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Limits On Growth of Energy Use and Economies
snoop.daub writes "Dr. Tom Murphy, professor of astrophysics at UCSD, has a new blog called 'Do The Math,' and the first few posts are doozies. In the first, he shows the impossibility of continued exponential growth in energy use. Even if a new, 'free' energy source is developed, thermodynamic limits on efficiency mean that the heat associated with converting this energy into useful work will increase the temperature of the earth to unbearable levels within 300 years. In the second, he extends the argument to economic growth. The timescales there are faster, only 50-100 years. Fascinating stuff. Time to stop breeding, folks, or to get our butts into space."
He's not taking into account what a really big CoolerMaster can do for that heat problem.
No one who has predicted the end of the world has been right, to date.
-- $G
Could someone please sit down with key leaders and explain to them in plain English (or the languages of their choice) why virtually all the premises upon which our society is built, fail the test of exponential growth. Even the national debt. As it currently exists, if we were to take 100% of the income from every American today, it would not pay off the national debt. Its all a ponzi scheme and the idiots running the ship have simply run aground. Its time to get straight, tell the truth, clean up the mess, and make the planet fit for human habitation on all levels. We start by fixing the disaster that our economy(s) are/is, and we get on with the SANE job of designing then implementing sustainable future.
So this Prof. Tim Murphy just has rediscovered Malthus... and it only took him 200 years. Wow!
You're telling geeks to stop breeding? Isn't that redundant?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Seriously, heat build-up was part of the reason for the multi-hundred trillion plus population of the Puppeteer's to move their homeworld into a further orbit.
Then they learned that the whole galaxy was going to be exposed to a massive radiation wave caused by some black hole collapse in the galaxy's core.
We should plan for that.
If/when we ever get to the point that the human population is too large to be sustainable, it will correct itself. History shows us that famine, war, and plague occur when we run out of resources or populate an area too densely. Some of the strong, smart, and lucky will survive to repopulate.
The big problem with his assumption is that in 1400 years our knowledge of physics doesn't change. It's like an an aysos in the 1800s saying we won't be able to keep our homes lit because we will have killed off all the whales. I'm not saying I know the answer, just I am smart enough not to claim exponential energy growth using today's technology.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Presumably, more government control of everything is the proper fix, right?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Every time I see this Models & Extrapolation game I am reminded of yesterday, last year, a decade ago predictions that turned out flat wrong, and the 300 year time frame makes it unfalsifiable like the 10 year budget cuts.
The one place we should be employing the Precautionary Principle is get into space as Einstein, Heinline and Hawking have all recommended.
Since we have an abundance of energy we can simply turn our air conditioners backwards and cool the earth back down.
We're all DOOOOoomed. Doommed.
I'm really tired of all this "being a human being is evil" nonsense.
So many out there would tell you to live your life under a rock, never have kids, never enjoy anything, because OMG THE EARTH IS DOOMED BECAUSE OF YOU.
I consume because I'm alive. That's what the world is here for. Deal with it.
These posts also appeared on The Oil Drum (www.theoildrum.com) a couple weeks ago. If anyone hasn't been there already, it has been the epicenter of all things energy-peakoil related on the intertubes since before the runup in 2008. It has a consistently high signal-to-noise ratio in the comments as well. Exceptional site.
Look how much has changed in 100 years, in 10 years, even in 1 year.
Things change quickly. There is no way to predict anything that will happen in 20 years properly when it comes to technology, which is driven by (1) warfare, (2) government research, (3) input costs versus need. I'm against 1 & 2, but in terms of technology chasing either speed or efficiency, we've been more focused on speed than on efficiency because energy is so damned cheap, and it's likely to stay cheap for the time being.
As long as energy is cheap, our focus will be on doing things faster or better, but not more efficiently, except where there is a financial incentive to.
If energy costs start to go up in a significant way, research will focus more on efficiency than on speed or quality.
For years I've wanted a simple, scriptable home automation system. I've played with all of the systems out there, but without smart outlets and smart meters, the systems are useless. Why aren't there smart outlets and smart meters that actually work? There's no need -- energy is cheap and easy to get.
This is fearmongering, pure and simple.
Space increases as r^3 (give or take a little gravitational bending) and the speed of light limits the rate at which the radius of inhabited space can grow. Any process that depends on exponential growth to maintain stability will quickly overwhelm our ability to expand outwards. At best we buy ourselves a couple more millenia - a blip in cosmic timescales.
You don't need a PHD or a complex study, just common sense.
Why do so many people in finance continue to insist on growth?
We should be focusing on steady state sustainability.
http://m.nypost.com/p/blogs/capitol/free_cell_phones_are_civil_right_htTMcKQFrjdvyl9A6NHPdP
breeding, and I'm ready for space!
Exponential growth in any real (not imaginary/virtual) system must slow down when it exceeds some percentage of it's total environment. Eventually, it hits a saturation point and must slow down. While the exact percentage that defines saturation varies with the growth rate and environment, typically exponential growth can't continue once it reaches 50% of it's environment. So, on a very basic level, he has simply stated the obvious.
