Guest post: This rollercoaster will keep going up-up-up forever
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on No worries.
…“by the end of the century, nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population, and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse”…
Well maybe they should have tought of that, hmmm? Aren’t there other economic systems not reliable on “reliable growth?” “Supply and demand” isn’t nearly as robust a law as “You can’t eat if there is no supply. Or drink. Or breathe.” You’d think we’d have a bit more sense than a mat of bacteria in a Petri dish that thinks it’s got a limitless supply of growth medium at their disposal. Or not.
Our current economic regime represents a tiny fraction of the time that humans have been on Earth. We’ve never had it so good; we’ve never made it so bad. We haven’t yet realized that these two are cause and effect. It doesn’t have to be this way. We could do fine with less stuff; better still if there were fewer of us putting pressure on the planet. There’s a bare minimum required to sustain our numbers, but our impact goes way beyond that. How much of what we’ve done has been the result of industrialized liesure and entertainment, mechanized, motorized, mass-produced – and consumed- pleasure and distraction? Ophelia’s comments on cruise ships hit this on the head. Yet stopping this would be seen as a restriction on “freedom.” But our freedom to be irresponsible is costing the world. Shifting gears to change this would cut into too many profit margins for it to be permitted. So much easier, and cheaper, to continue with business as usual for as long as possible than to disrupt everything and retool how we do things to forestall disaster. Which will be a good deal more disruptive, but whatever. So the ones selling us the tickets will keep telling us that there is a free lunch, things are just fine, and that this rollercoaster will keep going up-up-up forever. As long as there is money yet to be made from the Cruise to Hell, they’ll keep offering passage and an all-you-can-eat buffet. Mustn’t alarm the bacteria paying customers, right?
Yes and no… A steady-state economy would be what you’re looking for, but AFAIK no real-world example of such an economy actually exists. And yeah, if we don’t figure out how to transition to such a thing, the human population will inevitably be reduced by unpleasant means :-/
(A cut-and-paste from YNnB’s original at ‘No worries’.)
Tool-making dates from around 3 million years ago in the Olduwan culture of Africa. One day, an Australopithecine ancestor of ours bent down, picked up a stone (maybe even one with a naturally sharp edge to it) and used it to shape a bit of wood; or whatever. From that point, it was downhill all the way to modernity, and on the way to here today Fourier and others formulated the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that the Universe is running down, order is giving way to disorder, and entropy is increasing.
Locally, some components appear to go the other way, as when green plants turn a low-energy collection of molecules (carbon dioxide and water) into the high energy combo of sugar plus oxygen.
But here is the catch: no matter how environmentalist, careful and frugal with non-renewable resources (eg iron ore, coal) we are, we are unavoidably spreading uniformity all over the world. The way to sustainability is not by going off into space looking for another planet to colonise, but by somehow ensuring that everything we use is part of a cycling-recycling process, that in the long-term has to be 100% watertight and completely efficient.
Beside that, the old alchemists’ quest for a way to turn base metals such as lead into gold is child’s play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan#:~:text=This%20leads%20to%20current%20anthropological,earliest%20tool%2Dusing%20human%20ancestor.
Omar, you forgot the third ingredient: sunlight. Carbon dioxide, water, and the abundant sunlight we have daily access to on this planet. The sunlight which is currently cooking us, because we’ve stupidly made it harder for it to to escape back into space.
The reason that we have an apparent decrease in entropy here on our little planet is because our star is heading inexorably in the opposite direction.
tigger: not to split hairs, but I was referring to the entropy reduction at the molecular level in photosynthesis. In an avalanche, there is a net reduction in both entropy and potential energy. But at the local level, on the side of the mountain, some rocks conceivably do manage to gain PE by being thrown upwards by the rest coming down.
But you are quite right. Without the input of (non-molecular) light, photosynthesis does not happen.