Galactic-scale energy: Part 1
Posted by Euan Mearns on July 22, 2011 - 10:45am
This is a guest post by Tom Murphy. Tom is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. He currently leads a project to test General Relativity by bouncing laser pulses off of the reflectors left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts, achieving one-millimeter range precision. Motivated by the unprecedented challenges we face, he has applied his instrumentation skills to exploring alternative energy and associated measurement schemes. Following his natural instincts to educate, Murphy is eager to get people thinking about the quantitatively convincing case that our pursuit of an ever-bigger scale of life faces gigantic challenges and carries significant risks. This article is Part 1 of a two-part assessment of the implications of continued growth. The article first appeared at Do The Math.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we have seen an impressive and sustained growth in the scale of energy consumption by human civilization. Plotting data from the Energy Information Agency on U.S. energy use since 1650 (1635-1945, 1949-2009, including wood, biomass, fossil fuels, hydro, nuclear, etc.) shows a remarkably steady growth trajectory, characterized by an annual growth rate of 2.9% (see figure). It is important to understand the future trajectory of energy growth because governments and organizations everywhere make assumptions based on the expectation that the growth trend will continue as it has for centuries—and a look at the figure suggests that this is a perfectly reasonable assumption.
Growth has become such a mainstay of our existence that we take its continuation as a given. Growth brings many positive benefits, such as cars, television, air travel, and iGadgets. Quality of life improves, health care improves, and, aside from a proliferation of passwords to remember, life tends to become more convenient over time. Growth also brings with it a promise of the future, giving reason to invest in future development in anticipation of a return on the investment. Growth is then the basis for interest rates, loans, and the finance industry.
Because growth has been with us for “countless” generations—meaning that everyone we ever met or our grandparents ever met has experienced it—growth is central to our narrative of who we are and what we do. We therefore have a difficult time imagining a different trajectory.
This post provides a striking example of the impossibility of continued growth at current rates—even within familiar timescales. For a matter of convenience, we lower the energy growth rate from 2.9% to 2.3% per year so that we see a factor of ten increase every 100 years. We start the clock today, with a global rate of energy use of 12 terawatts (meaning that the average world citizen has a 2,000 W share of the total pie). We will begin with semi-practical assessments, and then in stages let our imaginations run wild—even then finding that we hit limits sooner than we might think. I will admit from the start that the assumptions underlying this analysis are deeply flawed. But that becomes the whole point, in the end.
A Race to the Galaxy
I have always been impressed by the fact that as much solar energy reaches Earth in one hour as we consume in a year. What hope such a statement brings! But let’s not get carried away—yet.
Only 70% of the incident sunlight enters the Earth’s energy budget—the rest immediately bounces off of clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28% of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15% efficiency. Let’s assume 20% for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes?
When would we run into this limit at a 2.3% growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. 275 years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization. And think about the world we have just created: every square meter of land is covered in photovoltaic panels! Where do we grow food?
Now let’s start relaxing constraints. Surely in 275 years we will be smart enough to exceed 20% efficiency for such an important global resource. Let’s laugh in the face of thermodynamic limits and talk of 100% efficiency (yes, we have started the fantasy portion of this journey). This buys us a factor of five, or 70 years. But who needs the oceans? Let’s plaster them with 100% efficient solar panels as well. Another 55 years. In 400 years, we hit the solar wall at the Earth’s surface. This is significant, because biomass, wind, and hydroelectric generation derive from the sun’s radiation, and fossil fuels represent the Earth’s battery charged by solar energy over millions of years. Only nuclear, geothermal, and tidal processes do not come from sunlight—the latter two of which are inconsequential for this analysis, at a few terawatts apiece.
But the chief limitation in the preceding analysis is Earth’s surface area—pleasant as it is. We only gain 16 years by collecting the extra 30% of energy immediately bouncing away, so the great expense of placing an Earth-encircling photovoltaic array in space is surely not worth the effort. But why confine ourselves to the Earth, once in space? Let’s think big: surround the sun with solar panels. And while we’re at it, let’s again make them 100% efficient. Never-mind the fact that a 4 mm-thick structure surrounding the sun at the distance of Earth’s orbit would require one Earth’s worth of materials—and specialized materials at that. Doing so allows us to continue 2.3% annual energy growth for 1350 years from the present time.
At this point you may realize that our sun is not the only star in the galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy hosts about 100 billion stars. Lots of energy just spewing into space, there for the taking. Recall that each factor of ten takes us 100 years down the road. One-hundred billion is eleven factors of ten, so 1100 additional years. Thus in about 2500 years from now, we would be using a large galaxy’s worth of energy. We know in some detail what humans were doing 2500 years ago. I think I can safely say that I know what we won’t be doing 2500 years hence.
Why Single Out Solar?
Some readers may be bothered by the foregoing focus on solar/stellar energy. If we’re dreaming big, let’s forget the wimpy solar energy constraints and adopt fusion. The abundance of deuterium in ordinary water would allow us to have a seemingly inexhaustible source of energy right here on Earth. We won’t go into a detailed analysis of this path, because we don’t have to. The merciless growth illustrated above means that in 1400 years from now, any source of energy we harness would have to outshine the sun.
Let me restate that important point. No matter what the technology, a sustained 2.3% energy growth rate would require us to produce as much energy as the entire sun within 1400 years. A word of warning: that power plant is going to run a little warm. Thermodynamics require that if we generated sun-comparable power on Earth, the surface of the Earth—being smaller than that of the sun—would have to be hotter than the surface of the sun!
Thermodynamic Limits
We can explore more exactly the thermodynamic limits to the problem. Earth absorbs abundant energy from the sun—far in excess of our current societal enterprise. The Earth gets rid of its energy by radiating into space, mostly at infrared wavelengths. No other paths are available for heat disposal. The absorption and emission are in near-perfect balance, in fact. If they were not, Earth would slowly heat up or cool down. Indeed, we have diminished the ability of infrared radiation to escape, leading to global warming. Even so, we are still in balance to within less than the 1% level. Because radiated power scales as the fourth power of temperature (when expressed in absolute terms, like Kelvin), we can compute the equilibrium temperature of Earth’s surface given additional loading from societal enterprise.
The result is shown above. From before, we know that if we confine ourselves to the Earth’s surface, we exhaust solar potential in 400 years. In order to continue energy growth beyond this time, we would need to abandon renewables—virtually all of which derive from the sun—for nuclear fission/fusion. But the thermodynamic analysis says we’re toasted anyway.
Stop the Madness!
The purpose of this exploration is to point out the absurdity that results from the assumption that we can continue growing our use of energy—even if doing so more modestly than the last 350 years have seen. This analysis is an easy target for criticism, given the tunnel-vision of its premise. I would enjoy shredding it myself. Chiefly, continued energy growth will likely be unnecessary if the human population stabilizes. At least the 2.9% energy growth rate we have experienced should ease off as the world saturates with people. But let’s not overlook the key point: continued growth in energy use becomes physically impossible within conceivable timeframes. The foregoing analysis offers a cute way to demonstrate this point. I have found it to be a compelling argument that snaps people into appreciating the genuine limits to indefinite growth.
Once we appreciate that physical growth must one day cease (or reverse), we can come to realize that all economic growth must similarly end. This last point may be hard to swallow, given our ability to innovate, improve efficiency, etc. But this topic will be put off for another post.
Acknowledgments
I thank Kim Griest for comments and for seeding the idea that in 2500 years, we use up the Milky Way galaxy, and I thank Brian Pierini for useful comments.
Contact
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License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Really enjoyed that, thanks - there are a few folk I know who will be getting that as a link to read.
A friend of mine called me today with news from the US patent office that his patent application for a hot fusion reactor will be granted. He's been fighting it out with the patent examiners for quite some time. Of course, having an idea is one thing and getting it to actually work can be quite another.
That's a very big gamble to spend a lot of money to get a patent for something he can't afford to test. Is he hoping some company sees the promise of his idea and licenses it?
I think he's open to suggestions on licensing. Meanwhile, he's attempting to build a small-scale demo with some investor funds. I told him to be careful with the neutron bursts should he actually be successful. He needs lots of help IMO, but is being careful who he shares information with. He might open up some if the patent is assured. He's crazy smart, a true "lone inventor" type, and a very nice person.
I'm good at making things work, have zero interest in money, very cautious, and could use a good distraction. I have knowledge in many fields. denkou137 at gmail
I'll put you in touch. He could use some help. I'll warn you he's weird, but in a nice, humane way. His humor is, well, bad in a korny way. (I'm much wittier, but not in his league intellectually).
You can't make patents any more. Sci-Fi authors have already invented everything.
Today we (hopefully) see the last shuttle mission land safely.
If not quite the end of manned space travel, the current plans for a replacement are a smaller, less powerful shuttle to orbit. There is no guarantee that the money will ever be found to build it. China has finally put a man in space, but it is not exactly high on their list of priorities. We still have soviet era craft, which at least are 'cheap' and practical, and reliable.
I think this is a good day to talk about living within the limits of the energy flow on this planet.
SpaceX can put twice the payload into orbit that the Shuttle can and at one fifth the cost. The SpaceX Dragon capsule can put seven people into orbit now again at one fifth the cost of the Shuttle.
I'm the biggest fan of SpaceX you'll find, but don't mistake vision for track record. To date, SpaceX has put into orbit exactly 3 rockets, and the combined payload of all three of them amounts to less than half of one Shuttle launch.
SpaceX *intends to build* the Falcon Heavy, which would have about 80% the payload capacity of the Shuttle, at about 1/5 the cost, but they have not yet built a single one, much less launched it.
SpaceX's Dragon capsule *is designed* to carry up to 7 people, but so far has carried nothing into space but a wheel of cheese.
SpaceX will hopefully be a huge player in the future of America's space program, but so far, they're all potential and little payoff.
SpaceX is nice, but let's not forget that the Delta Clipper solved this particular problem nearly 20 years ago, replete with real-life reusable prototypes that worked. And then the program was delibertately de-funded and buried by NASA political hacks who favored the Martin X-33 VentureStar. Proving once again that the biggest obstacle to human potential and technological progress is not lack of know-how, energy, or even exponential growth --it's politics, greed and human stupidity (the only infinite resource in the universe).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
Oy, don't get me started. I replied earlier that SpaceX is promising but hasn't built enough flight hardware to prove itself yet. Even more so for the DC-X program, which never built anything that flew above 10,000 feet. The program showed a lot of promise, yes, and NASA's takeover and mismanagement of the program did it no favors.
But in the space flight game, it's CRUCIAL to distinguish between rockets that actually fly, demonstration hardware that isn't space-ready, and rockets that exist only as Powerpoint presentations.
Hitching your dreams to a Powerpoint rocket is a big part of how NASA got into its current position.
While NASA was not going to follow this concept and maybe for your stated reasons, the best the small proto-type achieved was almost 3,400 meters high - not exactly up into space.
Tom
Once we appreciate that physical growth must one day cease (or reverse), we can come to realize that all economic growth must similarly end.
You have shown that growth in ENERGY use must cease, but have somehow extrapolated that to "physical growth" or "economic growth". While GDP growth is correlated with growth in energy use, the range in energy use/ unit of GDP is very large, think of the energy used in manufacturing a work of art compared with the energy used in flying on a similar valued overseas holiday. Or more extreme what about a unit of GDP used to manufacture energy saving activities such as home insulation
Yeh, I've been telling the British Government for ages that mass production of works of art is the way to go;-)
More seriously, the general point you make is a good one. I believe that OECD economies should be planning for low energy content high value GDP - such as iPhones and other forms of home entertainment. Virtual fantasy vacations enjoyed from the confines of your home.
The French have been clever in targeting luxury fashion goods - perfume and handbags - but that market is limited to a position high up on the pyramid of the Ponzi scheme. If you try to spread it lower down to the masses then the high value part of the equation fails.
Ah—you've anticipated my next post very nicely. Thanks for the setup (and stay tuned next week).
I was going to jump in to respond, but I suppose I should wait for part 2 of your series. Heh. I'm looking forward to it!
How valuable is the GDP metric? Take even NDP (net domestic product)and I think you'll find a tight correlation with energy use. Global civilization will not maintain the infrastructure it has built. At least I haven't seen much indication that it can do so.
Correlation isn't causation.
Think Chevy Tahoe(10MPG)->Toyota Corolla (35MPG)->Prius (50MPG)->Volt (230MPG/100MPGe).
Nick, The Volt isn't more energy efficient than the Prius. It is more liquid hydrocarbons efficient. The Volt weighs more than the Prius because of its batteries.
True. The transition from Prius->Volt says more about oil than all-energy.
Still, you'd agree with my basic point, right?
Nick, Is your point that we can uncouple economic growth from oil prices? That this is possible because we can shift to vehicles that have double the liquid fuel energy efficiency or no dependency on liquid fuels?
Well, here's my take: the vehicles that do not use liquid fuel cost more than that the vehicles that do use liquid fuel. So we step down our living standards (albeit not catastrophically) when we switch to EVs. Also, it is far easier to go from 25 mpg to 50 mpg than from 50 to 100 mpg. There's a declining return on energy efficiency.
Also, the population still hasn't recognized the need to do the transition and the mainstream media and political elite are not telling the population that we've got to radically and rapidly cut our dependence on oil. So hard to use the transition capacity we have, let alone grow our transition capacity.
I expect the economy to stagnate or shrink in the next 10 years due to Peak Oil and other natural resource constraints. Right now in the USA we are already not having an economic recovery since we are 7 million people below peak employment of 2006 now 3 years after the economic dive. The US population has grown by several million in this time. The transition away from oil is obviously not going to be easy. PHEV and EV ramp-up rates have been slow so far.
the vehicles that do not use liquid fuel cost more than that the vehicles that do use liquid fuel.
A Prius was cost-competitive with a similar ICE vehicle when gas was at $3.
A Volt after the rebate costs maybe $3k more than a Prius, comparably equipped. Fuel savings close that gap.
A Leaf is cost competitive with a comparable ICE vehicle.
it is far easier to go from 25 mpg to 50 mpg than from 50 to 100 mpg. There's a declining return on energy efficiency.
If you use gallons per mile this gets clearer: you're going from .04 GPM to .02 GPM, then from .02 to .01 GPM. So the first gain is twice the 2nd gain.
Really, if the US went to 50 MPG that would be most of what we'd need. With falling industrial/commercial consumption and rising tight-oil (shale oil) production, we'd mostly eliminate our net-import bill.
I agree that as a society we haven't really recognized the need to kick our oil addiction. I'd say that US elites mostly do, which is why the EPA is pushing for a 50+MPG CAFE.
Have you read "This Time Is Different - eight centuries of financial folly"?? They assert that general financial crises such as we just suffered generally take a long time for recovery - oil isn't the root cause of everything...
And the talk about cars ignores all the other infrastructure that the USA (and others I suspect) has permitted to deteriorate. What I am saying is that if the USA had kept up its infrastructure so as to get an "A" from the American Society of Civil Engineers, then we wouldn't be so energy efficient per each dollar of GDP. This site as posters that dream of new infrastructure--we cannot maintain the current one sufficiently!
Actually, we'd probably be more efficient: it's pennywise and pound-foolish not to invest in infrastructure.
The US underinvests and overconsumes. Very short sighted.
Neil,
But computation uses energy and the energy cost per computation has limits. Energy cost per computation efficiency is on the rise. But there's got to be a wall for that.
Almost certainly. The question: is there any reason to think that wall is anywhere near the point that would create problems?
Tom, thanks very much for this interesting reworking of the impossibility of infinite exponential growth widely promoted by Al Bartlett, Meadows et al in Limits to Growth and Richard Duncan's Olduvai theory.
http://www.albartlett.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
http://dieoff.org/page125.htm
The trouble is that exponential growth is possible for a while and as you point out its the only thing Man has experienced and it can be extremely difficult to grasp or accept that one day this must end when the system boundaries / limits are approached.
Of course with population stability and energy efficiency gains an end to growth does not have to be unmitigated disaster in the near term. But it does have far reaching consequences for the way our socio-economic system works. I believe that pensions and social services will be hit first and hardest. The whole global economy is in fact a Ponzi scheme requiring ever larger numbers of people to be inserted at the base of the pyramid for it to survive.
There are already signs of confusion about why what is happening in the world is happening. The political system is going to continue to try and gorge itself even though there is not enough food around for it to do so.
Sounds about right.
I can well remember more than 30 years ago one Geoffrey Howe*.
Geoffrey said that: "We [western industrial/commercial civilization] have cracked all the big problems facing humanity, and it is just a matter of rolling it out."
Which brings us to where we are. Has that "roll-out" reached a quarter of the way globally? As you point out with your links, what seems blindingly obvious now, has actually been obvious for a long while.
NB *(British Chancellor of Exchequer 1979 - 1983: Wikipedia: "[his] combination of policies became one of the defining features of Thatcherism in power. Some commentators regard Howe as the most successful Chancellor of his era").
This is a 'fun' mental exercise but of little practical value - sometimes, a nonserious article makes sense.
As for thermo-nuclear fusion (excluding the Sun), such a process is the only massive (or high density) power source foreseeable, and it can be done given enough effort(read money.) At the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), a group called Nike has an excellent approach that could work using direct drive lasers (unlike the worthless approach by the National Ignition Facility at Livermore which uses indirect drive that is really just a weapons application approch.)
Of course, General Fusion in Vancouver has a really impressive approach (strangely, the idea was invented at NRL) that has an excellent chance to produce energy but whether great enough to be viable, only time will tell.
Solar has potential and could be useful but even at 30% conversion efficiency would not supply cost effective solutions until the kilowatt costs come down a great deal and even then, still needs an efficient way to store the energy – maybe hydrogen (which could then be used for vehicles/aircraft.)
Even ITER has potential as a fusion source that could (if redesigned, of course) be made to breed (rather safely) fission fuel even if this approach can barely exceed useful break even. That has been an overlooked application for the Tokamak design since such a device can do this without the weapon’s issue associated with fission breeders or the safety concerns (a fission breeder melt down would be far more dangerous than that of a normal BWR fission plant lost of coolent/melt down.)
Fusion concepts are great, and I count myself among those hoping we pull it off. But a central point of the post is that in a few hundred years it's won't matter what technology we develop: we can't count on any source to maintain a growth profile on this planet. I consider that knowledge to be an excellent example of practical value.
I was talking about the here and now. Continued growth of population and energy consumption following mathematical exponential functions is about as realistic as using math to prove time travel - both utter fictions. Fusion could help us solve energy issues for many decades even if there was exponential growth (which won't occur) and help billions from starving during our current life times and slow and even stop AGW - goals worthy of thought and effort which I am sure you would also agree.
But if the trajectory we are on is not sustainable, what better time and place than 'the here and now' to change direction?
We are addicted to consuming ever larger quantities of energy, energy that is right now destroying the livability of the planet and, as the not-too-distant future, as the post shows, will simply become impossible.
So to this addict, you offer a new source of the drug--your assessment seems to be that we just need a more reliable pusher and everything will be alright.
Do you find humanity in good shape, overall? I don't. Affluence, tech, urbanization, growth and so on all contribute to better human living conditions and, quite importantly, lower total fertility rates. We may not need growth a hundred years from now, but we do now. Or at least, India, Nigeria and Bangladesh does.
If our current trajectory is unsustainable, then so is abandoning it, right now.
"If our current trajectory is unsustainable, then so is abandoning it, right now."
The very last thing we need now is over all growth. India is the poster child of how national GDP growth does not necessarily lift all ships.
So some redistribution may be in order, but growth is not needed for that.
Growth has been uneven everywhere, everytime, but it eventually does lift all ships. We definitely need more of it. India's stats are improving quite fast.
Redistribution, however, is quite limited in it's application, at least when it comes to the (semi-)voluntary gifts from richer to poorer. It has not been demonstrated to be effective across country boundaries, and is of limited use even within countries.
