Energy consumption has decoupled from population growth rates and economic growth.

How much energy will we consume in 1,000 years? Most projections of the population have it stabilizing at around 15 billion. But continuing at its current growth rate (an optimistic assumption I think), gets us to about 150 trillion humans in 1,000 years.

And at 2% growth rate, each of those humans will consume 20,000 times more energy than a circa 2023 human.

Now state of the art technology wastes about 80% of the energy consumed, so this is equivalent to 100,000 times more useful energy consumed per human.

So the physics in this page is a good examination of the surprisingly large compounding effects of unchecked exponential growth.

There's a 2nd big assumption:

That tidal energy extracted is additional Earth's rotational energy loss above what Earth does by itself.

According to the paper, tidal energy is dissipated through friction between ocean water & the seafloor. This dissipated energy subtracts from Earth's rotational energy. And some rotational energy is transferred to the moon (which makes the moon move further out). Ok so far.

Author's 2nd assumption is that as tidal energy is tapped, this is extra energy that subtracts from Earth's rotation.

But is it? It might also be that tidal energy extracted by humans, comes out of some fixed 'budget', and the remainder is dissipated naturally. More tidal energy extracted by humans -> less tidal energy dissipated through ocean vs. seafloor friction.

Kind of like solar influx: it's a huge but (apart from fluctuations) fixed amount. We can tap some % of that potential, but what's available doesn't increase. And what humans don't tap, gets absorbed / radiated out by other natural processes.

I won't even hazard a guess. But it would be interesting to figure out which of those applies.

Maybe I'm naive and simple minded. But that just seems insane.

If I'm doing the math right, at 2.3% growth = we produce more energy than the Sun in 4500 years.

It doesn't matter how many years it is. It's never happening.

Just look at how damn hot and inhospitable the sun is. We're not producing more energy here!

It'd be infinitely more plausible to build a Dyson sphere around the Sun, and call me naive on that, too, but I'm skeptical that's ever gonna happen either.

In a far-future where a TNG-inspired Dyson structure were somehow feasible (1AU size, habitable surface on interior, etc.), it’d be incredibly disappointing if we applied the (unrealistic) science and (unrealistic) resources towards building such a thing, rather than interstellar efforts. Buuuut maybe I’m just projecting my disappointment with our planet’s current approach to science and resource utilization.

Which would leave 4000 years or so to colonize every system with 1000 light years.

In each system collecting and engineering with low gravity material (asteroids, centaurs, smaller moons, etc.) and using that to capture solar energy will get routine.

Gas giants are basically massive hydrogen nuclear energy depots.

Earth and even our solar system don’t form any kind limit to resource growth on time scales like that.

Which is good, because Mercury is mostly metal, whereas e.g. Mars is mostly rock and thus not useful for this kind of work

Not so. The calculation of the 1031 years is equation 19 and assumes the decrease in rotational energy all goes to human purposes.

The flaw in the OP is the assumption that human consumption keeps rising at .02 per year for 1031 years: we would probably boil the oceans away because of the waste heat from using that much electrical power.

Which would slow the earth due to the change in angular momentum

Intuitively, if we extract energy from the tides, tides will be less tall and the speed of water will be smaller. Ocean currents will slow down too.

What I don't know is, less friction on the seafloor means that we would actually make Earth slow down less faster than it would do if left alone?

And currents are also affected by the rotation of the Earth, temp differences, and salinity differences so they might not change dramatically.

I keep posting this link here on HN but, once again, it seems very appropriate:

> The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

Edit: The link points out that in 1,400 years we'd be using energy at the rate produced by the sun and in 2,500 years at the rate of the entire Milky Way. Even if we solved the heat radiation problem, it seems unlikely we'd be able to obtain fuel for our fusion reactors at a sufficient rate given the speed of light and the density of matter in the universe.

The sun radiates heat like a blackbody sphere with the surface area of the sun and a surface temperature of 5600K or so.

If the Earth were to have a fancy heat pump that radiated the same amount of heat into space, it would need the radiating area times the effective temperature to the fourth power equal to that of the sun. The real killer problem is that your heat pump is subject to the Carnot efficiency of pumping heat to that same temperature.

By the most straightforward Second Law calculation, entropy transferred to hot side >= entropy removed from cold side. So Q_hot / T_hot >= Q_cold / T_cold. Q_cold is the heat removed from the pleasant ~300K place where the humans are. At 5600K on the hot side, 18.6 times as much heat needs to be radiated out, so for every bit of useful work done on Earth, at least 17.6 times as much energy is consumed in cooling. If you want the radiator to be only half the surface area of the sun, multiply that by about 16.

What future humans really need is a Dyson sphere with absolutely enormous radiating area. :)

building things which receive sunlight but which emit IR at this wavelength would have a cooling effect, though I don't know to what scale.

no need to pump anything up to space, lol. just put hot stuff inside vessels which are painted with a material which radiates heat at this specific wavelength.

thanks for nitpicking; always appreciated

That sounds like a line from Dr. Strangelove by the titular character with ol' Bucky following up with "Mr. President, we should not allow a heat pump gap!".

When you have a capped number of humans, and every last one of them is jacked into the Matrix and has everything they could possibly want - what is there left to grow? If the growth in "wealth" doesn't actually reflect an improvement in human experience, then it's a pointless term. Sure you can have two computers trade virtual tokens at an ever-increasing rate until you saturate the network cable, but calling it "wealth" is an exercise in semantic subterfuge.

It's like saying economic growth is unbounded because you can always print more money. Eventually it has to bottom out in something real.

Wealth as used by economists just means all the goods and services that we provide to one another, sometimes with the addition of "services" like a clean environment. It's very broad and includes things like cultural wealth, and doesn't even have to involve selling something.

That's why printing money doesn't create economic growth and nobody claims otherwise. In fact in the debate they specifically agree to discount inflation to avoid it getting in the way.

The economist's position - and yours, apparently - is that "growth", whatever it is, can be sustained literally infinitely, on a finite rock amongst a finite group of hairless apes where nothing about the actual situation is infinite. So you can either have a highly abstract definition of "growth" that allows this to be true, or a definition that most people would recognize as meaningful or positive, but not both.

But let's make the same assumption for a moment. For economic growth [of wealth] to stop requires two things to stop: population growth and productivity growth. As GDP is roughly population * productivity.

Clearly, populations can stop growing or shrink. We can also assume a finite population limit. So this is an argument that productivity growth is also finite. But, why should that be the case? Take the example of computers. Modern computers are much more productivity enhancing than older computers, but they are also smaller (i.e. less physical resources needed) and more energy efficient. Even if the Earth had reached carrying capacity, smarter chips would continue to be designed and the productivity boost of computers would keep increasing. That's just one example, there are many others.

But again, the finite world assumption doesn't hold. So the whole debate is a bit of ivory tower silliness anyway.

2) You've just relabeled the discussion from "wealth" to "productivity". In any case, scoring some efficiency wins here and there is once again a game with physics-imposed limits.

I repeat my question: when all humans are fully fed, housed, maximally entertained and satiated, every dopamine receptor firing on all cylinders - and you can't make more humans - what exactly is there left to grow? At all, let alone exponentially?

I confess I find the notion of infinite exponential growth of anything, let alone things humans value, so patently and obviously physically unsustainable that I am deeply perturbed by these earnest efforts to defend it. I engage in the spirit one might engage Flat Eartherism, as an intellectual exercise in probing the manifestly absurd - except that this dogma apparently pervades mainstream economic thought, an observation that should terrify anyone who wants civilization to survive.

When the pair of people in the article were talking about space they meant within the realm of reasonable projection. If your rebuttal to economics is that the field hasn't considered what happens when humanity runs out of galaxies to colonize they'll just chuckle and happily concede the point, because if that's your strongest criticism then for all practical purposes they've won (people will still listen to them because the point you're making is irrelevant in practice).

That's especially true if you make absurd arguments like the survival of the world being at stake because economists don't constantly caveat all their papers with footnotes saying it doesn't apply if humanity reaches the end of the universe. That's itself incredibly silly flat-earther levels of dialogue.

> You've just relabeled the discussion from "wealth" to "productivity".

No I haven't, but this whole thread is sort of proving the point that the term wealth is quite confusing to a lot of people.

We've already seen the economic definition of wealth. How can we obtain more wealth? Because wealth is just everything we do for each other summed up, the most obvious way is to add more people. But people don't work alone, we can increase our output by deploying technology and ideas. Economists call the output scaling of a person "productivity" and it's more or less a function of how much tech that person has access to. A farmer with a tractor is more productive than one with access to only a hoe. Culture and ideas are also a factor but it's mostly tech.

So wealth and productivity (and population size) are deeply related. One is the multiple of the other two:

Wealth = population x productivity

Assume a stable population. Then you are asserting there are limits to productivity due to physics. That may be so, but again, if those limits are hit in 50,000 years then nobody cares.

> When the pair of people in the article were talking about space they meant within the realm of reasonable projection

Oh good. In that case the reasonable projection is that we'll never leave the solar system, probably barely leave the Earth. You were the one making wild predictions about sustaining infinite growth by colonizing the cosmos, not me.

