[LINK] Growth … was Re: This makes me angry.

[Rick Welykochy]

[getting cosmologically OT...]

Frank O'Connor wrote:

> The other problem is that our economic system is currently built on the premise of continuous growth, and when that fails we get recessions. Cyclical recessions are no bad thing, simply part of the capitalist cycle ... but recessions that degenerate into depressions and the like can cause misery and deprivation like   you wouldn't believe.

Our current Big Corporate system is at most 100 years old. And since its inception, corps
have continually eroded their social responsibilities, successfully lobbied for reduced
taxation, and enjoyed larged and larger swaths of profit as a percentage of GDP. Mere stats
you can look up.

More conspiratorially, Big Banking is behind the recession cycle. There seems to be plenty
of evidence of the 1% or perhaps 0.1% making massive profits from past recessions / depressions.

> Unless someone can propose a working alternative to the economic system we currently work under, growth will continue to be seen as desirable and the cycles of 'irrational exuberance' and recessions will continue. However, the duration between the cycles seems to be dropping rather alarmingly over the last 50 years ... we now seem to have a less than 10 year boom-bust rhythm.

Perhaps as in agriculture, we could "fallow" our economy for a time period, save our non-renewable
resource, as they are fine sitting there in the ground, and reach some level of stability in
the population and the economy.

In real money terms, we are not better off today that we were twenty years ago. We are worse
of, corps and CEOs are making record incomes/profits. And this situation is worstening (from
my perpsective) or getting better (from a CEO's perspective).

> But it would be a tragedy if our tenure on this planet lasted only 50,000 years, and we were consigned to paleontological history long before we managed to do anything of particular note. With an obituary of "Here lies Man. Discovered fire and the wheel, and then it all went to crap." Hey, a 50,000 year fossil record is so minuscule it would probably not even be noticed by any species that subsequently evolved into intelligent beings.

Our tenure as the species homo sapiens dates back at least a million years, according to my
readings. But let's not quibble over numbers. Observe that 99% of all species that have evolved
on the planet are now extinct. I would be surprised if the average species lifetime is more
than 10 or 20 million years. And I would be also very surprised if humans reached or exceeded
that.

BTW: the fossil record homo sapiens and its ancestors goes back at least 4 million years,
to the common ancestor of apes and man. And DNA sequencing is comfirming in spades what
the fossil record has allowed us to glimpse and ponder.


> Maybe that's the reason behind the Fermi Paradox. Who knows?

Heh ... does a paradox need a reason? Simply stated, the Fermi Paradox asks why, within
such a vast universe, we have no evidence of other life.

I myself see no paradox. If we indeed endure for 10 million years as a civilisation, a
very  optmistic view IMHO, that is a very short stay relative to the age of our universe.

The diameter of our expanding bubble of accessible space within the larger entirety of this
universe in which it is contained is only about 45 billion light-years. The probability of us,
during our short stay, encountering an alien civilisation during its short stay is cosmologically
insignificant.

Time aside, consider the true enormity of space. Our nearest galactic neighbour is over 1 million
light years away. Even if there was one alien civilisation in each galaxy, and there are more observable
galaxies than stars in our Milky Way, the chance of them making a journey through space and eventually
finding us, or perhaps signalling us from their galaxy, is unbelievably minute.

> Insomnia induced maudlin philosophy ... fueled by an excellent brandy. I've got to stop doing this.   :)

Cheer up. You are probably living in the last generation that will live so long. As they
now say, the younger generations are eating themselves into early graves.

cheers
rickw



-- 
____________________________________
Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
      -- Charles Darwin (introduction to 'The Descent of Man' 1871)