However, as heat can be converted to other forms of energy, there are ways to dissipate and/or use the surplus heat. Also, higher efficiency methods of converting heat into electricity or other useful forms of energy will delay the saturation point. So, he's correct in theory, and his details are probably not an accurate prediction.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
The academy of sciences didn't do the math when Pons and Fleischman made their claim of low temperature fusion-like data available to the world. The Catholic church didn't do the math when Galileo and Copernicus stated that the Earth was not the center of the universe. The US government never does the math when it comes to a balanced budget, they just generate more taxes to spend. Why should I care to "do the math" when the mess this planet is in never adds up. It's always the fault of the hungry consumer and never the arrogant, greedy powers that were.
He wants his concept back.
At first I thought that the OP wanted to continue exponential growth by moving people into space. However, there's no place in the solar system that can sustain human life with anywhere near the efficiency of Earth. The resources in terms of energy to move a large portion of the population into space would be enormous, and I don't see how this endeavor could possibly be self-sustaining. It seems that the space option would only aggravate the problem. Then I though that perhaps the OP is suggesting a kind of Logan's Run type approach--we could use space as a means of disposing of excess population. However, there are other solutions for the Logan's Run strategy with far greater energy efficiency and without the problem of generating copious space junk in LEO.
I'm almost all the way through it. Very sobering stuff, only a few bits I have quibbles with. Or, if you don't have the time, read the synopsis.
The point about the assumption of growth is an important one. The world's financial systems are built on that assumption i.e. anyone who lends money expects to make a profit on the loan, after inflation if applicable. That's true of all loans, from the smallest micro-loan to the trillions in sovereign debt owed by the USA.
(this is not a
Why not simply shunt the heat into another universe?
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, only some countries have to stop breeding actually. Numerically speaking, European countries should fork away all day long.
Soon we'll grow everything we need, we'll feed our equipment and housing rather than fuel it, let stuff grow rather than mine and refine.. Problem solved, population of ten or twelve billion humans living wealthy and prosperous lifetyles, energy needs go through the floor. As to the "Monsanto Type Personalty" problem that might arise with this, we use the time honored French Revolution solution.
If, like me, you find classical economics to be about as useful as Ptolemaic epicycles or creationism for describing the real world, I suggest studying biophysical economics, which examines economic questions from the perspective of thermodynamics and other physical laws. One of the main concepts in biophysical economics is that of net energy (oftentimes called "return on energy invested.")
Net energy is the amount of energy available to do work once you subtract the amount of energy required to extract and process it. Tar sands in Alberta, for example, have a much lower net energy than the crude from the superfields of Saudi Arabia due to the amount of energy required to mine and process the tar sands. (One of the major limitations to biophysical economics, IMHO, is the lack of rigorous estimates of the net energy of current energy resources. Net energy curves are usually plotted without error bars, for example.) With net energy in mind, you should always disregard the folks who talk about energy resources strictly in terms of volume. For example, you could find a deposit of 10 million barrels of oil, but if it takes 9.5 million barrels worth of oil to extract and refine it, then the rest of society only has 500,000 barrels of oil to run tractors, create fertilizer, maintain existing infrastructure, and produce more human biomass.
A convincing case can be made that industrial economies are faltering not from the actions of Wall Street and the stooges in high finance, but the decline in net energy available to human civilization. The progress of the past few centuries has almost entirely been underwritten by fossil fuels, and the Green Revolution is a nice way of saying that we convert nonrenewable, low entropy energy sources into edible calories. But the net energy of present energy resources is significantly less than the “easy oil” that we found at the beginning of the twentieth century. So you basically have less net energy to go in the following buckets: real economic growth, human biomass growth, maintenance of current infrastructure, and energy required to remediate the environmental damage of industrialization (e.g., Fukushima cleanup). You could probably think of a few more.
Anyway, I could spend hours writing about this subject, as it’s profoundly interesting and does a wonderful job of explaining why shit’s heading south, but I’ll direct you to the experts should you want to learn more:
“Question Everything,” a blog on biophysical economics by Dr. George Mobus (PhD in computer science)
http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/
TheOilDrum.com for discussions about peak oil, peak net energy, etc.
Energy and the Wealth of Nations, a textbook on biophysical economics that will be released this November. The book’s authors have been studying energy return on investment and its relation to biological systems for many years now.
TFA is awesome - great to see scientists talk about economics, since the reverse is probably a lot less likely.
this is all inter-related. Other than the doomsday prophesying and fatalism - the simple fact is that humans are consuming too many resources and it is not sustainable. This itself is a direct result of neoliberal economic policy from the 80s onwards, the astronimic growth in consumerism and the ridiculous fetishism of equating GDP with happiness or wellbeing. The current economic model of 'developed' countries relies on ever-increasing growth, which means MORE consumerism. At the same time, we're applauding 'developing' economies for increasing their own GDP through usage of non-renewable resources. Capitalism cannot remain static - it relies on continued growth and that only means more resource consumption. Capitalists argue that these resources can be substituted and we can rely on technology to dig us out of this predicament, but it seems far from assured.
