Charlie Stross writes great science fiction and a blog which usually leaves me wondering how I can enjoy so much the novels of a man with whom I agree so little. In a recent post he linked to an article by UCSD associate professor of physics Tom Murphy to explain why space colonisation will not happen. Since the site is called “Do the Math” I was expecting some numerical analysis of space colonisation. Instead the article contains lots of reasons why space travel is hard and slow and requires lots of energy and is not likely to be done much more by NASA, but nothing that suggests it violates the laws of physics.
I like physicists. They do real science that gets answers from proper observations. So I was a bit disappointed by the space article and went in search of goodness. There must be some good insight that a physicist like Murphy can offer.
He analyses the growth of energy consumption. Since 1650, total energy usage of the United States has increased by about a factor of 10 every 100 years. If energy production continues to accelerate at this rate, we’ll heat the atmosphere to 100C in 450 years. Murphy is not saying this will happen, he is saying that there is a limit to how much energy we will want to produce. So far so good. But how much energy can a person use? Why does it matter?
Once we appreciate that physical growth must one day cease (or reverse), we can come to realize that all economic growth must similarly end. This last point may be hard to swallow, given our ability to innovate, improve efficiency, etc. But this topic will be put off for another post.
So this is to be a Limits To Growth argument. In this other post Murphy talks a lot about the limits to how energy efficient things can be. He is right that it will always take a certain amount of energy to heat food, for example, and that there are processes that can not be improved beyond physical limits. But he seems unable to imagine economic growth without growing use of energy. Doing the same task with half the energy, something that is a routine advance in computing technology, is economic growth. Murphy admits this, but gets hung up on the fact that these other things can not improve. This is a problem, because
As long as these physically-bounded activities comprise a finite portion of our portfolio, no amount of gadget refinement will allow indefinite economic growth. If it did, eventually economic activity would be wholly dominated by us “servicing” each other, and not the physical “stuff.”
To which I say: what is wrong with that? Here is what Murphy thinks is wrong with that, and here we get to what may be his fundamental error:
The important result is that trying to maintain a growth economy in a world of tapering raw energy growth (perhaps accompanied by leveling population) and diminishing gains from efficiency improvements would require the “other” category of activity to eventually dominate the economy. This would mean that an increasingly small fraction of economic activity would depend heavily on energy, so that food production, manufacturing, transportation, etc. would be relegated to economic insignificance. Activities like selling and buying existing houses, financial transactions, innovations (including new ways to move money around), fashion, and psychotherapy will be effectively all that’s left. Consequently, the price of food, energy, and manufacturing would drop to negligible levels relative to the fluffy stuff. And is this realistic—that a vital resource at its physical limit gets arbitrarily cheap? Bizarre.
This scenario has many problems. For instance, if food production shrinks to 1% of our economy, while staying at a comparable absolute scale as it is today (we must eat, after all), then food is effectively very cheap relative to the paychecks that let us enjoy the fruits of the broader economy. This would mean that farmers’ wages would sink far lower than they are today relative to other members of society, so they could not enjoy the innovations and improvements the rest of us can pay for.
The first paragraph simply lacks imagination, but the second one is almost unforgivable. Food production has already gone from being nearly 100% of the economy to a much smaller proportion of it. Are farmers poorer as a result? Of course not. There are fewer of them and each one produces food for more people. This is how food has got cheaper in the first place. A human body needs 100 Watts to work. We could completely automate food production using some multiple of 100 Watts per person which is only a small proportion of each person’s energy budget, and there is your almost free food. With this kind of material abundance economic activity can be completely intellectual, no problem at all.
Can growth continue forever after that? It is possible that we will hit some limit of how much computation, and therefore intellectual activity, can be done with the available energy. Ray Kurzweil has tried to calculate the physical limits of computation and his answers are in units of how many entire civilisations can be simulated per second. So the limits are quite high.