>That may be so, but again, if those limits are hit in 50,000 years then nobody cares.

50,000? You fail to appreciate the scale of exponential growth. The whole point of the original article about tides, and the discussion between economist and the physicist, and for that matter this entire comment thread, is that exponential growth hits physical limits really quickly - hundreds of years, not tens of thousands.

You keep hopping between "unlimited physical growth is possible because SPACE" and "actually growth doesn't need to be physical to count". I hope we've knocked the first one down. As for the second, I ask for the third and hopefully final time - when everyone's fed and happy and jacked into the Matrix, what's left to grow? What even is "productivity" in that scenario?

You're making a different argument now, probably without realizing. The original blog post starts by saying:

> I said to him, “economic growth cannot continue indefinitely,” just to see where things would go.

Re-reading the blog post I see that it's very confusing, because the physicist isn't retelling the story clearly and probably not thinking about his argument clearly. He uses the word "exponential" in the title of the blog post, but then his recounting of how the discussion begins doesn't involve that. The first time it comes up in his retelling, it's when the physicist starts conflating wealth with energy. So whilst you are talking about exponents they appear to be irrelevant to the argument.

Phrased another way, for as long as humanity can somehow improve its collective situation in some way the economy can grow.

But even if the economist had tried to defend unlimited exponential growth, it would only affect the time window within which economic claims are valid. Remember that we're talking about wealth, which isn't dependent on physical limits. There's no theoretical upper limit to wealth just like there's no theoretical upper limit to how big numbers can get. Or rather, to argue that there is a limit, you have to start making complex and highly speculative arguments about hypothetical limits to human ingenuity, potential and preferences which is why the counter-argument goes in the direction of talking about the Matrix.

Let's put that to one side. Just like the physics guy in the article you clearly think you're winning some meaningful points here, but you aren't. Like most fields of study, economics is the study of worlds that roughly resemble our own. This is so obvious that it doesn't normally need to be stated explicitly. Perhaps it's not obvious to people who research physics due to the unusually universal nature of physical claims. So the statements it makes are grounded in a set of axioms and contexts, one of which is when they say there are no limits to wealth they mean in practice, for a world and society somewhat like this one.

That's why to argue against this point you have to keep bringing up wholly theoretical societies, where we reached the limits of the universe or became brains-in-jars. If you want to talk about the economics of the Matrix then great! Go for it! It will make for intriguing science fiction, but not more. It is A-OK if our current definitions of terms like wealth and growth fail for hard sci-fi worlds.

However photovoltaic and wind does not produce much waste heat. Arguably solar and wind cannot scale 1000x but then you could have non thermal fusion like Helion's https://www.helionenergy.com/technology/.

Btw, thermal power is already showing limits (rivers overheating in summers), we don't have to wait 400 years to see its failure.

No, it doesn't. The waste heat, at the very end of the day, is always rather close to 100%. I.e. we use all that electric energy we generate to power computer, fridges, and many other machines, all of which – sooner or later – convert that electric energy to heat. (And, well, maybe a bit of chemical binding energy, depending on the application. But then, a few decades later, those products of our work will usually fall apart and/or are being burnt or torn down.)

> you could have non thermal fusion like Helion's

No, you can't. As the author says:

> this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.

Free free to have a look at his other article (the one he links in the paragraph above) for some more details -> https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law

We mostly use energy to manufacture things.

Life takes energy and lowers the entropy of the planet. Why shouldn't humans able to do the same? Any technical reason?

The technical reason is called entropy. Diffuse heat is hard to concentrate and use, much like gas outside of a container.

Reducing entropy necessarily produces waste energy + entropy elsewhere. So the technical reason this cannot be done at the planetary scale is called Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Yes, we could try to put all that excess entropy & heat into space but there are limits to that (Stefan-Boltzmann law, among other things).

Long-term ongoing economic growth, expressed as a constant percentage, is baked in to most current orthodox economics and economic policy. Even apparent mavericks such as Thomas Piketty assume that growth will continue interminably (noted in Capital in the Twenty-First Century).

Rather than being a critique of Liu, you've actually written a criticism of those he himself is generally addressing.

Whether it is or isn't, the optimal strategy for a nation is likely exponential growth until it can't, and then switch as quickly as can be done with the least problems.

Since nations are competing, and we're talking about exponentials here, the cost for cutting off exponential economic growth too soon is likely to become irrelevant to the future, which every nation is going to strive to avoid.

Countries which grow quickly bake those assumptions into financial, industrial, economic, and political policies. They create companies, regulatory bodies, and financial systems which are predicated on growth. They create economic ideology and the mechanisms for promulgating it which are founded on growth. They create development patterns (most especially of urban land use --- the most massive impact of the automobile was on city and suburban landscapes), and consumption patterns.

Once entrenched, those are all exceedingly difficult to dislodge.

I'd argue that China is wrestling with this now, and that a fair bit of the disruption of the past few years (above and beyond exogenous shocks, notably Covid-19) involve this, as the CCP attempts to wrest power back from industrial, financial, and real estate interests.

Some European countries (notably the Netherlands and Amsterdam with its bicycle- and transit-centric transport planning), Japan, and possibly others such as Costa Rica, seem to have followed a lower-growth curve. These may actually find transition more viable.

At the capital of capitalism, the United States, transition faces absolutely massive obstructions in the form of politics, politics-expressed-as-social-values, economic interests, finance, real estate, land use, transportation, building codes (residential, commercial, and industrial), and more. Those are far more significant obstructions than actual technical solutions, and the more illuminating advocates of sustainability that I follow tend to emphasize this.

(I'll list these later, though I'm still waiting for XorNot to cough up. I'll give them a few more hours.)

I think it's a mistake to assume stability in nations and a strong self governing community between them can be assumed at all points in the future, especially if there is some stop to exponential growth at some point (but not only because of that). Economic power is somewhat fungible with mitary power, and lack of power in a possible future less stable system of nations could be very problematic.

In short I think the safest and most conservative path for any nation to protect it's future is to take advantage of as much growth as it safely can for as long as it lasts.

Another way to look at is that is the U.S. was to opt out of growth right now, how long would it take for us to become irrelevant on the world stage, and how long after that before we were (and our citizens) negatively impacted by trade deals because of lack of leverage (which is probably a best case scenario of negative possibilities IMO). It's the job of a government to avoid that scenario.

Transitioning is hard, but I'm not sure it's harder than the alternative, depending on how far out we are to it being forced on everyone.

That said, I'd be happy to read whatever info you have on the topic to expand my thinking.

To that extent, "rapid growth" seems largely a matter of "reaching your ultimate potential earlier". And the post-rapid-growth phase turns out to have ... interesting challenges: environment, politics, demographics, and more, many of which emerge after sheer growth alone can no longer paper over conflicts or issues which had been present all along.

There's also of course the argument that GDP doesn't measure actual net wealth or common weal, which is a criticism that dates back to the origins of GDP/GNP, and even its creator, Simon Kuznets. There are numerous alternative measures that are proposed. One aspect I've not seen much addressed is that GDP is largely a tool for managing macroeconomic monetary dynamics, that is, as total monetary exchange grows or shrinks, then the monetary base itself must be adjusted, which is the remit of central banks. Those banks can create or destroy money at will (pursuant to policy goals and prime directives), because money itself is not wealth. The knock-on effects are felt profoundly in asset markets, that is, goods or securities whose principle or significant function is to serve as an inflation-resistant store of wealth: stocks, bonds, real estate, precious metals, collectables (art, wine, cars, etc.), and the like. Asset value inflation is not itself economic productivity. It may reflect economic productivity (that's at least the fig leaf covering stock markets), but far more often, asset inflation simply follows national and global monetary policy, most especially rising in times of loose money or easy loans (largely equivalent terms). John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929 remains an excellent post mortem of one such event. To that extent, measuring GDP growth alone provides distorted view of actual wealth growth, both at the level of individuals (say, median, bottom quintile), and of net national power and stability, though of course how distorted is the stuff of legendary disagreements.

There is a history of countries burning through growth potential with immense rapidity, most especially in the case of natural resources extraction. Instability in the Levant following the mid-2000s has been tied to loss of net-exporter status among oil producers (Syria, Egypt, Libya), as well as food scarcity through both climate-related crop shortages and reduced imports as oil revenues decline. One of the more spectacular cases is the Pacific island nation of Nauru, which underwent a birdshit apocalypse after (briefly) highlighting as the world's richest nation (per capita) after what proved to be a highly limited resource reached its limits. <https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/10/world/a-pacific-island-na...>

The country's recovered somewhat by entering into the hospitality business. That is, it runs internment camps for the refugees Australia would prefer to pretend don't exist and sends elsewhere: <https://devpolicy.org/nauru-riches-to-rags-to-riches-2021041...>

To the extent that contemporary economies run on the basis of extraction (petroleum, coal, natural gas, minerals, groundwater, topsoil) and sink exhaustion (the ozone layer, heavy metal contamination, greenhouse gasses, plastics and endocrine disruptors, habitat and species disruption, ...), none of which are costed into either market transactions or national wealth/income statistics ... well, we're all on busses headed toward various cliffs, some nearer, some further.

