[HN Gopher] Limits to Growth (1972)
___________________________________________________________________
Limits to Growth (1972)
Author : Tomte
Score : 89 points
Date : 2024-12-30 10:02 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bit-player.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bit-player.org)
| phtrivier wrote:
| I would be an interesting addition to clarify what "resources"
| mean here.
|
| A common rebuttal of the Meadows report that I keep reading is
| "they predicted we would run out of resources, and we never ran
| out of anything."
|
| Do they mean metals ? Coal ? Oil ? (As I understand it, we
| _kinda_ ran out of conventional oil, but were able to replace it
| with shale oil et al... so it's unclear [1])
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
| trod1234 wrote:
| They clarified what resources mean in the updates.
|
| They also used simplification models which don't account for
| many of the cascading problems that can't be directly
| quantified (i.e. dragon king events, debt defaults/ponzi
| failures, pollution (pfas). There was an austrian report that
| showed we are following the business as usual approach, and
| that we have dangerously overshot.
|
| Brittle systems lead to unexpected and chaotic failures.
|
| Failures in food production, or related logistics; would spell
| catastrophe since half the population is dependent on peacetime
| technological production methods.
| em500 wrote:
| Best to get this straight from the source[1,2]. Resources are
| detailed from p.54 onward.
|
| [1]
| https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth/page/n55/mode/...
|
| [2]
| https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~wggray/Teaching/His300/Illustrat...
| roenxi wrote:
| > (As I understand it, we _kinda_ ran out of conventional oil,
| but were able to replace it with shale oil et al... so it's
| unclear [1])
|
| That doesn't really change the math. It is a finite resource,
| the amount consumed keeps going up. There has to be a peak.
| Growth tends to be to a logarithmic or exponential curve, so
| adding a huge amount of extra resource doesn't change the date
| all that much on long timeframes.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Resources are infinite (Julian Simon).
|
| And exponential doesnt mean the peak will be in 20 years. It
| could be 500 years.
| roenxi wrote:
| Real resources humanity can access are not infinite
| (scientists & engineers) and economists can get their
| assumptions wrong (everyone, including economists).
|
| And there is no way our current trend of oil use can be
| sustained for 500 years. By then our oil use will be
| negligible compared to what it is today unless something
| truly bizarre and unforseeable happens.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| If we make oil from nuclear or solar power using fuel
| synthesis, we can carry forward indefinitely.
| roenxi wrote:
| Yeah but we wouldn't do that. It doesn't make sense to
| pay the energy conversion costs; it is already more
| efficient to store power in non-oil batteries.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Not true for aviation, where weight and volume are both
| constraints.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| For me, scarcity arguments based on "preferences" don't
| make a ton of sense, but I see your point.
|
| I'd give even odds there will always be use cases for
| burnable fuels, and almost all vehicles use burnable
| fuels currently. Sure seems a shorter path to just pull
| CO2 out of the air and keep moving along as we always
| have, vs electrifying everything.
| baq wrote:
| Grow our civilization's energy consumption by ~2% yoy and
| you'll boil the oceans in 400 years.
|
| Or course, the planet will be uninhabitable much, much
| earlier, so it doesn't matter too much.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Maybe we can go with a bit more of nuances here.
| Uninhabitable is probably an "overstatement", as in, if
| all human civilizations collapse globally consequently to
| its collective hubris, chances are good that other
| species will thrive in this very different world. We can
| even suppose continuation of some humans but with
| different life modalities.
| baq wrote:
| I'm not sure which part of 'boil the oceans' you think we
| can sort of exist in. In this scenario we become Venus
| except with thinner atmosphere, so no balloons to save
| us.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| They're not saying we can exist. They're saying that it's
| not uninhabitable to something, therefore making the
| value judgement that it would be uninhabitable is simply
| not true. Which is another kind of value judgement about
| how important your own values are.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Someone should have told Intel when they started work on
| Netburst.
|
| Some optimization required...
