Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dsign 390 days ago
What utopia? Material scarcity is certainly not one. Agree with the rest.

I however have hopes for the future. Our society is still locked in and "end of history" mentality that makes most of us believe that economically and socially we have reached the end of the road and that all that is left are minor tunings. The next "collapse" or "big" crisis, that can come from anywhere (not necessarily be a purely economic thing), may shake that belief from us.
1 comments
jay_kyburz 390 days ago
The article suggested we are facing a collapse because some resources will be exhausted, but I missed what resources there are talking about? As far as I'm aware there is still heaps of everything.

I don't think we should be digging everything out of the ground we can, but I don't here anybody saying we are about to run out of anything.

link
padjo 390 days ago
It’s been said about helium and fossil fuels pretty regularly for the last 20 years.
link
eru 389 days ago
Yes, and these predictions have always turned out wrong.

We are still getting a lot of helium as a by-product of natural gas extraction. If helium gets more expensive, people will make a bigger effort to capture it.

link
justlikereddit 389 days ago
Malthusian themes have been recurring for the last 200 years.

Every few years a functional illiterate with disproportionate reach in media thinks that "current reserves of X" is a value describing the total amount of X available on the planet and that this can only ever shrink and will hit zero in our lifetime. The doomers scream and have a tantrum over our impending apocalypse for a year or two, then it fades into an embarrassing silence before repeating with theme Y instead.

Eventually we've rotated through the entire doomer alphabet and we're back at screaming about X again, as is the case with the OP article which I didn't read and never will but can reject in its entirety based on having seen the Doomer pattern a hundred times before.

link
st-keller 390 days ago
Availability of nutrition rich soil to grow stuff is one thing - google some facts about fertilizers and the resources they are made of. Clean water is also not a thing you can take for granted.
link
eru 389 days ago
What facts? There was a big scare about ten years ago about how we are going to run out of phosphorus in about five years. Look for 'peak phosphorus' or so.

Obviously that hasn't happened.

link