One option is to expend resources on things which presently have relatively low value but would be exceedingly useful in a post-carbon / post-collapse society. That includes basic skills, sustainable practices, sustainable infrastructure, and the social patterns which can effectively utilise these. Keep in mind that this runs directly contrary to market signalling as markets have an overwhelming present-bias in assigning values, as anyone caught holding the bag after a crash can tell you. Potential future utility simply isn't considered, and in general, non-market mechanisms seem to be required to encourage such investments.

(There are other systems which similarly fail to consider long-term value, and it's long been a favourite trope to note the immense ecological contamination and pollution which occurred in the Soviet bloc. However similar desecration was seen both earlier and simultaneously under market systems ... both are poor at delivering ecological equity. Ultimate reforms have tended to emerge through social movements, legislation, and legal recourse, none of which are market-based.)

My final argument is that much of the advantages attributed to economic growth can be had at relatively low levels of same. That is, equity and distribution count for far more than total gross production or consumption. Invest in infrastructure, healthcare (with a strong emphasis on basic access and preventive measures rather than heroic interventions), education, affordable housing, social safety nets, and sustainable development of transport, built infrastructure (at individual building, community, regional and national levels), resource preservation and enhancement (e.g., water, soil, forest, and wildlands cultivation), actual productivity, mitigation of undesired consequences, and the like, and ... I think you might see a path which whilst it might not register on mainstream metrics is actually preferable over the long run.

> One of the counterarguments to exponential growth, particularly in the context of limits, is that growth rises to some constraint.

This is an interesting concept, and depending on what we believe fuels growth is obviously true to a greater or lesser extent (mostly greater, in my opinion). It's obvious that resources fuel growth, and different countries have different kinds and amounts of resources, so those eventually being tapped means loss of at least one fuel of growth. Population also fuels growth, but there are obviously limits there (even if people often can't agree on how and when they will express themselves), such as living space and ability to source food.

At the same time, there are things that fuel growth (in this case whether we're talking about GDP or some more holistic metrics of citizen wealth or well-being) such as new technology, whether it be spurred advances in the hard sciences or soft. Political, organizational and social technologies are not to be underestimated here I think. A change on society that causes a marked decrease in psychological problems such as depression, or increase in happiness in some other way, would be immensely important.

In the end though, the technological changes are probably hard to hoard for the benefit of one nation over the other (even if adoption of something that seems extremely beneficial doesn't often happen on short time frames), so the things that cause growth that are limited resources at likely the important thing to focus on. It seems fairly obvious to me that different nations already have different amounts of these resources or the ability to grow them, and will hit those limits at different times.

In the end though, it may not be what matters, as while there are countries of different relative potential, there's also growth through current relative power. Powerful countries can achieve better terms in trade with others by leveraging that power, so the more powerful you are, and the sooner you can bring that power to bear, the more benefit it brings you. In this way, being economically more powerful than others is itself is a form resource to be tapped for more growth.

> ere is a history of countries burning through growth potential with immense rapidity, most especially in the case of natural resources extraction.

To be clear, my argument is not necessarily to grow as quickly as possible (I think that's obviously non-optimal given the negative repercussions and the unknown time at which growth becomes capped), but to continue to try to leverage resources into growth when still possible as fast as is safe (which is obciously complex and hard to do and a moving target).

In large I think that means countries should keep doing what they're doing. IU also think ecological sustainability should be more emphasized, but I don't think that is antithetical to what I just said. We should attempt to grow as much as we can, but pay close attention to the consequences and try to minimize the negative ones. Hopefully that means we're also paying attention to any eventual slowing of cessation of a lot of growth drivers and planning for what that entails as we near it.

> My final argument is that much of the advantages attributed to economic growth can be had at relatively low levels of same. ... Invest in infrastructure, healthcare ...

That investment is where I would like to see a lot of the growth funneled into. The quicker we grow in ways which do not exacerbate those problems, the more resources we'll have to put towards solving them. Ultimately, in a perfect world that might mean picking the areas of growth that have the most bang-for-the-buck to leverage that towards actual problems for people (because it's easy to abstract this away to countries and just say let's get more people which will drive more growth), to make individuals happier, because otherwise why are we bothering.

That most of these decisions are made by large machines that often work through emergent behavior that is hard to steer is not lost on me, and I understand most my arguments are academic and ivory tower in nature.

Finally, thanks for including a large supplementary comment of sources. I'll be adding them to the stack of things I should read (but unfortunately rarely allow myself time for). I truly appreciate it.

The first time I'd run into the notion that high metabolic systems burn out faster was reading Asimov's book on black holes, The Collapsing Universe, when I was a young boy, and learning that the hotter and brighter a star, the shorter its life. The very largest known star, CY Canis Majoris, is a red supergiant, near the end of its life, and is thought to have formed 8.2 Mya, roughly the same time h. sapiens and chimpanzees diverged on the evolutionary tree. Contrast the birth of our own Sun at about 4.5 Bya.

The notion that human civilisations might be somewhat akin to stars, burning through their metabolic and resource foundations, has a symmetry to this concept, though there are more confounding factors to cultures than there are to starts, where metallicity, mass, and the presence or absence of stellar companions are about the only relevant factors affecting lifespan.

The idea that civilisations are bounded by limits and that growth only reaches those limits more quickly also punches some gaping holes in the notion of long-termism, which argues for maximal growth and growth rates. That makes sense if ultimate growth and all stages along the pathway are both unlimited. If, however, there are both local and global maxima, that is, ceilings to growth and sustainability, and most especially if reaching those limits is a high-risk event, then rather than argue for maximal growth at all times, a more reserved approach is called for.

The question of two species or cultures competing for the same resources is another point, and it's been raised several times in this thread. I'd look to actual ecosystems where fast- and slow-growing species (including r/K selection theory: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory>) exist. If the slower-growing species is also the more resilient for other reasons, then its slow growth need not be an ultimate handicap. That of course isn't a given, but depends very much on both the fitness landscape (selective pressure) and specific species adaptations. Human cultures are not identical to biological species, though they share some resemblances. Most especially, cultures are malleable, individuals can move between cultures, and the practices and knowledge of cultures can be shared, adopted, and transmitted to a much greater extent than biological species' genetic code is.

(I'd also like to make as painfully clear as I can that I am NOT equating "human culture" with any specific ethnic or geneological line, but rather the knowledge, practices, language, geographical distribution, and activities of groups of people, whether of common or diverse ancestry. Rather I'm focusing on both as persistent patterns which share the characteristics of inheritance, variability, and selection, and are thus evolutionary phenomena.)

As discussed in another comment, alliances matter far more for cultural protection than measures of wealth (collective or per-capita GDP, say): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37400918>.

I'm not saying that national capability as expressed in defensive capabilities doesn't matter at all, but suggest that it matters far less than one might generally think. Even at times where marauding empires were fashionable, the empires they created rarely survived long: Alexander, Rome, Napoleon, and Hitler all made tremendous conquests, but in three of those four instances, lost control within a few years, decades at the outside. Rome itself held at maximum extent with no peer in capabilities for a few centuries.

Common interest and fraternal bonds seem far more effective than military might. Certainly less costly. And one could argue that both Pax Romana and Pax Americana were based more on economic than military factors.

On the 2nd and 3rd points: Certain forms of growth, most especially those based on fossil fuels, must end in the very near future to avoid absolute catastrophe. The political and economic opposition to this remains strong, unfortunately. As for channeling growth into basic infrastructure and safety nets, amen!

Glad you're getting something from this.

Ophuls's political-ecological approach is being carried on by Thomas Homer-Dixon: <https://homerdixon.com/writing/>

There are other authors: Bill McKibben's Eaarth (sic), Joel Magnusonn's The Approaching Great Transformation, the book Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, all of which I have to hand. Vaclav Smil has written his own damned library on resources and sustainability from a technical perspective, largely looking backwards though with some forward-looking elements. I particularly recommend Energy in World History (1992, 2019) and Energy and Civilization (2017). Energy Transitions (2016) tackles the specific question of converting to a sustainable-energy path: <Energy Transitions>. And there's a long list of other Smil publications.

Kate Rayworth's Doughnut Economics is another prescriptive work looking at ways forward. <https://www.kateraworth.com/>

The original Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens) remains relevant, and is freely available online: <https://donellameadows.org/the-limits-to-growth-now-availabl...>. I strongly recommend reading primary sources over hot takes, interpretations, and commentaries. It's also helpful to remember that LtG served not as a prescription but as an alarm: there's a clear problem and we've got to wake up to it. Sadly, more than 50 years onward, that alarm continues to be ignored by many (including within this thread).