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Provided most energy ends up as waste heat, not as/in
| stuff, I suppose (leaving aside doing waste heat
| intensive things off planet and dropping products back to
| earth etc.).
| baq wrote:
| Managing heat with purely radiators (i.e. no need to dump
| hot matter into space to lose it forever) is...
| challenging at scales required. Not saying it can't be
| done, but it's a long shot.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Yes, purely radiating away heat might be tough. That
| said, 400 years at 2% is more than a factor of 2,500 -
| I'd expect some quite substantial changes to go with that
| as far as industry and society are concerned. For
| example, a lot more energy use might not be waste heat
| but creation of stuff or waste being high energy
| energetic radiation.
| orwin wrote:
| Your main point might be real, but until we manage to
| make it work around 0K, i'd have a hard time to believe a
| carnot engine can have an efficiency close to one. I
| think current "future" tech aim for something like ~50%
| (theorical) efficiency, and that's with a _very_ wide
| temperature differential that would put a real strain on
| materials.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| This extrapolation is based on "money is a claim on
| energy", which assumes some kind of linear, or linear-
| like relationship between energy and wellbeing.
|
| Just because a relationship is linear-ish up to a point
| doesn't mean it always will be.
|
| The system is trapped in a what-is-measured-is-what-is-
| managed loop, where we worship "growth" without
| understanding what it's for.
|
| These can all be true without contradicting one other:
|
| - Many people on the planet can't access as much energy
| as they need to achieve optimum happiness and wellbeing.
| Making more energy available to them would alleviate
| suffering.
|
| - Providing enough for all 9Bn to reach their optimum
| without destroying the environment will be extremely
| difficult. There aren't enough critical minerals
| available with current tech for everyone to live a high-
| energy electric dream.
|
| - Some have vastly more energy than they need, and
| depleting resources to make them richer won't make them,
| or anyone else, happier. There is a diminishing returns
| effect beyond a certain point, where a massive increase
| in consumption only produces a small net gain.
|
| - Nevertheless, the super-rich do not have so much that
| we could redistribute it all and the poor would also have
| enough. Liquidate the rich, give it all away and the poor
| will be.. slightly less poor.
|
| - The relationship between energy and wellbeing is not
| fixed or linear, and may indeed come down with time. For
| example, if you have an effective and energy-efficient
| information system, people don't need to expend as much
| to live a good life (you don't need to go halfway around
| the world to find the girl or the job, if it turns out
| there was a good one in the next town or city over, but
| if your information systems suck you'll never know). Same
| for matching buyers to sellers and so on.
|
| $2Bn accrued to the balance sheet of Elon Musk counts the
| same in global GDP as $2Bn accrued to the balance sheet
| of Ghana. I don't need to tell you which one will do more
| for humanity.
| baq wrote:
| I just want to point out I don't care about numbers in
| computers, since they rather obviously don't matter for
| thermodynamics of oceans. Dollar-cheap infinite energy
| (fusion... if it's here) is actually a scary prospect
| from the boiling of oceans perspective. Current economic
| system will need to adapt globally or it'll destroy the
| civilization it helped create in an epic overshoot.
|
| I don't care if the system understands what's it for as
| long as the planet remains habitable. Regulators have a
| _tough_ nut to crack without a world government to
| prevent runaway collapse due to either scarcity or
| abundance of energy.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Perhaps. Dollar-cheap infinite energy (massive IF) also
| means interplanetary civilisation (also massive IF)
| starts to look viable.
|
| I'm personally not convinced we'll get there. "S"-curves
| also look exponential in the first half of their
| lifetime. Trouble ahead, but on the positive side, don't
| underestimate human ingenuity when it comes to keeping
| those bread trucks rolling.
|
| Looking at outcomes - within the global top 20% or so of
| nations, there is little correlation between GDP and
| happiness, freedom, life expectancy and so on. A net
| worth of $1B, $10B, $100B buys you weeks (if that) of
| life expectancy vs $10M. What do we actually think we're
| going to get in return for boiling the oceans? Food? Sex?
| Shelter? Love? Or just a bunch of AI-generated VR porn?
| Iridescent_ wrote:
| Conventional has already peaked, and it is possible that
| even producers will decide to stop extracting
| nonconventional oil because it is too expensive and the
| price of a barrel fluctuates too much (IEA 2020)
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Liquid fuel isn't a finite resource, or is at least only
| finite to the extent the universe is finite.
