Discussion of Energy-Related Issues

[MediumTex]

I guess that answers our question if infinite growth is possible. It's definitely not possible!

The trick is to be able to create an optimistic scenario for humanity when armed with this information.

I think that humanity's basic problem is that we evolved based upon making decisions that were optimized for short time periods (such as one human lifetime or less).  As we have discovered great caches of non-renewable resources and seen our societies erupt in size and complexity as a result, this bias in our decision making toward shorter term results has created the conditions for some spectacularly bad outcomes.

It's certainly impossible to predict how this will unfold over the next 1,000 years or so, but past eras of civilization have followed a predictable course of ascendance and then decline, as natural resource constraints rendered certain ways of life obsolete.  This was Joseph Tainter's basic argument in "The Collapse of Complex Societies", which was a book with a lot of filler, since the basic premise was so easy to describe and the argument for the validity of the premise so easy to make (in many ways Tainter's argument seems almost too obvious to require much documentation from past societies).

If you had walked up to one of the Egyptian pharoahs and told him that in a few thousand years the only thing that would remain of his way of life and his system of beliefs would be some monuments and markings on stones, he probably would have scoffed at you the same way people today are quick to scoff at people who suggest that this high-tech high-consumption world we have built is not sustainable.

I think that one of the basic concepts people don't fully appreciate is that we have built a world economy that requires perpetual growth.  For example, if you think about the premises behind many forms of debt, it is that the future will always be larger than the present, which will allow people to fund future consumption AND pay off past debt out of future earnings.  When this set of economic premises begin to be invalidated--even on a small scale--as they were in 2008, it helps one understand just how poorly our economic system functions when growth ceases.

I think that when faced with this degree of structural cognitive dissonance, it is entirely understandable that central bankers and politicians would throw everything they have at the problem, but everything they have is ultimately unlikely to buy more than a little extra time until certain underlying forces that do not appear in economic models begin to intrude on certain carefully cultivated human delusions.

The good news (sort of) is that I think a lot of this stuff will unfold long after most of us have "run out of runway"  (to quote LoneWolf), though sooner or later these ideas WILL become impossible to ignore and the same process is likely to unfold as we have seen throughout history, and it will likely lay the groundwork for some future civilization that IS able to provide better answers to the problems of sustainability and survival than we have come up with in the last 200 year burst of explosive economic, industrial and population growth.

Not to pile on, but even assuming that we do solve all of the problems described above, we are also going to have another Ice Age at some point (if history is any guide to these things), and that is going to be a real challenge for whatever human populations may be around then, even if they have come up with an economic system that doesn't destroy the ecosystems necessary for human life.  

The ultimate challenge for humanity is to find a fate for itself that differs materially from that of the dinosaurs and every dominant species that came before us.  The ability to pull this off will be the ultimate test of whether our superior intelligence really confers any long term survival advantage.  

[Gumby]

That was supposed to be optimistic?

I guess now we have Soylent Green to look forward to  ;D

[MediumTex]

That was supposed to be optimistic?

I guess now we have Soylent Green to look forward to  ;D

Sorry.  I get a little carried away sometimes.

I always imagine modern humanity as this great computer that is plugged into a fossil-fuel powered energy source, and as long as there is power in the plug, the computer will do amazing things.  Unplug the computer, however, and the ability to translate human imagination into reality becomes much harder.

In many ways, modern people are like the Bionic Man, except we aren't aware that we are bionic--we think we got this strong through the force of our cultural, political and moral beliefs.

[rickb]

Eventually the Sun will go supernova as well.  If humanity wants to survive we're ultimately going to have to find other planets to live on.  Off hand, I'd say rebalancing human life on 4 planets might work fairly well.

[MediumTex]

Eventually the Sun will go supernova as well.  If humanity wants to survive we're ultimately going to have to find other planets to live on.  Off hand, I'd say rebalancing human life on 4 planets might work fairly well.

  That's great.

If you look at our space adventures thus far, however, in the past three decades our manned space program seems to be going backwards.

Looking forward, I don't think more than a handful of humans will ever leave the earth's orbit (I would be happy to be wrong about this, though).

I once did a calculation of the amount of energy expended to build the pyramids and found that the first manned moon mission consumed approximately the same amount of energy that was required to build the largest of the pyramids in Egypt.  I thought this was interesting because both of these accomplishments were, in a sense, monuments erected at or near the height of each of these cultures and civilizations.

It sort of tickles the imagination to think about 1,000 years from now people sitting around and telling stories about humans who visited the moon, and how the story could be perceived as pure mythology.  Unlike the pyramids, there is no lingering reminder that the moon missions actually took place, which makes it that much easier to convert the events into mythological narratives, with appropriate embellishments here and there (e.g., Neil Armstrong might become a Zeus-like figure, while Buzz Aldrin could be Poseidon).

If you've ever studied "cargo cults" (or watched Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and remember the kids who lived at the airplane crash site), you know how very easy it is for people to convert the accomplishments of industrial capitalism into supernatural events.  It's probably not so far-fetched to think that our own descendants might do the same thing with the wonders of our current world. 

One requirement for the kind of mythological-ization (I just made that word up) I am describing would be a massive loss of knowledge between generations.  One catalyst for such a loss of knowledge could be an EMP event at some point in the future when most of human knowledge is stored electronically (as opposed to on paper, as much of it is now).

[Lone Wolf]

It sort of tickles the imagination to think about 1,000 years from now people sitting around and telling stories about humans who visited the moon, and how the story could be perceived as pure mythology.  Unlike the pyramids, there is no lingering reminder that the moon missions actually took place, which makes it that much easier to convert the events into mythological narratives, with appropriate embellishments here and there (e.g., Neil Armstrong might become a Zeus-like figure, while Buzz Aldrin could be Poseidon).

It really does.  After all, even today we have our own strange little subcultures that view the moon landings as mythology.  I like to think that 1,000 years in the future some doubting Thomas will unearth this video of Buzz "Poseidon" Aldrin" punching an aggressive moon landing conspiracy theorist in the face.  I'd have a completely different view of mythology if archaeologists had dug up old Youtube video of Poseidon sucking some dude into a maelstrom or spearing him with his trident.

If you've ever studied "cargo cults" (or watched Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and remember the kids who lived at the airplane crash site), you know how very easy it is for people to convert the accomplishments of industrial capitalism into supernatural events.  It's probably not so far-fetched to think that our own descendants might do the same thing with the wonders of our current world.

Cargo cults are fascinating.  I'd encourage anyone who even remotely enjoys anthropology to read about them.  Humans are capable of utterly confusing cause and effect, sticking them together in a blender and then downing the whole dysfunctional smoothie in one gulp.  (Reading about cargo cults was actually one of the things that made me have my first doubts about Keynesian economics many years back.)