Don't forget it is also this consumerism that is the basis of the current global recession - consumer credit has vastly expanded over the last 30 years, after the wage-productivity gap (http://margotbnews.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/wage-productivity-gap-caused-crisis/) widened. But capitalism still needed our spending, so we all loaded up our credit cards and took on loans we couldn't service. Even though developed economies grew at a stupendous rate (based on the dubious GDP measurement), income inequality has widened. And NOW, after all this, conservative governments are dramatically cutting social spending, justified by the totally false equation of a national economy being similar to a household income - you shouldn't spend more than you earn. This is rubbish - sovereign economies (ie. not the eurozone) can print as much money as they like to avoid a default.
This whole thing is just a great excuse for the neoliberals to make out that we can no longer afford welfare, and that cutting any income support is financially prudent. And the masses just suck it up.
Think very hard about what is unique and unrepeatable about this moment in history. Now extrapolate 50 years ahead. All of a sudden, those remarkable, delicate and doomed circumstances that make your life so pleasant right now - DON'T EXIST (food, clean air, water, infrastructure, toys, relative afflluence, relative safety). Just because they have existed during the few years you've been alive doesn't mean that happy circumstance shall continue. All available evidence, and any thorough projection (yes, there have been many over the past half a century, mostly with essentially the same clear message), makes it pretty clear this brief light bright period in the West is ending. It didn't have to be this way but a lot of very poor choices were made (and continue to be made).
you had me at #!
Where heat is needed.
The human element of a global ecosystem must conform to and follow the fact it is part of that ecosystem. We can't pretend it's not. Our intelligence gives us obvious benefits over other animals, but otherwise, there are tons of hard limits.
For starters, you can't populate the world at or above its current level without serious backlash, ie. over-competition for resources, loss of biodiversity to make room for massive food operations, etc.
Then there's the fact people need to have certain things in their lives (ownership, personal space, security, appreciation) that cannot be simply dismissed in the course of pursuing some sort of Utopian ideal. Our culture has gone there, done that, and we know full well it doesn't work. The world has no place for ideals, only reality. We have to move forward on the principle of planning for the worst while hoping for the best and trying to bring out each individual's best. That's it in a nutshell and I'll spare the long discussions on it here.
Next, each person needs a certain amount of supplies to live out a happy/healthy lifestyle. Think of it as Starcraft on a grand scale. If you don't start with depots before you bring out more people (you need lots of food, water, housing, etc.) then you're screwing yourself. IRL has no cheat codes.
Also, our current economy is built on a mantra of "total productivity," something that's going to prove an even bigger problem soon. In our current situation each nation's economy is dependent on huge hordes of make-work jobs, speculators, excessive management and superfluous employees. Think about that for a second. Most of us, myself included, are here seeking an excuse to exist as employees because this was the system we've been forced to live in. But all that can quickly change: technology can replace 2/3 or more of today's workforce freeing up time to train for other tasks or at least clearing away schedules to give us space to do things we actually want to be doing. Problem is, this would collapse the economy as we know it and disrupt things for a few years to come until we get our shit together. It's another case of you have to pay before you receive.
But I have to wonder, is this potentially an inevitable fork in the path we've currently set ourselves on?
(And last but not least, where does the author get his energy from, a Bag of Holding? There's something called the "solar constant" that seems to be ignored. Sounds like orc mischief to me.)
If you can find a way to build three houses using the same amount of energy, material and time that you used to need to build just one of those houses, then you just tripled the economic output of that activity.
In short, the argument that economic growth is in any way whatever tied to energy or material use is bogus.
Why is it that people run these numbers and assume that say, efficiency stays stagnant. Heat in almost every use of energy is a by product that is the result of inefficiency in converting all the energy. I'm certain in the next 300 years the efficiency of our appliances/computer/electronics will drastically increase and therefore, drastically lower the heat they output.
That's precisely what has been happening in the real economy at least since the 1950s - the service sector now constitutes around 75% of the US economy, and that proportion continues to grow. When you take the hyperbole away, the issues around the US federal budget are actually about this transition. The health sector is becoming a larger and larger sector of the economy. The fight is over how this should be paid for and allocated. Liberals claim that government can do this most fairly and efficiently, in large part by raising taxation levels and procuring health services (through, for instance, Medicare). Conservatives believe that the private sector is the best way to do so. But, whatever your position, it's all about the health sector taking up a larger and larger fraction of GDP. There are other places where the author's understanding of economic history is a bit shaky. He claims:
No, it doesn't mean that. It means that there will be fewer farmers, a phenomenon that started with the Industrial Revolution and has been continuing almost without interruption ever since.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
MIT was commissioned decades ago to study the 'Limits to Growth' by the Club of Rome. The created a simulation and published a description of their efforts in 1972. Then updated the program and its parameters 30 years later and published again. It's very interesting. The authors made it accessible and understandable. The conclusions are not what you might expect, especially if you are just itching for an argument like so many here seem to be.
