No stigma. Many more technological solutions to social problems will be needed. For instance, I’m convinced we should be pouring a lot more money into geoengineering.
I imagine that it wont always go like this because it seems like the amount of matter and energy we have access to is finite. We answered overexpansion with a technology that enabled further expansion. There are metaphysical guarantees that this will not always work. No matter how many false physical constraints we overturn the second law of thermodynamics seems to guarantee (this is debatable) that we will eventually hit a wall, and we will look back at the mess behind us, and we will ask if this was the fate we really wanted, whether things could have been much better for everyone if we’d slowed down and negotiated back when we were small enough and close enough to manage such a thing.
No matter how many false physical constraints we overturn the second law of thermodynamics seems to guarantee (this is debatable) that we will eventually hit a wall . . .
Granted that we will eventually hit a wall, there’s a good chance the wall is so unbelievably far off that it might as not exist for another million or billion years and allow for astronomical (literally) amounts of growth. Heck, even what we get out of the Earth alone could be increased multiple orders of magnitude. Suppose there’s a point at thinking about slowing down, I think that point is very far away.
Travelling at 50c% there are 116 million galaxies reachable; at 80% there are 762 million galaxies reachable; at 99%c, you get 4.13 billion galaxies.
For reference, there are 100 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, and from a quick check it might be reasonable to assume 100 billion is the average galaxy.
The ability to colonize the universe as opposed to just the Milky Way is the difference between ~10^8 stars and ~10^16 or ~10^17 starts. A factor of 100 million.
Similarly, the sun’s estimated energy output is 3.8x10^26W (Joules per Second) whereas civilization’s current energy usage is estimate at ~10^24J/year in a recent year (2012 or 2014?). That’s something like 9 orders of magnitude of more energy that’s being expended than we currently use (simplifying a whole bunch).
There’s finite and there’s finite, some of those finite’s are freaking huge. I say let’s get ’em.
But being more serious, if we think about the EV of different strategies, I think the EV continuing to pursue growth (as jasoncrawford defines it) for the foreseeable future is better than very prematurely trying to limit growth and be “sustainable” notwithstanding the risks that eventually there will be some kind of crunch.
Admittedly, I could be wrong about the limits of potential technological capabilities. If for some reason we hit a a limit of what we can do far earlier, then there might be a wall far sooner than when we run out of energy. But even such a wall seems at least quite a ways off.
Agree. We have barely scratched the surface, literally, of one planet in one solar system. We use a tiny percentage of the energy from the one star closest to us. The amount of mass and energy available to us is so many orders of magnitude beyond our current usage that in discussing 21st-century industrial policy it’s effectively infinite.
No stigma. Many more technological solutions to social problems will be needed. For instance, I’m convinced we should be pouring a lot more money into geoengineering.
I imagine that it wont always go like this because it seems like the amount of matter and energy we have access to is finite. We answered overexpansion with a technology that enabled further expansion. There are metaphysical guarantees that this will not always work. No matter how many false physical constraints we overturn the second law of thermodynamics seems to guarantee (this is debatable) that we will eventually hit a wall, and we will look back at the mess behind us, and we will ask if this was the fate we really wanted, whether things could have been much better for everyone if we’d slowed down and negotiated back when we were small enough and close enough to manage such a thing.
Granted that we will eventually hit a wall, there’s a good chance the wall is so unbelievably far off that it might as not exist for another million or billion years and allow for astronomical (literally) amounts of growth. Heck, even what we get out of the Earth alone could be increased multiple orders of magnitude. Suppose there’s a point at thinking about slowing down, I think that point is very far away.
Similarly, the sun’s estimated energy output is 3.8x10^26W (Joules per Second) whereas civilization’s current energy usage is estimate at ~10^24J/year in a recent year (2012 or 2014?). That’s something like 9 orders of magnitude of more energy that’s being expended than we currently use (simplifying a whole bunch).
There’s finite and there’s finite, some of those finite’s are freaking huge. I say let’s get ’em.
But being more serious, if we think about the EV of different strategies, I think the EV continuing to pursue growth (as jasoncrawford defines it) for the foreseeable future is better than very prematurely trying to limit growth and be “sustainable” notwithstanding the risks that eventually there will be some kind of crunch.
Admittedly, I could be wrong about the limits of potential technological capabilities. If for some reason we hit a a limit of what we can do far earlier, then there might be a wall far sooner than when we run out of energy. But even such a wall seems at least quite a ways off.
Agree. We have barely scratched the surface, literally, of one planet in one solar system. We use a tiny percentage of the energy from the one star closest to us. The amount of mass and energy available to us is so many orders of magnitude beyond our current usage that in discussing 21st-century industrial policy it’s effectively infinite.
Do you see any downsides at all to “slowing down”?
How do you weigh those against the risks you’re foreseeing?