This is Murphy’s other error. He writes, “I am unsettled by my growing concerns about the viability of our future”. In response to these concerns he proposes abandoning growth, not having kids and not eating meat. But he has gone the wrong way. He calculates that there are limits and is afraid of attempting to reach them. If you flip the argument around, what physics tells us is just how much wealth is possible. I have already described how material abundance can be had for very little energy. There is plenty of energy for a much larger population to live a much longer life with no material concerns and as much entertainment and intellectual stimulation as a person could want. Perhaps Murphy knows this, and it is the source of his cognitive dissonance when he writes, “such worrying is not consistent with who I am.”
Here’s a simple solution- just move the Earth away from the sun at a pace to match the heating! Two giant solar mirrors, one at each pole, should do the job! Any other technical solutions?
And another fallacy- service industries are growing anyway, but Murphy doesn’t seem to realise this. I might not eat at a fast-food restaurant much, or a regular restaurant, but they are examples of ‘service industries’ in the food sector, surely? And wouldn’t a smaller pool of farmers mean more money for the farmers?
And what else are physicists but recipients of the knowledge from that service industry called education?
A dose of hard, nasty reality: For the vast majority of human beings on this planet, life is a cycle of misery. Starvation and violence are widespread, murder and rape commonplace, and corruption is all around us.
There are too many humans on this planet; more humans than jobs, more humans than fuel, more humans than food. The problem is indeed, math.
The blunt truth is there’s far too many of us; our sheer numbers have made us into mediocrities.
Those who pontificate over how marvellous and splendid their new I-phone is see the world purely from their puny, small-minded, and wholly elitist perspective.
Here’s hoping Mendicant means what he says- and volunteers to reduce our numbers by one! (No, I’m not giving you my address- i meant a peaceful suicide!)
I’ll drink a toast to my small minded petty and elistist perspective and if it comes down to fighting to preserve it, I’m a damned good shot.
Now back to the Murphy guy. He has not got a clue about the space frontier. His Statist blinders are so total that he has utterly missed the fact that this decade is the transition point at which the majoriy of human spaceflight will be private and for-profit. I ought to know a little about it since that’s the line of work I’m in. Also, for Ad Astra readers, I have a fairly hefty article on the history of the commercial launch revolution in the next issue.
He also does not consider nanotechnology, an industry which is growing at a rapid pace now; the rise of AI; and I am sure he will be utterly horrified that many of us may start living for centuries or millenia and the time for that is coming soon. I do not know about you, but if he thinks people should die young, ie under a few thousand years old, I would politely let him go first.
And btw, ‘vast majority’ is pure hyperbole. It was true a half century ago when most of the third world was still deeply infested with socialists, but to the extent that breed has failed to breed true and has died off, a revolution has happened that has increased wealth many times. Both China and India are on the way to becoming wealthy countries like Japan and America. It’s a messy transition but it is happening. As for some African countries, it they’d take their remaining soclalists and put them on an island where they can cause only themselves to starve, the whole place will explode. Africa is a potentially wealthy place and Africans I have met (when left alone by they Euro-socialist educated elites) can be quite enterprising and are more capable of running their own lives than the outsider post-colonialists who insist on ‘helping’ them. As if they couldn’t do it themselves.
Stross’s article is a gem: how otherwise intelligent people can sometimes be prone to abject idiocy.
“If we continue to grow richer soon everyone will be able to afford a horse and no one will want to clean up the mess Then we’ll all be smothered in horse manure.”
“Benz? Never heard of him.”
To cite a phrase coined by a great man of physics, he’s not even wrong.
One of my life maxims is “bullshit baffles brains” , I have always assumed it applied to a con-merchant baffling brainy types. Maybe it also applies to brainy people baffling themselves.
Too many people huh.
Would you care to name those who are superfluous?
We know how countries and societies get rich, we have now seen it happen often enough. In fact, to keep a society poor these days takes government action.
Sorry Mendicant, but you just couldn’t be more wrong.
Hey Mendicant– Was life better when the population was half what it is? 1/10? Ever?
One of
Stross’ commenters nailed it; he’s a troll.
Why are so many SF authors located in Scotland such America-hating socialist Euroweenies?
Wrong on a truly heroic scale. Never in human history has a lower percentage of humanity not lived one failed crop away from starvation. Never in human history has such a proportion of humanity had a higher average life expectancy. And how can there be ‘more humans than jobs’ when more humans inevitably means more demand for goods and services… ie jobs? Your notions are simply nonsensical.
