits of growth are real. Very real. And unfortunately, many problems we are seeing might be the prelude to the prediction.

"It’s quite human-centric to assume that all other possible civilizations will make the same choices."

Well, there should be many and we see none. This is not encouraging. While the best idea to look for life is to look for an entropy source, I think advanced live in space may be similar to us. They would need some kind of sensors (eyes, ears) and likely they would have been predators at one stage in the evolutionary path.

[sologoub]

Those links are so oversimplified to not be useful. The arguments are for an ideological point of view and not a real analysis. Just consider that population growth is stagnating and going into decline. While energy use per capita is likely to increase, it’s not clear at all that things will continue as before even a 100 years from now. Even the AI race is seeing smaller models perform as well or better a year old ones. We are definitely in a fast growth phase of energy use there, but will it continue to grow indefinitely or will we become much more efficient and hit diminishing returns stalling further investment or plateauing energy use? Who knows… On the scale of the next 100 years, humanity can definitely meet its energy needs with nuclear and clean sources if we have the collective will. Will we? Time will tell.

[c22]

The argument that our rate of growth will decrease in the future is not incompatible with the argument that our current rate of growth is unsustainable.

[Beijinger]

The changes that our growth rate will turn long term negative before 2050 are pretty good. I won't go into details for the consequences.

[baq]

Sir, on this planet we obey the laws of thermodynamics, but politicians don’t seem to mind. If you argue that growing energy by 2% yoy is oversimplifying, look at previous trajectory and who gets to lose their jobs if the pattern stops.

[zmgsabst]

Your first link says that in 400 years, we’ll need a second location to continue growing.

And…?

I think that actually supports the other person’s view: if your entire argument amounts to “in 400 years, we’ll need to have space stations or settle Mars with nuclear!” that isn’t really an argument against growth now.

[c22]

The link predicts that in 400 years we reach a growth limit at the 100% solar exploitation of earth's entire surface area, so it's likely we'll have to get off planet well before that.

It goes on to predict that to maintain

> 2.3% annual energy growth for 1350 years from the present time

Will require total exploitation of our local star. This is a tight timetable to construct the relevant dyson sphere, even with the associated gains in engineering/construction efficiency and expertise.

There are additional cogent arguments that bypassing the solar energy requirement (with e.g. nuclear methods) will pose significant challenges in radiating the waste heat within ~1400 years.

These projections are based solely on the rate of growth, so it seems clear that while we may be able to keep growing indefinitely, the rate at which we do so will need to asymptotically approach zero.

[zmgsabst]

I couldn’t have predicted 2024 from 1624 — so I assume I’m similarly incompetent at forward predictions of 2424.

Trying to guess from 1AD what 2024AD would look like would make me sound like I was speaking myths — so again, I have to assume I’m similarly unable to guess at the timeline (4000AD) where we’d run out of galactic solar energy what our existence would be like.

There’s nothing in my grandchildren’s grandchildren’s time that would prohibit growth — and I’m okay admitting I lack the wisdom or capability to solve problems on so grand a scale. The links posted bolster my position that the “limits of growth” are irrelevant to me, almost entirely.

To the extent that they may impact my great-great-great-great-grandchildren, I think they’ll be better able to handle the troubles of their time with the benefits of a robust economy, vibrant society, and abundant wealth. Nothing you’ve posted suggests that I should try to limit growth or that anyone would benefit from the attempt.

[c22]

Certainly--I am still investing in the stock market.

However, this thread is about detecting alien civilizations in far off star systems so I'm not sure why you'd expect any of this conversation to be relevant to your immediate situation.

[theamk]

You can clearly see the energy growth slowing down starting from 1980's or so.. and yet the rest of article keeps going like this is not happening, and same rate from 1650's will hold for many more years.

It won't. Population growth is slowing down, per-human energy growth is probably even decreasing compared to 20 years ago.