The now-defunct Worldwatch Institute published an annual State of the World publication which was an anthology of articles on sustainability generally, from 1984--2017, and give an excellent sense of the breadth and progress of thinking on these topics. Those are mostly available via the Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/search?query=worldwatch+institute+state+...>

Worldwatch's founder, Lester R. Brown, has written numerous books, his latest covers this topic, The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy <http://www.earth-policy.org/press_room/C68/market_forces_dri...>

Looking at the energy picture alone, there's David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which breaks down the technical picture, with a focus on Britain though applicable elsewhere, clearly and soberly. Freely available online: <http://www.withouthotair.com/>

That's just skimming the top of a huge literature. There are a tremendous number of different viewpoints, of topics and approaches, and of course disagreement. Contrary to the assertions of some, however, there are specific and actionable recommendations to be found. Looking into the bibliographies and notes of the works listed should launch you further in whatever direction you care to explore.

Japan also consciously entered on a relatively lower-energy path than the US, largely through energy and vehicle taxation and licencing practices, though there were others. That's not to say Japan doesn't have a large number of automobiles, or a strong automobile sector. It does.

But domestic autos tend to be smaller than those made for export elsewhere, there's a tremendous domestic transit system (famously the Shinkansen), and Japan's electronics industry (with hits and misses) was the result of a deliberate government-directed policy toward more efficient resource utilisation over simply mass consumption.

Not perfectly achieved, by any means, but a contrast to policies elsewhere.

I question this definition of relevance. To me, relevance is having a healthy, happy, sustainable society and culture. It's not accumulating goods and energy consumption in a self-destructive and planet-destroying way. The sooner nations realize this, the better.

A well regulated and lawful country where your rights are respected both internally and internationally is a luxury of a powerful nation and a stable system of narions. The former is what I'm saying is is important with regard to growth, because the latter can't be assumed to always exist in the future.

There's a long-standing observation that countries in which stable political, economic, and technological cultures have emerged have tended to have natural defences. The British Isles and Japanese archipelago in particular both avoided successful foreign invasion or even significant attack for nearly 1,000 years, until the 20th century.

Contemporary stability has more to do with Superpower alliances than geography, though geography still matters. The grand central-European plain had been the parade ground of invading armies since before the Mongol invaders, but today is largely peaceful, so long as one looks underneath the NATO umbrella. Ukraine suffers not only flat geography, ready river and sea access, railway infrastructure, and a long and unrespected border with Russia, but status as an unalligned state, whose prior security treaties with Russia have been abrogated.

The first four factors are common to numerous other states, it's the last which has proved critical to its history since 2014.

And such alliances don't require especially robust economic capability. Among the 31 members of Nato are wealthy states in absolute (Germany) and per-capita (Liechtenstein) terms, but also some of the poorest, notably Montenegro at 75th worldwide per capita and ranked 46 of 50 among European states in overall GDP (2023). Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Romania, and Slovakia are other states with low overall or per-capita GDP:

  State     GDP EU rank   GDP/capita (WW)
  -----     -----------   ---------------
  Albania:           40              101
  Belgium:           12               18
  Bulgaria:          26               73
  Canada:           n/a              n/a
  Croatia:           29               54
  Czechia:           19               37
  Denmark:           16                9
  Estonia:           35               38
  Finland:           18               15
  France:             3               21
  Germany:            1               16
  Greece:            22               39
  Hungary:           24               51
  Iceland:           37                6
  Italy:              4               25
  Latvia:            34               50
  Lithuania:         30               44
  Luxembourg:        27                1
  Montenegro:        46               75
  the Netherlands:   7                12
  North Macedonia:   42               92
  Norway:            13                3
  Poland:            10               49
  Romania:           17               55
  Slovakia:          25               45
  Slovenia:          31               34
  Spain:              6               29
  Turkey:             8               53
  United Kingdom:     2               22
  United States:     n/a             n/a

- I've listed the North American members, but omitted their GDP as these are not European states.)

- EU rank is 1--50 inclusive.

- GDP/capita rank is 1--134 within Europe, based on global IMF rankings of 192 states worldwide.

Sources:

- GDP overall: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...>

- GDP/capita: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...>

Takeaway: Alliances trump GDP or per-capita income.

How sure are we that the trends we see during periods of somewhat large economic growth (on average, overall for most nations) will continue when that environment is not the same? As more and more countries enter the end/modernity stage of economic bootstrapping (and China and India did), what pressure does that out on nations already at that level?

More than NATO I think trade agreements keep the world together (and drive membership of NATO) as codependency might as well be formalized. If some of that codependency goes away, and countries decide to protect and encourage local sectors (which might be more feasible in a low growth environment, I'm not sure), do the other relationships stay the same?

I'm not claiming to have answers, but I do have a lot of questions and see a whole lot of unknowns.

How the global political landscape might change in a post-growth world is the stuff of thousands of speculative fiction and cinema plots.

You're looking outward at multinational alliances based on today's (mostly) nation-states. Another consideration is how those states themselves might fare. It strikes me as quite possible that larger states (the US, China, India, Indonesia) might well fragment, and even mid-sized powers (Spain, the Netherlands, Mexico) could splinter. The political situation in the US has been described as a "cold civil war" for some years (see: <https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/3/29/a-cold-civil-wa...>). Russia has been fighting to retain or regain ceded Soviet territories since the mid-1990s. There are separatist movements of various shades in Spain (Catalonia, Basque region), Belgium (Waloonia), the UK (Scotland, Northern Ireland), Canada (Quebec), India (multiple), Indonesia (multiple), Israel (Palestine), the Philippines (multiple), just as a list of more developed and stable nations. (I'm omitting Africa entirely, a huge list of itself, most of the Middle East, and Central and East Asia, largely as those deviate from the Western / OECD conditions fairly markedly.) China is of course unified, but has ethnic strife (Uygers and Tibetians), reintegrated regions (Hong Kong), and contested territories (Taiwain, Arunachal Pradesh, South China Sea, ...).

There've been outright separations: Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia into Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia (Balkans gonna Balkanize...). And reunifications, most especially of Germany.

The map of Europe has hardly been constant, and even as recently as the mid-19th century is largely unrecognisable today: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=P9YnYRk8_kE>

Another factor to consider is that the same trends which would likely lead to degrowth will also make massive military campaigns far less viable. This affects not just the field of battle, but the entire logistical pipeline as well as the capability to build and resupply weapons, vehicles, ships, and ammunition. I'm reminded that the introduction of the sweet potato to New Zealand utterly reshaped that region's tribal landscape: the cultures with potatoes could march and campaign further than those without. (If I recall, this is discussed in one of Jared Diamond's books.) More recently, introduction of muskets to the Maori led to another technological-superiority disruption: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars>. Reintroduction of horses and the introduction of firearms to Native American cultures had similar effects.

Other thoughts:

- NATO exists not only as a bulwark against the USSR / Russia, but to protect access to Middle East oil and gas on which Europe depends in the extreme. Falling significance of both could alter that calculus.

- International shipping relies on safe seas and ports. Transoceanic trade blossomed under the British Navy and has flourished under American naval protection. Piracy exists only in small backwaters now (notably Somalia, though small-craft boardings are not unheard of particularly in central and Latin America, and S.E. Asia), and overt shows of force are not exceedingly common, but there are regular patrols off the Horn of Africa and Gulf of Aden, that I'm aware of. Rogue states including Iran and North Korea have attacked or commandeered vessels. Much as with shooting down commercial airliners, this is immensely disruptive to trade, and can result both in wide diversions of shipping routes and cessation of trade to unfriendly ports. Submarine warfare by both Axis and Allied forces was devastating during WWII, and both costs and countermeasures were extensive. NATO plays a role here as well.

And whilst I'm adding commentary: the legacy of colonialism and arbitrary drawing of borders by colonial powers (the Sykes-Picot division of the Middle East in 1918, and the highly-inorganic map of Africa, which seems to be slowly rationalising though not entirely smoothly) resulted in exceptionally arbitrary borders which bear little relationship to communities and cultures on the ground.

One might make a similar argument about state borders within the United States, most especially west of the Mississippi, where straight-ruled lines ignore rivers, divides, cultural, and economic clusterings.

The weighted-Voronoi diagram "United States of Craigslist" map reveals an alternate organisation based on the nearest localised Craigslist instance:

<http://uxblog.idvsolutions.com/2011/07/chalkboard-maps-unite...>

And of course, there's how New Yorkers view the world:

<https://brilliantmaps.com/new-yorkers-world/>

Cryptocurrencies are kind of going in that direction, where the "value" that is reported as economic growth doesn't correspond to any kind of real-world matter or activity, but is simply assigned to some specific group of bits.

I can kind of believe that this virtual kind of growth could continue a long time without boiling the planet, but of course that doesn't make things less absurd, as the "value" would represent nothing objectively useful and would have to be maintained artificially - either through scarcity mechanisms like PoW etc, or through locked-down devices and ecosystems.

So that kind of "growth" could go on forever without burning the planet but would probably be a step back for civilization.

There's no evidence whatsoever that economic growth can be decoupled from resource, and most especially energy, usage. There are instances of increased efficiencies, which thanks to the Jevons Paradox increase overall resource utilisation (economically, efficiency is equivalent to a reduced price, and hence induces greater demand). And there are instances of outsourced resource utilisation (both in terms of inputs and of waste sinks), most notably that of China which has committed tremendous domestic resources and incurred immense environmental insult in providing "cheap goods" (that is: goods lacking fully-costed externality impacts) to developed countries.