|
| Whether we use conventional oil, shale or synthetics is
| really just an implementation issue. The basic idea of solar
| energy + hydrogen + carbon is pretty much common.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Wait what are you arguing exactly?
| psychoslave wrote:
| Growth itself is very ambiguous.
|
| To start with, there will always be a growing number of
| events that (relatively to our species evolution, until its
| disappearance) will be in the past. Not necessarily more
| events with artifacts to which we can have access to though.
|
| It's not like "consumption" is an act of annihilation of
| anything, this is all transformations. At least as far as
| energy-mass equilibrium goes.
|
| In a sense, we can literally lose information, as it will
| never be possible to access it again, be it a star (the
| stellar body) existence that is out of observable, a species
| which disappeared million years ago that has let no trace of
| its passage on earth, or our beloved ones whose loving memory
| won't last much centuries.
| anovikov wrote:
| Current theory is that there will be peak demand instead.
| Which is same as "peak", but happens with prices falling
| rather than increasing.
| polotics wrote:
| Interesting! Can you point to a good model that shows
| demand constrains first and ahead of availability crunch? I
| never saw anything approaching that result, liquid fuels
| are hard to replace, no?
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| We've reached 'peak carbon'. The world is increasingly
| acknowledging that higher concentrations of carbon
| dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
| increase the overall temperature of the planet, which
| changes planetary weather patterns, and that this
| changing climate is expensive to adapt to.
|
| As such, we're emitting a more than economically optimal
| amount of carbon dioxide, and demand overall should drop.
| Hence, peak demand. More energy consumption can give us
| more good things, so the energy consumption itself isn't
| bad, but we've reached a point where the side effects of
| the energy consumption are eating into the benefits we
| get, probably past the point of marginal benefit overall.
| polotics wrote:
| mmh sure. I think your take is extremely optimistic, you
| mention The World as if there were a collective
| direction, but from where I stand CO2 emissions look like
| the ultimate example of the tragedy of the commons.
|
| Also the side effects of benefits have large delays, so
| economics are very dependent on the rate of discount you
| use for your net-present-value calculation...
| cryptonector wrote:
| Yes, you are totally correct, and yet the Malthusians can be
| wrong when applying this argument because we humans respond
| to price signals.
| orwin wrote:
| Price signal are only relevant is you have a price
| elasticity of demand, which oil and gas obviously don't
| have, as they are the building bricks of modern trade and
| production. Also if logic isn't enough, you just have to
| look at oil price/consumption to see how inelastic oil
| prices are.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > price elasticity of demand, which oil and gas obviously
| don't have
|
| Not remotely clear. First, we have enormous amounts of
| coal and uranium, so we can make electricity for
| thousands of years, and EVs mean that if we have to give
| up on oil, we can. Second, the U.S. has something like
| 1,200 years' worth of proven shale natural gas
| reserves(!), so again, we can make all the electricity we
| need.
|
| And many countries have vehicle fleets that run on
| natural gas, so again we could give up on oil if we had
| to.
|
| Manufacturing natgas-powered vehicles is way less
| resource intensive, and way more sustainable than
| manufacturing EVs. And if we have that much in the way of
| shale natgas reserves then running out of oil won't be as
| big a problem as you paint it.
|
| The development of natgas-powered vehicles and EVs
| happened in spite or because of the demand inelasticity
| of oil.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| There's still plenty of conventional oil capacity in West
| Africa, Iran and Venezuela.
|
| None of those places are producing at anything close to max
| capacity. Nobody really cares (other than the people who live
| there) because the world has enough shale.
| Iridescent_ wrote:
| Shale oil is extremely unreliable, and its producers have
| barely ever been able to make any margins out of it because the
| required investments are heavy and constants. Wells reach
| maturity after months or weeks, and then they need to be
| replaced. If we have not yet reached peak _all_ oils, then it
| will probably happen in the coming years.
| palmfacehn wrote:
| A good example is the claim that land is an inelastic resource.
| The counter point is the supply of accessible land worth
| utilizing is elastic. Improvements in transportation technology
| open up more land for utilization.
| d_silin wrote:
| If you run it on defaults for longest possible time (500 years),
| the outputs will reach the equilibrium state.
|
| It is very simplified simulation, of course. But seems to
| indicate that even in the absence of expansion beyond our home
| planet, humanity will not go extinct, but rather settle into some
| ground state .