Man has become the dominate actor in the natural global system, and we have choices to make regarding our future. We can seek to understand our cumulative effect or we can bungle in what's left of jungle, fiddle while home burns or just party like it's 1999. If you're interested enough to read a grown up book, here's a chance.
Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
Earth already obtained a near perfect self sustaining state. Then we screwed it up.
We can have that again: Simply abandon our industry and technology.
Maybe it is our so called solutions that are the problem. Maybe there was never really a problem in the first place.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The folly of an economy based on constant growth has been known since there have been bean-counters with enough foresight to do all the math, which is to say extrapolate out a bit more than "next FY". We could argue about the time frame, but even 50 years seems rather optimistic right now.
No reason why you can use some of that energy to pump the heat from the earth.
Opt 1: Create a BFL (big freaking laser), feed it using heat engines, aim at outer space.
Opt 1a: Aim BFL at Jupiter, ignite atmosphere, create 2nd small sun, colonize Jupiter's moons.
Opt 2: Pump heat into vats of molten rock, launch into space.
Opt 3: Create a space loop, hot material goes up, radiates into outer space, cool material comes down.
For being a scientist thinking about limits of energy use, he sure thinks kinda small.
Build a really big heat sink.
When will these Malthusians give it a break? The birthrates of western countries are falling below replacement level. It is important for prosperous decent people to have three or more children, unless you plan to hand western civilization to immigrant peasants hostile to western culture. Given the low cost of frackgas I plan to keep the thermostat turned up high this winter. Freeze in the dark if it salves your conscience.
an ill wind that blows no good
This was taken verbatim from a post from Usenet. I am not the author.
I think we can support about five hundred billion at the levels of present day affluent American suburbia or Singaporean city:
The more people, the more skills and human energy. But at some point we will start to run short of room on planet earth, resources, entropy sinks, and food.
With a population of five hundred billion to one trillion, most of them living a western middle class lifestyle, we could solve the human genome problem in a few months with the money one would get by passing around your hat and free voluntary donations of time and labor. The boy scouts would have sufficient resources to build colonies on the moon and in the Kuiper belt. We would have sufficient resources not merely to map the human genome, but to understand it, and rework it, and redesign it, perhaps for purposes such as growing artificial organs and ending and reversing old age. (A project vastly larger and more difficult than merely mapping it.)
Another area where a vast population would come in handy is the biotechnology and nanotechnology project of making useful devices that look after themselves like cats and breed like rabbits, completely absorbing the biosphere into the technosphere. Again the main obstacle to us producing such things today is the vast complexity of such things.
The laws of physics make it impossible to move hundreds of billions of people to the stars rapidly using known or reasonably foreseeable technology, but with immortality, we would have the time and patience to travel to the stars using less rapid forms of transport. Immortality is basically a problem of understanding and reworking an immensely complicated system, thus it is a classic example the kind of scientific and technological project that would benefit from a substantially higher population.
The question then is what are the likely physical limitations that could prevent such a desirable outcome: what would we run out of first?
raw materials and energy:
The cost of separating rock into its various pure chemical compounds is roughly comparable to the cost of refining ore: Therefore if we were reduced to mining rock, rather than ore that has already been separated for us by natural processes, this would increase raw materials refining costs by roughly five or ten times, since rock is roughly ten or twenty percent useful ores, depending on what one counts as useful. We are already processing low grades of iron ore which not very long ago would have been considered rock, not ore.
Since the refining and raw material cost of ore is an insignificant fraction of total costs in an advanced industrial society, this would not have a substantial mpact. A gradual and orderly conversion to lower and lower grades of ore, until we are refining rock rather than extracting ore, will not have any large economic impact.
A ton of granite contains uranium and thorium roughly equal to one hundred tons of coal, assuming breeder reactors and nuclear waste reprocessing. This ratio is typical of continental rocks, but is not typical of the earth has a whole: Once we strip mine the entire continental surface of the earth to about thirty or forty miles deep, we will no longer be able to employ fission power. For a population of several hundred billion immortals, people with a vastly longer perspective than ours, fission power would eventually come to be seen as disturbingly finite. Fortunately this leave more than ample time and resources to create space based solar power systems.
For some sufficiently large population the waste heat from all this is going to cook the earth, but if we assume one trillion people consuming as much energy per head as people in the USA consume , this is not going to heat up the earth substantially.
The total energy of sunlight falling on the earth is one hundred and ten million gigawatts. A population of one thousand billion people, consuming energy at about the rate
The population is predicted to plateau at 10 billion or so within the next 100 years. Even with increasing standards of living, our need for energy will stop increasing long, long before we start using a significant amount of sunlight hitting Earth.
That is not to say that energy shortage is not worth worrying about, just that this article's point is mostly theoretical.
Not Groucho, but the one that wrote about what economies without growth need to look like. I would pretty much put the vilification of Marx's work on the doorstep of the dependence on the assumption of growth.
Economists seem to be the only people who think that exponential growth can go on forever. Unfortunately physics has a small problem with that.