But there's nary a trace of actual empirical evidence of substantive decoupling in the real world. Much handwaving and could-be's, however.

We know the economy is decoupled from physical limits because we have built it to be that way. If you go to my bank right now, they are not going to have a physical pile of valuable objects there which is my account balance. They have a computer that stores numbers, and obviously it needs energy to operate, but it doesn’t cost 10x energy to store 10,000 instead of 1,000 in the database entry for my account balance.

But that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with decoupling the actual economy from its physical foundations. Long after Qing, China remained fundamentally dependent on rice and wheat harvests (and suffered tremendous population losses, as much as 8 million deaths) many centuries later.

The wealth-tracking representation has been decoupled from any substance with intrinsic value, but the economy has not.

Put another way: you could have a monetary system in which currency was entirely backed in precious gold and silver, and introduce huge quantities of same to your economy ... without increasing the actual wealth of the nation by Adam Smith's definition, "annual produce and labour of the nation". This was precisely the situation Spain found itself in following its conquest of the Americas and importation of vast quantities of South American gold and silver.

If you insist on measuring the economy solely in terms of "substances with intrinsic value," you will find the limit of economic growth at approximately the limit of those substances. However this is begging the question because it's not the only way (and not the currently accepted way) of measuring economies.

Anyway, it's not just the representation, wealth itself is increasingly nonphysical and hypothetical. For example not only is my $1,000 bank account just a database entry, my database entry is most likely offset by about $900 in loans to other people. So my saved cash is actually about 90% claims on future payments by other people. Or look at stocks; at a P/E of around 20 currently, 95% of the value of my SP500 index fund is hypothetical. And of course the whole point of a bond is future payments.

Market-winning behaviors are also becoming less physically correlated. Did Barbie take 5x as much energy as The Flash to make or present? Does a 3 bedroom row house in San Francisco use 5x as much energy as a similar house in Detroit? Does Apple use 3x as much energy as Amazon? Does it take twice as much energy to make a Mercedes C class as a Honda Accord? There are tons of examples like this. Rice and wheat harvests are a pretty small part of modern economies now.

Look, I agree that a certain level of energy usage is required to enable economic activity. If we were to cut our energy use too much, we would limit or perhaps crash the economy. People need food, clothes, shelter, plumbing, communications, etc. I'm just saying: that is not equivalent to proving that future economic growth is bounded by energy usage. One does not logically follow from the other.

I don't, and specifically pointed out precisely an instance where money was not grounded in material goods. However that is a red herring as money is not wealth but is instead a measure of wealth. My own theory is that the reason many monetary systems have been based on specie or some similar intrinsically valuable material has to do not with coupling/decoupling of production to physical inputs, but to trust. That is, when you have a money-issuing authority imbued with high trust, the need for metal-backed currency disappears. "Seigniorage" is then a measure of trust in the money-issuing authority, and fiat currency (with effectively infinite seniorage) implies complete trust.

(The concern that such authorities occasionally abuse their trust, and/or run up against circumstances in which deflating the currency becomes a financial and economic necessity, is a separate issue. That problem isn't limited to fiat currencies, however, as the devaluation of specie-based currency such as the Roman denarius illustrates.)

The relationship between economic output and material inputs, specifically energy inputs, has been identified by several authors, in particular Steve Keen and Robert U. Ayres, "A Note on the Role of Energy in Production":

Energy plays no role in the standard Cobb-Douglas Production Function (CDPF), and a trivial role in a three-factor CDPF where it is treated as a third input, independent of labour and capital. Starting from an epistemological perspective, we treat energy as an input to both labour and capital, without which production is impossible. We then derive an energy-based CPDF (EBCDPF) in which energy plays a critical role. We argue for the redefinition and measurement of real GDP in terms of exergy. We conclude that the “Solow Residual” measures the contribution of exergy to growth, and that the exponents in the EBCDPF should be based on cross-country comparative data as suggested by Mankiw (1995) rather than the “cost-share theorem”.

<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...>

As Keen and Ayres note, including energy along with capital and labour in the Cobb-Douglas production function accounts for virtually all of the "Solow Residual", the amount of productivity not accounted for by capital or labour, and which was previously attributed to "total factor productivity". Keen & Ayres reduce that almost entirely to energy input.

Your sojourn into prices as opposed to wealth creation (in the real economic sense, rather than the somewhat more familiar, but irrelevent in this case, financial sense) is yet another red herring. Asset prices are not intrinsically grounded in production costs, particularly for price-inelastic goods such as real estate. Rather than being defined by costs of production, they're defined by surplus value, and following the theory of rents first expressed by David Ricardo, the seller will tend to accrue surplus consumer value of such assets. That is, real estate prices rise to match the income potential of that location.

Information-heavy good such as luxury brands (Apple, Mercedes), entertainment (cinema), are based on a combination of manipulating tastes (advertising and marketing, reputation), constraining supply (particularly in real estate), and in competition for a limited resources (cinema screenings vs. cinema audiences). Note that in the case of cinema, costs of production are independent of viewings, so the industry is very interested in both total budget and ticket sales. But individual ticket prices tend to be relatively uniform across titles, what varies instead are the number of butts in seats. (This varies somewhat: Imax theatres may claim higher prices, but again, this tends to be across all titles, and matinee or off-peak screenings may offer lower prices, but again, uniformly for titles.)

Rice and wheat, as well as oil, gas, and coal, are commodity goods, not assets in the sense of real estate and gold. They're subject to supply and demand, but prices are determined by the marginal or surplus producer, depending on market circumstances. Where demand is less than total production capacity, the surplus producer, that is, the producer who can choose to sell more or less product at will, determines price based on their own production quotas. From 1931--1972, this was the United States, managed through the US Department of Interior (via "certificates of clearance")[1] and the Texas Railroad Commission (through drilling and production quotas)[2]. Since 1973, control has effectively resided with Saudi Arabia, as the US passed domestic peak oil and no longer had surplus production capacity.

Where demand exceeds production capacity, it is the marginal producer of oil, that is, the one whose costs just allow operating profit at the present market price.[3] As market prices rise and fall, those marginal producers enter and leave the market, literally turning on or off well pumps, with the cost of running the pump often dominating their own production costs of their "stripper wells".[4]

Because fuels, and foods, literally power the rest of the economy, as prices for either rise, there is less profitable activity to be undertaken by utilising them. If we express national productivity in terms of $GDP/barrel-oil, there is a range of roughly $300--400 at the low end to ~$3000 at the high end, with the US coming in at about $1,200/bbl of GDP.[5] If oil costs $50/bbl, then that is $1,150 of net productivity per barrel. Should the price rise to $100, the productivity falls to $1,100. The US can afford this reasonably well. A country netting only $250 profit at $50/bbl however falls to $200, or a loss of 25% of economic productivity. (India and China were at about this mark.)

The low price of food and energy masks their true value to the economy, because it is precisely the differential in price and output which is what determines the scale of the rest of the economy. Take away fuels and foods, and you'll find that total productivity falls by far more than the previous total exchange value of those goods.

________________________________

Notes:

1. See Daniel Yergin, The Prize, (1992), particularly chapter 13.

2. Yes, the Texas Railroad Commission controlled global production of oil. Because Texas.

3. Or, in cases, not even profit but cover non-fixed costs, and thus encourage the producer to operate at a net loss.

4. See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripper_well>

5. As of ~2015 when I last looked at this.

They never want to examine the consequences of that thought (no growth means we're into a zero-sum game) or whether they think we're even plausibly close to the limit (instead they want to have a proxy argument about environmental damage or global warming, and are very uninterested in any specific solutions to their go to examples - i.e. "we can't possibly stop emitting CO2 from power generation, we must simply use less power!").

But no.

War. War, real estate, and more pretend finance for finance sake. Either that or mass producing the tools of tyranny.

Even stars have limits to their energy. If you don't believe in limits then you aren't accepting physical reality.

Given two countries where one lints it's economic growth and the other doesn't, if they're given another few hundred years before a limit is hit, which one is in a better place to respond when that limit is hit? Does the country that minutes itself even still exist as it did, or was it taken over by a stronger one (whether economically, militarily or culturally)?

I could point to any number of examples refuting this, but really prefer you lay your cards on the table first.

My question was quite specific: what do you think we should do in the next 5 to 10 years? Apparently you've read widely on this topic! So widely that when asked this question, the only thing you did was throw book titles and author names around and talk about how great they are. Rather then anything about what they say.

I mean presumably all these distinguished luminaries drew some actionable conclusions right? Because you are calling for actionable things to happen - such as?

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37386379>

I gave multiple specific authors who have proposed plans. Yes, it's a number of titles; I assure you that's only the thinnest scraping of the broader literature. Or to put it plainly: there are many people who've had "answers they want to elaborate on" ... and you're now complaining that there are too many of them?

Tough to please.

I've asked you now three times who it is you're claiming has no answers.

I'm not exactly still waiting. But if you'd care to provide a response to that question I'd appreciate it.

I'm not asking for a thesis. Just a listing of who or what references you're pointing at.

