The Ultimate resource

What Hacker News says

1. nickikJun 2021
   In fact, more humans now then ever and we have more resources then we ever had.

   > Did we have global climate change, ecosystems extinction and resource depletion 200 years ago? lt Yes. In fact some of the smartest economists and intellectual at the time were panicking about things like 'peak-coal'. Sound familiar? Go actually read Jevons. Others were panicked about over-population, go read Malthus and the Population trap.

   There was a massive popular movement in the US predicting imminent over-population and resource exhaustion in the 60s. Read things like The Population Bomb.

   And it always end up with the same fallacy and terrible dangerous zero sum ideas. Jevons was so afraid of 'peak coal' he suggested the government should roll back technological progress so the coal would be available for longer.

   Paul R. Ehrlich and his ilk suggested that the US should not lend of food aid to India and said it was preferable for them to starve now in small numbers rather then millions later.

   Not to mention the horrible, discussing suggestion they had about other forcible population control measures and not just for India, but they also want such policies in the US (This is literal professor from Standford, suggesting forced sterilization as a solution).

   Of course 'peak oil' that nobody cares about now, was a huge thing in the early 1990-2000s. In the 2010 people thought rare-earth were gone run out. And yet not a single non-renewable resource has actually ever seriously run out. Ironically renewable resources like whales are far easier to exhaust then non renewable resources.

   > Every single human on the planet consumes enormous amount of resources during their life time, there must be some reasonable limit on how many humans the planet can support without being turned into concrete jungle with deserts. People obsessed with this id

   This is again wrong. This is the exact zero sum fallacy that has lead to all the fallicy explained above and actually even worse the the much, much worse outcome of WW1 and WW2. Read some of the text of some of the German High Command before WW1 and all the suggestion they made. Read Hitler nonsense about 'Lebensraum'. Its all the same idea.

   The idea that because if the total resource base is fixed, if there are Slaves who are consuming them, it means less for the Germans. There is simple logical conclusions that can be drawn for that, and they did.

   The opposite is actually true. More humans, consistently has lead to more resources being available. Not just in the absolute but also on a per-human bases. The total amount of farm land needed has actually decreased in the US. There are far more forests in Europe now then there were in 1200.

   You can today get 1kg of almost any material cheaper then in 1900 and you can get it in higher quality and of course you can also get tons of materials that simply didn't exist in 1900. Aluminum started out worth more then gold and now is not much more expensive then dirt.

   Our total energy reserves now are larger then they have ever been. The discovery of uranium/thorium alone provides 10000x more energy then all forest that existed the world in 1500. The discovery of photovoltaic alone means we can take gigantic amounts of energy from a huge fusion reactor in the sky.

   More humans consistently has meant the exact opposite of what you are suggesting. Read 'The Ultimate Resource' by Simons that was a direct response to the 'Population Bomb' people.

   The difference between a bunch of dirt, a bunch of stone or a bunch of dirty sand is technology. Technology, human knowledge and productivity, is what turns utterly worthless stuff into resources. The Nevada desert for example has been without resources, and now it might turn out that it is the single biggest lithium resource in the US. What is and is not a resource depends on human knowledge and technology.

   The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. The bronze age didn't end because we ran out of bronze. The iron age didn't end because we ran out of iron. The oil age isn't ending because we are running out of oil.

   Urbanization actually means we can have far, far more people using less space then ever before and people even do it voluntary. There are huge parts of the US that are basically uninhabited and actually are consistently less inhabited over time.

   We are not even anywhere remotely close to potential maximum efficiency of farm land. Our methods have been improving year over year for 200+ years. And farming now still doesn't look that different compered to 200 years ago. We are not close to max productivity. In terms of productivity per labor hour farming has improved even more then when we simply looking at land productivity.

   Using actual simple fact, a marginal increasing in human population has actually increase to resource availability/consumption by any one human.

   Some of the smartest people and intellectuals in history who have not understood this effect and it has to be relearned and proven wrong over and over. Doesn't matter if its Malthus in 1700s or Elon Musk in 1990s. There are good and bad things that come out of this, some of these people look at this situation and simply do something about it themselves, Norman Borlaug or Musk. More often however it lead to people who wanted to limit population, take resources by force or prevent technological progress.

   Show morethread
2. dailycrudMar 2018
   The late (and quirky) Julian Simon wrote on this topic, and on the related notion of ostensibly limited resources. Worth checking out if you are not already familiar with his viewpoint:

   The Ultimate Resource, 1981, Princeton University Press, ISBN 069109389X.

   The Ultimate Resource 2, 1996, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0691042691. http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

   thread
3. mkempeApr 2014
   Two fundamental arguments of the thesis that we will not "run out" of natural resources for productive purpose have been made eloquently in:

   - The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon [1] --the human mind has limitless potential to select and pursue the use of materials; and

   - Capitalism by George Reisman [2] -- the phenomenon of price responds to actual supply and demand, and prompts profit-seekers to develop and switch production accordingly.

   [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691003815

   [2] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0084RU67S, see Part One, Chapter 3

   Show morethread
4. lupin_sanseiSep 2009
   The essential problem with the Peak Oil theory is that although it correctly understands that oil prices will rise as oil gets more scarce, it doesn't recognise that higher prices cause a change in people's behaviour that causes more oil to be made available. (More exploration, better extraction methods, substitution with alternative energy sources, conservation of existing oil usage). All the oil we have is because the high prices of oil have caused people to go and look for it in the first place.

   High prices are a signal to society that we need more of something. If/when oil prices rise it automatically moves people into the energy business in order to solve the high oil price problem.

   The late economist Julian Simon has a terrific book about these issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource

   See also the "Conservation of Resources" section here: http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p242

   Show morethread
5. billswiftAug 2009
   Yep, that's a deluded fantasy all right. See "Ultimate Resource 2", "The Resourceful Earth", or "State of Humanity" by Julian Simon or "Earth Report 2000" by Ronald Bailey.
   thread
6. sovaMar 2021
   >Time is the only thing we will never be able to make more of. It is The Ultimate Resource, as Julian Simon points out. This makes Bitcoin the ultimate form of money because its issuance is directly linked to the ultimate resource of our universe: time.

   All things equal, BTC has a limited supply, making it unusable as a currency (but great as a deflationary store of value). I suppose the definition of "money" is less specific than "currency," but this notion of "money" goes contrary to the nomenclature of the human realm. Yes, technically anything that is tradable is "money," but then the term becomes rather meaningless.

   Money must be backed by a creative asset, such as an orchard or labor or technology. Time alone a currency does not make.

   Show morethread