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| It seems unlikely that humanity will go extinct. Even in the
| case of a massive population crash, there would be many
| "islands" of communities and all of them would still have quite
| a few local technologies such as knives and whatever else they
| can make like basic wheels.
| psychoslave wrote:
| >It seems unlikely that humanity will go extinct.
|
| From what our geological archives tell us, this seems rather
| the most likely scenario, even if we all managed to transform
| ourselves into wise people whose main trait would be
| temperance and judicious anticipation driven by efficient
| peaceful communication leading to the whole humanity living
| in harmony. Having a species that reach a stable form over
| million of years is not that easy.
| cryptonector wrote:
| At some point the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will
| irreparably drop below plant starvation levels, then humans
| on Earth will go extinct. Even if not, at some point the
| atmosphere will thin too much, then humans on Earth will go
| extinct. Even if not, at some point the Sun will go red
| giant, and then for sure humans on Earth will go extinct.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Of course, all creatures will eventually. I just meant in
| the next 10,000 years.
| cryptonector wrote:
| At the rate at which CO2 is disappearing from the
| atmosphere -or rather at the rate it was disappearing
| before the Industrial Revolution- we might only have one
| or two million years left. That's rather soon. The IR may
| well have added millions of years to the remaining
| lifetime of photosynthetic and aerobic life on Earth.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Well, even if that's the case, I don't think it's a big
| loss. All things live and die, and our time will come
| too.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I'm not sure how a simplified simulation indicates anything.
| You have to assume it represents reality, but how is that
| assumption justified?
| empiricus wrote:
| A couple of years ago I learned it is possible to create glucose
| directly from solar power. The estimates from the authors of the
| paper were that earth could feed 1 trillion ppl this way.
| gooseus wrote:
| True, but the systems that do this most effectively require a
| lot of other limited resources besides solar power - most
| notably arable soil, fresh water, time, and usually also some
| additional processing to render that glucose ingestible for one
| of those people.
|
| So maybe the Earth could supply 1 trillion people with food if
| it was turned into a farm planet devoid of any other
| biodiversity but those required to support human life, assuming
| those 1 trillion people were living and doing all their non-
| agricultural industry somewhere else.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Sounds about right. That's the limit from direct thermal
| pollution. It involves basically turning the Earth into a space
| station, with air and water cleaned and recycled.
| buescher wrote:
| Now if we could just find a way to iterate on methods of doing
| that, maybe use evolutionary methods, eventually we'd have
| practical, efficient methods of using solar power to make food!
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| Do you have a reference to the paper?
|
| If the same could be done for amino acids, starting from feces,
| and if the electro-biological transducer could be mineaturized
| people could get it installed in their stomachs & bowels, with
| an extension cord coming out the exit orifice, like a vacuum
| cleaner...
| WillAdams wrote:
| For a discussion on this see:
|
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
|
| Isaac Asimov wrote a short story which touches on this (basically
| the last zookeeper/pet owner is confronted with the requirement
| that his menagerie be exterminated) and also did some
| calculations --- if the earth's crust were converted to biomass,
| there would be a limiting element if memory serves, phosphorous.
| gooseus wrote:
| As an aside Meadow's primer Thinking in Systems[1] should be a
| required text in middle/high schools (imho).
|
| Donella Meadows died of cerebral meningitis at the age of 59 in
| 2001[2], I truly wish she was someone we could be hearing from
| today.
|
| [1] https://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donella_Meadows
| arthurjj wrote:
| Strongly endorsed for middle/high schoolers introduction. I
| read it last year and thought it was a good _introduction_ but
| will feel a little simple for the HN crowd. Most of the value
| is in The Appendix followed by Chapters 1, 2 and 6, so you
| could even shorten it more. My only caveat is there 's a lot of
| degrowther propaganda in it that you would need to caution the
| kids against
| bmitc wrote:
| > degrowther propaganda
|
| What do you mean by that?