I've been reading some George Mobus recently. Depressing: http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2011/05/will-earth-be-the-stage-for-a-cosmic-tragedy.html
Theoildrum.com is the best source for unbiased information about our energy situation I know. It's no less depressing.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
We are simply pawns in a computer generated model to predict the collapse of society... and funding has just been cu
Yup, all correct... energy growth is not sustainable, therefore by extension economy growth isn't sustainable. It contributes to too much Global Warming. There is lots of study and data that can't be ignored. So, if these things are bad, then we should fix them right? Ok, lets fix it... lets turn the power grid off, stop driving, euthanize 6 billion people, and regress technologically... forget about expanding into space, longer life spans, and lesser quality of life (the Dark Ages were a blast weren't they). After a few hundred years, a comet collides with Earth, and Humans become extinct. Oh, you don't want any of these things? Well, you joined the wrong species, moved into the wrong universe, and chose the wrong laws of physics. Sry k thnx bye!
BS. Obama has already saved us ALL.
If a truly "free" energy source were developed (one which could produce unlimited amounts of cheap energy), the thermodynamic problems really don't matter. At that point you have sufficient energy to move the Earth if you want, or to construct enormous structures for better radiation of energy into space (can anyone say Dyson sphere?). Or you can just drag a comet into the ocean every now and then...
Overindustrialisation, and a corresponding increase in planet surface temperature, was part of why the Puppeteers had to move their planet further from their sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson's_Puppeteers
(Of course, his idea of solar-power voltaics over Ringworld was to use giant thermocouples, so some details are a little off, but the concept was there, 40 years ago.)
Quite a similar conclusion to that of Prof. Bartlett, emeritus professor from UC Boulder. He used to give a lecture on the simple arithmetic of exponential growth. The lecture is available online at the address below. I like the way he parallels humans to unsuspecting bacteria filling up all available space in a vial. He also touches on the energy issue, but of course the main thematic is that exponential (fixed rate) development is dangerous because we only perceive the risk of resource depletion linearly, and usually when it's too late to prepare or even react sensibly. A very refreshing lecture, here's the link:
http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy.html
Or we could employ them? Our ethics clash with the idea but we would be better off training and employing the immigrant population, we just don't want the mess of shanty towns to house them all effectively. Stop with the welfare and put them to work. I feel guru just writing that down but it's completely logical. We already outsource, which is equivalent except we also outsource the political problems of having a labor class in our first world nation, which leaves us with little industry and no low level management jobs for our indigenous poor.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Meant to say "guilty just writing that down".
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
It's only a problem and no solution can be found if you're a communist. Capitalists see problems as solutions waiting to be found, which is how we got this far. The thinking that we are in an unsolvable problem is related to the communist takeover of our world, and is, in fact evidence of that. If you think this is a real problem then you have already been eugenically modified into a subhuman by the godless communist religion of political correctness.
Two-dimensional thinking detected. He's restricting himself to the surface of the flat Earth, and ignoring what is not on this planet. Thus he is restricting his infinite numbers by not considering astronomical numbers.
No kidding! Population is a Logistic Curve, not an exponential one. It only looks exponential because we haven't hit the inflection point yet (for the total world population anyway; developed nations have hit the inflection point and Japan is at the asymptote).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
From article: "Once we appreciate that physical growth must one day cease (or reverse), we can come to realize that all economic growth must similarly end..." Ok, Mr Murphy already enjoyed his 20+ years of education and got his PhD. Now he can spend his time playing with his shiny new radiotelescopes and the rest of the people in the world may just starve to death, because he demands we stop using his valuable resources. Mankind needs A LOT AND A LOT FASTER ECONOMIC GROWTH AND MORE ENERGY at least while there are people who die of hunger, lack of drinking water and lack of simple vaccines. Those guys have the right to eat, drink, go to school and party like crazy if they fucking want. Societies with proper basic life support and education tend to grow in population slowly or to not grow at all, this eventually, with technological, political and organizative improvements would lead to stabilization in world population and the resource use would naturally stabilize. And if we continue growing, we will use all this galaxy's resources and many more if neccesary to support HUMAN LIFE, DAMMIT. Now, Mr. Murphy, stop pretending you know economy, go read a few history books, travel a little, and stop pulling stupid extrapolations out of your ass.
You display a stunning lack of understanding of what he is said. He didn't say don't feed the hungry. He didn't say we are wasting resources. He said that the ever increasing consumption of those resources cannot go on forever, maybe not even more than a couple hundred more years at the current rate of increase. This is based on the amount of energy received by the earth from the sun and laws of thermodynamics. There's no changing or getting around either.
Then you live in a blessed land indeed; anybody who is subject to the whims of the western economic system - specifically those whose economies are intertwined with the United States - must depend upon endless expansion. It is the underlying message behind imprinting currency with "In God We Trust".