In response to the people haters such as Mendicant, I have to say there are not enough people in the world. Just release the shackles, let people interact and trade, and we’ll all prosper handsomely.
Many people are obsessed with what the economy should be. How egocentric and anal is that?
We live, we buy the things we want, we die. The uncouth nail stylist can give just as much value as a factory worker or a miner, even if it is to people you despise as superficial.
Collectivists always start defining hierarchies of worth. It’s delusional and often dangerous.
Kurzweil’s idea of accelerating tech change is not just pie in the sky: it seems to be based on hard fact. I for one an optimist.
Don’t worry about a character like Mendicant. If he’s not a troll, then he’s what I would call a sort of fascist. For all the bleating about poverty, I suspect he really does not care all that much for people and wants many of us dead. HG Wells used to write the same sort of rubbish. These are the sort of people who think that sterilising poor and weak people is a great idea.
The evidence is clear that outside of sub-Saharan Africa, the condition of Mankind has improved and continues to do so, particularly when capitalism is allowed to operate under the rule of law and when property rights are respected.
And it would serve this idiot Mendicant well to realise that the greatest losses of life in recent decades have been due to wars, and in particular, the great collectivisms of Russia, China and the like.
As others have said, if he worries about too many people, he should start with himself. He clearly is a net drag on the rest of us. There’s no time to waste, old chap.
Where are these people who are suffering because there is not enough food, exactly? There are starving people in North Korea, sure, but that has nothing to do with the ability of the world to feed them. I am in India right now, and there is lots of poverty here, but no starvation. The truth is that the battle to feed the world is over (as Paul Erlich once put it) – it has been won. This is a magnificent thing, and yet many people seem to have weirdly ambiguous feelings about it.
A dose of hard, nasty reality: For the vast majority of human beings on this planet, life is a cycle of misery.
This doesn’t even pass the laugh factor. The vast majority of human beings have been lifted out of poverty and are in fact seeing pretty dramatic material improvements in their lives.
But that’s standard fair for lefties. They imagine that something is so, and argue using this imagination is in fact truth. But for most of their assumptions a simple look at the fact reveals that their very assumptions are wrong, leading them to come to very wrong conclusions. Garbage in, garbage out.
Murphy’s writing reminds me of the old engineer’s saying: Simulation is like masturbation, the more you do it the more you become convinced it’s the real thing.
Well, that would settle the question of the viability of the future, all right.
And to the chorus of responses to Mendicant, let me add: Extinction begins at home, son.
Im pretty sure that at “some point in the future ” the population will grow beyond the Earth ‘s capacity to feed them all (that time being far, far away) but to return to the OP that would seem to me to be a pretty effective driver for space exploration.
Unless it drives it well enough in advance to make the issue moot.
wh00ps: Maybe, but it is not imminent. All present trends suggest that global population is going to stabilise at some point in the next 50 years, and is then going to fall. Of course, trends can and will change, but there is no immediate danger of global population going much beyond ten billion. That assumes we do not make radical advances in life extension, which may not be a safe assumption. (I really hope it isn’t a safe assumption, because this would be something magnificent).
What pisses me off is this: when I was a kid in the 1970s, I got the whole overpopuation/starvation/collossal cities full of starving people/environmental collapse/horrible third world getting worse thing thrown at me. A lot of third world governments bought this – consequently obscenities like China’s one child policy, which is very possibly the worst piece of government policy in all of human history. Nothing that has happened since has happened as the people who came up with this argument predicted – nothing whatsoever. Having paid no attention to anything that has happened in the last 30 years, they still cling to these views and accuse us of being the unrealistic ones.
Michael, posting from an India that has very much not got any food shortages.
Charlie Stross’ problem, Rob, is that thinks that he is writing scathing satire of extropians and libertarians, as if writing about us as he does in ways that he thinks is taken to absurd ends, will turn us off of our views, except that we respond “YES, thats exactly what we want!” …. and we keep buying and reading his stuff and dreaming of a future just like that as our best of all possible words, and he remains convinced is the worst of all possible worlds.
I hadn’t considered that, Michael Lorrey. If true it’s a bit depressing.