It appears to me that our current paradigm has "spread the wealth" only under some very special circumstances and that those circumstances are now beginning to disappear. The conundrum is that the aspiration of gaining a greater share of the wealth than your neighbors is the driving force for industrial capitalism. So, by definition, it is poorly arranged for even equitable distribution of the created wealth. In the 19th century wealth creation was enormously enabled by the development of scientific thinking and the availability of easily obtainable energy sources. I think that, at first, large parts of the industrialised population was impoverished and degraded by the changing circumstances rather than enriched. There are many examples of that.
It was only when "creeping socialism" was added to the mix that any significant portion of the wealth began to trickle down to the working classes. Even that was only a result of the meagre political pressure put on the titans of industry at times when it appeared that revolution was at hand.
Now wealth is being spread around the world as globalization takes hold and the evidence is that a larger portion of that wealth is being concentrated, again, into a few hands. Much of the wealth that used to be in the hands of the western working class is being spread more thinly into the developing world in a race to the bottom.
The term "redistribution" implies some kind of inappropriate allocation of the the results of development. Any country can create any economic system it chooses that distributes the wealth created by industrialzation in any way it chooses. There are an infinite number of ways to do this. When wealth has been most evenly distributed in the capitalist-industrial world we have had the most stable economies. A large part of the current economic troubles in the world today are a result of the redistribution of industrial wealth back to a smaller fraction of the economy. See:http://www.zerohedge.com/article/concentration-wealth-destroying-democracy.
The economic rules now in place in the US are largely defined by those holding the most political power and are enabling an exaggerated concentration of wealth. The results are what you see.
Not really. The driving force is the demand of the customers.
I profoundly disagree. Wages increase on the labour market primarily due to forces of supply and demand. The industrial labour market soon diversified, which increased the demand for skills, and as urbanisation progressed, the relative supply of new very-low-wage workers abated. It is a socialist myth that unionization, minimum wages and so on helped very much. Raising wages above the market clearing level mostly serve to produce unemployment.
Again, I disagree. The evidence is opposite.
Wrong again. It's an upward spiral. There is absolutely no race to the bottom. None.
The economic system affects how much wealth is produced. The evidence is quite clear that increased economic freedom improves the economy.
If you look at the poverty and malnurisment indexes the world STOPPED to improve those in 2005 . Eve before the crisis the data in 2007 showed that the trend reversed . And the UN see the world death rate beginning to grow again. We peaked . We are on the way to meet Malthus brainchild .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition
see the tables after epidemiology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate
I don't think there is a way to reverse the trend .World has a monstruous inertia and is prone to hurt itself even more when things go wrong. Think export bans and resource wars .
Better and more recent data .Discard the optimist 2010 pediction ,the russian heat wave and resultant loss of production killed that .
http://www.fao.org/docrep/012/al390e/al390e00.pdf
Much more important than that is the shape of the graph , see fig 2 .It shows the situation improuving at a ever reducing rate then reversal.I think last time when world had a reversal in that index was when the medieval little ice age hit .
Thanks for the great links, Ahernar.
One point on the mortality trend, though.
Because of the global boom in population over the last fifty years or so, it is inevitable that mortality will increase over the next decades as people born during the boom start to die off.
I expect that we will get there earlier given PO, GW and other coming disruptions, but you are right that this represents a historic shift, reversing a centuries-old trend.
Herman Daly, former Senior Economist at the World Bank: "[neo-classical] economics is an ideology parading as a discipline."
Hazel Hendersen, who has been Regent's Lecturer at the University of California (Santa Barbara) and held the Horace Albright Chair in Conservation at the University of California (Berkeley): "[neo-classical] economics is a form of brain damage."
And see this article from Scientific American by Robert Nadeau (who also has written informative books on the subject):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-economist-has-no-cl...
There have been major movements in many of the major economics departments around the world to move to what is sometimes called 'post-autistic economics,' but perhaps you are unaware of these developments?
http://www.google.com/search?q=post-autistic+economics&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8...
You can also find similar people that say similar stuff about the theory of evolution.
That said, I'm certainly aware of the criticism of economic science, and I'm aware of different schools of economics. However, the different schools agree on a lot of the basics that only socialist loons contest. If you would like to argue that the labour market for some reason doesn't obey the laws of supply and demand like other markets do, then please feel free. And if you like to keep saying that it's me that's ideological, I can't stop you either.
The evidence is opposite.
That's an interesting study, but if you look closely you'll see that a big part of their contribution was to properly weight China.
If you include China then the world is growing and the poor are getting disproportionate benefits. But that's becase China has made that an explicit governmental priority.
The lessons: these things vary by country, and governmental policy is extremely important.
I think you need a bit more than that hand-waving to argue that governmental redistributive policy is "extremly important". Strangely, China is everything. One day it is all about "slave labour" and extreme inequalities, the next day its success in giving the poor disproportionate benefits is due to "explicit governmental priority".
India is more socialist and fares worse. China was less inequal than India in the 80-ies but is now more unequal, and that may have something to do with how China has soared past India, and how it has let growth reach a greater proportion of its population.
more than that hand-waving to argue that governmental redistributive policy is "extremly important".
I didn't say "redistributive" - there's a lot more to gov policy than that. In this case it's probably mostly about creating jobs for rural newcomers. Did you read that article about income inequality from the Atlantic that I gave you recently?
Also, the main point here is that the study you provided showed that world inequality was increasing because China overall is poor and is growing faster than other countries. Income inequality within China is growing - just not fast enough to overcome the fact that the overall average income is very low relative to the rest of the world.
"In this case it's probably mostly about creating jobs for rural newcomers."
Ah, yes, if "explicit governmental policy" was meant to say "being more capitalist", then I agree.
"Did you read that article about income inequality from the Atlantic that I gave you"
Very shallowly, since it seemed to agree with my views and seemed US-centric. Perhaps I missed stuff, though.
"Also, the main point here is that the study you provided showed that world inequality was increasing because China overall is poor and is growing faster than other countries."
Decreasing, not increasing. Also, China is not the only determinant, even though the impact is large.
that article about income inequality from the Atlantic that I gave you" Very shallowly, since it seemed to agree with my views and seemed US-centric. Perhaps I missed stuff, though.
Yes. There's discussion of other gov policy, such as regulation of financial institutions, labor and education policy.
Decreasing, not increasing.
Yes, that was a typo. My point remains: intra-country inequality is increasing, and world inequality is decreasing primarily because very poor countries are growing (mostly China). Basically, decreasing world inequality is a statistical artifact - very poor countries are growing, and that's a good thing, but it's not really helpful for analysis of economic and public policy.
It's tempting to be overly simplistic: "free market is good", "capitalism is bad", etc. It seems to me that pure free markets work well sometimes, work well with proper regulation other times, and sometimes don't really apply to the problem at all. One needs to be practical and deal with the complexities of the situation.
Perhaps the rising inequality in many rich countries is a statistical artifact due to immigration of low-skilled people?
I can go as far as to agree that well designed regulation in some areas may not hurt or even be helpful. Well designed regulation leans heavily on the market to do most of the heavy lifting. I don't think this is the right place to fight this out, though, so I rest my case.
Perhaps the rising inequality in many rich countries is a statistical artifact due to immigration of low-skilled people?
The Atlantic article concluded that immigration was not a major factor in the US, and the US has more immigration than the average OECD country.
It didn't convince. I've delved a little deeper in the article now. I'm very unimpressed.
hmmm. Well, anything specific strike you?
Actually, I think you'll find that wages increased because the factory owners realised that if their workers couldn't afford to buy the factory products, the sales wouldn't materialise. Henry Ford was a good example of that realisation.
This is a myth that makes no economic sense whatsoever. If Ford raised wages by X dollars (decreasing profits by as much), very little would come back as revenue from car sales, and only a small portion of that revenue would be profits. That doesn't fly. No, factory owners increased wages because they had to - because of competition in the labour market.
That statement is beyond absurd! Care to back it up with hard data? I'll bet you can't!
I obviously didn't mean "all" literally. If so, a single counterexample would be enough to disprove it. (Perhaps you feel that you have been left on the bottom yourself?)
ONE example?
We've got the greatest disparity between extreme wealth and poverty that we've ever had on the planet.. this, at the Peak of our Growth due to Cheap Oil.
Clearly, it is floating Elon Musks and Richard Branson's Boats disproportionately higher than the humble dinghies floundering along in Central America, Eastern Europe or North Africa. How much of this growth can be directly linked to usurous and Proto-colonial economic charades played on the third world.. essentially driving the hulls of these Shiny, western yachts up onto the decks of the poorer countries rafts to get a better perch..
This is not very surprising, nor problematic.
Ditto here.
Extremely little.
Here's an extremely good article on this topic:
http://www.slate.com/id/2266025/entry/2266816/
That's going too far. It's true that exponential growth must cease regardless. But it *does* matter what technology we develop, if we care whether that exponential curve settles down to a society of billions living in comfort and health, or a society of millions living lives of misery, starvation, and early death.
Please check the statement: "exponential curve settles down." Settling down means getting off the exponential train and ending physical growth. Exponentials are at fault for "going too far," not the analysis of what happens if the exponential continues. So you're right, in that if society expects to keep up exponential energy growth (regardless of technology), they've gone too far.
Maybe my point here is narrower than desired, and maybe stating that exponential growth can't continue is obvious to most intellectually-oriented folks (i.e., readers of this blog). But for many, it's a point that still needs to be made, and I think this is a cute illustration.
Would you have said that to those living in the 18:th century? But for them, it was real, and continued to be real for the entirety of their and their childrens' lives. Isn't that enough?
I once argued in a computer chess forum. An authority on the subject said that chess is O(2^n), i.e. "exponential", meaning that the size of search tree is exponential with the length of search depth. I said no, it is O(1), i.e. the search tree is finite, the search time is bounded however deep you search. I was/am right, but was ridiculed in the forum. For them, chess program authors, the search is exponential and always will be. However, if they, theoretically, got very far in the search, they would eventually reach mating or drawing positions and search space growth would end. However, why would they care? They didn't, and most didn't even understand what I told them.
It would be much more interesting if you stated, for example, why growth is necessary (is anyone claiming that?), when it might end (is it in relevant time frames?) and why. Population growth is ending and mature economies doesn't grow their per-capita energy consumption much.
At least half of the growth is to meet the growing number of people. If we had a stable population we would solve half of the problem.
We need to distinguish between improvement and growth. We have no need of growth only a desire for improvements. We can have iGadgets and a US population of 100 million rather than 315 million. That would lower our energy use by a factor of three.
Thankfully, world population growth is stopping. Per-capita economic growth is what really counts, I agree. Nobody would be happy about 3% population growth and 2% economic growth. The other way around is much nicer. However, we also need to realize that humans are the ultimate resource. 300 million will innovate faster than 100 million, and create a more efficient, dynamic and diverse market. When the Indians and the Chinese innovates like the Western world, per capita, the pace of tech progress will be even more amazing.
Yes and no. Will it really become practical to learn yet another new "smart phone" needing endless arbitrary series of new taps and gestures to get anything done, once a week? Once a day? Will it really become practicable to spend 200% of GDP on ever more "innovative" medical "care"? 500%? 1500%? At some point we'd have to replace ourselves with virtual robots à la Kurzweil, just to keep up and not be reduced to utter poverty by the medical "system". (And if you think the philosophical arguments are heated now, you ain't seen nuthin' yet...)
It seems I appreciate tech progress much more than you. However, when it isn't practical or interesting for us to innovate anymore, or grow production, I guess we'll stop doing that. That point, however, lies squarely in the sci-fi-realm, and irrelevant to today's politics. Regardless of what a few environmentalists think.
Innovation is not a function of raw population numbers, as even a moments reflection would make clear.
The relatively small populations--tens of thousands at most--of Sumerians developed writing, math, astronomy, medicine, urban living...basically civilization. It did not take billions of people to do that. Similar things could be said of sixth and fifth century bce Athens and may other places--massive innovations with relatively few people.
They had numerous city-states quite close to each other, each having tens of thousands of inhabitants, and the Sumerian era lasted some 3000 years. Their density and numbers allowed their innovations at their rate. Our density and numbers allow more, obviously. Higher population counts and bigger economies allows for more good brains and more R&D funding.
Must respectfully disagree. Population growth is *not* stopping, it's still growing. It's the *rate* of growth that is slowly decreasing. The U.N. projects population growth may stall or reverse between 2050-2090 if current trends continue, but... there's nothing inevitable about it --it's still educated guesswork.
While "2% population growth and 3% economic growth" is preferable to the reverse, -2% population growth even with 0% economic growth would be far better. Steady state resource/energy use with a declining population means more resources for everyone, not to mention no added stress on the ecology/environment. I prefer quality of life to quantity myself.
Re: 300 million being better than 100 million, on what basis to you make this assertion? The Classical Age, Renaissance and Industrial Revolution all happened with a fraction of today's world population, and this did not appear to hinder "the pace of tech progress". Once again, human priorities and quality of brainpower applied seems to matter more.
I agree, the population is projected to peak or plateau in the second half of this century, and the global population now grows not exponentially, not linearly, but sub-linearly.
Yes, your growth alternative has twice the per-capita growth, so I agree it might be more comfortable. Why 300 million is better than 100 million? I think I said why. The ages you mention would probably have progressed faster with more people. More brains means more top brains. More density means more influences and better "drive".
Up to a certain point, I would agree with you. There is a fuzzy but potentially quantifiable "critical mass" of people that catalyzes and enables for the rapid exchange of information (any sociologists out there care to chime in?). Which is why technology progresses faster in agrarian vs. hunter-gatherer societies, industrialized vs. pre-industrial, cities vs. exurbs, etc. However, just as earlier posts explained how we a reach point of diminishing returns (or even *negative* returns) beyond a certain point in terms of energy consumption, house size, etc., the same is likely true for population size/density as well.
If we have more "top brains" simply because of an ever-expanding population, but those brains have limited access to education, research money, and have to fight tooth-and-nail for basic resources (think modern day Somalia), then what good can they do? Ditto for living in overcrowded hyper-dense slum cities, where quality of life approaches that of a rat in an avercrowded cage.
Larger populations and more density may have been a big catalyst for progress in earlier ages (though far from the *only* catalyst), but I would argue that technology, living standards, and access to education and information are far more important factors today.
Take China with 1.2 Billion people or India with about the same. How many Nobel laureates in physic or chemistry have they produced in the past 50 years? The environment is also a factor (in a larger set) to kindle/drive innovations. Dictatorship, war, peace, fear, reward are some good/bad stimuli, for example.
Sure, but stats are improving, so not only do we get more top brains, a greater proportion of the top brains gets resources. Also, the average age of a human being is going up, so the proportion of adult brains increase as well.
However you cut it, a larger population means a larger economy, more funding, more good brains, more educated brains and a more diverse demand for innovation.
300 million angry, hungry, and ignorant peasants will innovate all right. They will find a hundred billion ways to make life as miserable as possible for everyone within striking distance.
The kind of innovation you imagine requires education and a hope of a better life. That is exactly what is being squeezed out of the American working classes right now.
If we had a stable population we would solve half of the problem.
Part of the issue is the money system based on interest.
So long as there is growth - no one cares about interest.
What happens to a debt based economy when the enegy growth input stops?
It undergoes a bit more stress, as it adapts to it.
"chess is O(2^n), i.e. "exponential", meaning that the size of search tree is exponential with the length of search depth. I said no, it is O(1), i.e. the search tree is finite, the search time is bounded however deep you search. I was/am right"
of course this is wildly off topic but your comment on chess is simply twisting the meaning of words and doesn't contribute to the understanding of the chess problem.
"Population growth is ending ". i think it is widely assumed that around 2050 there are around 9 billion people which seems to contradict your statement.
"mature economies doesn't grow their per-capita energy consumption much". of course because the so called mature economies cannot afford to consume more. nonmature economies consume more and more. and since the population keeps growing then the total consumption grows quite fast.
"why growth is necessary". it doesn't matter if it is necessary or not (whatever that means). the point is that eventually it's not possible.
Actually, it was they who twisted the meaning of words, or rather, definition. The ordo notation has a precise definition, for instance. Also, I definitely feel that my comment on finiteness contributes to the general understanding of chess.
Funny. The peak of around 9 billion was precisely what I was thinking about when I wrote that.
Not so. They could definitely use a larger share of their GDPs for energy.
Superficially one would think a game of chess has an exponential search for possible moves, but the game is bounded by the endgames.
The population on earth at first glance appears to be able to grow exponentially, but upon further inspection it is bounded by natural resources, sun inputs, water, arable land, etc.
Why do you think that the analogy is not apt again? You lost me.
Yes, that is an apt analogy, but it is different from the point I was making. It was actually that the chess programmers' somewhat narrow view was practical enough. To them, it is reasonable to view the search as exponential, and they won't see anything else during their life times (if they don't switch to quantum computing, perhaps).
I would like to argue that similarly, our generations need not worry much about the limits to (economic) growth. To us, it could just as well be exponential.
maybe hydrogen
Or not.
http://www.tinaja.com/h2gas01.asp
And there is the issue of what would happen to the Atmosphere with the leaking H2? Would it destroy the Ozone layer on its way out to space? Would O2 levels increase if H2 floats away? What kind of new corrosion would happen with metals now that H2 would be in the air?
Hydrogen Effects on Climate, Stratospheric Ozone, and Air Pollution
http://gcep.stanford.edu/research/factsheets/effects_climate.html
Turns out there are some issues with widespread H2 leakage, like H2 rises into the stratosphere, where it can form water, and stratospheric clouds are the substrate on which high altitude ozone is destroyed. Also talks about H2 increasing tropospheric ozone and methane.
The wiki page on the hydrogen economy currently has more info about issues/costs of trying to use hydrogen as an energy carrier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy
I'd be wary of the tinaja links beyond the points about hydrogen.
There are some crazy statements about PV:
No dates on this pdf, but this hasn't been true for 20 years.
This is just nutty - PV panels don't have switches on them.
An amusing illustration of the absurdity of projecting too far into the future.
One can extend this by considering human population as well. Let us take 2500 years as a point in the future that we are interested in. If population doubles every 70 years, then there will be roughly 35 doublings between now and then, and this will yield approximately 2.4e+20 people. If you spread that over the land area of the earth, it would be 1.6 million people per square meter, and (assuming each person is 80kg) that humans will be 0.3% of the mass of the earth, and that people would be stacked up roughly 128km high. Although if we were harvesting all of this energy from the Milky Way, many of the humans would be out servicing those solar arrays, so I suppose it wouldn't be quite as bad as that. And for that matter, there might be other sentient beings in the galaxy that might not want us to take all of the energy of the entire galaxy..
Left as an exercise to the reader would be the calculation as to how long it would take for human populations at this level to consume all of the oxygen on the planet.
Read this one:
I don't have the link, but at one point (in the '90's perhaps) world population was going up at a rate that, if projected out 10,000 years--the length of time that civilization has existed, the weight of the population would be greater than the weight of the entire universe.
In only 9000 years the solid sphere of human flesh would need to be expanding outward at faster than the speed of light.
And, since as velocity increases to near C mass increases to near infinity, and at C, it reaches infinite. At which point, humanity collapses into a black hole under its own mass, and the problem is eliminated.
Perhaps the reason we see no advanced civilizations and many black holes is now explained?
And, than you, ed, for providing me with a smile and a chuckle.
Craig
Edit: as mass contracts into a BH, it emits some part either as energy or cosmic rays; I suggest we would become a "cosmic fart."
Oh, but don't you realize that we would have so many more 'top brains' and exponential innovation?
ericy, that was the entire point!!! No matter how absurdly one wishes to extend growth arguments, the end game is as far ahead as Christ was behind.
Peter Huber's book is a pretty good example of what most people seem to think about energy consumption:
http://www.amazon.com/Bottomless-Well-Twilight-Virtue-Energy/dp/04650311...
The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy
Huber & Mills
Here is a variant of your export land model:
And as we are talking about endless growth, one way of solving the problem is to cut the zeros off from the banknotes:
So what is new, France did it during the sixties shaved a couple of noughts of the French franc,it doesn't affect the value of the note, it doesn't stop deflation or inflation, it just hides the ravages of former inflation.