Seems to be a considerable challenge for you to do so, just sayin'.

I've mentioned numerous specific examples refuting that here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399144>

It’s like saying “you can’t imagine a bigger number than I can.” A person can always imagine a bigger number, and the marginal cost of doing so is merely what is necessary to store the larger number in a ledger.

What this means is that if 100% of growth comes just from inflation then "GDP" will have increased but "Real GDP" wouldn't have.

That monetary equivalence equates to real purchasing power over goods and services. Nominal changes in currency values (whether foreign-exchange or inflation/deflation) are pencilled out in this way.

And the GDP growth that is measured is as a percentage in terms of those constant currency units. Which, again, reflect actual capacity to purchase material goods or the product of energetic effort.

Money is a measure of wealth, it is not wealth itself. Much as a ruler is a measure of length, not length itself.

The ability to measure 1,000 km does not equate to the capacity to travel 1,000 km.

The ability to measure a hectare of land does not equate to the possession of a hectare of land.

The ability to measure a year's worth of labour productivity, or industrial output, does not equate to the realisation of a year's worth of productivity.

And financial units absent the goods and services that they can access ... are worthless.

For most of human history, money was itself physical wealth, or constrained in proportion to physical wealth. Which in turn constrained the maximum value of any good or service it could buy.

Now goods and services can grow as valuable as we ever want them to be. They can even be imaginary. That's how a few thousand smart people at Apple who produce nothing physical can be considered nearly 6x the value of ExxonMobil and the tremendous amounts of land and resources it controls.

There are commodity monies, where some underlying commodity serves as money. However that relationship is often symbolic rather than strict. One classic instance is in the 1945 paper "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp" by R.A. Radford, which describes the goods-and-services economy which emerged largely around the "currency" of cigarette packs amongst Allied prisoners within Axis prisoner of war camps during World War II. The paper illustrates both the capabilities and limitations of currencies in effecting trade (a surplus of cigarettes with a surfeit of actual goods ... means there's no effective economy), as well as the dual role of cigarettes as having utility (at least to some prisoners) in addition to their exchange value. Highly worthwhile reading:

<https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550133>

I've addressed the nature of money as a commodity grounded in trust in this earlier comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37389020>

More generally, I've found it useful to think of money as the commodity of most universal demand. That is, whatever else it is you have, a sufficient quantity of money is preferable. Where fiat or coined money isn't available, this often becomes some commodity: grain, hides, shells, raw gold (or silver or copper), nails, cattle, etc.

William Stanley Jevons identified a properties of money as utility and value, portability, indestructability, homogeneity, divisibility, stability of value, and cognisability. Of those, I differ with him on utility and value, as we have fiat currencies and accounts notations of no intrinsic value themselves, rather utility and value are the inverse of trust in the money-issuing authority. "Seignorage" in specie is then a measure of trust, and fiat currency effectively has infinite trust.

William Stanley Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange Chapter 5: <https://archive.org/details/cu31924013816172>

In your Apple example: what Apple produces is a future stream of profits, and systems which provide utility to purchasers of those systems. Apple is actually a poor choice to illustrate your argument as contrasted with a pure-play software or information provider (say: Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or Disney) in that Apple is fundamentally a hardware producer, and their business model is actually predicated on physical products (iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, Mac Pro, etc., and increasingly the chips which power those devices: <https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/>).

The notion that immaterial production is economic is far older than the modern Internet economy. Any service, starting with unskilled labour, is immaterial in a similar sense.

And the value of more abstract economic activity is actually grounded in primary productivity, a distinction that goes back to at least the Physiocrats and Quesnay's Tableau Économique. More recent variants include Clark & Kennessey's multi-sectoral classification:

- Primary Activities: Agriculture, forestry and fishing; Mining

- Secondary Activities: Construction; Manufacturing

- Tertiary Activities: Transportation, electric, gas and sanitary services; Wholesale trade; Retail trade

- Quatenary Activities: Finance, insurance, and real estate; Services; Public administration

Zoltan Kenessey "The Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary Sectors of the Economy" (1987) DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4991.1987.tb00680.x. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4991.1987....>

Every activity beyond primary is based on the consumer surplus value and energetic potential of the primary activities. Absent ag, forestry, fishing, and mining, you'll have no Apples.

More: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612141005/https://old.reddi...>

As a forecast which may or may not happen? Yes.

As an actual outcome that has been decided a priori? No, not at all. Only planned economies tried to do that.

so far it has been the case with human economics across all countries/economies. yes some shareholders will be zeroed out during recession, but others will continue on the growth journey

It's common in finance and population ecology. See, e.g., lynx-hare population dynamics.

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

For example, the US had a fertility rate of 7.0(!) in 1800 and saw no significant population growth due to births because most of those kids died well before reaching the age of reproduction.

Historically, fertility rates have always dropped once basic standards of living have managed to get rid of excess child mortality.

We know from experience that if those places actually started to improve, then the birth rate would drop precipitously.

Are you talking about something else ?

As to 2022, China did briefly drop to a TFR of 1.09, like GP said [1]; but the moving average over several years is more like 1.3. You have to put the 2022 drop in context that their very strict lockdown went into its third year, and there were two cases of pregnant women losing their babies e.g. because the hospital denied them entry for having negative Covid tests but a few hours too old [2].

[0]: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/fertility-ra...

[1]: "China's fertility rate drops to record low 1.09 in 2022- state media" https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-fertility-rate-dr...

[2]: https://fortune.com/2022/01/07/china-covid-cases-miscarriage...

Turns out the East Asian style of hyper-competitive child rearing has its downsides, namely the high costs dissuade parents from having children altogether.

China faces every antinatal problem the west does, except far worse.

1. Extremely high housing prices making family formation expensive

2. Small apartments suppress large family formation (Seen in Europe)

3. General collapse of marriage rates due to changing incentives and thus moral norms

4. Higher education decreasing fertile years.

5. Economic depression, especially for young people, euro debt crisis level of youth unemployment.

You add to that, that China still officially has a 3-child policy (not that many people even have 2), because the birth control bureaucrats still need a job.

China is probably 2nd lowest in the world behind South Korea, and will stay there, if not

Scott Galloway (and others, like Elizabeth Warren) have been saying this, about the US, repeatedly: US education costs rose (or at least, were allowed to rise by the politicians who were nominally regulating them) by 1400% since the 1970s [https://www.profgalloway.com/inflated/]. This was not sensible policy but if GDP growth via financialization of (third-level) education etc. is your economy's chosen indicator, it's what you get.

Anyway the low TFR is not necessarily a demographic crisis, it's up to the country whether it lets its population decrease (Japan, China), or uses immigration to sustain whatever its target population growth is (US, Canada, EU, SG, Aus).

> 2. Small apartments suppress large family formation (seen in Europe)

You're getting the direction of causality wrong: apartment size was a reaction to the decrease. Contraception, more years of education and other social changes were the drivers of smaller apartment sizes, not the effect.

Rates are normally calculated by couples. 0.85 per person is a decline.

1. Easter island -- we, humans, deforested the island, that degraded and depleted human population significantly even before the first european ships discovered the island. From what I've heard, "Rapa Nui" movie is unusually historically correct on the events.

2. St. Matthew Island -- 29 introduced reindeer rapidly overpopulated the island and ate all the available food there, so the whole population died.

Same thing can happen on planet Earth.

More recent research shows that this is probably not true - there's evidence that the population was growing right up until the arrival of Europeans[1].

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210713090153.h...

It is almost like humans are not mindless animals who solely reproduce because of biological urges or something.

I suppose spacefaring humans might use that kind of power but if they are living in space they are no longer part of the biosphere of Earth.

Sure, why not?

It's absurd today for the average person, but it's the kind of thing rich people get to do already, and looking at the rich today is a decent (though imperfect because inflation and invention don't work like that) hint for what normal people can afford in a richer future.

Cheapest flight I've ever taken was 9.99 from Berlin to London — not sure if pounds or euros, but does it matter when either way it is less than I used to spend on a week of school lunches nearly 20 years earlier?

The comparison was conceptual thing to similar thing. Only the rich own and operate private planes, that hasn't changed. The fact that other, more sophisticated planes exist doesn't undermine the point.

There are also diminishing returns. And past leaps in lifestyles aren't guaranteed to continue the same trends, and can reverse.

The earth has seen several major extinction events. Arguably humans are the cause of the latest one. Doubtful we can sustain billions of us without an ecological system to produce our bare necessities, certainly not enough for a full life.

No, they are selling off seats that aren't taken. They are making more money since those seats would be empty.

Cutting costs would not be selling the seats and saving on fuel.

My guess is if flights priced in externalities they could not be cheaper than alternatives like trains. (Unless they're leaning on whales like first class to subsidize cheaper seats.)

That's literally the billionaire lifestyle.

Meanwhile cryptocurrency is seeing decades of power efficiency undone as miners bring old power plants online and want to burn tyres to power their scams.

In the future, we might use a lot of energy for the we cannot imagine today.

In the future, we might stop using every the way we do today.

In the future, we may produce and consume substantial energy in places other than earth's surface.

