(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)
Yet another, quite well meaning, person fails logic 101, yet nevertheless rails against the most fundamental flaw of capitalism. Even, supposedly, one more fundamental than the "r > g" dilemma that Marx & Piketty highlighted. The author's big insight?
"... the assumption that exponential growth can continue forever on a finite planet."
To his own, undetected, embarrassment, the author goes on to invoke thermodynamics.
Oh my. This is tragic.
Somebody please stop him before he sticks yet another foot in his mouth.
(One of his friends? Please take him quietly aside & explain that evolution is NOT commodity growth - or expanding mass - but rather reorganization.)
The only "growth" that has occurred on planet Earth these last 4.5 Billion years comes from that fraction of the incident solar wind of particles & photons that isn't diverted by our magnetic field ... plus the ongoing rain of cosmic dust, occasional meteorites & hopefully VERY infrequent comets. Does he really think that evolution can't continue? Nothing's stopped it yet. I'll take the word of Mother Nature over this confused rhetoric.
Anyone who's ever taken apart a motorcycle, washer, & tractor and used the parts to make a frankenstein machine called a snowmobile knows that no
"exponential growth" occurred, only the repurposing of existing materials into new combinations.
Now if we start mining moons, comets & asteroids on a truly cosmic scale, THEN we might have to worry about growth. Until then, hopefully we'll stick to evolving more logical humans, capable of even slightly greater ranges of abstract reasoning.
It really does seem to be true that
"People will do anything in their power to avoid thinking." [Forgotten, 18th century naturalist.]
ps: Running out of oil/gas carbon deposits to oxidize? That's the same argument touted in the 1830s, when panicked people predicted the world would go dark, because they were exhausting the supply of whale oil! And that wasn't the first panic!
Roughly
one billion years before 1830, maybe prokaryotes even panicked at the thought of running out of space for regulatory proteins to regulate their increasingly complex dna "plasmids."
That was just before eukaryotes discovered that repurposing tiny viral siRNA microstrands could disintermediate many dna-regulating proteins. The rest is continuous growth of evolutionary history, as they say. We may need cultural-siRNA to organize on a greater cultural scale, but don't hold your breath waiting for human culture to stop evolving.
One has to have some imagination in order to trust in future developments, and evolution. Otherwise, you're painted into the NeoCon Corner - "If We Can't Imagine It Yet ... It Can't Ever Exist (not to mention that someone must be hiding what our paranoid imagination DOES come up with.)" :(
Do we have problems? Yes. Are we shooting half or more of our own emerging feet? Yes. Does that mean that evolution will stop? Hell no!
If anyone thinks otherwise, I have a tinker toy bridge in Arizona that they may buy, take apart, and reassemble into a faster than light space ship, for their escape from this dead end planet.
