171 comments on The Fifth Problem: Peak Capital
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171 comments on The Fifth Problem: Peak Capital
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Robert2734, you must obviously hail from a different planet, one whose radius is increasing linearly with time. If your home planet's radius is steadily increasing, then your planet's surface area is expanding as the square of time, and its volume is expanding as the cube of time. Your planet could possibly sustain exponential growth of population, capital and economic output for a very long time, because your planet has no resource limits to growth. This planet, unfortunately, has a fixed radius and hence there are resource limits to growth that only idiots can ignore.
Didn't you know, the Earth is expanding! It grows for us, to sustain our man-made Cockaigne indefinitely! You can watch it happen here.
Just kidding. We are doomed and nothing can save us. There are simply too many people with their heads in the clouds, unwilling to face reality and act accordingly.
Why do you mock Samuel Warren Carey's work? Have you actually done any real research on it? If planets arent growing, then try explaining this video. I've said it a million times, put your money where your mouth is. At least have the intellectual honesty to try and explain Neal Adam's videos. There are a dozen more that are equally convincing.
I find it ironic that you'd say "We are doomed and nothing can save us." The solution lies along the same path as expansion tectonics. There are whole avenues of science that remain closed off to the scientific community. From the insights revealed by Kirlian photography to the beautiful simplicity of the WSM, the possibilities are amazing. Maybe if you took a little time away from all your doom and gloom...
If people continue to allow themselves to be manipulated into a very limited scientific paradigm, then yes we are doomed. The "powers that be" today are even more powerful that the "powers that were" hundreds of years ago that had everyone convinced the earth was flat. Why people choose to be enslaved by these same forces throughout history is something that I may never understand. But if we are doomed, it is only due to a failure to use our brains.
Not a convincing explanation at all.
How about this? Water ice under high pressure at a potential subduction zone melts - that's how ice skates work - and any water produced would sink below ice without trace through the obvious cracks.
So you don't see subduction zones or need expanding planets, just a simple everyday phase change, all you see is the spreading zones as underlying liquid water freezes as it is exposed in the cracks between the moving plates of ice. The smooth filling of the gaps between the obviously spreading plates of ice is just evidence of liquid water under the ice.
This planet, unfortunately, has a fixed radius...
Anywhere from 50 to 100,000 tons of mass is added to the earth each year. Though this does not appreciably increase the size of earth, it does increase the radius. There is no fixed earth. I thought fixed earth ideas went away with Aristotle's death over 2000 years ago?
As far as resource limits, our technology is relatively primitive and we are unable to penetrate more than 10 miles into the surface. We have no idea what resources the planet contains.
The scientific community has dismissed the "Expanding Earth Theory". The following details are from the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_earth_theory
"Modern measurements have established very stringent upper bound limits for the expansion rate, which very much reduces the possibility of an expanding Earth. For example, paleomagnetic data has been used to calculate that the radius of the Earth 400 million years ago was 102 ± 2.8% of today's radius.[6] Furthermore, examinations of earth's moment of inertia suggest that no significant change of earth's radius in the last 620 million years could have taken place and therefore earth expansion is untenable.[7]
The primary objections to an expanding Earth have centered around the lack of an accepted process by which the Earth's radius could increase and on the inability to find an actual increase of earth's radius by modern measurements. This issue, along with the evidence for the process of subduction, caused the scientific community to dismiss the theory of an expanding Earth."
You're rebutting something completely different from the original assertion.
Oh, boy.... so often I find myself confronting this unbelievably naive argument: "we'll just dig deeper". Do you realize how expensive it is to dig holes miles long? Besides; go back to your geology books. "Ores" are the result of the combination of geological and biological factors and these interactions take place at or near the surface of the planet. Even if you could dig a 50 miles deep hole, you won't find anything interesting in there.
Removing overburden is expensive, but we aren't exactly penetrating down to the mantle and exhausting all the lithophilic ores anytime soon.
Lithophilic ores are a small subset of useful metals. In any case, by definition ore is only "ore" if it can be mined at a profit (positive ROI); you appear to be talking about mining metals at a loss, irregardless of cost. Running out is generally irrelevant for metals; affording to be able to mine or recycle them is relevant, and peak capital (affordability) is the subject of this thread.
You appear to be constructing strawmen. Stop.