In the future, the concept of energy itself might be different, much like people couldn't imagine the type of energy involved in nuclear fission.

In reality we're already certain to hit a population maximum in just two+ decades, and not only that but the world is very likely to be on a negative population growth curve after that for some time. And we're going to need some new tech revolution to drive energy demand in developed countries up much more than it is, and the developing world's per-capita demand will not likely exceed the developed world's once fully developed.

I.e., we're not growing forever, the end of population growth is around the corner, and the end of energy demand growth is not much further.

I realize the big issue is settled here but just to scope this detail: the total land area of earth is coincidentally approximately 150 million km^2

At 150 trillion humans each human would get just about a square meter. Many of those square meters are uninhabitable.

I highly recommend that you find a copy of this (in)famous book about it: << City of Darkness>> (https://cityofdarkness.co.uk).

Similarly solar isn't renewable because at some point the Sun is going to run out of hydrogen, and if you made a dyson sphere to capture all of the Sun's energy you would wipe out life on earth.

[1] https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population

[2] https://earth4all.life/news/press-release-global-population-...

For that to happen we need almost complete automation, which would provide cheap food, cheap housing, cheap healthcare, and lack of worry about the immediate future.

Even if you can sustain 1% increase in population per year, 1000 years of prosperity will result in

(8 billion)*(1.01^1000) = 167673 billion = 167 trillion people

(1% is roughly the current population growth, but it's slowing down)

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

Our global energy consumption in 2008 was estimated to be 474 exajoules. The total energy received by the earth from the sun during a year is about 5 million exajoules, a fraction of which reaches the surface. 5 million is much more than 474. But at a seemingly modest 2% per year growth rate (as it was between 1980 and 2006), our energy consumption will match those 5 million exajoules in less than 500 years!

Think about that: if energy consumption growth continues at the current pace, then in 500 years we'll either be using ALL solar energy received by the earth (leaving none for the biosphere), or we'll have figured out some magic technology to produce 5 million exajoules of energy per year. Assuming the magic technology, where are we going to get rid of all that extra heat? It would effectively be like having a second sun on earth, cooking us in place.

edit: I copied the numbers above from a post I wrote in 2010, so it may be a bit out of date. But Sabine Hossenfelder recently made a video where she talked about a similar timescale, i.e. boiling oceans in 400 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRtA7STvH4

Maybe a few hundred years from now, Internet archaeologists will find your comment as one of the first harbingers of the coming World Energy Crisis, much as we see the 1912 Rodney & Otamatea Times "Coal Consumption Affecting Climate" snippet today.[0]

Then they'll find this comment...

----

[0] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/rodney-and-otam...

A computer today costs roughly the same as a computer in the 1980s, and it also consumes roughly the same amount of energy as a computer from that era. We got faster computers because we got better at making transistors.

If we look at laptops, a device which consumes 200W already gets hot enough that it is uncomfortable to actually place on your lap. A 1kW desktop computer is pretty much impossible to cool.

At our current population, those 5 million exajoules a year is a constant power consumption of roughly 16 megawatt per person. For comparison, that's about the same magnitude of energy you'd need for every human to launch a Falcon 9 to eat lunch in the ISS. Once figures get this big, you simply run out of things to do.

It's been well known since at least The limits to growth[1], 51 years ago.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROTWKG19120814....

Maybe in 1950 people would have argued that soldering all those vacuum tubes would be too difficult, and they'd have been correct, but transistors and CAD changed the entire reference frame.

If only collective intelligence could rise above it all we might be well on the way to enjoying the creation of a more efficient, less wasteful, and more worthwhile future. . . but that too mentally taxing to engage with. . .so it goes

Or the only thing achievable is travel at some fraction of the speed of light. Say, a few %. At which point the nearest stars are a few-centuries away (one way trip), making interstellar travel feasible at least in theory.

But say, 99% or 99.99% of lightspeed? That's what's done with a few particles in huge projects like the LHC. So ehm.. no. Not unless (see above).

Then to send that equipment requires sub light speed - say 0.1C

Once the equipment is on the other planet, then sending information is 1C.

I think the assumption that we need to send humans to other planets is not true.

Once we figure out how to build better space faring beings that we can stream our consciousness at light speed, that seems more feasible for space travel.

Humans are squishy meat bags that need to eat multiple times a day, pee, poop, sleep, stable temperature and many other needs to survive.

There’s a reason why humans have only made it to moon which is about 400,000km but for all other planets only rovers have touched down.

I highly doubt Elon/SpaceX will have living humans on Mars in our lifetime, it’s much more likely they’ll have their Optimus robot or a descendant of it on mars receiving instructions from Earth.

Human intelligence and consciousness isn’t that special. Just an algorithm running on biological hardware.

The world population is predicted to peak about 30% above where it is now and then fall back -- maybe to 7 billion people sustained. We seem to need about 200 GJ per person to be really happy [1], so let's assume 300 GJ per person.

We should be able to get by, happily, on 2000 EJ per year sustained. By your figures, that's less than 1% of what the sun provides.

[1] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2...

Then at that rate we'd have 100,000 years of Tidal energy available even if we used it for the totality of our energy needs (and 10,000,000 years if we use it for 1% of our needs as taken in the paper). And that was basically the point of the person you're responding to: it's not so much that tidal energy is non-renewable, the problem is that the paper assume exponential consumption growth, and exponential growth is unsustainable no matter what.

If my maths is right, that's about 40,000 kcal per person per day, or about 15 times the energy consumption of an average adult.

I'm trying to figure out if that's a lot or not. On the one hand, not: this ratio is not strictly bounded in any way, and the human energy consumption is an arbitrary denominator. Still, a very rough interpretation is to say, we consume daily, on average, the fruit of work of 15 people.

Of course, that is very skewed. I wonder what the ratio looks like for an average American or European - must be much more.

It goes to show what a gilded life we live (on average!!!). Before industrial revolution, all energy basically was muscle power, and it's like for every 1 person alive, we have 15 servants turning the generator for us. I suppose some of this number is literal service providers, fed by food produced by powered agriculture.

Is there a logical upper bound to this number? Is there some energy amount we can't use given sufficient supply? Ultimately, all energy we produce is spent on humans so our energy consumption is a yardstick for human energy needs.

But that's not quite right either; a lot of energy is wasted. I wonder how much of this number is clothes that go straight from factory to landfill, AC left overnight, inefficient engines and energy storage.

I don't really have a point, other than I think this is an interesting fraction to look at.

I got some numbers form a random result in google: http://www.ejolt.org/2012/12/human-energy-use-endosomatic-ex...

Endosomatic energy (i.e. food): 3.5GJ/year/person

Exosomatically energy (i.e. firewood, electricity, solar, fossil fuel, whatever):

hunter-gatherers: 20 GJ/year/person (i.e. x6)

agriculturalists using animals: 60 GJ/year/person (i.e. x17)

industrial society: 200–300 GJ/year/person (i.e. x57-x86)

As someone with a physics background... well... it's within an order of magnitude or two, so that sounds close enough to be probably accurate.

http://insideenergy.org/wp-content/uploads//2017/01/historic...

from:

https://insideenergy.org/2017/01/12/energy-explained/

This doesn't account for all the “imported energy” that comes when you outsource your industrial production abroad. Granted even then the energy consumption doesn't increase exponentially anymore, but it's not flat either.

What is also interesting is that China's "energy intensity" - energy used per unit of GDP is pretty flat, if wealthier nations were exporting energy demand via imports I would expect that number to be climbing. I am at a bit of a loss as to how to determine exactly what is going on TBH.

> if wealthier nations were exporting energy demand via imports I would expect that number to be climbing

Why? These exports from China generates GDP in China so it just grow the energy consumption as well as the Chinese GDP, making the ratio flat.

I don't know, if your basis for your opinion is that you googled it and you got some very wide ranging and contradictory results then that seems like a poor foundation to start with.

> Why? These exports from China generates GDP in China so it just grow the energy consumption as well as the Chinese GDP, making the ratio flat.

If the ratio is flat then there isn't really much of an export of energy effect in my view. If you are exports were dominated specifically by the use of energy (over say human capital or laxer pollution standards) that intensity would rise because it would be the source of the economic advantage. I.e. if domestic consumption trade 1 unit of energy for one unit of growth but exports trades 2 units of energy for one unit of growth intensity will rise if exports dominate the energy mix. That does not seem to be the case.

A huge proportion of US imports seem to be based on "assembly" from what I can tell, the dominant categories from China are electrical/electronic goods and industrial machines - most of the stuff is the assembling of US & EU (and Taiwan for semiconductor reasons) made parts.. the energy mix of the import-export dynamic seems like it needs a lot of analysis - I would like something authoritative that shows an attempt at an analysis, I can't seem to find it.

But nobody ever said that. Chinese exports don't have to be driven by the use of energy to actually consume the energy! Labor cost was the main factor (but not really anymore, and the most labor intensive industries like clothing have long transitioned to even lower-wage countries in South-East Asia), followed with the industrial expertise (with a enormous qualified workforce tailored for industrial production), but once the industrial production happens there, the energy is consumed there and not in the Western world.