| MarkusQ wrote:
| The whole book is an argument against growth (cf the
| title). More specifically, all the models implicitly assume
| that rising costs will never reduce demand (and thus
| consumption), drive the search for alternatives, or make
| increased efficiency economically viable. It like writing a
| book called "The limits to driving" and showing that pretty
| much every car on the road will quickly smash into
| something if the drivers are assumed to continue
| accelerating in their present direction, and no one is
| going to use their steering wheel or breaks effectively.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| This particular subthread is about the book _Thinking in
| Systems_ , not _The Limits to Growth_.
|
| While related, they are not the same book.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| My bad. Thank you for the correction.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| _Thinking in Systems: A Primer_ is an introduction into
| systems thinking, about stocks (resources), flows
| (actions) and feedback loops. The book isn 't an argument
| against growth, but an argument for the sustainability of
| systems, especially how to think about and model them.
| The boundaries of a modelled system are purely
| conceptional and won't exist in the real world like we'd
| wrongly assume, D. Meadows makes this more than clear. I
| think @arthurjj is reading something into it that just
| isn't there.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Ah. Thank you. I misread the thread.
| arthurjj wrote:
| I don't have a copy in front of me but throughout the book
| there are many comments made against modern society and
| some of the examples that she gives are clearly 'set up' to
| be against growth. I didn't realize she also wrote Limits
| to Growth and according to wikipedia, used some of that
| work and was edited by an org called the Sustainability
| Institute which explains it.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_In_Systems%3A_A_
| Prime...
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| You seem to conflate the term _sustainability_ with "
| _degrowth_ " which is just not the case in the book
| _Thinking in Systems_. I 'm really curious where you
| picked that up from? In fact, a non-sustainable system is
| a system that is very far from any growth because it is
| about to collapse - only a sustainable system is able to
| grow, natural and artifical alike.
| bmitc wrote:
| But propaganda? What is the agenda, then, and what would
| be obtained through that agenda?
|
| There are very clear issues in both society and the
| environment that are both directly and indirectly caused
| by the obsession with growth.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I think that when trying to determine what is propaganda, all
| else being equal, a good rule of thumb is that the messaging
| in support of the prevailing system is more likely to be
| propaganda than the messaging against it. This is due to the
| simple fact that the prevailing system (in this case growth
| focus / capitalism) has all societal institutions built to
| support it.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Hard disagree. Just because people reached a consensus on
| something doesn't then mean talking about that something is
| propaganda. Is all talk about modern medicine propaganda?
| All talk/technology that uses AC electrics over DC?
|
| In the modern world it seems like EVERY discussion is 'why
| XYZ is wrong' and there is zero defense/explanation of
| how/why we reached/settled on XYZ (current norms) in those
| discussion, just attempts to discredit xyz/norms.
| jl6 wrote:
| Ironic that the model is all about how finite resources must
| eventually run out, and so _production_ cannot grow without
| limit, whereas in the real world it's _consumption_ which seems a
| more pressing threat. We are probably capable of producing and
| burning more than enough fossil fuel to render the climate very
| human-unfriendly.
| wavemode wrote:
| I remember when gasoline hit $3 per gallon and people were
| extrapolating that it was starting to run out, and would
| eventually reach $100/gallon, triggering global wars and a mass
| switchover to electric vehicles.
|
| 20 years later and I just filled up my car for $2.89 ...
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Limits To Growth is kind of a test case for whether people got
| the memo about the academic research crisis or not (which
| incorporates the replication crisis, but is wider than it).
|
| The World3 model came out of social studies and isn't even really
| science, given that the authors never tried to obtain evidence
| for their hypothesis before publishing. World3 is a toy with no
| predictive value, which is why reimplementing it in HTML is
| possible: it's just a handful of equations. Such a thing never
| could make accurate predictions, which was extremely obvious at
| the time and pointed out by many (e.g. Nordhaus, Smil), but this
| didn't stop its authors being feted as great scientists
| regardless.
|
| There's a lot of similarities here with COVID modelling in the
| sense that these sorts of academic modelling exercises all seem
| to suffer the same kinds of problems and social failure modes:
|
| * Over-simplified to the point that laypeople can easily spot
| what's missing.
|
| * Guesses pulled out of thin air are treated as having equal
| value to measured data.
|
| * An implicit assumption that the population is purely static and
| doesn't react to changing circumstances in any way. When later
| the predictions turn out to be wrong it's argued that they would
| have been right if not for the modelling causing behavioral
| changes, making the entire exercise unfalsifiable pseudo-science
| by its own premise.
