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Comment by ttoinou | Hacker News Reader

Resources are infinite (Julian Simon).

And exponential doesnt mean the peak will be in 20 years. It could be 500 years.

Real resources humanity can access are not infinite (scientists & engineers) and economists can get their assumptions wrong (everyone, including economists).

And there is no way our current trend of oil use can be sustained for 500 years. By then our oil use will be negligible compared to what it is today unless something truly bizarre and unforseeable happens.

If we make oil from nuclear or solar power using fuel synthesis, we can carry forward indefinitely.

Yeah but we wouldn't do that. It doesn't make sense to pay the energy conversion costs; it is already more efficient to store power in non-oil batteries.

Not true for aviation, where weight and volume are both constraints.

For me, scarcity arguments based on "preferences" don't make a ton of sense, but I see your point.

I'd give even odds there will always be use cases for burnable fuels, and almost all vehicles use burnable fuels currently. Sure seems a shorter path to just pull CO2 out of the air and keep moving along as we always have, vs electrifying everything.

Conventional has already peaked, and it is possible that even producers will decide to stop extracting nonconventional oil because it is too expensive and the price of a barrel fluctuates too much (IEA 2020)

Grow our civilization’s energy consumption by ~2% yoy and you’ll boil the oceans in 400 years.

Or course, the planet will be uninhabitable much, much earlier, so it doesn’t matter too much.

Maybe we can go with a bit more of nuances here. Uninhabitable is probably an "overstatement", as in, if all human civilizations collapse globally consequently to its collective hubris, chances are good that other species will thrive in this very different world. We can even suppose continuation of some humans but with different life modalities.

I’m not sure which part of ‘boil the oceans’ you think we can sort of exist in. In this scenario we become Venus except with thinner atmosphere, so no balloons to save us.

They're not saying we can exist. They're saying that it's not uninhabitable to something, therefore making the value judgement that it would be uninhabitable is simply not true. Which is another kind of value judgement about how important your own values are.

While such a scenario is certainly possible, it's not something that can be achieved by humanity by solely leverage on its current capacities to transform earth environment.

See for example https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/47070/20231113/earth-s...

So, to answer your question, in the part where humanity can certainly change the world to its own detrimental, but is currently not able to really put it in a state where absolutely no life form is conceivable anymore, and that even putting it a state where some hunters gatherers would not be able to survive is not a 100% garantie outcome of current trends. though I would rather consider the current trend rather awful if you ask.

Someone should have told Intel when they started work on Netburst.

Some optimization required...

Provided most energy ends up as waste heat, not as/in stuff, I suppose (leaving aside doing waste heat intensive things off planet and dropping products back to earth etc.).

Managing heat with purely radiators (i.e. no need to dump hot matter into space to lose it forever) is… challenging at scales required. Not saying it can’t be done, but it’s a long shot.

Yes, purely radiating away heat might be tough. That said, 400 years at 2% is more than a factor of 2,500 - I'd expect some quite substantial changes to go with that as far as industry and society are concerned. For example, a lot more energy use might not be waste heat but creation of stuff or waste being high energy energetic radiation.

Your main point might be real, but until we manage to make it work around 0K, i'd have a hard time to believe a carnot engine can have an efficiency close to one. I think current "future" tech aim for something like ~50% (theorical) efficiency, and that's with a _very_ wide temperature differential that would put a real strain on materials.

This extrapolation is based on "money is a claim on energy", which assumes some kind of linear, or linear-like relationship between energy and wellbeing.

Just because a relationship is linear-ish up to a point doesn't mean it always will be.

The system is trapped in a what-is-measured-is-what-is-managed loop, where we worship "growth" without understanding what it's for.

These can all be true without contradicting one other:

- Many people on the planet can't access as much energy as they need to achieve optimum happiness and wellbeing. Making more energy available to them would alleviate suffering.

- Providing enough for all 9Bn to reach their optimum without destroying the environment will be extremely difficult. There aren't enough critical minerals available with current tech for everyone to live a high-energy electric dream.

- Some have vastly more energy than they need, and depleting resources to make them richer won't make them, or anyone else, happier. There is a diminishing returns effect beyond a certain point, where a massive increase in consumption only produces a small net gain.

- Nevertheless, the super-rich do not have so much that we could redistribute it all and the poor would also have enough. Liquidate the rich, give it all away and the poor will be.. slightly less poor.

- The relationship between energy and wellbeing is not fixed or linear, and may indeed come down with time. For example, if you have an effective and energy-efficient information system, people don't need to expend as much to live a good life (you don't need to go halfway around the world to find the girl or the job, if it turns out there was a good one in the next town or city over, but if your information systems suck you'll never know). Same for matching buyers to sellers and so on.

$2Bn accrued to the balance sheet of Elon Musk counts the same in global GDP as $2Bn accrued to the balance sheet of Ghana. I don't need to tell you which one will do more for humanity.

I just want to point out I don't care about numbers in computers, since they rather obviously don't matter for thermodynamics of oceans. Dollar-cheap infinite energy (fusion... if it's here) is actually a scary prospect from the boiling of oceans perspective. Current economic system will need to adapt globally or it'll destroy the civilization it helped create in an epic overshoot.

I don't care if the system understands what's it for as long as the planet remains habitable. Regulators have a tough nut to crack without a world government to prevent runaway collapse due to either scarcity or abundance of energy.

Perhaps. Dollar-cheap infinite energy (massive IF) also means interplanetary civilisation (also massive IF) starts to look viable.

I'm personally not convinced we'll get there. "S"-curves also look exponential in the first half of their lifetime. Trouble ahead, but on the positive side, don't underestimate human ingenuity when it comes to keeping those bread trucks rolling.

Looking at outcomes - within the global top 20% or so of nations, there is little correlation between GDP and happiness, freedom, life expectancy and so on. A net worth of $1B, $10B, $100B buys you weeks (if that) of life expectancy vs $10M. What do we actually think we're going to get in return for boiling the oceans? Food? Sex? Shelter? Love? Or just a bunch of AI-generated VR porn?

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