Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Limits to growth. If the line go up forever/space colonization crowd is right almost all my beliefs fall apart.
I mean, we haven't figured out how to circumvent physics. There is a hard upper bound.
But it turns out that said upper bound is in theory way higher than you might intuitively expect. Harnessing the total energy output of our local sun is a good starting point. But genuinely, humanity's limit will probably be more psychological and social than physical. Can we coordinate well enough to get out there without blowing ourselves up?
Hence why I hopefully believe that intelligence and wisdom are linked.
But I like this answer. Do you have a specific expectation as to where the limit exists?
I think material limits will hit us far before we can even get to harnessing all the energy available on the planet. I, like the original limits to growth study, think that we are pretty close to material limits right now. We are basically already at peak oil and we hit peak copper this year. Global warming (really global climatic instability) is worsening, as well as microplastic/endocrine disruptor pollution that is making it more difficult to reproduce. AI, short-form media, and other opiates are deskilling the population at a time when genuine scientific advances require more and more resources to achieve. There's a perfect storm of bad shit looming down on the line go up narrative, meaning it is not long for this world.
I too agree that the limits are in some part social and psychological. If we weren't so obsessed with consumerism and pointless travel we could have shepherded our resources better and got a little further, or maintained a pretty solid standard of living for a long while. But things like space colonization are a largely foolish endeavor and this is because of fundamental physical and biological limits, which will prevent us from leaving this planet, or even ever fully consuming its resources.
I would challenge you to read two resources in the New Year: Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works (yes I did write a really negative review of this on Goodreads, but the first few chapters about material resources are fundamentally solid), and Tom Murphy's Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet. I think many people on this forum (and in wider society) are energy and materials blind, which lead to extrapolations from the past two centuries of economic and technological growth that I find to be fanciful.
Claims of being ‚at peak X right now‘ decompose into two elements, one is a completely unsupported and constantly falsified prediction of decline, the other the correct statement ‚we now produce more X than ever‘, which is hardly supportive to the doomer‘s central thesis. Despite the abundance of resources (as in, there are many types of useful resources), you never see these global peaks in hindsight, they‘re always hiding right around the corner.
IDK man, copper is pretty convincingly in decline. We basically haven't found any new large scale copper discoveries in the last 15 years. Grades are continually declining. We're currently mining ores that are 0.6% copper!!! And this is only going to continue to get worse. Unless we find an extremely large easy to exploit source of copper approximately ~now, copper production is guranteed to fall in the next 10 years.
Source
A line-go-roughly-up price graph, a list of things copper is useful for, and price forecasts by banks and mining companies, that‘s your evidence? Not worth the paper they‘re - not -printed on.
Of course the grades have been getting worse. The grades of everything (coal (less anthracite more brown) , oil (less sweet more sour) , copper, uranium etc) have been getting worse since humans thought of something to do with them. The total amount of copper on Earth is around 1014 tons in the top kilometer of Earth's crust, which is about 5 million years' worth at the current rate of extraction. The only reason they don‘t find more deposits is because they aren‘t motivated at current prices.
Every time I have to ask the same question: What makes this moment special? People could have, and HAVE made, the exact same argument for the last 200 years at least. They were all wrong. You have your theory/intimate conviction that says ‚at some point we‘ll run out‘ on one side, and on the other you have empiric proof of your ideological forefathers being wrong every single time. We're observing a physical phenomenon, and you have a theory that sounds convincing but always fails , while I can predict exactly what happens - shouldn't you give up at some point?
Let me try and lay it out how I see it. The extraction of every nonrenewable resource is defined by a tailed Gaussian curve, where the easy to harvest resources are mined/harvested first. The really easy sources of fossil fuels and minerals were harvested a long time ago because they didn't require large expenditures of energy. High grade ore and high-pressure oil deposits are no longer readily discovered as those have been exploited and exhausted by lower tech civilizations (the Romans for example exhausted much of the easy to access mineral resources of Europe). With better technology lower grade sources of these resources can be accessed, but these usually require more of an input of energy. To go from PA or Texas gushers to fracking for example requires a higher input of energy because you need to pump water into rock at high pressure to get the oil out, refine it more, etc. Same with copper and other minerals: more energy is required to get copper out of lower grade ores than higher grade ores.
This would not be a problem if we had unlimited energy. We literally could filter seawater to get the copper we need. The problem is that we are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels for pretty much all our energy, and they have been getting more expensive to extract since about 1970 due to declines in easy to access oil/coalfields. You can see this in the behavior of oil prices: steady if declining real price until 1970, and then consistent if ragged increase in price since then. This increase in the cost of energy is one reason why mining companies don't want to invest in exploration: the energy cost of extraction is continuing to rise, meaning any new mine with low ore grades may not be worth the investment because of associated high-energy costs.
To answer your last question: I don't think now is special. I think we've been in a slow decline since the 1970s. Real assets (houses, cars, most real foods) have had a real increase in price over the last 50 years, reflecting a real chipping away at living standards here in the west. I think this reflects increasing costs of energy, the fundamental basis for human society. Of course there are other explanations for this phenomena on the forum, many of which may contribute as well. But I think energy is primary. The "peak" I think will merely be the point where it gets difficult to deny this.
Of course if we successfully invent fusion power, I will be wrong about this. Then we can access effectively unlimited materials here on earth. In that case pollution will be a more limiting factor, which we can theoretically solve with unlimited energy as well.
I don't know man, I think my way of looking at the world has pretty good predictive value. My copper futures outperformed the S&P500 this year. I also would predict real global increases in the cost of material goods: which also has happened over the last 50 years, with notable exceptions in electronics. In addition, the increased energy expenditure required to get these resources is having terrible effects on the biosphere: global warming, ocean acidification, and loss of wild animal biomass. All of these graphs are going in the direction that my view of the world would predict.
Of course if we invent fusion this all could be moot, but even then, given the history of how human society has dealt with increased energy availability, its doesn't seem likely to me that we would actually solve our ecological problems.
This is just throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks. The (also false) ecological destruction argument is entirely separate. If we run out of energy and resources, the ‚destruction‘ will cease.
Fusion? What about fission? We already have hundreds of years of proven uranium reserves, and it‘s a small part of nuclear energy generation cost.
According to your EROEI math, the romans, and then the 19th century english, were richer than we are, since they had access to high-grade resources they could mine for less energy.
Incorrect - the "running out" of resources means that we will have completely shifted the Earth's climate and seen immense changes to global temperatures and environments. The environmental damage is only just goin to get started when that happens, and the human infrastructure damage will be immense. Every single port city is going to be underwater and new ports will have to be constructed. Shifts in climate means that the areas which receive rain and the areas which are habitable for humans are going to be very different to what they were in the past - which is going to be a big problem, given that our farms and other infrastructure are located in places where they are most efficient right now, as opposed to the world we're going to be living in once all that carbon is back in the atmosphere. Not to mention the terrible weather events we'll get during the transition - and which are already starting to show up.
I'll believe that nuclear fission is a viable answer to our energy needs when you show me a nuclear plant capable of generating energy at a profit without government subsidies of one kind or another. Good luck! Nuclear fusion has been twenty years in the future for the past eighty years, so you'll have to forgive me for not being too excited for it.
No, they didn't have access to fossil fuels. Technically they were richer in the sense that they could have chosen to use those fossil fuels responsibly, but we already know that in reality they didn't.
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