One has to wonder if the person who wrote was just being extremely sarcastic of if they really are that ignorant >:-(
I once heard a quote, "Intellectuals are people who tell stories to frighten one another." Thus we know well the popularity of horror throughout history...people enjoy a jolly good scare.
It is not so good for children, who sometimes take stories designed to give a nice thrill by way of fear as something to be taken seriously. In one way, we are all children of a sort...
I first read a calculation just such as we have seen above when I was about 10 years old. It was an essay by the great thinker Isaac Asimov. As we can see in a short bibliography of his essays, he had much to say on the subject:
http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/Essays/overpopulation.html
As you can imagine, I was horrified. Many of the essays implied the end was very near...the title of one essay, "Can the world survive 2000?" caused me to do some quick math...yes, the world would be essentially unlivable by the time I was 40 years old, and needless to say, the suffering leading up to the turn of the century would be horrific...in other words, most of my adulthood would be spent in an era of little growth, then no growth, then collapse. Not much to hang you hat on, as folks of an older era would say. Then at 15 years of age, I read Tofflers great work, "Future Shock". (yes, I was a geek in those days, as you and I can now plainly see).
Asimov had made the case that if population growth continued on the same "exponential" growth curve as it has since about 1600 (roughly comparable to the time frame given by Professor Murphy) we could see that in only a few hundred years, the weight of human flesh would be greater than the weight of the Earth, and in only a few thousand (approximately the history of humans as we know them) greater than the weight of the known universe! The implications for energy consumption, food consumption, environmental destruction all followed naturally.
Alvin Toffler in "Future Shock" discussed the growth in...well, EVERYTHING, from the production and consumption of energy, to the growth of paper consumption, the growth in number and titles of published work, the growth in speed of vehicles, on and on and on. In chapters called "The 800th Lifetime" (referring to the number of lifetimes, generation to generation, since mankind became capable of literacy and farming/animal husbandry), and "the accelerative engine", a reference to the way in which developments in any one area/science speed up developments in all sciences, Toffler explained brilliantly that what was changing fastest was change itself. Acceleration feeds acceleration...up to a point. The title of the book is often misunderstood, because Toffler was making the point that at a certain point the whole mechanism flies apart.
Toffler woud make the point in his book "the Third Wave" that despite all other problems, we would never reach that point. Yes, there would be constraints on energy, there would be environmental constraints, there would be issues of human rights and the resistance against abuse of whole populations, but these were not the one principle reason the "exponential growth" would stop. The central reason was this: It would no longer be needed.
Toffler makes the argument that the MASSIVE growth of everything was a product of the Industrial Age, and the industrial age was essentially finished. The infrastructure was built, the world was united by high speed transport, higher speed communication, and confluence of exchangable ideas. The need to consume to build was winding down, since much of what was needed was built. Only wasteful and stupid economics would drive the attempt to build more and more, and that would end soon enough.
Suddenly, I realized that the need to grow anything, and everything, had limits. Let us take an example: Beer. It is given as a statistic that 35 billion gallons of beer are produced yearly(!) Perhaps you thought the production of gasoline was overwhelming, until you read a statistic like this about another "refined" liquid. How much "exponential growth" has occured in the production of beer in the last 2000 plus years? It would have to be an astronomical number, to fill the world with the beer it "needs" (although who can make the case that beer is a need...on the inverse side, who amoung us would make the case that it is not?). Can we assume that the production of beer will continue this astronomical growth rate? How much beer can any individual drink (and I have known people who tried to test those limits)?
Let us take cars...the growth in the usable speed of automobiles has been exponential, especially in the early years. However we have seen the need for speed begin to reach its saturation point. The 30 mile per hour difference between walking speed and the early automobile was revolutionary. The 30 mile per hour difference between 120 and 150 is essentially useless in real terms, and the 30 mile per hour difference between 150 and 180 becomes a wasteful frivolity. We are finding this to be true in much of life: The first 1000 square feet of a home are the difference between poverty on the street and humane living, the second 1000 feet less so, and the third 1000 and more becomes a burden.
Of course, Professor Murphy sees this, being a clever and intuitive fellow, as he ends his essay with a sort of rhetorical "happily ever after" after his little horror story:
"At least the 2.9% energy growth rate we have experienced should ease off as the world saturates with people. But let’s not overlook the key point: continued growth in energy use becomes physically impossible within conceivable timeframes."
Essentially, this makes the essay a morality tale...something like "we cannot keep growing like this forever...oh, by the way, we know we won't, but just so you know, we couldn't if wanted to." True, but who will want to? Why engage in an exercise so pointless? Already, growth in population and energy consumption has stalled in all the most developed nations (we are essentially growing by immigration or "sharing the wealth" (and the work) with poorer citizens of the world.
Exponential growth has always been the strawman, easy to argue against since even to the most modestly educated amoung us, it can be seen not to be possible. Fortunately, with a little thought, it can also be seen to be pointless and not desireable. I can make the same argument about exponential growth I just made about infinite "exponential" beer...that it is idiotic on the face of it.
We went through a historically very brief (when placed in context) period of fantastic growth over the last 400 years because we were building something. Would we assume that a man building a house who went from zero growth in lumber consumption to comparitively astronomical levels in only a year would continue to grow his consumption of lumber at the same pace for the rest of his life? What type of logic would allow such a leap of imagination?
(A wonderful historical example was the growth in cathedral construction in the late Gothic high period...do you realize that if we had continued the growth in cathedral construction at that pace, by now the world would be virtually blanketed in cathedrals? And in only a few more centuries, we would have expended all the wealth the world could deliver in feeding the labor and procuring and moving the stone to build them? Why did we bother to stop building them at the "exponential" growth rate we were building them in the high Gothic period...did we run out of stone?)
I once watched an investment program on TV in which a young investment planner from India, intoxicated by what he found in America, projected that given the then current annual growth rates, the Dow Jones Industrial average would be at "Dow 100,000" sometime in the 21st century. He gave no particulars as to when in the century this would occur, or what erratic path it may take getting there,or how long it could remain there, or what "Dow 100,000" would actually be able to purchase at that time, just that, if you use the recent history of the market as a guide, it ABSOLUTELY would happen.
In a rare display of common sense, the host of the program apologized to the audience for wasting the viewers time.
RC
What permanent/upkeep-free things did we build, exactly? Infrastructure needs maintenance, transport needs energy. Without a lot of labor, energy and materials, I don't think much of the current infrastructure will be usable in a couple of centuries. We also squandered a lot of crude oil capital driving four-wheeled metal status symbols, not the most constructive use of this precious liquid.
Of course growth will not continue ad absurdum, but the problem is that the current economic paradigm requires it. Without economic growth, interest payments on debts will be impossible to sustain. Without a return on investment, what incentive for investment?
Right. Is this post absurd? You bet. Which means indefinite energy growth is absurd. Perhaps many Oil Drum readers are already sold on this point. Then welcome to the minority. Poll most people and you'll find that most implicitly view growth as reliable as a law of nature. My point is an old one, but still not widely internalized: that the actual laws of nature point to the impossibility of growth in the long run.
For those only interested in the here and now, that's what gets us into this mess. I'm an advocate of using our big brains to anticipate the long term future, so we actually have time to adjust course.
I'm guessing we all agree.
Galactic-scale energy, reminds me of other things galactic...
Like the Galaxy Song by Monty Python, the last two lines in particular....
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
I'm afraid we have left our run far too late for that.
the actual laws of nature point to the impossibility of growth in the long run.
Sure - growth in the consumption of physical resources.
But, as noted above, that's really what we'd have to call a straw man - no one's arguing for it. Sure, we can find a few people like Huber who like to go over the top...
I'm happy with this statement. This post is all about the physical limits. Judging from comments, not everyone agrees that even this point is a straw-man—which I admit I find a bit surprising.
Well, when you write a theoretical kind of thought exercise, you get people's imaginations going...
But this is exactly the point to this post. Our whole way of doing business relies on the premise that this is NOT a straw man. The vast majority of society accepts that infinite growth is both realistic and desirable. To even get started on the right course, this premise has to be changed, which will be about as easy as switching a Tea Party activist into a Marxist.
The vast majority of society accepts that infinite growth is both realistic and desirable.
Not really. People just want enough growth to get what they need.
Look at the French: they produce as much GDP per labor hour as citizens of the US, but they choose to work fewer hours...just cause that's a better way of life.
People clearly want far more than what they need, and they will expect whatever growth is takes to get it.
Most people don't NEED cars, yet there is a car for 3 out of every 4 Americans. Hawaii, which almost never gets above 92 F doesn't NEED A/C, yet almost every building has it.
Yes, France is better, but by less than factor of 2 (about 60% as many cars and as much energy use per capita). China, on the other hand, expects a growth rate of 10%.
The graphs show very concisely what a dramatic overshoot we are in. They paint a clear picture of why we can't keep it up. The business as usual that I give examples of above is completely untenable.
Our biggest obstacle is getting people to even see this fact. The best thing about these graphs, I believe, is how clearly they address this issue.
People clearly want far more than what they need
Well, I think we disagree about the difference between want and need.
Most people don't NEED cars, yet there is a car for 3 out of every 4 Americans.
It doesn't matter - the point is that car sales have flattened - they're no longer growing.
The graphs show very concisely what a dramatic overshoot we are in.
No, they really don't.
The business as usual that I give examples of above is completely untenable.
Actually, we can keep making cars (and other things) forever - just recycle them.
There are a lot of unsustainable attributes to human activity - we can fix them, if we choose to.
If we choose to.
You are partly right on this count. I think the need is kind of emotional, when you think you know the future you feel a kind of power (even if it's very difficult to predict the future) which is essentially the same that comes with esoteric knowledge.
Industrial age is not finished, there are around a billion people in China and India alone who have not seen even the dawn of Industrial Age, they want TV's, Cars and Refrigerators and no amount of lecture from Greenpeace will convince them to abandon those dreams, they are going to try very very hard for it mind you and you will see the consequences of it in the coming years if you've already failed to notice what's happening around you.
Ah the stone argument again, what you fail to notice is that the world has actually moved onto things more expensive than stone, for eg steel and concrete and in much larger quantities, so going back to stone would be that much harder.
With all respect, I don't think THATS IT I'M OUT really was pushing the 'Out of Stone' point in any way, but saying instead that even projecting such things as the problem isn't a worthy debate to begin with. This is, in my mind an intellectual 'Sin of Excessive Extrapolation' into which these arguments so often fall.
There IS surely still momentum for growth in China and your India, to be sure, and a hearty desire for 'More of the same' in Europe, Japan and the States.. but only just as there is still forward momentum to a flying dog who has not yet reached the end of his chain. I don't mean any insult by the comparison to dogs, but simply to say that 'there's what we wish for, what we've known, and what is possible'... and we, as hairs on this dog have very little chance of really gauging the remaining length of chain, or knowing quite what will happen when the links come up tight.. but trying to calculate the dog's full theoretical trajectory is maybe not the best use of our calculators at this point. We'll never get that far.
Bob
"Only wasteful and stupid economics would drive the attempt to build more and more, and that would end soon enough."
But that is just the problem--the economic system continues even after it has gone passed being useful to almost anyone and become lethal to pretty much everyone.
This sort of thing is valuable because it utterly dispels the kind of Star Trek optimism about the future that many people have.
Exponential growth can't go on for long at the same rate
no matter the technology...
Well.... What about if you had a TARDIS, then earth's past and future and alternate possibilities might be colonized and exploited for resources.
NOW OPENING: Cretaceous Park Condos
Yeah, Dr. Who kicks Star Trek's butt.
Why? We don't need exponential growth to go Star Trek.
I never said that exponential growth is prerequisite to 'go Star Trek'. But exponential growth would certainly impose scarcity on even a Star Trek level society. Such scarcity is barely shown ( I'm thinking of Harry Mudd as showing some evidence of scarcity ). Conflicts with other races are shown, but not too much scarcity within the Federation. Not even any money changing hands in TNG.
There would have to be megadeath upon gigadeath in the Federation ( maybe some space germs or genocidal space wars we never hear of ), or highly regulated demand ( scarcity of rights ) for this to work.
I probably don't understand your original comment then. But it doesn't matter. To go Star Trek, we need to grow enough to go Star Trek.
Yes, but the thing is.... I've been loong convinced that essentially Federation in the Star Trek universe shows some form of communist society at work. There are VERY clear indications of resource allocations by some technical committees, inidividuals seem to have access to all sorts of free health and food services, and so on. Perhaps not communism of the general Marxist type, but some sort of communism nonetheless.
Of course, I have become quite convinced over the past few years that some sort of communism will be required to get us out of this mess. Or rather to rephrase this: I do not believe there is a solution and I am convinced that the shit will hit the fan regardless, because "people" just don't get it. But, IF THERE WERE some solution, it would require some sort of communism. Not that I think there is a solution. Did I mention that? I believe that we're so far in the shithole we might as well aim for Utopia, for all the good it will do us.
Whatever emerges to limit human growth will have to be in the misery/death/degradation column because it has to satisfy the goal of limiting human beings from doing what they would like to do to the point that their population stabilizes or hopefully falls.
Some form of communism may indeed emerge to fit the bill. Or one of many other possibilities.
Wasn't Kirk quite amused by the whole idea of money, when they time traveled back to San Francisco?
Something like that. But the writers failed to explain why work was getting done when there was no reason for anyone to do any. Or why anyone would ever serve under captains who were less illustrious than Kirk. Or serve at all, since they could fulfill themselves to their hearts' content for free. Yup, even in a completely fictional universe entirely of their own creation, the most wishfully addled Hollywood types couldn't get communism to work.
Really?
You wouldn't do anything at all if not paid?
I'd say all of the contributors to TOD (and Wikipedia, etc, etc) have a different philosophy of life.
Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear enough. I was referring to "work" in its traditional connotation of toil. Scut-work like crewing and offloading the fictional "garbage scows", say, rather than the sort of stuff that someone in a modern developed country might have the luxury of pursuing as a fulfilling hobby.
I'd figure that many folks in the past (to say nothing of poorer parts of the world now) would have jumped at having enough leisure to be Wikipedia contributors, community musicians, etc., rather than having to toil mindlessly nearly all the time. Most likely they would not exactly have thought of the leisure activities as "work".
Well, I'd guess that the screenwriters who wrote those lines were thinking that the world of Star Trek didn't have much toil.
OTOH, I've notices a lot of toil in my viewing of the various ST series. Which is something that always seemed inconsistent to me: that work really ought to be eliminated by the kind of tech we see: food replication, very cheap energy, strong AI, etc, etc.
Just goes to show: it's very hard to create a realistic and consistent future universe.
As just one example: why haven't the droids taken over the Star Wars universe??
I agree, the Federation is likely quite socialist/communist. However, they don't demonstrate how it can work. In the real world, it seems it doesn't, you know?
I'm quite convinced of the opposite - that freer economies are required to get us out of this mess. Any market failure fixes should be as simple and as non-intrusive as possible.
I don't recall from Star Trek they ever mentioning HOW the federation was ruled. Also the use of the term "Federation" indictes they where NOT comunist. Commies like to centralize power, and federalism don't go well with that.
I also doubt free market can ever get us out of this mess. Actually, it got us into it in the first place. To get out of it we need to do a lot of things no one want to, and free market economy is based on selling stuff peoplerealy want to buy. Population reduction, less travel and spending, simplier life style... HARD things to sell.
In my own fantasy/sci-fi world (I write some stuff from time to time) scientists figure out in the begining of the industrial revolution that these things are going to happen. So they set up a 200 year plan, and invent Star Trek type of technologies in time, and finaly leave their planet behind and goes to space(so it ends up beeing enherited by the Stone Trolls). On our planet in the real world, it is now to late to do that.
No so. First, communist countries like to call themselves stuff they're not, like "democratic". Second, The Soviet Union was a merger of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
It does manage population reduction quite well. Even better if you don't subsidize kindergartens or give hand-outs for parenting and such. For the other stuff, I think the market economy can create swift acceptance. I.e. in the face of increased scarcity, the market will always balance supply and demand by the way of price, and with a minimum of education, people will accept that more or less as the weather - not much anyone can do anything about. However, to try to introduce scarcity a bit beforehand is hard, politically, although it can be done, as in European gas taxes.
I enjoyed this post.
I doubt that the technophiles are listening though. They probably will refer to their science fiction that they expect to come to fruition and attempt to back it up with "economics" worm-holes and dilithium crystals.
http://www.aspousa.org/index.php/2011/07/americans-select-dilithium-crys...
Well, since we're in the mode of ridiculous exaggeration, there are lots and lots of galaxies...
I believe that the e factor of going for all of the energy in the known universe would add another 1,100 years, so... enjoy! (based on there are about as many galaxies in the KU as there are stars in the Milky Way.
Craig
Well I think the whole point of this post was to go to absurd lengths and kill all doubt for the skeptics(if there are any left on TOD) so kind of hard to understand the comments calling this absurd.
Great article, thanks! Looking forward to part 2.
Wow, he just used up the entire energy of the universe, what comes next. Ahhah, foolish me , the alternative universes of course. For me, clearly too much Dr. Who.
You say it is absurd using some charts and not looking at how to do it.
Here I summarize some of how to do it.
Getting to Kardashev level two will be easy.
If we end up with a lazy Kardashev level two. Other solar systems make close (within about one light year) passes of our solar system every million years or so.
If humanity chooses to stop or slow growth at Kardashev level two that will a choice for them at that time.
I have written plenty of achieving the level of about kardashev 1 and then 2.
Those are the usual terms for
all solar energy for one planet - Kardashev level 1
all solar energy from one star - kardashev level 2
So getting closer or fully up to Kardashev level 1.
Factory mass produced nuclear fission with deep burn closed fuel cycle and accessing the uranium and thorium in the ocean.
A society using current energy could last 5 billion years at current energy levels. If you are earthbound the sun expands into a red giant at that point and if you were stuck with crappy technology then all of humanity is done at that point. Plenty of other astronomical bad stuff can happen over the course of a billion years like getting hit with a big asteroid. So the static technology plan is always hosed on those time scales.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/how-long-can-uranium-last-for-nuclear.html
A society using 100 times our current energy could last millions of years.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/07/deep-burn-and-seriously-scaling-nuclear...
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/01/what-would-it-take-for-yottawatt.html
A far better architecture for capturing the solar energy that hits the earth is the Hall weather machine.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/10/scaling-up-todays-technology-towards-j....
The Hall Weather Machine is a thin global cloud consisting of small transparent balloons that can be thought of as a programmable and reversible greenhouse gas because it shades or reflects the amount of sunlight that hits the upper stratosphere. These balloons are each between a millimeter and a centimeter in diameter, made of a few-nanometer thick diamondoid membrane. Each balloon is filled with hydrogen to enable it to float at an altitude of 60,000 to 100,000 feet, high above the clouds. It is bisected by an adjustable sheet, and also includes solar cells, a small computer, a GPS receiver to keep track of its location, and an actuator to occasionally (and relatively slowly) move the bisecting membrane between vertical and horizontal orientations. Just like with a regular high-altitude balloon, the heavier control and energy storage systems would be on the bottom of the balloon to automatically set the vertical axis without requiring any energy. The balloon would also have a water vapor/hydrogen generator system for altitude control, giving it the same directional navigation properties that an ordinary hot-air balloon has when it changes altitudes to take advantage of different wind directions at different altitudes.
By controlling a tenth of one percent of solar radiation is enough to force global climate in any direction we want. One percent is enough to change regional climate, and ten percent is enough for serious weather control.
The surface are of the earth is 510 trillion square meters.
So getting to 0.1% coverage is 510 billion square meters.
There is mylar that is 2 microns thick and weighs about 2.4 grams per square meter. Office Paper is usually 80 grams per square meter.
There is plastic sheeting with 0.3-0.9 micron thickness and weights of 0.54 to 1.2 grams per square meter.
US plastic film demand was expected to be about 7.3 million tons in 2012
So if you could achieve large scale production (equal to 1% of total US plastic film production in 2012) of 1 gram per square meter balloon sheeting with a diamond surface treatment and the other parts of the system there would be 73,000 tons of weather machine produced. This would cover 73 billion square meters. In about 8 years, one would be able to produce a 1% coverage Hall Weather Machine.
