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

[Frank O'Connor]

On 03/04/2012, at 5:18 AM, Rick Welykochy wrote:

> [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.
> 
Can't look at the last 100 years in isolation ... look at the last 50,000 years since we left Africa. There's plenty of evidence for it ... the extinction of the megafauna in Northern Europe, in the Americas, in Australia all coincided with the advent of our species in whatever area you want to nominate. Paleontologists try to avoid the obvious conclusion (Nah, it was a climate event, disease etc etc) but the coincidences are remarkable.

The Neanderthals were there for hundreds of thousands of years before we got there, but the megafauna only died off after we arrived. Could it be that our hunting methods were inherently wasteful (lets drive hundreds of the hug puppies off a cliff to furnish a single meal ... sound like a good idea to me, Horace) and that this was the origin of 'growth'. Facor in that the Neanderthals died out soon after we started intermixing (as did most major predator threats and competition) and you've got another example of our competitive urges.

I think it's in the damn gene, Rick ... our own little demon.

> 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.

Nah ... basically I see them as utterly incompetent, driven by short term greed and with the economic memory of an amoeba. They drift from crisis to crisis, from boom to bust and back to boom again, and don't learn a thing. The worrying thing is that the rest of us put them on an economic pedestal ... personally I'd prefer to see banking socially rated with child molestation and the like. I mean they add very little in the way of value to their product, and are essentially just middlemen between borrowers and lenders.

> 
>> 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.

Not gonna work ... an economy has to move or it stagnates and bad things can happen in the stagnation period.

> 
> 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).

Income wise we're about the same as twenty years back ... the difference is that we now work twice the time for the same amount of remuneration. Capital wise we are vastly better off (with real estate, stocks and bonds, superannuation and the like filling our respective coffers because of the extra wage provided by the spouse) but that capital isn't really earning what it should, we have gone into humungous debt to acquire it, and on a cold night capital brings little comfort to your or your dependents. It's a 'for a rainy day' thing ... especially the capital we all tend to acquire which is not particularly productive.

And of course, that spousal wage hasn't been all honey and roses .... prices have inflated to absorb a lot of it.

> 
>> 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.
> 

Nope ... homo sapiens is only about 150,000 years old at most, and only moved out of Africa with what could be termed it's current mindset 50,000 years ago. A million years back homo ergaster (who had the characteristics of a world class distance athlete and probably ran down its prey like the modern Bushman) roamed the world. A couple of other variants of humans interceded between ergaster and sapiens, culminating in homo neanderthalis who roamed the Middle East and the North between 400,000 and 25,000 years ago ... the remains of the last survivors of our cousins were found in a cave on Gibralter, and look to have died 15-25000 years ago. Apparently inter-mixing with a sapiens population was bad for their health.

> 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.
> 
> 

Mmmm... our ancestors go back even further than that. Great apes in one form or another roamed the African forests and later plains up to 8 million years ago. Their arboreal precursors lived in trees from about 40 million years ago. 

>> 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.

No evidence of intelligent life. When Enrico Fermi learned about the probable extent of the universe he was prepared to concede that life probably did exist in other places of the universe.

> 
> 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.

10 million years at our present rate of development? If we survived. We'd be using quantum entanglement for communications. We'd have vast habitats circling our star to feed and house the trillions of human beings that would exist. We'd be engineering the outer reaches of our solar system, mining comets and asteroids for mass so that the solar system would be effectively cleared, the gas giants for fuel and energy,  ... we'd be down to the gaseous matter in the Oort Cloud, probably feeding same into the artificial singularity to capture the resultant radiative energy.

We'd be pretty damn obvious ... at least in our own galaxy. 

At the moment we've got maybe 100,000 cubic light years of space-time that could possibly be aware of us (due to our electromagnetic emanations over the last 100 years) but that's a minuscule part of the volume of the galaxy ... and I don't have time to calculate the exact volume of space encompassed by our galaxy but at 250,000 light years in average length and breadth, and maybe an average of 10,000 light years in depth it's pretty humungous. And that's just our galaxy

> 
> 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.
> 

I'd disagree ... relying basically on the Drake equations and the fact that planets seem to be being discovered with monotonous regularity around local stars. The distribution and characteristics of said planets is even higher than the most optimistic assumptions made by Drake and his adherents 40 years back.

> Time aside, consider the true enormity of space. Our nearest galactic neighbour is over 1 million
> light years away.

And that's only a small sub-galactic neighbour ... the Andromeda galaxy is nearly 3 times that distance.  It's gonna be a big prang when it and the Milky Way meet up.                :)

> 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.

Excellent. I'll exit quietly into that good night knowing that my morbidly obese descendants are being wasted by McDonalds rather than the other baser instincts that so fuel our way of life.