Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia's article on Herman Daly is far more useful.

This NYT writer is from the fluff department, the part that cranks out "lifestyle" sections and clickbait, not the news side.

Wikipedia: "Daly argues that nature has provided basically two sources of wealth at man's disposal, namely a stock of terrestrial mineral resources and a flow of solar energy. An 'asymmetry' between these two sources of wealth exist in that we may — within some practical limits — extract the mineral stock at a rate of our own choosing (that is, rapidly), whereas the flow of solar energy is reaching earth at a rate beyond human control. Since the Sun will continue to shine on earth at a fixed rate for billions of years to come, it is the terrestrial mineral stock — and not the Sun — that constitutes the crucial scarcity factor regarding man's economic future."

"In Daly's view, ... it is believed that the price mechanism and technological development (however defined) is capable of overcoming any scarcity ever to be faced on earth. ... There is such a thing as absolute scarcity, and there is such a thing as purely relative and trivial wants"."

That sums up his position.

He's right, of course. The question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources? Tens of years? Hundreds of years? Thousands of years? The US Geological Survey tracks this for each commercially useful mineral.[3] It's worth reading.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy

[3] https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...

Thanks for the links.

I'm still confused though. Is the underlying assumption that the sun's energy being dumped on earth is essentially saturated? That is, "nature" has long since used all the available sun's energy and any energy we use from the sun is effectively taking away from nature?

Doing some back of the envelope calculations, we can estimate that the sun dumps around 700 peta watt hours per day whereas we use roughly on the order of 230 tera watt hours per day. Historically we've been increasing our energy consumption at about 2.5% per year which gives us a rough estimate of 250-350 years before we reach the limits of the available sunlight on earth. [0]

Daly's argument is that the 700 peta Wh/day minus the 230 tera Wh/day is maximally being used by "nature" and we would only be taking away that energy for our own use? If so, doesn't that seem a bit far fetched?

Also, natural resources might be limited on earth but are exist in abundance in space.

[0] https://mechaelephant.com/dev/Energy-Discussion.html

> I'm still confused though. Is the underlying assumption that the sun's energy being dumped on earth is essentially saturated?

No, it's just an economist talking. He's just saying that the sun's energy cannot be depleted faster, while mineral resources can.

We're just pond scum on the surface of the planet. The pond hasn't been touched.

Also, minerals are not "used up". They are transformed into different compounds. With energy, they can be transformed into more useful forms.

Besides, he misses the third source of wealth - ideas and information. Anyone who writes software is creating wealth.

> Anyone who writes software is creating wealth.

this wealth is built on top of a foundation of mineral wealth. Merely ideas isn't useful if not implemented, and to implement an idea requires said mineral wealth.

The point is that society has decoupled wealth creation from mineral extraction to a large degree. This has documented by other economists / historians as "bullshit jobs" / "useless jobs". People sending emails all day or influencers obviously depend on mineral extraction to exist, but the direct inputs to their wealth creation are not minerals. You can "implement ideas" with a relatively small footprint.

> The point is that society has decoupled wealth creation from mineral extraction to a large degree.

Have we really though, or is the coupling just obscured to the point of near invisibility?

Take software development. In a bounded context, a solo developer’s continued output of software looks quite clearly decoupled from material inputs. They may work essentially indefinitely, producing new wealth, powered only by renewable energy.

Step out of the bubble of the thought experiment, though, to look at the software development industry more broadly, and what do we see? A vast churn of new computing equipment in pockets, offices, unseen data centers, and embedded at every possible scale in between, with layer upon layer of software abstraction that chews up most of the increases in computing power anyhow.

Helium can definitely be used up if we keep putting it in balloons and allowing it to escape into space. Radioisotopes are also used up. Sure, we could transmute radioactive waste back into usable uranium or thorium but that would be a big energy sink, negating the primary use for those minerals. Fossil fuels have the same problem.

Yes, I know about helium.

> energy sink

The sun can be used to create more fuel. We prefer drilling for fossil fuels because it's cheaper. We know how to make synthetic oil and fuel.

Theoretically, if we achieve fusion, wouldn't fusing hydrogen create unlimited helium?

Once a gas escapes into the atmosphere any gas (apart from O2, N2 and CO2) is irretrievable economocally. Helium happens to leave the planet, but so what?

Helium is continuously produced inside Earth, it is the alpha radiation produced by the decay of Radon. There are natural gas wells that yield up to 10% Helium. If the market demand were there (eg airships), the Helium production could probably go up by a factor of 10 or 100.

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

> The question is, on what timescale do we hit the limits of mineral resources?

we are just scratching the surface of the Earth currently. Then there's the oceans. Then there's asteroids. Then there's other planets. Only a failure of imagination can lead to scarcity mindset.

Imagination is not reality. Reality have constraints that can be so complex that can be really hard to imagine. This is why we run simulations on computers when it comes to lets say weather and not do thought experiments only.

I can even give a real life example here. I am from Poland. And at this moment we are facing a coal shortage (which will cause energetic crisis in the winter) while sitting at the same time atop one of the largest coal deposits in the world. No one could imagine this as a possibility a mere year ago.

The answer is now. The 2030s is the decade of peak everything. Production of everything has been growing exponentially, but at a cost that is growing fraster.

From oil, to copper, to lithium, to rare metals, to meat, to topsoil, to methane, to classical computing, to GHG buffering capacity, almost all of the logistic curves we've been pretending are exponentials reach their inflection points in the next couple of decades.

This type of thing has been said many times before. No reason to believe it will happen this time.

I still vividly remember "peak oil" in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

This ignores Services entirely, which are part of GDP..

If you pay someone to sing a song to you, you're not using anymore resources then if the two of you were sitting around doing nothing. Bass portions of GDP growth are not Material intensive

I don't know. Let's keep burning oil for energy and find out!

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