Quote:
Originally Posted by Eclipse Now
But the question was what to do when we DO 'fill the earth' whenever that is and whatever it looks like. Aren't we just postponing that question discussing a history of previous Malthusian prophecies?
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Its certainly a race, but in my mind the question of what we do when we "fill the Earth" is moot.
The thing to realize about *any* of these resources is that we'll never actually "run out." We'll never suddenly wake up one morning and there's no oil. As I heard one economist try to explain it, you may have to scrape harder and harder to get the last drop of milk from your cereal bowl, but there will always be some there. You have to realize that its not "running out" that forces the change, its the steady--and usually *slow*--increase in the price of getting the resource that causes the development of alternatives.
Sure it may be fantastical--and obviously expensive--to talk about "mining" hydrogen from Jupiter, but its *not* a fantasy.
So my view is that its not about "what do we do when we run out of everything" its "what do we do to stay ahead of the resource depletion curve?"
In my mind "running out" is so far in the future that contemplating it is indeed counting the number of angels that dance on the head of a pin. Its certainly not going to happen in my lifetime and not my daughter's or her kids when they come along. Wasting time on figuring out the running out part just takes away from useful brain cycles spent figuring out what we do *now*, and that's *not* going to be easy...
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value,
Buffy