|
| * Either never validated against reality or actually falsified,
| but academics pretend otherwise.
|
| * Predictions phrased vaguely enough that what most people would
| consider to be falsification is later argued to be within the
| bounds of one of the many possible scenarios.
|
| The uselessness of such modelling exercises is evident in the
| fact that despite at least 50+ years of investment by academia
| and government into them, there are no academic computerized
| models widely being used to predict the course of the society or
| economy.
| api wrote:
| The assumption that human behavior and economic system behavior
| are static is to me the biggest flaw in virtually all of these
| models that I have seen. It also underlies adjacent panics that
| arise based on this kind of thinking, like the overpopulation
| panic. We can see how wrong that was in retrospect, though it
| may have been right if all behaviors and systems remained
| static.
|
| I wish the present day underpopulation panic people would get
| the memo. They are making the exact same errors around mindless
| extrapolation of present behaviors and trends. Instead of "with
| these birth rates we will be eating people in 50 years" it's
| "with these birth rates we will go extinct!"
|
| There are things to be very concerned about. What happens when
| you take current behavior and trends and drag it forward on a
| spreadsheet is not one of them. "If our company continues this
| growth trajectory we will be worth more than the entire global
| economy in 25 years!" Every single one of these models and
| panics is a version of that thinking.
|
| I think a more useful question when faced with such predictions
| is "how will this _not_ happen?"
| wodderam wrote:
| This is what the field of complex systems and complexity
| economics tries to deal with but it doesn't seem like
| complexity economics has taken off.
|
| With economics too there is a problem that a correct
| prediction that is acted on will be gamed and become a self
| defeating seemingly "wrong" prediction.
|
| I think the 2022 recession calls were probably a good
| example.
|
| If everyone believes there is going to be a recession in the
| future and everyone acts to avoid the recession we can't know
| the counter factual in the economy of not predicting the
| recession to know what was the right prediction.
|
| I have read this process referred to reflexivity but even a
| best selling trading book by George Soros himself didn't get
| this idea to stick in the popular mind.
|
| It seems like prediction is not even the right word to use or
| we should have a different word for a prediction that can
| influence the outcome of what it is predicting. Then there is
| even strong and weak versions of this process that we haven't
| bothered to separate from the proper word prediction in the
| sense of weather prediction. That the prediction is basically
| independent of what it is trying to predict.
| not_the_fda wrote:
| No, it's a test case for whether people understand exponential
| growth. The very first chapter of the book goes into this.
|
| The inputs don't matter that much when you are growing
| exponentially. By the time you get pricing signals, you are
| already cooked.
|
| Its like bacteria in a petri dish, one day you are at 12% full,
| then, 25%, then 50%, then 100%, then you die off.
|
| We are already seeing the early signs of the system collapse
| with climate change and we have more and more people pumping
| more and more carbon into the atmosphere.
|
| The keystone of modern society is agriculture, which was only
| possible because the climate stabilize 20k years ago. We are
| destabilizing that climate and are in uncharted territory. We
| had the opportunity to do a course correction when the book was
| published but people like you down played the ramifications. In
| the last 50 years we have done nothing and are now cooked.
| flocciput wrote:
| What's with the weird jump in life expectancy around 47 years in
| or so? It's especially visible at higher values of the 4th
| slider.
| mhh__ wrote:
| There's a retort called "Models of doom" that I haven't read but
| can vaguely guess what it'll say. When was the world supposed to
| have ended by now?
| abetusk wrote:
| For the lazy, the blog post that accompanies it (2012):
|
| http://bit-player.org/2012/world3-the-public-beta
|
| The source code:
|
| https://github.com/bit-player/limits
|
| I haven't read "The Limits of Growth" but I assume it's from a
| "peak oil" perspective, predicting societal collapse once oil
| runs out. I think it's pretty clear we're past idea now, with
| solar energy and other renewable being deployed globally because
| of the exponentially decreasing economic costs.
|
| One thing I do find interesting is the cyclic nature of the booms
| and busts of population growth predicted by the model. Even if
| the assumptions of the model are invalid (short term finite
| supply of energy) it still might explain some gross level
| behavior.
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