Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Re: When resources run out

Empty-world / full-world
Fox — (archived)

<Will resources become scarce? Sure. Some will. Then, assuming we have freedom of action, we'll think of something else. I'm sure forward-looking ancient Celts were wondering what the heck they would burn when the peat ran out.

We'll never know if that was the case, but what happened to Britain was a major deforestation, mostly by converting wood to charcoal... until someone discovered anthracite. I don't need to review the history of fuel development in this crowd, I'm sure - the bottom line, though is this:

We've run the gamut of things to literally burn as fuel, and I hope no one here is naive enough to believe new coal and petroleum is coming into being somewhere below the surface. The Carbonaceous Era only happened once, there was only so much land surface available then (as there is now), thus the supply is not only finite but bounded, even if we don't know the bounds yet. That leaves fission and fusion, of which the former is, sadly, anathema and the latter is vaporware.

And that's only fuel. There's a kind of myopia about resources in general by which most conversations on the subject reduce to sources of energy, but it takes many other kinds of raw material to run a planet.

The bit LJ posted about capitalism jogged my memory, and took me in short order to page 64 of T.S. Robinson's Green Mars. Much too long and complicated to quote (those who own or can borrow a copy are invited to read approximately seven pages), but the gist is this: What we know as capitalism, which has unlimited growth as its core faith, is based on the "empty world" model of resource availability, where there's always something else to replace a depleted resource. The alternative (as propounded in the book by the character of William Fort) is called "full world economics". I must defer to the book, for now at least, for a fuller explanation.

Even in Robinson's alternative Earth, where fusion power and nanotech are givens, classical economic growth is limited by finite resources and expanding population. As Fort says (p. 65), "We can't make soil out of electricity."

One of the main reasons I've been pushing space exploitation all my life is precisely to get beyond terrestrial resource limits.

Since you know the physics and the math, Tom, I'll just remind you of the biggest problem with that approach with three letters: ROI.

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