The production system would be a more advanced version of bubble wrap production. Each bubble would be functionalized and perhaps laser cut into separate balloons. Rapid printable electronics would probably be the best way to get the solar cell and GPS components into the bubble/balloon. The printable electronics would need to be scanned onto the surface of the sheet, before the top layer is attached.
===
With better than todays nanotechnology one could easily produce a more advanced version of the hall weather machine. It is a weather machine and a means to use not that much material to get to Kardashev level one.
Mark I and Mark II weather machines.
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=2922
Weather machine Mark I - many small aerostats—a hydrogen balloon—at a guess an optimal size is somewhere between a millimeter and a centimeter in diameter that have a continuous layer in the stratosphere. Each aerostat contains a mirror, and also a control unit consisting of a radio receiver, computer, and GPS receiver. About 100 billion tonnes of material with regular technology and 10 million tons with more advanced nanotechnology.
Once you are approaching kardashev level one or even at ten times the current world economy then funding a true space industry in the solar system is trivial
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/12/nanotechnology-for-climate-control-and....
If your nanotechnology is at this level then making spaceships and sending nanofactories to Venus and asteroids would be relatively simple. It would be about twenty million tons of material for the mirror bubbles and converters for each earth scale energy system. Then the electricity has to be transmitted and distributed to where it needs to be used (a super-grid which could be wireless)
Two billion of those systems turns humanity into a Kardashev Type II civilization.
Producing large bubbles in space is something that looks very doable.
The bubbles would be set up to focus solar energy to make the collection of solar power easier.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/04/possibly-last-niac-studies-are-being.html
The most interesting Nasa Institute Advanced Concepts (NIAC) study released from the March 2007 meeting is Devon Crowe of PSI corporation for making large space structures from bubbles that are made rigid using metals or UV curing.
A single bubble can be 1 meter in earth gravity, 100 kilometer in low earth orbit or 1000 kilometers in deep space. Foams made of many bubbles could be far larger in size.
Metal can be evaporated to coat the inside of the bubble for reflective sails and telescopes.
I also think that GDP growth will get faster. So we will get to (or need to get to) Kardashev level one and level two far sooner than your 2.3% projection.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/12/world-economic-trends-through-2100-and....
Surrounding a star is called a Dyson Sphere after Freeman Dyson the physicist.
dyson swarms, dyson bubbles, dyson shells, Submerged Dyson Spheres, etc...
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/04/dyson-swarms-and-dyson-spheres.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/04/dyson-bubbles-statites-molecular.html
Robert Kennedy quote - Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not
So, we will actually build "The Ring"?
Craig
A 4 mm thick solid sphere around the sun would collapse to a disk, whose final conformation would depend on the material and the initial angular momentum.
There would be many satellites in a dyson swarm. it would not be solid
The OP didn't propose a Dyson swarm.
The OP proposed a physical impossibility.
You are right the OP proposals were all bad ideas or impossible.
Wich was the point; to show that eternal growth requieres impossible solutions.
It is all about population growth and nature will stop it using starvation, disease and pollution and we will help with war. This is evolution in action.
No, it is stopping by urbanization and female education.
These have, indeed, been major forces in lowering the rate of population so far.
Going forward, it is hard to see how, in the not-too-distant future, much of MENA and South Asia will avoid the fate of the current horn of Africa.
Enormous population pressures are smacking straight into resource constraints--especially oil and water--and into catastrophic (for these regions) climate change.
We'll see. With good governance, I don't think there is much of a problem. Good governance, however, is doubtful.
"Good governance, however, is doubtful."
You can say that again, brother.
All too sad, how much misery could be avoided with a little enlightened policy.
The MENA and South Asia deserve the very best governments they can get.
But even the very best governments may find it difficult to continue to feed a population that is growing rapidly, is going to keep growing rapidly just from demographic inertia (large percentage of the population below 20), and where there is vanishingly small arable land, and a vanishing amount of oil or other local resources to trade for food.
Maybe, as you say, they could get genius governments that will invest in just the right exportable technologies and renewable energy sources. I hope that this happens. But as you say, it is rather, 'doubtful' more's the pity.
'
This is kind've fun, but misleading. It suggests that very long-term growth in energy consumption/production is a tenet of mainstream economics. This is highly unrealistic.
1) goods production levels off in a form of the logistics curve. For example, US car sales (cars & light vehicles) plateaued in the 1970's. Appliance and other durable goods have plateaued in the the same way. Like the demographic transition for population growth, resource consumption does not show an infinite exponential pattern. Instead, it follows an S-curve, levelling off at some point. We have more than enough resources to allow that, though I'm not optimistic about preventing some of the terrible consequences of our neglect of the environment, like species extinction and climate change.
2) growth in energy consumption per unit of hard goods could be eliminated permanently - energy efficiency growth could continue at the rate of growth of goods production for as long as needed for the plateau in point 1. Energy efficiency isn't a priority in a low-energy cost environment. Cars could run entirely on ambient solar power, if necessary (yes, I know, that would be inconvenient - don't get distracted by that - it's a theoretical point which is addressing a very theoretical Original Post). Homes can be made zero-energy.
3) goods production can flatten, while services continue to grow indefinitely.
The fact is that wind, solar and nuclear can provide far more energy than we'll ever need.
Once goods production flattens (we seem to agree that it will or must), do you think services can really grow indefinitely? Growth is a nasty friend, in the end: service would have to comprise essentially the entire economy, which is difficult to pull off without an anchor chain to physical resources. The boat can rise higher with the tide, but the anchor chain is only so long.
The second part of this story (stay tuned for next week) addresses this aspect. Once we are on board that physical resources cannot grow forever, does that impose a restriction for economic activity in general in the long run?
do you think services can really grow indefinitely?
Well, until we had all of the services we needed. Knowledge workers like doctor and programmers mostly need a solar powered laptop.
in the end: service would have to comprise essentially the entire economy
On a percentable basis, perhaps, but not on an absolute basis. Everyone would continue to have the same level of goods as they had when production plateaued, and that would work just fine.
Think of cars: production levelled off because demand was satisfied. Consumers were happy. There was no deprivation.
Once we are on board that physical resources cannot grow forever, does that impose a restriction for economic activity in general in the long run?
Not at all. Again, we only need a certain level of goods - once we have them, we're fine. Then growth continues for those services we need more of: healthcare, engineering, education, arts, etc.
Services would ultimately be limited by human perceptual bandwidth. People would not buy services which they can no longer perceive (although certain high-end audio stores are a limited counter-example).
Yes, I imagine service growth would eventually end.
A good problem to have.
Is the delivery of services subject to productivity gains?
I think the price of services is ultimately included in the price of goods.
Is it even possible to have a service only economy?
Is the delivery of services subject to productivity gains?
Sure. A lawyer can spend 4 hours drafting a brief with a pencil, or 2 with a word processor, or 1 with software with canned phrases and automated bibliography. He or she can spend an hour presenting a motion in open court, or 5 minutes filing it online. A doctor can handwrite a radiology report, or word process it, or dictate it into software that automatically transcribes it.
I think the price of services is ultimately included in the price of goods.
Healthcare is partially a corporate cost in the US, but not anywhere else in the world. How is education included in the price of goods?
Is it even possible to have a service only economy?
No - no one is suggesting that .
I think a report could justifiably be called a good rather than a service. In fact I think the very definition of service implies a productivity factor of 1. Unfortunately goods and services are sometime too mixed to separate.
I think a report could justifiably be called a good rather than a service.
hmmmm. A paper or electronic report is a good?? Seems like an information thing to me. That's not a hard good - it's an intangible service.
very definition of service implies a productivity factor of 1
? Could you expand on that?
Nick... I think what you are describing is a paradigm shift? no.
you are talking about optimizing consumption and economic management to some boundary?
I think so.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewables; taxing mineral consumption instead of subsidizing it to reduce mining and increase recycling; moving from consumerism to quality of life; etc, etc.
Pretty conservative stuff on TOD, I hope.
"Replacing fossil fuels with renewables; taxing mineral consumption instead of subsidizing it to reduce mining and increase recycling; moving from consumerism to quality of life; etc, etc."
These and more are all good and necessary.
Why insist on calling it 'growth'?
Would you find it exiting and thrilling if your doctor declared that there was a growth on your lung?
If you have kids or nieces or nephews, do you really wish for them eternal growth? Wouldn't you be wishing them, then, to become monsters (essentially exactly what the global economy has become)?
Why insist on calling it 'growth'?
Because that's what most people call it. That's what economists call it.
Growth is generally considered to mean "improvement in our daily lives". Why fight that? Why tell people their lives have to get worse, if it isn't true? That will just destroy any hope of communicating to them that we need to make changes in the way we do things.
Steppenwolf - Monster
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk3sURDS4IA
Then the argument if there is one.... is how you get there?
consumption and population will adjust to physical boundary conditions...that's going to happen one way or the other? The END no returns
the impression I get from your POV is that this condition will be reached by an almost transparent process where perceived growth in some socio-psychological sense seems uninterrupted
A seamless BAU meld into this new paradigm
Why not? A carbon tax would fix most of it seamlessly.
consumption and population will adjust to physical boundary conditions
Not really. Again, look at vehicle, appliance and home sales in the US: they peaked and plateaued. That's what happens in any affluent society - people get enough. Same thing with population - google "Demographic Transition".
this condition will be reached by an almost transparent process
I think that's happening in Europe. In the US, not so much - legacy industries are fighting tooth and nail. And, I think that's understandable, if lamentable - if you're an expert on ICE engines, you could lose your livelihood in the transition to EVs.
so what you are saying is that population/consumption will adjust to some perceived desirable zietgiest [way] before physical constraints intercede?
because?
thinking about that is interesting because its means that BY LUCK we will adjust ahead of the curve because the limits on growth will be perceptual and this percived level is BY LUCK inside the physical boundary
what if the level of desirable affluence was outside of the physical boundary... I would have thought a OECD lifestyle applied globally is just that?
alternatively society has some innate physical limit detector which kicks in.... what the market?
Yes, humanity has been enormously lucky.
Yes, an OECD lifestyle with no changes at all is indeed outside the physical boundary. For instance, there isn't enough oil to power that many ICE's. On the other hand, that's not really a problem: there's more than enough wind power to drive that many electric vehicles. And, luckily, equivalent EVs are actually more fun to drive than ICE's.
How do we foresee the need for such substitution? Well, heck in part through the efforts of things like TOD!
The best is: we don't really need to forsee it. This is the kind of thing the invisible hand sorts out along the way.
That hand depends on the good judgement of entrepreneurs, managers and investors to find opportunities to make money. They often depend for that on scouts like us.
I don't think so. I think they mostly react to current market parameters. Few can bear the cost of being incorrectly timed with their projects, and the few that can probably doesn't listen to doomer cultists.
they mostly react to current market parameters.
Ah, but what influences the current market parameters? I'd say that the very large increase in interest in oil futures in 2005-2011 had a lot to do with PO theory.
in that case why aren't they buying something else?
They are: US industrial/commercial oil products consumption fell by 13% from last year to this.
Corporations respond pretty strongly to price signals.
yeah but thats the US.... you see the problem
Yes, some countries keep prices low, and so they consume much more than is optimal. They hurt themselves as much or more than anyone else.
That includes the US of course, but at least in the US prices can rise with world prices.
It's unfortunate that the boundaries are the worst place to be, top and bottom.
Obesity levels in America are stabilising but that isn't exactly great considering where they have stabilised.
Have you seen the amount of waste that comes out of one hospital in one day? It is a lot more than a doctor with a laptop.
Much of the waste you're thinking of is related to the activities of daily living: food, etc. That consumption would take place wherever the patient was.
Arguably some of health care is specialized goods, not services: drugs, medical devices and some treatments. We could spend some time analyzing that, but I'd say the discussion above about goods applies to them: they don't take much energy to manufacture, and their volume is limited - most of healthcare costs are highly skilled services by doctors, nurses, etc.
Radiology requires some equipment, but that equipment is durable. It doesn't grow so much as change: CT and MRI develop increased speed, resolution, etc. Actually, radiology consumes a lot fewer resources than it did 40 years ago, as it converted from silver-based film to digital imaging.
This, of course, raises a larger question: don't services require a base of hard goods to operate?
Basically.....no. Education requires only people and an IT infrastructure. The same applies to most services.
You might ask - doesn't IT require energy?
Sure, but not much in the grand scheme of things, and PC/tablet/smart phone/server energy consumption are declining even as their functionality increase. Infrastructure investment peaks and then declines - highways, churches, homes, etc. That's why we saw a railroad bubble in the 1880's, an electrical generation bubble in the 1920's, and an internet bubble in the 1990's. IT infrastructure has already peaked and leveled off. See the very good post above which talks about the cathedral building bubble in the middle ages.
And what would that waste stream be if the materials were not disposable?
It used to be material was sent to an autoclave and reused.
The surfaces were scrubbed with hot water and soap (sometimes spiked with bleach or ammonia) Sheets were boiled/steamed.
As far as I know no one has done an energy comparison of the old way VS the embedded energy in the new disposable way.
Autoclaving works.
Sheets are still re-used in hospitals.
You don't really want respiratory therapy tubing re-used, though I've seen it...
Unfortunately a share of this waste comes from inefficiency. Including expensive reusable items bought, used once, thrown away, and replaced. I know because for a short while I have been on "the inside" and saw shocking wastes. Tax payers money, you know.
I think SuperLuminalWallOfMeat would be a good handle to have on a blog...
Actually, growth in goods production could continue indefinitely, if desired: the value of goods is a function of both quantity and quality. For instance, the US car industry is still growing in inflation adjusted dollar terms because they keep adding features: anti-lock brakes, electronic stability control, low-energy tires, etc, etc.
No, growth in goods production cannot continue indefinitely. Material acquisition and product development/construction depends upon availability of excess energy. If we agree that energy production will peak, and EROEI will peak even sooner, then it logically follows that resource production must peak along with it. This is not on the scale of hundreds of years of growth proposed in this essay - decades is much more likely. This idea is directly linked with Greer's salvage industrialism society and Gail's reduced discretionary income hypothesis.
If we agree that energy production will peak, and EROEI will peak
1) that's not the thesis of the Original Post, and
2) we don't agree on that. Wind, solar, nuclear, etc can and very likely will provide as much energy as we need. Wind in particular is scalable, affordable, high E-ROI, etc.
Nick,
As I have previously brought up in conversation, this assumption is clearly wrong...
It could only be true if we had unlimited resources to make it happen. The sheer size of the build-out needed is way beyond current capabilities. If the entire world were to have an average energy use of 1/3 that of the US population on a per head basis, then we would need to build ~670 1000MW nuclear reactors per year over 40 years to get there. Or perhaps 10,500 sqkm of solar PV per year over 40 years, or perhaps 634,000 3MW wind turbines per year over 40 years.
The above assumes that total energy use is ~200,000 TWh per year, which it will be in 2020 at current rates of growth, and then rises no further.
It could only be true if we had unlimited resources to make it happen. The sheer size of the build-out needed is way beyond current capabilities.
Nah. FF plants can be replaced as they wear out, and that won't cost much more. New coal is almost as expensive to build as wind, and of course wind doesn't have fuel costs.
200,000 TWh per year
That's 23TW. That's way too high. Current world electrical consumption is about 1.9TW, and overall electrical generation needed to replace all world energy consumption might be about 4-5TW.
Prices are not static, they are dynamic. Any cost you cite is a current estimate. Imagine a conversation in 2002 saying, well, we can do this because oil is only $20 per barrel.
wind has a very high E-ROI. Higher oil prices don't change the cost of wind substantially.
Nick,
When talking energy consumption, I am taalking in TWh, (Tera Watt hours). When people talk TW (Tera Watts) they are usually talking capacity, please do not confuse the two.
Current world energy use was ~143,800 TWh in 2008, according to the IEA. You can see it here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
Simple maths of oil use also tells the number is high. 88,000,000 bbl X 365 days X 1700 KWh/bbl = ~54,000 TWh.
Your numbers are out by large factors, hence why your arguments about how possible renewables will save us.
Please do the math to see for yourself.
I am taalking in TWh, (Tera Watt hours).
Divide by 8,760 hours to get average TW.
You're using primary energy - you have to divide that by about 4.
Nick,
"Divide by 8,760 hours to get average TW."
100% capacity. Which type of electricity production gets that? I'm afraid I only used the common known capacity factors for solar, wind and nuclear.
"You're using primary energy - you have to divide that by about 4."
Yes, there will never be any waste of electrical energy produced? /sarc off
Hide_away,
Nick was correctly quoting the average energy consumption (TW), this has nothing to do with capacity factors of different energy sources.
Primary energy in oil has losses at refining into gasoline and much lower efficiency when used by ICE in small cars and light trucks (about 20%), compared to about 80% efficiency of EV's using electricity(mainly losses in charging batteries). EV's and hybrids have additional efficiencies by recovering some energy normally lost in braking, so overall use about X5 less energy than most ICE vehicles using oil derived energy.
Oil is used in more than the lightest smallest vehicles, it is also used in large trucks and tractors. The extra weight of the batteries will reduce the efficiency. The same goes for longer distance small vehicles. The reason the current crop of EV have such a short range is that they rapidly lose efficiency (and cost too much) if they are given extra range.
Electricity also has losses from generation to final use, especially if it is in the form of millions of wind turbines scattered all over the shop, with less than ideal cableing, combined with step ups and down in voltage.
Even if you cut down by a factor of 3 the number of wind turbines, solar, or nuclear plants needed, the resources needed that number is still huge and not likely in a world of diminishing FF.
The extra weight of the batteries will reduce the efficiency.
Not really. Regenerative braking greatly reduces the importance of mass. With EVs aerodynamics become most important.
Electricity also has losses from generation to final use
That applies to both FF and renewable power, and is only about 7%.
the resources needed that number is still huge
It only seems that way - the world energy sector is huge, and so are the annual investments needed, whether you use FF or renewable power.
"Regenerative braking greatly reduces the importance of mass."
Actually, no. Every kilogram of mass that is slowed down or prevented from running downhill had to be accelerated from rest or driven uphill in the first place.
If you are driving economically you would do very little braking. Most of the energy dissipation due to mass is through flexing of the tyres. So regeneration makes little difference. More mass always imposes a fuel penalty.
Every kilogram of mass that is slowed down or prevented from running downhill had to be accelerated
Actually, no. The energy used for acceleration doesn't matter if it's recaptured during braking.
If you are driving economically you would do very little braking.
Not in city driving. Careful driving can reduce braking, but I think you'll find that if you take that too far that you'll have enraged drivers behind you.
Most of the energy dissipation due to mass is through flexing of the tyres.
Most of the energy dissipation due to mass in conventional/ICE vehicles is due to the energy lost in braking - that's why you'll see lower MPG figures for city driving. It's true that more mass causes more tyre flexing, but that's not the primary problem.
In EVs aerodynamics become the largest energy loss by a good margin: that's why you'll see better MPG figures for city driving. Of course, high-efficiency tyres and low-friction electric drive trains help with that.
Nick,
It is interesting to note how you refer to "city driving" with regenerative braking, yet nowhere in my original post of heavy vehicles (trucks and tractors) and long distance was "city driving" mentioned. Where I live in a food producing area 200km from the nearest 1m+ metropolitan area, regenerative braking would be effectively useless.
The following words are the ones that really show how we cannot move easily over to a renewable world as you so often suggest, Copper, Lithium, Aluminium, Glass, Concrete, Steel, Tellurium, Silver etc. All of these would have to have a massive increase in output to make an alternative to current FF use possible. The fact is that to increase the output of those resources would take a lot more energy in developing decreasing ore percentage grades.
It ends up being a catch 22. We need to spend a lot more energy developing renewables over a long period of time, to just stand still. This would mean robbing many other areas of the economy of their energy uses, to satisfy growth in renewables. If other areas of the economy cannot function properly, pretty soon there is a contraction, which leads to less money for investment, which leads to less spent on renewables.
