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Comment by prodigal_erik | Hacker News Reader

I'm not usually a fan of long talking-head videos but this was absolutely worthwhile. What's most chilling is the story of the bottle and the bacteria, and the realization that somehow finding a whole new planet would only tide us over for a couple more generations, after which we'd need two more....

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There is no sustainable growth without sustainable decay. Makes you wonder about those financial systems based on economies with compounded interest -- exponential growth -- which are supposed to be resident on a finite planet.

The population bomb is kinda heading the other direction though. People moved to cities, where kids were a liability instead of an asset, life was exciting, and women had opportunities. Now birth rates in modernized countries are below the replacement rate (which causes exponential decay as impactful as exponential growth), which is largely made up through immigration.

In the limit case, birth rates in modernized countries are close to zero, and the entire population is comprised of newcomers from the places that are above the replacement rate. These countries could places for opportunity, not familyeither be like companies (where people work and live much of their lives but don't replenish themselves), or they could be like retirement homes.

So the real problem is people don't understand the logistic function? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

But it's all considered in a vacuum. Even though the majority of the population don't understand the problem, this is ok. We have an economic system that benefits those who predict impending needs and place themselves in situations to provide for them.

Take a look at the green industry ramping up. In the not too distance future, I think most of us here expect oil replacement to be highly profitable.

I disagree with these doomsday predictions from pure arithmetic. It seems to me that the reverse is true - exponential "problems" provide the core drive for our economy. What drives the entire start-up industry? I'd say it's identifying profitable exponential growth scenarios and providing for them. To me, this explains how primarily capitalist countries tend toward stability, until them become strangled by ever increasing regulation (that's not to say I'm against regulation in general, but I think we need to be as proactive about removing it as we are about adding it [wow, I went off topic there]).

I agree to some degree. I feel like this guy thinks he's playing sim-city and setting the population growth rate. Tell me he doesn't remind you of the domestic advisor!

Yes, many people are working on solutions, but I think the point is that for green industry to succeed, growth in energy consumption has to actually stop, and preferably reverse. It's good to be clear about about the goal.

That's not a good goal. And besides not being good, it's also impossible if you are trying to avoid mass catastrophe.

Economic development directly correlates with energy use. To reduce energy use you would either need a massive depression, or for a lot of people to die.

But the news isn't all bad - nuclear power is both green, and sufficiently available to allow us to continue energy growth. So I would make that the goal.

No, to reduce energy use you'd need for people to take conservation seriously and to dramatically improve efficiency. Plenty of energy is wasted on inefficient cars, poor insulation, wasteful industrial processes, and so on.

In the short term, sudden changes in energy consumption are very disruptive. (For example, see gas prices and the auto industry last year.) But a longer-term, gradual shift towards less energy usage need not be.

To be clear, is this because green energy is (yet) incapable of satisfying our current needs, or purely because our ability to generate green energy is as finite as from oil?

Actually, what I meant to say is that fossil fuel consumption has to stop growing and preferably decline. But there are limits to green energy too. For a British take on this: http://www.withouthotair.com/

Note that he does say in the video that these are not predictions* , and that it's just arithmetic. He goes on to pretty much agree -- in a less specific sense -- with what you've said: "the consequences of the arithmetic will play a major role in shaping our future."

* Except for the petroleum graphs. Video 8/8 1:00-2:00ish.

> To me, this explains how primarily capitalist countries tend toward stability

Except that doubling GDP, resource consumption, etc every 20 years hardly can be called "stability".

Certainly a great video.

But one thing I didn't like about the bacteria in the bottle story was that he conveniently switched to 100% growth for that example. And then made it sound like Boulder was in the same position "it's 11:59 in the Boulder valely" etc.

But still his main point it dead on.

Well, he had just prior spent some time explaining how to convert any growth rate to 100% just by scaling the time axis. So when he says it's 11:59, he means it's 10 years (or whatever) to the end, if one were to assume constant growth.

I'm reminded of Isaac Asimov's short story The Last Question (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html), which deals with very similar issues on an entirely larger scale.

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