My recollection was that the XT came out in early 1983. Hell, the 8086/88 weren't announced till sometime in 1978 and SCP built their first 8086 board set in 1979. Anyway, the period from about 1990 to 2002 was when the big speedups took place - i.e. from when the 25MHz 486 was the hot machine to the netburst architecture.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
The "professors" comments paid in part by PETA, save the whales, tree huggers everywhere.
I'm not saying he's blowing smoke, just hot air. The author is analyzing a real problem we face today in a future tense. It's all buggy whips to me. I'm sure there were 19th century public commentaries on the same subject but in terms of horses, cobblestones, whale fat and arable landmass (always a favorite). Yes, yes he's got charts and graphs showing how our economy can't keep growing and how we'll all die of heat saturation or some such.
100 years from now hopefully we'll move on from the short lived stock markets, banks and other parasites on the exchange of goods and services. Then all this economy talk will be nothing more than buggy whip mania. None of these so called institutions are necessary anymore, we just don't realize it yet. We have real time communications worldwide! Why do we need centralized clearing house to capitalize projects? There all just middlemen to get interested parties together and are being automated more and more. We should just cut the middle men out and let the infrastructure do the work.
Likewise with energy. There is mention of solar panels being 85% heat engine because it's only 15% efficient. I though the other 85% was solar radiation bound to heat up the earth anyways. Renewables don't just mean free delivery, it means that the east energy is already a part of the system. Any harnessing if this energy is actually a temporary reduction (eventually it gets returned via entropy but with a slight delay) as water in a river ultimately returns to the oceans. 100-200 years from now we will be putting a lot of energy OFF the planet. Whether it is more satellites, space exploration, asteroid mining or fueling colonies. More buggy whips. When we are draining energy off planet the current concerns with heat engines, global warming, etc will be a distant memory, like the problem of how to keep the streets clean of horse manure is today.
I think the author is a skilled writer and agree that there is a need to solve these problems today but I find his notions that today's problems will be relevant in the future, to be quaint and somewhat shortsighted and naive. It is not easy to see the future when the present is blocking the view.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I can't remember far enough back to the day when I didn't know that heat was a more severe limit than the available energy supply. Only the money for nothing, chicks for free crowd ever thought differently.
I mean, how hard is it to plug the mass of planet earth into E=mcc? Or just the hydrogen portion of the earth's oceans? Hot enough for ya?
Freeman Dyson talked about the importance of signal to noise ratio in physical systems at least as far back as Infinite in All Directions (1988). I vaguely recall he argued that if the universe continued to expand until it reached a fraction of a degree Kelvin in temperature, and you only had a few megawatts of available free energy in the whole universe, at such a low temperature, the universe could remain filled with computation.
Heat kills. Our mammalian forefathers made a major misstep to lock in at 300 degrees Kelvin. We'll regret that yet. Even worse than the C language NUL terminator mistake.
First of all the totality of energy available on the earth is not limited to the amount of sunshine falling upon it divided by an arbitrary efficiency of photovoltaic cells. Tide and geothermal are of value as well. Furthermore no one is of the opinion that unchecked exponential growth is sustainable in the long term, to assume that this is the prevailing belief in the scientific community is laughable. When you look at the demographics of countries like china, which will age before it grows old, exponential growth is not really anticipated. So, since the total energy of the world is not limeted to the amount of sunlight falling on it at any given time divided by the efficiency fo 1970's photovoltaic cells, and no one of any intelligence is saying that unchecked exponential growth is possible the net value of this article is total value (0) divided by time spent reading it (1).
See Garret Hardin, Living within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos.
As for going out into space, he explains that the amount of energy to send a small percent of earth's population to, where? Mars? Just launching them into space would quickly use up all oil reserves.
Some countries do have growth but have not increased their energy use.....since well 1970....
still reading?
Apparently the submitter didn't RTFA or didn't get the main point. We would be consuming the energy output of our entire galaxy within 2500 years if we try to sustain the current growth rate. And it would be 2 galaxies only 10 years after that, then 4, 8, 16, ...
The point is that exponential growth can consume seemingly limitless amounts of resources in much shorter spans of time than you would intuitively expect.
There is not enough oil to recover. That is the actual situation. It's not a question of carrying capacity, we have enough. The sun makes it there is no limit to the energy per person we can consume (we can use 1000 times more than we do now if we use all solar power available). You should wonder do we want to have all energy handled through machines or do we want to maximize the utility of nature. anyway, this guy is bolivious and the piece is irrelevant.
While we may be fixated on growth as a good thing, when it happens to us its called cancer and extraordinary measures are invoked to limit it. But the posters are right, business types are fixated on this idea regardless of how irrational. A few years ago I was doing work on a stock trading application -- but scaling the server farm was difficult because of the delusional views of the business/marketing types. They were thinking of exponential growth until mot likely my dog would be day trading. The reality was that there was a Markov Chain type migration among the providers in the market -- so a lot of the expensive scale-able hardware ended up wasted.