It is interesting to note how you refer to "city driving" with regenerative braking, yet nowhere in my original post of heavy vehicles (trucks and tractors) and long distance was "city driving" mentioned.
Here's what you said: "Oil is used in more than the lightest smallest vehicles, it is also used in large trucks and tractors." I take that to mean that you want to look at the overall picture, including both small and large vehicles. The fact is that about 50% of oil consumption in the US is for light vehicles, and the amount used by heavy vehicles is perhaps 15-20% of overall oil consumption.
The original reason we started talking about regenerative braking is to analyze the difference between primary energy and electricity. The fact is that whether we're talking about small or large vehicles, an EV will use 20-33% as many joules in the form of electricity as an ICE will use in the form of liquid fuel.
Copper, Lithium, Aluminium, Glass, Concrete, Steel, Tellurium, Silver etc. All of these would have to have a massive increase in output to make an alternative to current FF use possible.
Have you actually looked at the volumes needed, and the substitutions available?
The volumes of glass needed are tiny. The volumes of aluminium, concrete, and steel are small in the world economy. Tellerium supplies are an open question, but CdTe thin film solar is just one of many forms of PV - if it doesn't scale, something else will. Similarly, there are a lot of substitutes for silver in PV. Lithium is abundant, and in any case there are many other battery chemistries available - lithium just happens to be the most convenient and fashionable. Copper is the item you mentioned that is both important and that does seem to be peaking, but it has substitutes for most of it's applications and can be recycled.
We need to spend a lot more energy developing renewables over a long period of time, to just stand still.
Not really. Wind power has a very high E-ROI, which means that it takes little energy to build. EVs take relatively little energy to manufacture - not much more than ICE vehicles, even including the battery.
No stop signs?
Wind has limited locations, just like Fission.
Most places that lack sun lack human population density.
Wind has limited locations
Sure. Countries of the world might have to...cooperate a little. Trade with each other. stuff like that.
And wind is more evenly distributed than fossil fuels.
Why would this be a problem? A reactor cost perhaps $4 billion (much cheaper in such volumes, of course), times 670, would be $2.7 trillion. The world GDP is, if I remember correctly, somewhere around $60 trillion (and your assumption of 1/3 of US energy use would imply a much higher world GDP). Less than 5% of production for collecting energy. No problem.
The world has a total of about 440 reactors. Where do you think the expertise, equipment, uranium etc is going to come from to build (to completion) 670 per year. Do you really think they would only cost $4b to build when every man and his dog are trying to build them?
Do you really think that it would be plain sailing getting nukes built after Fukushima?
I live in the real world, I see a big problem.
It will have to be ramped. It will have to be breeders.
As I said, less. Much less.
Not if we don't need them.
Wind power cost approximately one million/megawatt installed so if the 4 billion you are talking about to built most likely a one giga/watt atomic power station was spent building wind turbines then you would have 4giga/watts of power. With a utilisation of approximately 33% which is normal for the new turbines then you would have about third more bang for your buck when it comes to continuous power production. With the infrastructure for building them in place, I see no problems in this amount of power production up and running in less than five years instead of ten to fifteen years for an atomic power station. Vestas estimates that that the energy costs to build a wind turbine is approximately, everything included around 80mega/watt/hours say a couple of weeks and it has paid back its energy input costs. Do we need any more arguments for and against, it seem to me that wind wins hands down.
YM,
"With a utilisation of approximately 33% which is normal for the new turbines"
Do they use the best sites first, or do they save them for later? My assumption is that the capacity factor will go down as more are built. At 33% you still need 570,000 per year.
From the Vestas web site....
They install 3,000 a year, and they are not all the big ones. Do you really think it is that easy to set up the infrastructure to build your 570,000 per year or my 600,000 of the big ones?
Do you have a reference for this? I would like to follow it up, as it does sound promising.
The lifecycle number above is incorrect.
For accurate life-cycle (EROEI) estimates you can look at the files at the bottom of the Vestas LCA page.
Particularly, there's a very detailed analysis for the V112.
Of course, since the energy extracted from the wind scales with the wind-speed as
~V3, a small difference in the wind conditions of the site will result in much faster/shorter payback. So it's common to have a site with 50% higher windspeeds, producing 300% more energy!As a rule of thumb, on a good site you can see energy payback in 6-10months. (including all the energy used for mining, smelting, transport, assembly, construction, service and dismanteling). Currently the Fossil Fuel content of that energy mimics the world energy mix. Quite simply because steel is bought wholesale on the steel market, and a lot of it is produced in countries using coal. Transport is mostly oil based, but a lot of the assembly is done in renewable energy powered factories/offices.
Do they use the best sites first, or do they save them for later?
Depends on the area - in the US capacity factors for newer wind farms are higher than for old ones. That's because there are far more good locations than have been used, and tech is improving.
The "best" sites right now are where costs are low, not just where the wind blows the most. Proximity to load and availability of transmission has a lot to do with that. More generation can pay for more transmission, meaning better wind sites will be available. There are immense amounts of better wind available given sufficinet transmission.
Tmurphy,
Once goods production flattens (we seem to agree that it will or must), do you think services can really grow indefinitely?
I am sure you will expand on this in part2, but I am not sure we can agree that goods production will flatten (if you mean stop growing) assuming no population growth!
A good example, virtually all electronic goods continue to provide more "value" and less "materials". A lot of the increased value is due to software improvements, and technology improvements. This improvement is not fully reflected in GDP growth but you only have to look at a 15 year old mobile phone or computer or wrist watch to see that we can have improvements in "wealth" without using more "materials". Some of this increased wealth is hidden because of the dramatic decrease in prices of these items which are not fully reflected in GDP adjustments.
When we look at services again we can see a dramatic improvement. There is a good reason why most of us no longer bake our own bread, or butcher animals, someone else can do this faster, better and using less resources(energy). The other improvement in services has come from automation, replacing the maid or housewife with dishwashers, cloths washers, microwaves etc. My mother washed(boiled) cloths in a heated copper tub with a hand ringer which I am sure used a lot more time, water and energy than my energy efficient front load machine. Today the equivalent maids and housewives provide more valuable services by working in the wage economy, even if some are selling or manufacturing or perhaps recycling the metals from home appliances.
I'm not sure I understand this "without using more materials". As far as I can see, 15 years ago ...
Npeople had mobiles. These have been mostly landfiled, (with typically a 2-5% fraction being recycled). NowN e^t/Tpeople have mobile phones, ... which will end up mostly in the landfill. I fail to see the "without using more materials" part. If you replace something with something new, you need more materials. If more people want this new stuff, then the net effect is more materials.Does anybody have numbers to document a decrease in material throughput in any western society? [with some LCA flavour to make it half-fair].
Otherwise, to those that argue that once roads and houses are built the growth of energy will stop ... are you sure you wouldn't want a yacht? A flying car? come on!! a little trip to the moon? Wants are infinite and won't stop just because we have built infrastructure.
Does anybody have numbers to document a decrease in material throughput
US light vehicle and major household appliance sales have peaked and leveled out, despite falling prices (after inflation adjustment). US light vehicles are 99% recycled.
Massagran
If you replace something with something new, you need more materials.
Early mobile phones contained about X10 the materials of present phones, and could only send and receive voice. Same for computers. To provide the worlds population with a new phone every 2 years now will use a lot less resources than doing that 15 years ago.
Wants are infinite and won't stop just because we have built infrastructure.
Most people stop eating and drinking when full, you can only be driving or sailing in one vehicle at a time, are you suggesting that people will accumulate homes and vehicles exponentially? or is it more likely most will live in the family home they inherit that has been in the family for 200 years, will have a few luxury vehicles rather than 100 SUVs that would be difficult to maintain. In a stable population most wealth will be passed on without dividing amongst many siblings. There wont be many new rich, all will have grown up with family wealth(by our standards).
@Nick,
I have worked with industrial recycling, and I am skeptic about the figure.
If you say that 99% of the metal from recycled cars is recovered I could believe it (note that mixing metals degrades their quality and a couple of % in weight of the recycled metal will end up taken away from the foundry mixture as slags and impurities that go to landfill).
The composition of vehicles incorporates more and more plastics, foams and composites which either go to landfill or are downcycled into fillers with varying efficiencies. On top of that you need to count all parts that never make it to the end-of-life recycling. Tyres, broken bits, cars that rust away, etc.
I agree with you that the automotive industry recycles a lot, which is good, as they use a lot of metal. But overall, metal recycling in the US (and the world) stands around 40-50% ... the rest is in the landfills (stats, p25 or in any LCA database).
I don't know about that specific figure, but overall, in the US, the material use is increasing (also per capita), See the report from the Material Resources Institute. In particular, look at p. 19, of the report.
In the US, in the last 30 years, the use of things like wood, gypsum, titanium dioxide have increased by around 100%. And the rest by around 20-40% depending on the accounting methods.
Tons used by unit of GDP is a tricky measure too. If inflation was 0%, would it still work? If we subtract war-expenses, financial derivatives ... or other products which may or may not contribute to the welfare of society, ... does the kg/GDP still shrink? I don't know the answer, but I think it's more complex than you make it look.
@Neil1947,
15 years ago: Nokia 2110, 236g.
today, 2011: Iphone 4, 137g
Are you trying to tell me that the number of phone users has only doubled since 1995?
In fact, according to these stats, the material used for phones is growing a little ...
You say, when everybody has a phone this will stop? Phones now do more things?
Think again. How often did people replace their phones in the 90s. And today? What about Kindle+ipad+phone+two laptops....
I hope so, but have not seen this. If people can they tend to want a city flat, country house ... and the children generally want to move out. From the Center for Sustainable Systems, 63% increase in house size since the 70s (140% since the 50s)
and 16% decrease in average number of occupants per house since the 70s.
Are you suggesting people didn't have enough houses in the 70s?
So, no. I don't see your argument.
Many things are not recycled that could be - it's simply cheaper at the moment not to.
And, for some goods consumption has been satisfied, and so sales have peaked per capita. For some goods we're not at that point.
My point: There are a number of good examples of "peak demand" that demonstrate that the sales of goods can be considered to follow an s-curve generally; and very close to 100% recycling is certainly doable, if and when we choose.
As far as housing goes: yes, average size has grown, and average occupancy has fallen. On the other hand, the marginal utility of that extra space is pretty clearly smaller. A few people are moving towards satisfying wants instead of needs, and most are using more space because they can. In my experience for most people this has an end-point best exemplified by the "empty-nester" - someone who chooses to downsize their house because it's larger than they need.
Since we're being a bit silly for instructional purposes, we might as well follow through on one of the comments above, and observe that in some sense galactic or intergalactic growth is ultimately limited to the cubic, rather than the exponential. Once you're using energy as fast as you can, and populating a sphere expanding at the speed of light, you're pretty much done with the higher powers. IIRC one of the SF writers (Clarke? Benford?) noted that a long time ago.
Peak Velocity of Expansion.
Thanks for this, Professor Murphy. It provides an update to such valuable critiques of growth as Professor Albert Bartlett's Arithmetic, Population and Energy that adds both style and substance. I even took a stab in this direction with my article, All the energy from the Sun, although I didn't take it to anywhere near the hilarious scale that you explore. Also, I greatly appreciate your thermodynamic analysis, which I have not seen elsewhere and which provides a valuable tool for critiquing industrial civilization.
I was discussing limits to growth with some friends earlier this month when one of them mentioned that he knew someone with some very promising fusion results. At the time, I knew that even with fusion we would chew through the available energy with astonishing speed, but I found it hard enough to make the scale comprehensible in a casual conversation that I was pushed to silence. Your thermodynamic analysis of the problem of additional heat from novel energy sources may be easier to grasp in those situations; I'm grateful for that addition to the universe of discourse.
In the Ringworld universe (Larry Niven) the Pupeteers had to move their planet 10 times farther from their sun than it had previously been to "cool it down". But of course, their population was hitting its first trillion inhabitants...
Rather than thinking in terms of energy generation or economic expansion, this nicely illustrates the need to tackle the population problem. We see it coming to a head all over the globe in various guises and it's not pretty, we need to manage population reduction humanely.
Desperate-1
It doesn't matter whether growth is exponential or not. Growth proportional to e^t, t^2, t or log(t) are all unsustainable as t goes to infinity.
Is the semi-log plot of global energy consumption also a straight line? Does it also have the 2.9% per annum slope?
For the US, the data since 1900 does not appear to have a 2.9% slope. The earlier part has a lesser slope that probably corresponds to the termination of most immigration and the saturation of coal energy extraction. The later part probably corresponds to the oil production peak in '74 and the subsequent limitation on imports in a competitive market.
Do these two segments resemble two logistic curve segments?
The US uses the same amount of oil today as it did in 1979.
If you look at the first of four interactive graphs at the EIA site, you find that the 1979 oil peak was just before the oil shock took us down a notch. The present value is after a severe shock to our economy. In between it was a fairly steady climb. The "flatness" implied by picking out these two data points does not tell a very complete story, but is rather a consequence of economic failures in supply and demand, respectively. So I don't take this history as an indication that the economy can perform swimmingly under flat energy demand. The 1979 oil shock and the 2008 financial sector meltdown were tough episodes. And I certainly don't view this as an indication that the economy is untethered to the physical world, as I think the comment above is meant to imply.
This is a very complex topic.
The 1979 oil shock happened at the same time as a generational change in inflation policy put Volcker in the Federal Reserve, raising interest rates to 18%. We really can't attribute all of the 1979/1981 recession(s) to oil.
I wouldn't suggest that the physical world has no impact: clearly oil shocks have an impact, and dramatically higher oil prices reduce economic growth. On the other hand, US GDP grew by 150% since 1979, and manufacturing grew by 50%, so clearly oil does not control the economy with an iron hand.
The "flatness" implied by picking out these two data points does not tell a very complete story
GDP fell after both of those shocks, but oil consumption fell even faster. GDP grew far faster than oil consumption, even with the return of very cheap oil. My point would be unchanged by choosing other points: it just is more dramatic and clearer with those two points.
My point: growth in goods and services can continue even with slow or no growth in energy consumption. Increasing energy supply through "nega-watts" is far cheaper than through new generation, and ultimately new generation from clean sources will be cheaper than the old sources.
My prescription: kick the oil and fossil fuel addiction, and move to a cleaner, cheaper set of energy sources, especially wind power.
The advantages of oil/FF are myths propagated by legacy industries, fighting change. Anything that suggests that PO (or peak FF) means TEOTWAWKI gives them ammunition. Articles such as this should be very, very careful to avoid giving those industries such ammunition.
Oil consumption has been in the range of 30-40 quads for the last 40 years. That's 0.7% per year, at worst, but could have been 0% with restrictions on car size and power. The US economy has been growing at 4% on average for the last 40 years, and probably would have even in the face of such car restrictions.
tmurphy,
There seem to be 4 issues: (1) consumption of energy and resources cannot increase EXPONENTIALLY for an extended time, but this doesn't prevent consumption of energy and some resources to increase LINEARLY for a very long time. If population is stable there is no reason to expect exponential growth in energy and resource consumption.
(2) with a stable population, there will be limits to consumption of food, and with modest increases in energy consumption many resources can be recycled so availability can increase(ie Kg metals/capita) with declining consumption( Kg mined/capita/year).
(3) improvements in technology allow better valued products and services to be delivered using the same energy and same units of resources.
(4) the available resource stock(metals,nuclear reactors, PV panels, homes, railways) can continue to increase /person and the "value/unit" of resources increasing will result in continued increase in real wealth, not increasing exponentially but increasing EVEN IF THE ABSOLUTE AMOUNT OF RESOURCE EXTRACTION/YEAR/CAPITA DECLINES.
I would argue that with a stable population, society doesn't need exponential growth in GDP or even growth in GDP providing most people become more wealthy in time.
"It doesn't matter whether growth is exponential or not. "
Yes, and No. This discussion is a continuation of the discussion of population growth that started towards the end of the 18th century. Malthus is remembered for a powerful essay demolishing the ideas of some earlier writers whose work is hardly remembered today. A lot has happened since Malthus, but the gist of the problem remains the same: Exponential growth is seen in data streams of many forms of human activity. It is easy to postulate exponential growth as a universal law, but impossible to construct a detailed recipe for continued exponential growth over an unbounded duration. Verhulst constructed (and published ~1840 ) an equation that did not have the property of unbounded growth of equation that Malthus criticised.
What has changed since then? Now there is a great deal more accuracy in the data, but not much useful new insight on the core social issue. We are still hoping that Malthus' reasoning is in error, but knowing in our minds that it is not. And yes. Many different proxies for population. None help.
Malthus observed that an exponentially growing population will outstrip an arithmetically growing food supply. On the other hand, even if the population growth were limited to the same order as the food supply, the food supply cannot grow arithmetically forever.
The logistic equation increases asymptotically to a limited value. It also is realistic only under specific conditions. If the food supply has a constant limited value, then the population may grow in accordance with the logistic curve to reach equilibrium.
Alternatively, the population may grow rapidly, exhaust some factor needed for food production, and the food production decreases. In this case, the population will rise above the equilibrium level and then drop below.
Even if there is no overshoot, a constant level of food production is problematic. Eventually there is likely to be some factor, such as erosion, pollution, or exhaustion of certain soil nutrients that causes food production to decline, and population along with it.
Nature abhors the steady state.
"Why is Man failing?" is the question. Of course, there are likely many recognizable, understandable and acceptable responses to that query. Having made this acknowledgement, I remain dumbstruck by one glaring and willful failure. It is the conscious and abject failure on the part of many too many top ranking professionals with appropriate expertise and extant scientific evidence to respond to one central question, the rejection of which appears to be allowing ' the stage to be set ' for big trouble that takes its shape in the form of some unimaginable sort of colossal, human-induced global ecological wreckage.
**** Is the population dynamics of the human species essentially similar to or else different from the population dynamics of other species? **** The implications of the correct response to that single query appear profound.
It is different from most, if not all, birds and mammals in their natural habitats.
These are almost always highly evolved to occupy a definite ecological niche and their population is limited both geographically and by the resources available in their ecological niche. Populations may fluctuate, as in prey-predator cycles, but do not change significantly over the long term. Populations may also crash due to epidemics or adverse weather or other factors, but rapidly rebuild towards the equilibrium values.
However, human population dynamics do have parallels.
For example, when rats are introduced to a Pacific island where the local fauna have no competitors they can multiply rapidly and wipe out their food supply, leading to a subsequent crash of the rat population.
Certain human inventions such as cooking, tool-making (especially metal agricultural tools), agriculture, boat building, building of houses, and the sewing of multi-layer tailored clothing have combined to a) allow humans to live and travel outside of the original tropical African and South Asian habitat, and b) to modify the ecosystem to produce foods which can be processed for human consumption and which can be stored and eaten over winter.
These inventions allowed the human species to become an invasive species over most of the earth by around 35,000 years ago and all of the earth except Antarctica by 12,000 years ago. They also allowed the development of civilizations beginning around 8000 years ago.
The relationship of humans to the ecosystem is very much parallel to the relationship of cancer to the host organism:
human <=> cancer cell in the sense of having lost controls on acquiring nutrients and multiplying,
city <=> tumor in the sense of a cluster of cells that form a tissue able to penetrate adjacent tissues, stimulated growth of new blood vessels to supply it, and grow in an unchecked fashion, e.g. the agricultural hinterland, mines, trading outposts of city states and nations.
colonization <=> metastases in the sense that travelers from villages/towns/cities have founded new cities in other areas, e.g. the founding of Carthage by Phonecians from the Eastern Med.
Cancers usually cause the death of the host.
Humans are to ecosystem what cancer is to host organism - an excellent analogy Merrill.
Taking your analogy further, in a healthy organism, normal cells have their narrow prescribed function and place, and they coexist in symbiotic dynamic equilibrium. Unlike normal cells, humans - and specifically, the Homo Colossus variety after William J. Catton - can do almost anything in any ecosystem, and we have most definitely upset almost all equilibria that preceded our appearance.
Like I said in the thread further down where we were discussing Tainter: the evolution of the human race is a negative return to complexity when seen from the point of view of Nature.
