The end of exponential growth

Avi Loeb wrote an article called “Intelligence means exponential growth”

I fervently disagree with just about everything he said in it, but then he’s a techno-optimist who thinks aliens will save us with technology, and I’m what they call a “doomer” who thinks, to be brutal about it, that we’re fucked right now.

That expletive was quite deliberate, if you’ve ever read my work, you’ll know that I very rarely use such words. I only ever use them to dramatically emphasise what I’m trying to say.

I responded thus:

“You seem to think that exponential growth is always a good thing. It is most definitely not. Human civilisation is inexorably heading towards a major catastrophe that might well lead to our extinction.

You said that intelligence always leads to exponential growth, I beg to differ.

Humans, in one form or another existed for nearly two million years before the expansionist form, Homo Sapiens Sapiens rampaged through the world wiping out all our most closely related hominid species and the majority of megafauna on the planet in the process. Homo Neanderthalis had a slightly larger brain than us, it's possible they were more intelligent than us, they didn't adopt this disasterous tendency to exponential growth and the unlimited destruction that goes along with it.

Infinite growth within a finite system is impossible. There's no point pointing up and saying that there're infinite resources out there (there aren't), because we can't access them in a large enough scale to make a meaningful difference to the cascading collapse and dieoff coming because growth is no longer possible.

I suspect that civilisation itself is unsustainable, it definitely is as long as we're ruled by sociopaths who think that their supposedly superior imagination can overcome physical reality.

If, somehow, we could find a way of magically finding the energy (carbon neutral of course) and materials to continue growing this cancer called industrial civilisation, then, in a few hundred years, the oceans would boil due to our waste heat and the planet would be uninhabitable.

Exponential growth is a whopping great disaster, not something to be celebrated.

I know that neither you nor most of your readers will believe a word of this, but growth is finished and you'll see the results for yourselves within a decade, judging by the way things are going.

Joe”

Of course, Professor Loeb hasn’t replied, and I very much doubt he will. His world view can’t withstand scrutiny in any depth.

His readers, however, can.

Frantabor replied with:

“A massive volcanoes flareup would destroy any insufficiently advanced civilizations. As would the wrong rocks from space landing at the wrong place.

Increasing tech advances are our best hope.”

Which is the dominant paradigm right now. “Technology will save us”

It won’t.

This was my reply:

“Tech advances are accellerating our predicament. You can't beat ecological overshoot, caused by exponential growth, with technology. Technology is what's made the situation so bad in the first place.

There wouldn’t be eight billion of us, existing within devastated ecosystems, where the vast majority of animal life on the planet is ourselves, our pets and our livestock, supported by industrial agriculture fueled by fossil fuels and fertilised with nitrogen fertilisers made from methane without it.

Exponential growth requires exponentially growing energy, which we currently mostly get from fossil fuels. The master resource that supports all this is diesel which is already in decline.

I know that the next thing you will say is "But renewables will save us". They won't.

All renewables have ever done is add to the exponentially growing curve of energy consumption. Not one drop of oil nor one cubic millimetre of methane has ever been prevented from being extracted and burned by so called renewables. They are nothing more than fossil fuel extenders.

There's no possible way that they could ever replace fossil fuels because without diesel for the mining process, we couldn't mine the resources to build them. That, of course, is if the materials are accessible to us in the first place. The resources to fully electrify this civilisation are more than we could possibly gather from Earth and the attempt to do so will destroy vast amounts of our already devastated ecosystems.

And then, because the life span of things like solar panels is 25 years, we'd have to do it all over again in a quarter of a century, and again a quarter of a century after that and at each repetition, we'd have to mine perhaps twice the amount we did before, to permit exponential growth to continue.

This is NOT physically possible and to attempt it would leave us on an uninhabitable planet.

Go and look up "The reindeer of St. Matthew Island". The population curve there, that looks like a shark's fin, is what happens to every single species that goes into overshoot. We are also a natural species. No amount of technology can prevent it from happening.

When the end of growth can no longer be hidden, the global financial system will collapse because it is also in a state of, and dependent on, exponential growth.

When that happens, our technological civilisation will go into cascading systems failure and collapse completely. The survivors will have to depend on whatever dregs of the world's ecosystems survive. We will be fortunate if a couple of hundred million humans survive.

This is not fantasy, it's physics. If you dare, start with peak oil, go to ecological overshoot, Read Richard Crim's work here about the climate, and start learning how to forage and other survival skills. Do it soon. It's unlikely this mess will last a decade.

Joe”

We MUST get past this denialism if we’re to have any chance of preserving some of the good things that came out of this civilisation before it’s too late.

Digital won’t hack it. I tried. I gathered around a million books in digital form, Entropy ate them. Failed hard drives, a fire, lost backups, a couple of decades later they were gone. This is something someone rich should be thinking about, because I suspect we’ll need something physical, durable, and well hidden because the first few hundred years after what’s coming will be full of very angry people who are more likely to destroy this sort of knowledge rather than read it.

We should be preparing, not denying, but the vast majority of people just aren’t there yet and the current elite never will be, for to act in useful ways means the end of their power.

Joe