But the other problem is that our knowledge of technology bounds are thinking about what is possible. Just think back a few years as to how expensive tube technology was and the costs of implementing our current environment with them. I, for one, would not have a local computer network that does so many things for us. So yeah, propagating the constraints of our current situation out becomes problematic, especially with the inefficiencies and losses considered normal. But somehow I don't think that will be the limiting factor. Being eyeball deep in people, now that's a different issue...
Anthropological note: Some people's brains are wired such that when they hear "growth will end" they hear "the world will end". Note how growth literally means the world to this poster. This sort of learned behavior usually derives from studying the science[sic] of Economics.
I don't understand what the point of TFA is. It is as if they just discovered if you enter x2 into your calculator and keep pressing = it quickly starts to display larger and larger figures before erroring out.
Finally someone who has a real degree can school these naive economists and financiers in a bit of reality!
In 100 years the world is so polluted that it is very bad for fertility.
One example:
The drinking water in Germany is considered to be one of the safest, yet it contains tons of leftovers from medicine from homes and farms. Babies get a nasty rash even in the smaller cities. The problem is known and neglected, becasue no one can solve it yet.
One can argue that the waste will be eaten by mutated bacteria, but no one can force people to stop taking pills and peeing enormous amounts of medicine into the rivers.
And this is just the developed world, just imagine how it is in the developing world, where environment is second to growth. US, Europe, China and India might have no drinkable ground water in 100 years.
You can expect this problem in every major city, regardless of continent or country.
Bankers at best simplify some transactions.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Infinite flavor, indeed!
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
You read Isaac Asimov, I suppose.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
That reminds me.. I need to pick up some more packs of 100 Watt lightbulbs on the way home tonight.
So you can continue to waste energy and thus, by some twisted logic, continue to stick it to The Man? Great plan!
Why do so many people in finance continue to insist on growth?
Because investors want a return on their investment and the ONLY way for a company to do that is to grow. I invest $100,000 in a company and I want it to become $1,000,000 in a reasonable time frame. Only way a company can do that is to get larger in the sense of developing a larger free cash flow. Furthermore, the human population continues to grow and those additional people will need additional goods and services. Additionally they probably want their standard of living to increase which demands still more growth. Growth by itself is not an undesirable thing. It's when it is growth without regard to the consequences. Growth that causes a larger problem for society.
It also depends on the expectations for a particular company and the risk versus reward ratio. Lots of companies such as utilities do not have prospects of fast growth but they do kick off a lot of cash. They are relatively safe investments so the expectations of growth are rather modest. Conversely, a tech company is a pretty risky venture and is unlikely to have a reliable and predictable cash flow for the next 20 years. As a result investors expect it to grow much faster and expect a return on their investment commensurate with the higher risk they are taking.
We should be focusing on steady state sustainability.
While I don't entirely disagree I'm not sure you have thought through the consequences. Technology advancement depends rather significantly on rewarding people for taking risks. It's easy to not reward growth but then technological development pretty much stops. There is little or no incentive for people do figure out new a better ways of doing things. I'm actually mostly concerned with situations where companies can abuse a public good (like polluting the air or water) without having to pay the full cost of their actions. If we are going to use fossil fuels, so be it. But their FULL cost, including pollution controls should (theoretically) be part of the deal. A big part of the reasons coal and oil are relatively cheap is that they are not fully responsible for the pollution they cause.
Since the galaxy is larger than 2600 light years across, then it's physically impossible to surround every star in the galaxy with a Dyson Sphere before then. And with population growth limited by the point at which the human race would have to become a superluminally expanding ball of meat to continue exponential growth ( in numbers of people ) there may be other restrictions due to c.
...
I heard about this study, and find it fascinating, as it goes to show the people are just not thinking of the big picture....the overall thought I have on
man and this planet, is that this what are starting point , but man's true place is in space....not on some planet tearing up all the land, and bringing extinction to all its species....in space we can develop as big and large as we want, no limitations or negative effect on the planet or planet life.....this is the way we need to live.
We have no respect for other life except our own, and think we have more right to live then the otter, bear, or tiger....
If we take ourselves out of the planetary equation, we might see mother earth recover a bit from our onslaught.
Google's worth as a bookmark system has seriously dropped with the way they're handling links now. Obviously, the links in my post are messed up, they should be: #1 and #2.
Funny how you bring up Buggy whips
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/
"In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output.
The problem did indeed seem intractable. The larger and richer that cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed."
A central fixture of his sci-fi books was a race of aliens which had existed for millions of years and had gotten to the point of drowning in their own waste heat. The problem existed because cooling technologies all move heat around to cool a volume rather than actually absorb heat and transition it to another energy form. As their population grew and energy use with it, all the extra heat built up.
The aliens solved the problem by moving their planet away from their sun, and eventually out into space on its own, balancing the generated heat with radiative cooling, or transferring the heat to the universe at large.
This article is an interesting mental exercise, but as noted it projects the technology of today into a future world with greater needs, which is about as valid as a renaissance thinker from the 1500s deciding the world would end when today's population existed, because there would be not enough food for us all, and wars over food would extinct the human race.
Niven knew he was assuming that no technology would be developed that would actually absorb heat, and he wrote around that.