I was never particularly religious, but if I had to submit my theory for what exactly the Original Sin was, it would have to be our wanton destruction of our "Garden of Eden". Maybe there is wisdom in those ancient books after all...
That's easily answered - yes, human population dynamics are very different.
Just look at Russia and Japan, where fertility rates are far below replacement, and absolute population levels are at the point of decline.
The difference: contraception and education.
Contraception and education make some difference, but not enough. See WORLD POPULATION TO 2300 for projections of population growth. TABLE 5. TWENTY LARGEST COUNTRIES AND THEIR POPULATIONS, SELECTED YEARS shows how Russia and Japan shrink between 2000 and 2050. However, it doesn't actually matter very much in the global population scheme of things.
Actually, I doubt that the 2050 average scenario is at all reasonable. They show Ethiopia going from 65.6 million in 2000 to 171 million in 2050. This is quite unlikely given the increasing drought and consequent famine in the northeast sector of Africa.
The 2300 high scenario of 36 billion is pretty clearly unattainable.
Look at Figures 2 and 3, on page 6. That's clearly a voluntary reduction in fertility, and it's very large. That's clearly very different from animal populations.
Please note that you're looking at a 2004 report, which means the data is 8 years out of date: the decline in fertility around the world has accelerated since.
Yes, the report assumes a fairly optimistic reduction in fertility to below replacement level in most countries before they converge to replacement level.
However, the latest report has numbers higher than the 2004 report. World Population to reach 10 billion by 2100 if Fertility in all Countries Converges to Replacement Level is the press release.
http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm is the report.
U.N. adjusts population growth estimates upward
I don't know if you noticed, Merrill, but you are on a thread whose main focus in discussing global resource limits, particularly in regard to oil, but of energy sources in general. You may or may not have also noticed that aquifers are depleting rapidly, that overfishing has rendered the seas mostly barren, that gw-triggered droughts and floods are cutting in to global crop production (a trend that will accelerate in coming decades and centuries) and that income disparities are increasing allowing the relatively few wealthy to adopt high meat and dairy diets that, along with bio-fuels, insane ag policies, and other factors, deprive further deprive the masses of poor affordable food.
Now the UN does not necessarily fully understand all these dynamics, or presumably they would be hosting this forum.
So when the study that you so kindly linked to says: "According to the high variant, an additional billion would be added every 10 or 11 years for the rest of this century"--I think we have every reason to questioning the cognitive capacity of the researchers. An extra billion every decade through the end of the century would yield a population somewhere in the range of 16 billion. Now I sometimes argue that a perfect distribution of all produced nutrients could provide (barely) adequate nutrition for everyone on the planet, even at 9 billion (with little left, though, for the rest of 'God's creatures'), I know of few who think 16 billion is a sustainable population in even the rosiest scenario.
As Yogi Bera said, "Predictions are difficult, especially about the future."
But the devastation going on now in east Africa looks like a glimpse into the not-too-distant future for much of MENA and south Asia, at least, given the enormous populations that have exploded in the last few decades in these regions and the increasingly slim chance that the land and water resources can support them, especially as PO and AGW kick in, as they are doing now.
I don't know who is going to have the job of telling the large percentages of the populations in many of these countries who are younger than 25 that they are not going to have food, water, jobs...and had better not have any kids unless they want to see them die of malnutrition in their arms. But somebody really ought to.
(Even better to tell the highest level consumers--including pretty much anyone reading this--to forgo having kids, or delay the first kid till well into your thirties and then stop at one. And to raise them as vegetarian subsistence farmers with minimal consumption of resources and energy.)
Unfortunately, for the reasons stated and others, I do expect to see US population continue to explode for a few more decades.
The UN studies are of interest, particularly for the 2000 to 2050 time frame because they show what happens to population according to demographic projections that use current population levels, current population age cohort sizes, and reasonable but optimistic projections regarding fertility and death rates.
It is unlikely that fertility rates will decline as fast as in their optimistic model, somewhat unlikely that the median model will hold, and the population growth in their high model is obviously beyond sustainability.
Therefore, since fertility rates will not be lowered, the death rates must go up.
In one of the attachments to the 2004 study, the author expresses some skepticism about the projections for Africa and some of the other regions are realistic. So I think that at least some of the expert authors are very aware of the problem. However, like climate scientists, they are caught up in the midst of political/religious battles that limit them to obfuscated expressions.
I think it is in the 2004 study that the assumption is that there is no inter-regional immigration after 2050. Due to rising social tensions and limited transportation fuels, I would expect international travel and international immigration to be quite limited as soon as 2030.
There are relatively few countries that export the majority of food on world markets. Most of them are developed or developing countries, e.g US or Brazil. These countries will likely divert more land and food calorie production potential into the production of energy. Consequently, international trade in food will also grind to a halt in the same time frame.
Therefore, the most reasonable expectation for the period beyond 2030 is that most populations will depend on food produced within a few hundred kilometers of where they live, i.e. within the same economic/political system. The populations will not be able to move and they will not be able to buy food from farther afield. If local food production is inadequate or fails, then populations will starve to death.
The question we started with wasn't really whether population levels are likely to stabilize where we would like them. It's "Is the population dynamics of the human species essentially similar to or else different from the population dynamics of other species?"
And a cursory look at fertility dynamics since WWII says that they are not.
Are they perfect and ideal? No. But, clearly these are not the fertility dynamics of yeast or reindeer: as affluence and food supplies increased and death rates decreased, fertility went down dramatically. That's nothing like the population dynamics of other species.
Technically a steady state is just a scenario with very small rises and then collapses. Our problems are exacerbated from thinking collapse is bad so we put it off for as long as possible until said thinking becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Our current rate of energy use must be well exegarated due to brainwashed "conspicuous consumption" and its globalized framework to sasistfy it .
Factoring into the equation all the small scale initiave and technological progress to save energy, they are still billions awaiting to live and consume like Americans in a big all in, green future or collapse.
Even if we had a miracle like the E-CAT we would still trash the planet by fishing out the ocean , cutting every tree and exploiting each other by any mean avaible due to the greedy always more mentality we have learned ...
So It would be interesting to investigate other form of social governance like the Cybersyn project created in Chile during the Allende period before the US destroyed this nascent alternative. Based on biology they aimed at creating a cybernetic economy which would run way more efficiently by merging every data stream to produce only what was necessary for the common good. Society would be be run by smart planification instead of the blind and chaotic tempo of the stock market.
Make you wonder how much more efficiently things would work if we got rid of the archaic and ineffecient political and economical system to get a state of the art XXI century social infrastrucure run by computers...
>trashing the planet by fishing out the ocean and cutting every tree
What is actually happening is that we are shifting away from wild fish catch and wild tree cutting.
Just as we shifted from hunting wild game to farms and ranches. Over half of the fish is now farmed (mainly in China.)
More productive farmed fish and tree farms will enable the wild areas to be left alone.
we are shifting away from wild fish catch and wild tree cutting.
Do you have data for that? I have the impression that we've depleted wild fish, and have been forced to start farming fish -that would have a different meaning.
Similarly, I'd love to see data that suggests that Brazil and Indonesia have stopped clearcutting their forests...
The wild is being depleted or is flat. But the point is that does not mean we have no fish. We have farmed fish and we get the wood but it is from fish and trees that we farm specifically for that purpose. I see this progress to the state we have with farms and ranches. Managed human dedicated ecosystems.
There is almost no wild cows or buffalo but there are plenty on ranches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture#Production_volume
In 2004, the total world production of fisheries was 140 million tonnes of which aquaculture contributed 45 million tonnes, about one third. The growth rate of worldwide aquaculture has been sustained and rapid, averaging about 8 percent per annum for over thirty years, while the take from wild fisheries has been essentially flat for the last decade. The aquaculture market reached $86 billion in 2009.
China aquatic production for 2011 is forecast at 53.5 million metric tonnes, up two percent from an estimated 52.5 million metric tonnes in 2010. China's 2005 reported aquaculture harvest was 32.4 million tonnes. So China is up 20 million tons of harvested fish and shrimp etc...
http://gain.fas.usda.gov/Recent%20GAIN%20Publications/Fishery%20Products...
I wonder is aquaculture is the great savior that it is thought to be by some folks:
http://vimeo.com/24217567
http://www.theecologist.org/green_green_living/food_and_drink/269615/to_...
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5883
Also, fish in the ocean are not there just to be hoovered up to be eaten by man. They are part of the World ecosystem. So, I am not sanguine about your comparison of almost no wild buffalo to almost no wild fish...
Reguarding the fish level in the oceans its more by looking at the big ecosystem picture that you get your answer.
The constant attacks on the ocean due to every human activity, not just fishing, is huge.
For example the PH levels have been quickly decreasing due to the rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
which in return is affecting the whole food chain :
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=phytoplankton-population
But the direct consequences of fishing are also huge by decreasing the genetic diversity of big fishes in the population, because when you fish the big one you tend to have always smaller catch in the long run.
Fish farming its not the panacea either , for some fish like tuna its impossible to breed them from the start due to their need of large areas to grow.
Fish farming tend to bue prone to disease like in chile in 2009 where many of the farms where affected by a virus severly decreasing the output.
And lastly the shit all those concentrated fish produce tend to fall on the ocean floor destroying all the ecosystem underneath it ...
Reguarding the tree cutting it's not necessarly linked to the cutting of tree for logging but to free the space for other more productive uses.
Like you said in brazil where the deforestation is more linked to new stellement of people and the use of the cleared space to cultivate soy bean or cattle.
The other exemple is also indonesia where the forest is being cut to make space for plam oil thus destroying the ecosystem for the orang outang.
All those factors will contribute to soil depletion and erosion in some years due to monoculture for industrial uses.
Tom, thanks for great post and joining the debate. At one level here you are preaching to the converted, but then you'll see a broad spectrum of opinion about what should be done to tackle these problems. Its also important to remember that the commenters are unlikely to be representative of whole readership.
In terms of trying to facilitate or to bring about change as some advocate, I believe the best we can do is to provide a framework for understanding events and consequences of actions. I think there is zero chance of any OECD economy abandoning the growth mantra for the foreseeable future. The consequences are too dire. Without economic growth, most OECD nations would quickly default on debts and there would be widespread collapse of our socio-economic system. No one (apart from The Greens) is going to vote for that.
But understanding that many of the major problems we face are caused by human population pressing on a number of boundary limits and explaining this to an ever wider audience may bring about incremental change in political behavior.
The political elite need to understand that "The Arab Spring" has nothing to do with an absence of democracy but is about populations in deep overshoot. No amount of democracy will create an abundance of food, water and cheap energy in Egypt.
It needs to be understood that Famine in East Africa is in part due to earlier efforts at keeping as many people as possible alive combined with a loss of mobility in what was a nomadic tribal system.
It needs to be understood that high and unaffordable energy prices are the result of our FF production systems working at their limits.
And in the overcrowded UK with major structural problems in finance, demographics and energy supplies, is it really the best and only option to encourage migration of young east Europeans to try and create a more desirable demographic profile whilst doing everything humanly possible to extend the lives of the old way beyond natural limits and any vestige of life quality?
At present I see a lot of right things being done for wrong reasons and many wrong things being done because of a lack of in depth understanding. Men argue, nature acts.
Thanks, Euan, for providing some perspective. As my first time contributing to TOD commentary, it is easy to form a false impression of the readership based on a few vocal individuals. But it's also very valuable: to the extent that I believe we have to change our mindset about growth, energy, etc., the comments point out the common objections such an argument will encounter. This provides an opportunity to rethink some of the central concepts of the argument to the betterment of us all.
Tom,
This is a very complex subject. Euan tried to deal with it broadly, so let me try it as well:
Beware of false trade-offs. If we're in overshoot, and TEOTWAWKI is inevitable, then it's important to say so. But if "overshoot" is unrealistic, or overly simplistic, then suggesting that Peak Oil (and Peak FF, and peak other things) will cause TEOTWAWKI is only giving ammunition to those people who are desperately attempting to prevent change away from oil and FF (and other things that are counterproductive).
I would argue that "overshoot" is way too simplistic: there's no question in my mind that we've way overshot some things: the amount of CO2 we can put in the atmosphere; the habitat we can take from other species; the harvests we can take from certain natural systems, especially fish; but the idea that we're in overshoot in energy terms is highly unrealistic.
The fact is that we could replace oil and FF in general quite affordably, if we chose to.
If we only chose to...
And that choice is affected by people saying that PO will cause disaster - how can we argue with an Exxon saying the solution is purely "drill, baby, drill" in the face of the idea that PO will cause disaster?? If we say that we're about to run out of coal, how do we argue with those who suggest that we don't have to reduce our use of coal because we're going to run out fairly quickly anyway?
---------------------------------------
You might ask: Isn't the effort to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy just Business as Usual? Shouldn't we be more ambitious about preventing growth that is destroying our environment?
I don't think so. We need to stop harming the environment.
Energy production per se doesn't harm the environment, Green House Gases do. Wind, solar, nuclear don't emit GHGs.
Industrial production per se doesn't harm the environment - careless mining and waste disposal do. Careless mining and waste disposal aren't essential to industrial production.
Economic growth doesn't harm the environment, careless expansion into wild areas does. Overfishing does. Over extraction of water does. Poaching in protected areas does. None of these are essential to economic growth.
I'm saying that
1) decoupling economic growth from environmental harm is possible;
2) decoupling is vastly preferable to deliberate reductions in overall economic activity intended solely to reduce environmental harm, and
3) decoupling is infinitely more politically possible than deliberate reductions in overall economic activity intended solely to reduce environmental harm.
Some good points. On planetary boundaries, there was a good article on these in Scientific American last year.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=boundaries-for-a-health...
Unfortunately it seems to be behind a pay wall, but iirc we have blown furthest past the planetary boundary for disturbing the nitrogen cycle. Humans now fix more nitrogen than the entirety of the natural world does.
On your last point, why the need to 'save' economic growth? Why do you consider this such an ultimate GOOD that you have to save it no matter what?
If 'economic growth,' unlike every other kind of growth known in the physical world, does not necessarily displace anything, then maybe 'growth' is the wrong term or wrong metaphor for what you are talking about. Why the fetishizing of this word?
By 'economic activity' I assume you mean activity in which money changes hands. Why is this so important to you? Can't important things be done without transfers of money?
As to energy, the study in this thread showed that energy use cannot continue to increase. So why would we want it to?
Even if all energy use up till now had been carbon neutral and non-radioactive, the things that we have in fact used the energy for has destroyed most of the livability of the planet for most species--there was a great mass extinction event going well before the effects of GW started kicking in in earnest.
why the need to 'save' economic growth? Why do you consider this such an ultimate GOOD that you have to save it no matter what?
A lot of people are still in poverty. Those who have enough goods still need much better services: health, education, childcare, eldercare, etc. They're not going to stop pursuing those things - they really won't. If they don't have to, why tell them they will have to give them up, which will only destroy any chance you'll have of getting thme to work with you in pursuing a sensible agenda?
maybe 'growth' is the wrong term or wrong metaphor for what you are talking about. Why the fetishizing of this word?
That's a fair point, but most people understand an improvement in their daily life in those terms.
Can't important things be done without transfers of money?
Sure. But that's a separate topic. I don't know why we want to confuse things with it - we have very hard work ahead just dealing with climate deniers, etc.
the study in this thread showed that energy use cannot continue to increase. So why would we want it to?
It showed limits that are very far away, and irrelevant to our current life.
, the things that we have in fact used the energy for has destroyed most of the livability of the planet for most species
Sure. So, let's stop doing that. But don't set up a false choice - it will be much easier to reduce our environmental impact with a strong economy.
Thanks for the thoughtful (as usual) step-by-step replies.
Lots of people should have modestly increased standards of living, above absolutely abject poverty.
In a world where the very few own and control the vast majority of the wealth, a little redistribution will go a long way toward covering these essential needs. No growth necessary.
Everyone else has to own up to the fact that almost all above this level have to drastically power down.
I see now other way.
Is that politically easy? No.
But neither was ending Apartheid, destroying the Berlin Wall, the womens movement, the civil rights movement...
The question is, are you willing to fight for what needs to happen, or are you going to be on the side of those who have historically said, "You can't change the system of Apartheid; you must work within the existing system." "You can't stand up against Eastern Bloc dictators; you must work within the system." "You can't end women's second class status; you must work within the system." "Blacks cannot be given the basic dignities most people grant to their dogs--it's not politically realistic; you must work within the system."...?
Do you want to challenge the system that must be challenged?
Or do you want to go on pretending that the system that caused the desolation of the planet, of our children's future, of everything most of us hold dear, the system that continues to destroy us, to destroy our communities, to destroy the integrity of the living world--do you want to go on pretending that that system does not need to be utterly and totally destroyed?
Time to wake up and smell the fading roses.
All of your examples is about open up access to markets and political rights. But you suggest limiting access for those who have adequate living standards, to make them poor. To make the previously extremely poor a bit less poor by punishing those who are productive, those who have an education and those who have put smart, productive open access economies in place. Since you think the best we can shoot for is the average living standard of Iran. Won't work, not gonna happen. Fortunately.
You know, almost everybody else thinks the Western world is doing very well. I think the best you can hope for is moving to Cuba or to an Amish community or something with that attitude. You can't gain any traction being negative like that and by suggesting destructive policies. That's what Nick is trying to tell you, to help you be constructive. You're not listening.
Everyone else has to own up to the fact that almost all above this level have to drastically power down.
Well, that's the first thing we have to discuss, because it makes no sense to me. We have plenty of affordable, scalable, high-EROEI, zero-carbon energy available.
What "system" are you referring to? As best I can tell, there isn't any country or economy in the world that doesn't want "growth", even if they redefine it a bit.
If the origin of life is a fairly common event in the universe, as it logically appears to be, and if evolution by natural selection and survival of the fittest is also a universal rule, as it also logically appears to be, then where are all the telltale electromagnetic signatures of advanced technological civilizations? Why haven't we detected any in the half-century plus of listening for them?
One answer consistent with our failure to detect signals of an advanced civilization may be that unchecked exponential growth regularly destroys civilizations on other worlds within a few thousand years after they start using complex tools and storing knowledge. This timescale follows easily from the excellent post above.
The opposite side of the coin, again based on the logic laid out in the key post, is that civilizations which manage to not destroy themselves after tens of thousands of years are likely to have lowered the growth rate of their energy use to a minimum, but even so, the hard limit of their star's energy output would likely have caused them to colonize nearby systems. However, such a civilization would be shining like an electromagnetic beacon in all directions within tens of thousands of light years and thus we should have detected it by now. Therefore, the absence of evidence may be evidence of absence, in this particular case: if the origin of life is a common event in the life history of star systems, then based on (non)observations, we can reasonably hold that the most likely fate of technological civilizations is unchecked exponential growth of energy use, followed by self-destruction.
That will be our baseline fate also, unless we consciously and collectively make the huge effort to change course well before we destroy the carrying capacity of the Earth. We must understand that there are Limits to Growth and change our mindsets to escape the trajectory of doom.
On the other hand, maybe advanced civilizations use fiber optics and high-gain, high-frequency antennas and don't continue the wasteful practice of high-power broadcasting. The residual rf energy may be difficult to distinguish from the radio emissions of the adjacent star.
Very interesting take on the Fermi Paradox. I've considered this too, and can add that we evolved to be incrementally smarter than our predecessors. We're clever enough to poke sticks in the ground that come out dripping with fossil fuels. So that's enough of an advantage to make a technological civilization. But what evolutionary pressures would instill in us an instinct for long-term planning and stewardship of finite resources?
Perhaps we don't have the chops to handle ourselves wisely enough to prevent overshoot. Perhaps this is a common trait of evolution: why would evolution skip a few steps and jump to a creature who can both find the surplus energy and be smart enough not to squander it? It is certainly reasonable to assume that the challenges we face in grappling with this problem are generic.
what evolutionary pressures would instill in us an instinct for long-term planning and stewardship of finite resources?