If you don't have the data that's fine, I was hoping for data!

No I haven't. Actually I said the opposite, and I will reassert it here: growth and energy usage doesn't need to be decoupled in any way, for China to actually export energy. Export is appearing on both sides of the equation: on the GPD side, and on the energy consumption side.

They didn't need to build massive lines of analog telecommunications, they just jumped right to cellular and satellite technology. They can jump right to solar and other renewables as they electrify. They can skip incandescent lighting and go right to LEDs.

More specifically: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prod-cons-co2-per-capita

The implausibly is staggering, we'd run out of resources to build extractors way before causing any meaningful shift in the rotation: if the monstrous land barriers of the continents take millions of years to drain a small percentage of the energy, we have zero hope of achieving much more with the solid mass available to us on Earth, short of a Dyson sphere-level breakthrough in "moving mass around", oh, and by the way it has to happen deep underwater as well, and we need to channel all the energy somewhere useful! Way harder than just making a ginormous but thin solar array in space, which is almost certainly what we'd do instead from a "energy cost to arrange matter" optimization POV.

Earth's mass is 10^24 kg.

E_earth = mc^2 = 9 * 10^40 J

E_current * 1.02^x = E_earth

474 * 10^18 * 1.02^x = 9 * 10^40

x = 2357.91 years

At a modest 2% growth we would be using up the entire Earth's mass in energy per year in only 2358 years.

So this is a bit of much ado about nothing. We're not going to exceed low single digits percentage points of the energy reaching the planet from the Sun.

Heat dissipation is relatively easy if we use 1% equivalent of Solar energy on Earth: the water cycle can speed up in response to positive forcings and slow down in response to negative forcings. This is why the planet's climate has been so stable in the sense of being a random walk centered on an optimum that supports the sort of life that we have on the planet. Similar observations explain Mars' and Venus' inhospitability: there's not enough atmosphere, much less liquid water on Mars to drive a similar thermostatic system, while Venus' climate is pegged at a maximum, with albedo as high as it can reasonably go, and it can't cool itself significantly with anything like a water cycle.

Imagine the sphere of a civilization expanding in space at some speed, in all directions. The volume of this sphere would equal time cubed (t^3) times some constant.

Now suppose this civilization has a magical power source that allows them to keep growing power consumption exponentially. So power consumption would equal 2^t (where time unit = one doubling time, 35 years in the case of 2% growth) times some constant.

2^t will always overtake t^3 no matter the constants, so power density of the sphere trends to infinity, so the civilization will cook itself in waste heat.

But yeah I expect we’ll not make it 100 years let alone 500. Our ability to change our behavior to avoid obvious problems is poor bordering on suicidal.

So nuclear?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

It's the same reason that the Earth radiates exactly as much energy as it receives from the sun, just a larger number of lower energy, higher entropy photons. What the sun really provides is a source of low entropy.

My thinking is that the energy that got absorb in other processes such a photosynthesis is a delayed release.

The energy released must have some time delay. Maybe it all averages out overtime.

Difficult problem I wonder if it is worth answering.

With a brief, 60 million year time frame exception during the Carboniferous, though, the energy stored in life processes is a wash. Assembly and decay are a net balance, and life itself is a strong driver of entropy, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if, on the whole, the biosphere is a net energy sink.

Of course we want to get into the details. I can see there are many reasons why the earth maybe releasing more than it absorbs.

...and this is why I like posting here!

I did find a reference to heat loss from the Earth itself- 87 milliwatts per square meter. Core solidification is slower than I remembered, about 1cm/1k years.

https://phys.org/news/2020-12-earth.html

An important caveat: this article assumes that energy consumption will continue to increase exponentially to get the 1000 year timeline of draining the rotational energy of the Earth.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37122796 | https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37313586 | https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to...

https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/newsroom/country-over...

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

There are 8 billion people in the world, and we’re on track to have 10 by end of century. Which is more likely? Everyone lives like a European (from a consumption perspective)? Or a bunch of people don’t or die while some do?

There are no systems that can ever be created to actually balance out / eliminate inequality, outside of very small communities operated via extreme authoritarianism.

See: modern Sweden. A formerly highly effective welfare state, increasingly brought to its knees by poor immigrants (and it's going to get a lot worse over the coming decades). They can't remotely handle what's happening to their country in terms of inequality, despite how good they have been historically at managing it. France - also historically effective at managing a high quality of life welfare state - has entirely failed at managing a similar scenario, and for the same reasons.

The exact same principle applies globally as it does locally. It can't be done under any scenario. So yes, vast inequality will persist forever, as it has forever.

The end of inequality is when there are one or fewer humans remaining.

We don't have to guess at likelihoods (will everyone live like a European). The answer is known and certain. Even within Europe half the population can't afford to 'live like a European.'

I'm willing to bet our descendants will be approximately as irrational and lucky as humans have always been.

There's a good chance that at least one of those ten billion are going to have some radically good ideas, and an even better chance than a few more will have some really good ideas.

I don’t think there’s any reason we should take “let’s kill everyone else so we can keep our nice stuff” should make any more sense in 2023 than it has over the last… well, such arguments pop up in all of human history, I guess.

To answer your question: i think it’s more likely that we build an egalitarian global society, or at least continue on the path.

> To answer your question: i think it’s more likely that we build an egalitarian global society, or at least continue on the path.

Good luck with that. Hope is not a strategy, but hopefully the future is not as bleak as the current data predicts. Show me a voter cohort that will willingly give up substantial go forward energy or resource quality of life for people on the other side of the world who they have not nor will never meet. Do you know how many people are dying right now at this moment because their basic needs are not being met? One every 4 seconds per Oxfam. This is before more frequent heat events, crop failures, aquifers reaching terminal depletion, etc.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/humanitarian-organiz...

Agreed it’s (extremely!) depressing, but facts are different than a reality based on feelings. Finding truth is following the facts to the (sometimes) unpleasant places it takes us.

Voters might never do it, but the guy who wins the Presidency and only has to face voters every 4 years, he starts thinking about Nobel Peace Prize the moment he sets foot in the WH, and to make a legitimate candidacy he needs to be a great humanitarian and/or getting some significant Foreign Policy victories.

Bush 43 took it upon himself to fund a whole lot of malaria and HIV prevention campaigns, and even Trump pursued the defeat of ISIS and normalization of relationships between Israel and the Arab world.

If we reach peaked our energy consumption in merely 250 years, that's less than 150 times our current consumption. I didn't do the math, but would date to suggest this gives us a few years more time on this planet.

The world used 9,717 million tons of oil equivalent in 2017.

Plugging in our growth rate that would mean the world used the equivalent of 13 tons of oil in 986 which is 515.84 million BTU.

US residents making <$20k and having wood as their primary heating fuel source use 50 million BTU of wood a year.

While we can argue specifics 10 households worth of fuel sounds a little low for a world with a population of 390 million.

Current tidal generators work either by inserting a turbine into the moving water; or by a dam that captures the high tide, then releases it through a turbine at low tide. Depending on the exact details, it could slow down the rate at which the current later flows over the seabed, which would reduce the energy dissipated from friction with the seabed. But, there's no guarantee that this would compensate for the energy taken by the tidal power generator.

You could imagine a different type of tidal power generator: covering the seabed with a giant treadmill. As water flows past, it drags the surface of the treadmill, generating power. My guess is this would dissipate less total energy than the natural friction of the seabed does. But, it doesn't sound very practical.

(Anyway, all of this is a moot point. As other commenters have noted, if human energy consumption actually were to grow 2% annually for 1000 years, we'd have way bigger problems than the moon becoming tidally locked.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_acceleration#Angular_mom...

>it will take about 10.468 billion years for Earth to lock to the Moon naturally.

This is bananas. I stopped right there and closed it. I see somewhere else in this thread that they tried to do that by extrapolating an exponential growth curve through an outlier (the industrial revolution!) for a thousand years. Maybe that explains it.

But... that's not an error. That's just bananas. Absolutely insane.

Some quick googling, FWIW, gives the earth's rotational kinetic energy as a quite plausible 2.1e29 J (though a little of this will not be extractable tidally, as the earth will lock to the moon at a few percent of rotation speed), and the total world energy consumption as 22.8 TWh/year. So the back of my envelope says that at current consumption we have a hair over... two trillion years.

But so what if we made a more reasonable assumption that annual energy usage will stabilize at, say, 5X of what it is currently, and the (unreasonable) assumption that we get 100% of that energy from tides.

Then how much of a rotational slowdown do we get after 1000 years?

Equivalently, after 1000 years, we'd see a rotational slowdown of around 0.001%.

So maybe not technically renewable, but many orders of magnitude more renewable than e.g. fossil fuels...

The sun will start becoming a red giant and kill us all in about one billion years, long before this tidal lock will eventually happen.

This theory is very interesting, although the author presents it with too much confidence for such big claims.

> The Earth's rotational kinetic energy is about 10²9 J, and the world uses something like 10²² J/year, so you could power the entire world for millions of years before you'd run out of rotational energy.

(my phone somehow has a ² but not a ^9; the first number is supposed to be 1e29)