If we happen to discover a way that a device can produce negative heat numbers (assuming power generation, transmission, manufacturing heat, etc are accounted for) the heat death of the earth will never happen. The devil is in the details...
Erik
Sorry dude, but the guys living from 7 BC to 33 AD probably knew much more about the end of the world than everyone today. Besides there has been end of the world scenario since 30 AD and none of them have been right so far.
First, he starts way back in the 1600s? What did he do, add up all the campfires that were burning back then?
Second, because he started his trend line sooooo far back, he is completely ignoring the recent (last 50 years) trend. Our energy usage is starting to plateau, and is quickly veering away from his red line slope of 2.9% increase per year. In fact, his red line is going to blow past 10^13 watts before 2050, while our actual use is going to be well below it.
This is why I've always thought that alien-invasion type movies don't really make much sense.
They don't if the goal is to enslave or to take resources. However, it makes a lot of sense if, you want to wipe out potential future sources of competition for said galactic resources...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Use the expansion itself as the energy source.
even the Pope recently said that people need to go outside more
What does the pope know about anything? He is the head of a group of nut jobs that believe that contraceptives are murder. Fuck him, fuck him in his stupid pope hat. He is probably contributing a fair amount to the very problem which we are speaking about by perpetuating his ridiculous religious dogma.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
space, imo. We should be moving towards it a lot faster than we are right now.
My fundamental complaint is that these numbers assume there is and will be no way to capture and harness waste heat and thus no way for energy to be recycled or reused, only reduced. I contend that as we are learning to treat matter as limited and in need of (re)cycling through our systems, we will learn to do the same with energy. That will both reduce requirements for energy input as well as problems associated with atmospheric heating.
With the economic concerns, the fundamental issue seems to be that he assumes the non-physical economy cannot become an absurdly small portion of the economy because producers of physical necessities will not do that work for no cost. This completely ignores the possibilities of both robotic labor (think Asimov), radical decentralization (think Star Trek's replicators) or even simply food production as a freaking part-time side job with ever-decreasing effort. I contend that we are and have always been working toward a future where production of physical necessities is a negligible part of our lives that does not require a human labor component at all. I realize that i am invoking sci-fi and things like replicators are not even on the technological horizon, but as the author indulges in fantasy to prove that even in a fantasy world, he is sure to be right, i find it obnoxious that he overlooks some very obvious possible solutions.
Endless growth is not totally impossible, it's just imaginary. This distinction is important because our modern notion of economic value is also increasingly imaginary. Thus there is no reason economic growth must be limited.
The funny thing about the blog post is that the author does not seem to realize the extent to which first-world economies have already made the transition he supposes. Services already make up almost 80% of U.S. GDP for example, while agriculture has been reduced to only about 1%.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
For instance, if food production shrinks to 1% of our economy
This is where the author lost me. The agricultural sector is already 1% of the U.S. economy.
I largely agree with what you're saying but I will add that the "service sector" includes not just actual services (like health care), it also includes the entire information economy, and pretty much all entertainment. This is important because as humans have to spend less and less time creating the basic necessities of life (food, shelter, clothing, etc), we will have more time to spend on entertainment and information--the value of which has little to no correlation with energy cost. I mean, it takes a certain amount of energy to create and play a video game, but different games can create wildly different levels of economic value, for about the same level of energy usage.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
No, seriously. This result has been known for centuries. People don't like it, but that doesn't make it news.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
It is interesting how history never teaches people. I am sure some while ago they were saying that population growth won't sustain itself because there won't be any more rock to carve caves into... On the more serious point, as a physicist, I am much dismayed to see such a post. I don't really understand why many of my colleagues like to throw in a bunch of arbitrary numbers, make a bunch of arbitrary assumptions, back it up with some realistically looking "fundamental" arguments, and put this on display as something. Take Drake equation for example - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#The_equation - an equation someone sometime wrote to argue that there got to be other extraterrestrial civilizations out there. The argument basically goes as - assume fraction of start systems with planets is 0.1, assume fraction of liveable planets is 0.1, assume probability of life is 0.1, ..., finally there is whole lot of starts in the Galaxy! so if we multiply all of that, we still get something that's bigger than 1 !!! :) well, this might look sensible on the surface, but where all these numbers came from? why is it that the probability of life appearance is say 0.1, not 0.00000000001? A set of arbitrary numbers plugged into even a meaningful formula still produces an arbitrary number. Unfortunately, this article is just another example of this misapprehension.
The exponential growth is nonsense, that much is clear to everyone, but that is not the point at all... The example with the bounding surface of human bodies expanding at the speed of light, someone made here, is an excellent one to highlight the absurdity of this whole issue...
OK, so he is saying with so much energy produced in the future the dumped heat will overheat the planet. Well that's easy - just build the Planet Cooler (sim-earth anyone?). But seriously, there is a number of solutions - eg dump heat to the space. This kinda debases his theory, not to say that it was not Dead On Arrival, eg, because we'll have lots of other issue before we can even get where he wants this to be.