It's easy enough to find numerous examples of humans who can and will do long-term planning and stewardship of finite resources. So, this isn't an evolutionary limit, at least on the individual level.
One could argue that this is a complex, emergent phenomena, but then we're deeply into speculation: I don't think we know nearly enough about the dynamics of evolution to begin to have good answers. For instance, we still have no idea what the group dynamics are that influence lifespan: is it individual? Is it the life of the grandmother that's important? Is it tribal? Heck, we don't even know what genes, epigenes, etc influence behavior.
I see no reason to make pessimistic assumptions beyond the obvious fact that we could be doing quite a bit better at this than we are. The fact that we know that says quite a bit about the potential for change. We aren't aliens, after all: we're ordinary humans, and we're quite aware that changes are needed.
Long term planning and stewardship of finite resources is commonly made if there is an owner and his ownership rights are protected by a stable society. If there is no owner or if ownership rights aren't protected, then whoever can will get the maximum short term profit and ignore the rest.
For instance, the other day I made the reflection that I treat my chanterelle picking spots differently. (First, let me mention that in Sweden, all are allowed to pick berries and mushrooms and so on on other peoples' land, not in gardens though.) Now, the spots I believe only I know of, I pick only the big specimens, and leave the rest to grow for the next time I go there. In places I know others also visit, however, I pick the small ones too, since otherwise, the next guy will just pick them before I get to them again. As far as I can see, others do the same. I "own" my exclusive spots, in a way. The rest is subject to the tragedy of the commons.
I know what you mean, and I'm sympathetic to the idea of applying property rights and free markets where they make sense.
OTOH, some philosophy:
I think you'd apply the same logic to something your family owned.
I suspect that humans are indeed programmed to take care of just themselves and their familes. On the other hand, the definition of family isn't hard wired, it's personal and cultural. We can extend it much farther than we often do currently, and many people do: some people are willing to protect the interests of their city, others willing to sacrifice for their country or co-religionists. Heck, think of animal advocates, or vegetarians who clearly have extended their definition of "us" far beyond humanity.
But will the vegetarian leave the small chantarelles to grow for the next guy? Will he drive little to let the Chinese use some more oil? I think we act unselfishly in selected areas of life, dictated by the cultures we adhere to. But I guess, if we have a strong enough culture protecting a commons, it may survive without ownership.
Well, we started this conversation about long-term planning and environmental stewardship.
I think that can become cultural. For instance, I think Germany has become pretty determined to pursue such things.
On the contrary, I think Germany has gone mad. They are keeping their lignite and have decided to dismantle their nuclear plants. Instead of stewardship and long-term planning, they are doing short-term politics.
they are doing short-term politics.
Sounds like you feel that special interests are prevailing. Coal companies?
No, I generally do not give much weight to the power of lobbyists and corporate special interests.
The multi-party parliamentary systems of many European countries give a bit too much power to marginal political parties and marginal views. The big old socialist parties has long needed to be anti-nuclear to not lose to many votes to the (also somewhat socialist) green parties. The reason they otherwise would is that the anti-side is much more passionate than the pro-side, so they would lose lots of votes by going pro-nuclear. After Fukushima, for much the same reasons, the incumbent German CDU och its leader Angela Merkel also felt they had to go anti-nuclear.
So, why do you think the green parties feel so strongly about it?
Lots of reasons. Genuine worry, lack of knowledge, symbolism, old prestige, party culture, purism, political strategy and so on.
But what causes the worry? Why that particular symbol? Where did old prestige link to nuclear issues? Where did party culture, purism, political strategy come from? Let's go deeper here.
I think it has a lot to do with the media value of suddenness and of materials that kill invisibly if you go near. Coal plants churns out death at a very even pace, not very interesting.
I believe the Euro green party has its origins in the anti-war movement, and the antipathy to nuclear has to do with it's ties to nuclear weapons.
At heart, I think this is an objection to the link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons proliferation.
I think a German rejection of nuclear power is seen as a good example for the rest of the world. Even now, every country in the ME is trying to imitate Iran...
Originally, that may have been be a big one, and due to inertia in politics, it may still be. However, it SHOULD be no biggie nowadays, and I think it isn't emphasized that much. I think a bigger problem is a misconception you seem to share, that it would be quite feasible to scale wind and solar to replace fossil electricity. I.e, the purists think there is a purer alternative, and then it's no wonder they go with that, especially since cost is not an issue for them. (On the contrary, higher costs are better, since it represents a bigger sacrifice, which is good and noble.)
it SHOULD be no biggie nowadays
Do you feel that Iran's program is not a danger?
a misconception you seem to share, that it would be quite feasible to scale wind and solar
Don't forget - we agreed that it was in the US. For Germans to do so requires either accepting higher costs or imported power from, say, Spain (at least for a while, until wind and/or solar costs fall quite a bit).
Iran's program is Iran's program. I don't think many Germans feel Germany's nuclear program is a proliferation risk. Also, I don't think my fellow Swedes think a few more or less nuclear reactors in Sweden would add or subtract to the proliferation risks.
Don't forget - we agreed that it was [feasible to scale wind and solar] in the US.
If we did, I have most certainly forgot. I remember you convinced me that (low penetration) wind may be as cheap as nuclear in the US, though. However, I can't remember being convinced that intermittent sources scales above some 20-25%.
I don't think many Germans feel Germany's nuclear program is a proliferation risk.
I wonder how many feel that they can't forbid other countries from pursuing nuclear without first setting an example? I wonder how many feel that investing in lowering the cost of alternatives might in the end give those other countries another lower cost option?
I can't remember being convinced that intermittent sources scales above some 20-25%.
No, we didn't get there. I'm going to have to spend a little time to create a simulation to prove it. When I get time...
Again, I don't think Germans, to any great extent, think that way about setting examples. Everybody should be aware that it would be pointless, as there are so many left that has nuclear weapons, not to speak of civilian nuclear power. Also, since the controversy has been centered around uranium enrichment, it should then suffice if Germany closed its centrifuge plant and let the enrichment take place in, for instance, Russia, as Iran has been told to do. I would be very happy to see Iran set up a fleet of a few dozen LWR reactors - that's not the problem.
Investing in lowering the cost of alternatives is all well and good, but that isn't what the recent German decision is about. That decision was about preferentially closing nuclear plants rather than lignite. That is environmental madness and won't help lowering the cost of alternatives one bit.
it should then suffice if Germany closed its centrifuge plant and let the enrichment take place in, for instance, Russia
Have you seen any discussion of this (or things roughly related to it) at all? Any discussion of Iran's nuclear program?
Not sure what you mean. Iran was offered it. In Greens' debate articles, enrichment is hardly ever mentioned - I guess it may be too deep for them. When they care to list all anti-nuke arguments, they certainly mention the proliferation concern and link civilian and nuclear power. But it isn't very common and Iran is very seldomly mentioned. The most common and most emphasised arguments around here (more Sweden, less Germany as basis) are, in my view, in order:
* waste handling and its long decay times,
* accident risk and Fukushima/Chernobyl/TMI
* high costs
* Mining hazards.
* Terrorism risks.
Lower are proliferation risks and uranium constraints.
"if we have a strong enough culture protecting a commons, it may survive without ownership"
Glad to see you concede this point, jep.
This is, in fact, the basis of most traditional societies since time immemorial.
It is mostly Economics Departments and advertising agencies that have convinced people to think otherwise.
Which side of that persuasion war do you choose to be on??
I don't think so. When they were in balance, I think it was mostly because they didn't have the power to expand numbers and operations.
The constructive side, the one wants to use technology and politics to go for a sustainable, high-tech, peaceful global society.
At least a few of your more rational neighbors in Denmark seem to disagree with your basic premise.
http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/DISCUSSIONS/N55_TEXTS/AB_LAND.html
So what we have is ever increasing concentrations of power and fewer and fewer rights for those that are for all practical purposes without power or rights. The problem is further compounded by the well known fact that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All we have to do is look at the enormous damage that those who hold power are doing the natural environment and the commons. Of course we also are well into population overshoot, which compounds the problem by a few orders of magnitude. I don't see this ending well for anyone.
Thanks for this link and position.
I have long found it... let's just say 'odd', that not owning a or renting a piece of earth (or a flat far above the actual surface of the earth) essentially means you lose your right to exist in a place.
It makes a nice little mash of Descartes (already rather barmy) dicutm--"I own, therefore I am--or at least have a right to be."
The link and quotation was hogwash, but thanks anyway.
No, we don't. As I have mentioned, global GINI is going down. Power is diversifying, spreading. Access orders are opening up with more political and economic freedom.
Yak Dung!! Power and wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the few, just look at what has been happening in the US.
In the US it has been concentrating a little. Globally, it has been diversifying and spreading.
"As I have mentioned, global GINI is going down."
Have you got any sort of reference for that? A quick search seemed to show it drifting slowly upward for a very long time now. Top-end living standards seemed to be rising a bit faster than bottom-end ones on the whole.
Note by the way, all: Gini is the name of the person who devised the coefficient - it's not an acronym.
Any sort, yes. Google it and switch view to images. All I saw supports my claim. One good in the heap:
So, inequality is getting worse in all of the countries listed above.
On the other hand, China, India et al are getting richer, so global income inequality is declining.
That's not really reassuring for people in higher income countries...
Perhaps not, but to me, the trend is positive. That skills and education pays off is good, that global inequality is decreasing is good, and that globalization (large markets) makes a few international giants' owners extra rich is no real problem.
The way to resolve the Fermi Paradox is to first make hypertelescopes and to place telescopes at the gravitational lensing points. Then we can observe the surfaces of planets in other solar systems. Need to have shading satellites for the telescopes.
Then also send probes and missions to other solar systems. Until we have surveyed and visited the other solar systems, we are speculating with no information.
If the whole galaxy is ours and there is no other intelligent life then why shouldn't we use all of our allotment of resources in the galaxy ?
There are multiple simple ways to sustainably get to Kardashev level one and then to Kardashev level 2. When you say - let us use an adaptation of the architecture and technology that we have now for Kardashev level 3 then of course you end up with crap. Especially if your approach does not work for K1 or K2.
If you just project out 20 to 40 years (which are difficult projections in any kind of detail).
For 2031, China will get close to the per capita income of the USA and India will have growth in the 8% range and Africa will have about 5-6% growth and there will be decent growth in Latin America.
About $240 trillion if World growth average 6% per year.
If India sustains and Africa accelerates from 2031-2051, then 6% world growth gets us to about $700 trillion. Energy growth will be about 2-3% less than GDP growth. The world would have ten times the current economy then.
China, South Korea, Russia and India will be exporting nuclear reactors at half the price of France and Japan. At about $1300-2000 per kw. There will be designs that remove the constraints on heavy steel containment domes. China plans to shift to breeders and offsite reprocessing to close the fuel cycle.
Part of my Ten technologies for reducing global warming
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/ten-technologies-that-should-have-big.html
1. China Broad Group making “Can be built” factory mass produced high rises and skyscrapers. Deployment of 5 times improved energy efficiency by 2020 with many partners (30% of new construction) would save 400 million tons of CO2 per year.
The buildings can be assembled on site at a pace of two floors per day. 30 stories in 15 days. 200 stories in 120 days. The new buildings will have construction cost and operating cost advantages and have the support of the Chinese government. China has about 25-50% of the world's construction. Urbanization going from 50% to 90%.
2. Black Carbon free cookers for 700 million households would save 18% of black carbon soot. Equal to about 10% (3 billion tons) of today’s CO2 in warming effect. Current target is 100 million households by 2020 for the equivalent of about 400 million tons of CO2 per year in warming reduction.
You have to roll your projection forward.
Have the best detailed view of now and (historically going back at least the number of years you are rolling forward) project forward year by year to at least 2016 then 2020, 2025 and 2030, 2040, 2050. If you do not have a solid and detailed basis then your projection will be meaningless.
You talk about 1350 and 2500 years forward.
Well looking 200 years back there was no petroleum usage and 400 years back there was very little coal usage. Also looking back 100 years life expectancy was half as long.
Are you stating that you estimate or predict that these levels of growth will occur?
?
I am forecasting that China will mostly sustain 7-10% its growth rate for 20 years.
There is a 4% per year boost from urbanization increasing by 1.5 to 2% per year. China will go from 50-95% urbanization. China is creating megacities connected by high speed rail and other super-infrastructure which boosts productivity and GDP.
Here is a list of technology that I expect to play out to boost or sustain high growth rates.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/listing-and-rating-technologies-and.html
1. Pro-growth Policies
2. Energy Efficiency - superconductors, thermoelectrics, improved grid
3. Energy Revolution - Mass produced fission, fusion, and maybe cold fusion
4. Additive manufacturing
5. Not so mundane - neuromorphic chips, quantum computers, photonics
6. Automated transportation (leading to robotic cars and planes)
7. Urbanization MegaCities
8. Urbanization Broad Group skyscrapers, Tata flat packed buildings
9. Robotics
10. Hyperbroadband
11. Sensors everywhere
12. Supermaterials
13. Improve medicine and public health
14. Space
15. Synthetic biology and recombineering
16. Education transformed and accelerated innovation
17. Supersmartphones, exoskeletons and wearable systems
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/05/forecasts-of-china-and-us-gdp-to-2030.html
I am projecting China to be a $75 trillion economy in 2030. China and Hong Kong will already be about $9 trillion at the end of this year if its shadow economy is included. $7.5 trillion without the shadow economy. Shadow economy is the rich 10% hiding most of their money.
India should be about $22 trillion economy in 2030 and the USA should be about $35 trillion.
You are very optimistic.
- Mass produced fission, fusion, and maybe cold fusion
- Hyperbroadband!
- Supersmartphones!
Your list offered above list certainly is full of hyperbole and sloganeering....
But TOD probably needs some dreamers as a counterpoint to the doomers, to frame the bounds of the conversation.
So, Rock on!
Edit:
http://www.steelydan.com/nightflyrics.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.G.Y._%28What_a_Beautiful_World%29
I went to the first link you posted...you forgot this list which was also posted there!
1. Economic abundance
2. Radical life extension
3. Physical and Cognitive enhancement
4. Blood Stream Robots
5. Supermaterials
6. Open Access to space
7. Pollution elimination
8. Computer Advancement
9. Shape changing functional devices like utility fog
Nextbigfuture is my website. I have written several articles on a mundane singularity. I have detailed articles on every point on both the old and new lists.
Over 8000 articles.
I will probably write a few hundred page book to detail how I think the future will play out.
In spite of current troubles we are heading for relative abundance. But we can do even better.
I made up the term hyperbroadband because we already have the terms broadband and ultrabroadband. Millimeter wireless van get to ten gigabits per second and better antennas can improve range while keeping things compact. Advanced optical fiber can get to terabits per second and it will not just be backbone speeds.
NVIDIA has a roadmap to smartphone processors 75 times faster than todaya dual core by 2015. There will be continued progress beyond that leading to multi peraflop mobile systems connected to zettaflop clouds. They will.have neuromorphic coprocessors and various quantum computing systems when those types of calculations or processing is needed.
Why?
Please, if and when you publish your book, let us know on this list.
I may buy a copy.
My shelves house a range of tomes, from political, military, history, science topics, non-fiction, and science fiction.
Do you envision your book as a listing of potential technologies along with brief descriptions of their potential positive impacts,...or are envisioning that, //and// delving into predictions of potential negative impacts, unintended consequences, and trying to weave a 'big picture' tapestry of how all these technologies will be molded by, and indeed mold, our politics and philosophies, and what impact the sum total may have on our future sustainability and quality of life, including the impact on all the other species in our ecosystem?
Have you though publishing a magazine format? If not glossy clay-coated paper format, perhaps a collection of articles published monthly/weekly/etc. suitable for viewing on an eBook reader such as the Kindle?
H
Jared Diamond (in Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) explores at least some of the reasons why we humans have in the past anyhow allowed civilizations to overshoot and collapse. (So has Joseph Tainter (in The Collapse of Complex Societies))
Diamond lists a number of ways that groups either do disastrous things or fail to recognize what they are doing will become disastrous if kept up.
One of the examples he gives is global warming. And let's face it, far more people know about global warming than they do about resource limits, exponential growth & peak oil. Yet will we as a civilization be able to do anything constructive about this before it is too late? Diamond says politicians use the term "creeping normalcy" to describe how slow trends in the middle of noisy fluctuations are not perceived until it is too late.
Could the same be true of exponential increases? Will we continue on because although we see the downward changes (less disposable income, higher debts, recessions, etc.) they are slow and don't readily correlate to running out of resources or polluting our environment?
In the past there doesn't appear to be too many civilazations that were able to live within their environmental/resource constraints. Most overshot and collapsed to a lesser state. I'd say that even with a number of people who get it, it may not be enough to change things before it's too late.
In Tainter's terms, as civilizations grew complex and thus faced increasingly complex challenges, they had to devise even more complex solutions, and eventually the returns to additional complexity were so low that "collapse" to a simpler state became the most likely outcome. Tainter posited that this was true for all the civilization collapses he had studied.
If Tainter was right and the "collapse due to diminishing returns to complexity" problem is generic (and not merely culture-specific) then that would be a major hurdle for technological civilizations aspiring to lifespans in the tens of thousands of years. Perhaps Tainter had already described the general form of the energy / thermodynamic absurdity challenge described in the key post.
Having read the comments, I still feel that our failure to detect signatures of other civilizations is, on balance of probabilities, a warning regarding overshoot and collapse. Here is my reasoning for drawing "evidence" out of the absence of evidence:
First, if the origin of life and evolution are common occurrences, then the evolution of intelligence may also be common. Just look at the many different intelligent species on our planet for the answer to that one!
Second, let us ignore life in other galaxies on account of the tremendous distances involved. We assume that the universe consists of just our galaxy for all intents and purposes.
Let us then assume that the evolution of intelligent tool users / knowledge storers is rare and the evolution of technological civilizations even rarer.
Finally let us also keep in mind that civilizations could be separated from each other by billions of years in TIME as well as distances in space, reducing the chances of overlap of their cosmological histories.
Even with all those constraints where are the EM signatures of a single technological civilization that came before us, that is self-restrained in its growth, that has spread to nearby star systems, and which has therefore survived for eons? We should have seen such signatures by now if they existed. (By the way, I don't buy the "a large spacefaring civilization maintains radio silence" argument)
So, the thought experiment I posted above can be interpreted as saying that if the origins of life and intelligence are not exceedingly rare, then technological civilizations likely tend to self-destruct (or be short lived) for generic reasons.
This conclusion has the benefit of being consistent with Tainter's findings based on the actual histories of diverse civilizations on Earth. He found generic cross cultural explanations for the process of collapse. Which is a must if one wants to argue that a common cause (such as no evolutionary pressure to anticipate overshoot and collapse) caused all past technological civilizations in our galaxy to go extinct within a few thousand years of their births.
civilizations grew complex and thus faced increasingly complex challenges
That suggests a kind of hegelian dialectic, in which complexity caused ever more complex challenges. That's not my understanding of Tainter. My understanding is that the societies faced challenges that were too big for them to solve, such as running out of resources, agricultural problems, or invaders. Their ever more complex solutions worked, until they didn't.
(my emphasis)
Tainter had essentially argued that there were diminishing returns to complexity, and that after a certain point it would be beneficial for society to "collapse" to a simpler state erasing much of the accumulated costly complexity that was overburdening daily life - which I think is essentially saying the same thing as your interpretation, i.e. that "ever more complex" solutions work until they don't.
As for the increasing complexity - the "ever more complex" solutions which you also referred to - I think this is a truism that we see everywhere. For instance, oil extraction technology started off as workers digging with spades a century before the Deepwater Horizon. It couldn't possibly have worked the other way round!
The one-way march of increasing complexity is also visible in the imaginary energy growth solutions in the key post. First you cover the land with photovoltaics, then you take over the oceans, then you try to surround the sun with orbiting PV panels, then you try to harvest the energy of every other star in the galaxy, starting from the nearest ones. You wouldn't try to harvest the energy of a star at the other end of the galaxy before you exhausted every last square metre of land surfaces on Earth. These things are almost self-evident.
I think we can safely generalize that for any and all entropic problems, the least costly (which almost always translates to "least complex") solution will be tapped first, until the entropy catches up. Every time entropy catches up, in a way your society is back to square one, only with a more complex structure requiring upkeep, and with a shrinking menu of increasingly more complex solutions. In that sense, my reading was that Tainter's analysis recognizes the self-feeding dynamic that I had referred to.
Come to think of it, one could say that the history of evolution on Earth is also exhibiting diminishing returns to complexity. Knowledge-storing, social, complex-tool-using and HIGHLY COMPLEX species like us have been spectacularly overshooting carrying capacity and are in the process of leaving one big dent on the interdependent biosphere of this planet. From the point of view of nature and evolution, our high complexity is delivering negative returns: nature really was MUCH better off if we had never evolved and if its domain was populated with less invasive species that had less potential of disrupting its myriads of balancing acts.
I think we can safely generalize that for any and all entropic problems, the least costly (which almost always translates to "least complex") solution will be tapped first, until the entropy catches up.
Unless it doesn't.
I think Tainter is talking about situations where resources run out, and there are no solutions. I don't think that's the case for energy: we have scalable, affordable, high E-ROI alternatives: wind, solar, etc.
Yes, we have high EROEI alternatives, but the point of the key post is that we will hit a wall with those too and sooner than most people would think.
By the phrase "hit the wall" I mean that we will reach a point where the next level "ever more complex" solution would yield (net) negative returns, making collapse the most advantageous option. This, as I recall it, was Tainter's generalized rule from studying those cases of collapse.
There are many examples of absurd complexity clearly past the point of negative returns in the key post, such as the fact that you would need more than one Earth's worth of specialized materials to surround the sun with a 4mm thick sphere of PV panels.
the point of the key post is that we will hit a wall with those too and sooner than most people would think.
Not really. The point of the key post is that we will hit a wall sooner or later. The reality: it doesn't matter. We'll hit a point where we have enough energy, and energy consumption no longer has to grow, long before that.
I would instead argue that we are in the first wave of intelligence in the galaxy, and that there only be one wave. It is also possible that fundamental physical barriers to both travel and communicate throughout the galaxy are such that even those planets which developed intelligence before us have not yet managed to break out of their local region far enough to be visible to us.
You must make a lot of assumptions to use the lack of evidence itself as evidence that intelligent life usually self-destructs. For example, if a species limits growth and continues to advance technologically, there is no reason to think that they would continue to broadcast EM in every direction.
"we are in the first wave of intelligence in the galaxy"
So this 'wave of intelligence' brought about a major mass extinction event on its planet, set off runaway global warming that will likely render its planet uninhabitable for its own species, has constructed thousands of a variety of kind of powerful weapons of mass destruction that at any moment could wipe out most of its own species along with most others, has filled its environment with long living toxins...
And this all in the 'first wave' of 'intelligence.'
God save us from the second, third and nth waves!!
Like I said, there won't be another :)
I tend to believe that these problems are embedded in the fabric of reality to force intelligence to grow. Fossil fuels allowed humanity to ramp up with surprising rapidity while causing Global Climate Change, which will force the development of Global Climate Engineering. Death and disease has motivated investment in a massive biotechnology revolution that could easily dwarf nuclear in terms of the potential power (and problems).
Mass extinction events are inevitable. We are entering the 6th such event, and yes, we caused this one. Mostly I want things to hurry up already, because humanity needs to punch itself in the face in order to become aware of its ability to throw punches. You think we'll shoot ourself in the face first, and there will be nothing left to be aware... Even the more extreme predictions for global warming allow for people living away from the equator, and I have a hard time imagining that collapse will be so total that all awareness and ability to rebuild will be lost.
The failures of your imagination are of little concern to a collapsing earth.
I'm not sure where you are getting your ideas of "extreme predictions for gw" but you should know that there is good reason to think that the sea beds of the Arctic could start releasing hundreds of billions of tons of methane into the atmosphere at any moment, if they are not already in the process of doing so.
(If you don't already know, methane is over 100 times more powerful than CO2 at current concentrations in decadal terms. And all of human activity currently adds about 30 billion extra tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year now.)
Here is a report pointed out to me recently by someone who is more enthusiastic about this stuff that anyone else I know of:
http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL6E7IK2TB20110721?page...
Cute. It's not that I can't imagine a total collapse, it's that it seems relatively unlikely. We still can't predict whether catastrophic clathrate destabilization would lead to cooling or warming, although the standard idea is cooling first by particulates in the environment, followed by warming. As a side note, the optics of massive explosive methane pockets drifting over Canada and Siberia to be set off by lightning would be phenomenal. I could only hope for something that would play so well on television to reach into the psyche of the complacent developed world.
Life will get very tough, but we can do far more than just attempt to sequester carbon, which is really more of a long term and permanent solution. For example, see here. If it comes down to it, we'll be doing far more drastic things.
You're a Doomer, and that's fine, but you seem to latch on to everything that supports your religion that humanity is most likely doomed to die. I think it's possible, but not so likely. Only time will tell which of us is right. We both agree that there are fundamental life-threatening challenges in humanity's future, we just have different ideas about how we'll respond to them.
I have no very clear idea about 'how to respond to them.' Do you?
Do you have a link to the study you alluded to that suggests clathrate release may at first cause cooling? I had not heard that one. Hard to see how that works, since methane has no particles.
Your link references 'clean coal.' If you find such obvious industrial lies to be even worth linking to, we are probably further apart than I had supposed.
If any even tiny % of the 10,000 billion tons of seabed methane releases suddenly and explodes, methinks it will be a bit more than an optical amusement.
Maybe one of our number crunchers can work out what the explosive force of, say, 100 billions tons (1% of the total) of methane exploding at once would be.
55.7 kJ/g http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane)
Here's a little something on a previous methane release:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/12/011210163439.htm
I always find it awesome when people say things like It is envisionable that the planet could be destroyed, I just find it unlikely. Thereis such a thing as the precaution principle (is that the english expression?). I think you have it ass backwards.
We haven't proved that the precautionary principle gives better results, and thus, due to the precautionary principle, we can't use the precautionary principle.
Very
funnytiresome. As you well know, the precautionary principle is about being confident of the absence of harm. Nothing to do with 'better'.If "better" is defined as "cause less net harm", then it has everything to do with it. For instance, the precautionary principle is applied to genetic modification of crops in the EU and lots of other places to such a degree that it cause a lot of harm.
We look in the radio spectrum for ET. Radio is only 100 years old. My guess is that in 1000 years we will come up with something better for communications across interstellar distances. So I am not worried that we have not found ET on the radio.
What is EM radiation? The interactions of electrons and photons explain all of chemistry and most of physics except for nuclear and gravitational, if I remember Feynman's lectures correctly. What you call "Radio" is quite fundamental and it is highly unlikely for an advanced civilization to avoid leaving fingerprints in it.
However, if they encode it, as we are starting to do, it may be very difficult to find the fingerprints unless one knows in advance and rather precisely what they look like. As recently as two decades ago it may have seemed good enough just to look for simple spectral lines, but very possibly that's not so. Catch-22.
The more efficiently information is encoded, the more indistinguishable it becomes from natural noise.
"Why haven't we detected any in the half-century plus of listening for them?"
That's a blink of an eye. We may just have had our eyes closed for the golden moment. Besides the universe is much larger than it's age, the observational bubble we are living in is 46 billion light years wide. There are regions which we never cannot reach or listen to. The total universe may as well be infinite in volume. Another civilisations may be sending signals 1000 billion light years from us in their bubble, and they might end up listening in vain for their entire cosmological history. There may as well be billions of civilisations hundreds of thousands of billions of light years away from each other.
Intelligent life is relatively rare. Or better to say we really have no data for a conclusion. There's massive amount of pure chance happening every moment, right now. Even the cosmological constants may bend in super large scales, and some regions of the universe would be completely unlivable whereas others would be better.
"At 2.3% growth, we would need to cover the whole surface of the earth with 100% efficient solar cells in 400 years. "
Does this assume the solar cells on the side of the eart which is turned away from the sun also generate electricity 24/24?
No: only the projected face of the Earth is contributing at any given time. At pi.R², this is one quarter of the total surface area. The factor of four difference is comprised of a factor of 2 for day/night, and another factor of 2 for geometry: not all panels see the sun overhead, leading to a projection effect.
Interesting that not a single person has mentioned a "light cone". The light from the dawn of human civilization has yet to reach the furthest reaches of the Milky Way galaxy. Obviously, the speed of the propagation of light limits growth (most obvious of the obvious). And no, warp drives are not physically possible. Or, I should note that they are exactly as possible as time travel. I'm just so tired of people bringing that up.
There are many arguments of the technological singularity breed that would actually see limits such as what are proposed here. If we put things in terms of theoretical computational power, the situation actually becomes pretty clear. Space, by the way, is only at a temperature of some 3 degrees Kelvin. Therefore, you could heat up a local area quite a bit relative to the natural burn rate of Hydrogen in stars and still have it hospitable for your space-faring race.
It is crazy to think about 10x growth in 100 years since certainly there are finite consumption limits of individual humans. The consumption beyond a certain level could only consist of robots doing the bidding of humans. But this might be an over-simplification. If humans no longer died, just put their brains into the network, then that will change things. If we create sentient computers themselves, then that could change the equation. And no, I am not proposing that we achieve the level of understanding the mechanics of the brain to achieve this. We have every ability to grow human tissue as well as alter genetic codes without destroying the cells. I would assert that a simple process of trial and error is more than sufficient to achieve things like super-intelligent brains that only exist as a node in a computer network.
People who don't see how the human race can figure out to sustain a 3% growth rate for 100s of years are lacking nothing more than creativity. It is true that ultimately the only physical limit is the propagation rate of energy through our light cone and the temperature limits that it causes. Would we ultimately destroy ourselves (whatever "we" be at that time) in such a state of living? Maybe those living on the periphery would decide that they don't want to limit their Hydrogen burn rate and so who cares if they cook the older civilization toward the center? It is most certainly a curious thought. It could, even, be a fun astronomical object to look for. That is, the heat death of an ancient society.
Generally though, I don't understand why so few other people think about the ultimate thermodynamic limits of a massive space-faring and technologically self-replicating society. The OP itself shows an inability to consider such far-flung concepts. Those who advocate perpetual growth are clearly of the technological singularity camp (due to basic algebra). So it seems like the OP is attacking a strawman which is that humans will continue to exist in a form that looks something like today but yet has unlimited growth. That's just plain stupid.
Why stop at limiting mankind's ascent due to just running out of energy & goods? And what happens when the universe "dies"? Is it "game over"?
Some have posited a so-called "Omega Point" first coined by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and later carried through using modern physics by Frank Tipler.
The idea as put forward by Tipler is that "human" consciousness evolves such that it expands to include the entire universe, effectively being a massive computing consciousness.
And how does it escape the universe's dieing? Tipler's prediction is that the universe must end in The Big Crunch. From Wiki: "Within this universe, Tipler assumes a massive processing capability. As the universe becomes smaller, the processing capability becomes larger, due to the decreasing cost of communications as the systems shrink in size. At the same time, information from previously disconnected points in space becomes visible, giving the processors access to more and more information. Tipler's Omega Point occurs when the processing capability effectively becomes infinite, as the processors will be able to simulate every possible future before the universe ends - a state also know as "Aleph".
Within this environment, Tipler imagines that intelligent beings, human personalities, will be run as simulations within the system. As a result, after the Omega Point, humans will have omnipotence, able to see all of history and predict all of the future. Additionally, as all history becomes available, past personalities will be able to run as well. Within the simulation, this appears to be the dead rising."
And Tipler claims this can go on for infinity: "intelligent beings accelerate the speed of their mental processes accordingly they can even experience a subjective infinite time during the last stages of the [universe's] collapse"
All of this "arises" out of the Anthropic Principle.
For more reading:
Barrow, John D.; Tipler, Frank J. (19 May 1988). The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford University Press
Frank J. Tipler (1994). The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. New York: Doubleday
Long before we hit the wall on energy consumption other growth limitations are going to kick in.
To the extent that the global economy depends on non-renewable material resources it operates within a closed isolated system. In this context, the "Second Law of Thermodynamics" states that in any closed system economic activity continuously and irreversibly degrades available material resources to the unavailable state. Thus, economic activity continuously depletes the resource base which sustains it.
Thus, the "Second Law of Thermodynamics" is the ultimate regulator of economic activity. This was pointed out by renowned Canadian ecologist Bill Rees:
http://combusem.com/REES.HTM
To the extent that the global economy depends on non-renewable material resources... the "Second Law of Thermodynamics" is the ultimate regulator of economic activity.
So, the obvious answer is to go to renewables.
Gee, I hadn't thought of that.
How many elements in the "Periodic Table" would you say are renewable?
Most of them, with recycling. Helium is a problem, as it tends to escape from the atmosphere.
Max,
In this context, the "Second Law of Thermodynamics" states that in any closed system economic activity continuously and irreversibly degrades available material resources to the unavailable state. Thus, economic activity continuously depletes the resource base which sustains it.
For many metals the opposite is happening, low grade ores are being concentrated into high grade metals. Think of copper, gold, uranium, even if some is lost because it is not practical to recycle 100%.
Touche sir. In terms of radical "growth forever" arguments, we have the following hierarchy (note crazy is the most conservative):
- Crazy
- Normal Economists
- Technological Singularity-ists
- Tipler
I've watched some of Tipler's talks on youtube. They are like magic. No really. I have doubt about some point, he mentions it, some big words are used, and all of a sudden it is waved away. Poof!
So, I guess I could question why, at all, the presence of advanced life would prevent the big rip, which is the obvious fate of the universe given dark energy. But that would first require glossing over Tipler's claim that computation can occur at a density that violates fundamental limits like the plank length in the first place. Seriously, his stuff is wacky. It is so wacky that it is unanswerable.
I'm all for extracting really major and even spiritual meaning from the anthropic principle, but Tipler's Omega Point has only marginally better basis than theism itself.
Reason and stars above,
I will never consider my self as having foolish cornucopian leanings again!
Pretty big talk for a species that doesn't know, as they put it, "where 90% of the matter of the universe is", does not understand the energies that are, as they observe it, "accelerating the expansion of the universe", debate the number of dimensions, knowing only that X, Y, Z, and T can't be solved as the grand underpinnings, and control, essentially, only electrical forces.
Excellent dose of humility. Hubris sometimes works, but I'm not comfortable with that policy. Many of the commentators (especially the dominant ones) seem to have all the answers and know where we're heading. But we simply can't know. I hope we can acknowledge that fact and agree that we need to be prepared with a plan B, plan C, etc. We need to take all credible outcomes seriously and challenge our assumptions and the sense of what is "normal" (like a growth paradigm) with analysis.
Some might assume that we will live on other planets, or that we will have fusion, or that we can successfully transition to a fully renewable energy infrastructure, or that we can decouple physical and economic growth. We should be aware of the challenges involved in each of these assumptions, and have in our back pocket a solid plan for dealing with the failure of any of these steps to come to fruition. Having no backup (possibly unappealing or modest) plan is gambling big time with our future. We may all want the same future, but wanting and delivering can be lightyears apart.
There's an enormous difference in difficulty between analyzing what can be done, and forecasting what is likely to happen.
It's very useful to know that there exist, with very, very little doubt, workable and affordable solutions1 to our fossil fuel problems.
Whether we will use them properly or, like the Vikings of Greenland, choose not to, will be up to our collective choices. As best I can tell, the primary barrier to better collective choices is resistance to change from the minority that will be hurt (car companies, oil companies, coal companies, etc, etc). This has little to do with the solutions, and is a problem for change of any kind at all.
1electrification such as electric vehicles and heat pumps; low/zero carbon sources of electricity from some combination of wind power, solar, tidal, nuclear, geothermal, etc, etc.
-----------------------------------------
I certainly agree that we should challenge all of our assumptions, evaluate all credible risks, and prepare a diverse set of options.
I'll assert to you, however, that running out of energy due to resource limitations is not a credible risk. I come to that conclusion after treating it as a credible risk over 30 years ago, and looking at the issue quite carefully. I've been contributing to TOD (for close to 6 years) in large part to clarify this question for people, and I'd be happy to discuss it at length with you as well.
tmurphy,
I hope we can acknowledge that fact and agree that we need to be prepared with a plan B, plan C, etc. We need to take all credible outcomes seriously and challenge our assumptions and the sense of what is "normal" (like a growth paradigm) with analysis.
If you mean that plan A is continued exponential increases in energy consumption, then you have done a good job of demonstrating that this is going to create serious problems very soon.
On the other hand I think a lot of the BAU assumptions can accommodate a stable population with a long term increase in economic growth even if this is fairly low and not exponential. In the last few 100 years we have survived the depletion of some natural resources and it seems the we will manage the replacement of most FFs by renewable and nuclear energy, and the substitution and recycling of rare metals such as copper and silver with more abundant metals or other technologies( digital cameras instead of silver in photography).
A stable population will remove a lot of the growth in resource consumption and with a reasonable improvement in recycling an actual decline in the rate of minerals extraction, even as GDP continues to rise. Similarly small improvements in energy efficiency (kWh/unit GDP) would allow growth in GDP with no or very small increases in energy use.
I guess if we are unable to replace FF by renewable and nuclear faster than FF depletion, we will have to go to plan B, which will involve some form of rationing of FF energy use(specifically oil), similar to what was done in WWII, some hardships but not really the end of the world, even if the process had to be maintained for decades rather than years, or until at least most ICE vehicles are replaced by EV. I think we can manage without any air transportation, better than my grandparents managed for most of their lives.
Rationing is just hole in the head. The market will clear all by itself. No rationing scheme can do better.
Excellent dose of humility.
Yes indeed! Thank you, KalimankuDenku, for this antidote to the manias of certain other commenters.
Most welcome. What fun! There's a lot more to know.
Janka Rupkina:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaF9xxUmMvk&feature=related
KalimankuDenku,
Are you saying that the theme idea of this post if too pessimistic, that limits to Human growth are rather far distant?
I dream of space.
As I have done...but...I have come to the conclusion that dreams of space ill not help mankind achieve sustainability on Earth.
Once you crawl out of the ocean
Where is there left to go?
It's obviously hidden by advanced aliens who have encircled most of the stars with dyson spheres, hiding them completely.
!
Could Be!
If only it was known
Really known
What causes mass.
The Mountain:
http://vimeo.com/22439234
lower resolution:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk6_hdRtJOE
Very interesting observation. If something is unsustainable, it will not be sustained. The balance of nature always will find a solution, whether or not we are happy with the outcome! Now, the question is, what to do about it? This has always attracted a lot of interest by rent seekers of all stripes, all over the world. Free, unfettered innovation strikes me as the most promising solution, and will most probably give us the happiest ride to wherever we go!
Don't know if anybody has mentioned it, but it struck me that figure 1 shows a broken trend around 1970. Since then, the per capita energy use of the US has not moved. All increased energy use since then is due to population increase. The story is the same for for instance UK and Germany. Since the population isn't growing exponentially and since energy demand is easily saturated, there is no basis for expecting an exponential energy growth rate even in the short term.
Could not agree more that there is no basis for expecting exponential energy growth. I think TOD readers are likely all on board. Surprising how many people aren't, though. I put an update on Do the Math that explicitly addresses the broken trend you point out. I don't explore the cause of the break (in terms of population, per capita use) but rather look at how well logistic functions fit. Surprisingly, logistic models based on finite total energy or finite total power fit the data to date quite well.
I've just joined TOD although I've visited and read here before.
I've read much of the above and was surprised at how involved the arguments became. Surely the point of this part 1 post was merely to show how quickly 2.3% compound energy growth will use up all energy stores IF WE CONTINUE AS WE HAVE BEEN DOING?
I see that part 2, the expected exploration of what growth means and what growth can be achieved, has already been posted so I'll take a look there.
Proving once again that the biggest obstacle to human potential and technological progress is not lack of know-how, energy, or even exponential growth --it's politics, greed and human stupidity (the only infinite resource in the universe). Credit Repair