Yes. Because those you spent it with must have, or you wouldn't have been able to buy anything with it. Therefore you caused things to happen that wouldn't otherwise have happened.
Debt is one of human's greatest inventions. It's what allows us to ensure that the underlying currency - human labour time - isn't wasted because there is no call to use it today.
Instead we have a currency - "here's a pig, owe me one" that causes a surplus to arise. Some people won't be able to fulfil that promise in which case it will, in advanced societies, be cancelled. That's what bankruptcy is for. The assets you used to secure the loan are then transferred to others. However the use of labour time in others to create the capacity to generate a surplus remains somewhere down the induced transaction chain.
Debt is the magic by which money is created on demand. That causes information to be transmitted down the supply chain that causes the capacity to make more to arise.
Which is why those societies that use debt are more advanced than those that chose to outlaw its use. They ended up with fewer days wasted in aggregate and more capacity to produce.
Most people fulfil their promises since it is inherent in human society to do right by others. And quite a lot of people like holding the assets that represent the debt as a status symbol of how well they have done - whether they can actually really call in those promises or not.
Forget the dollars and cents tokens on wealth, they can and are manipulated but intentionally and unintentionally. How much energy and resources that gets us do we have? That is the real currency we have to work with.
All the debt in the world means nothing if we cannot produce the goods with the token we produced assuming the resources would be there.
I have to remind people all the time of a simple truth - there isn't a one to one relationship between money and stuff.
And money isn't real. It's largely an illusion. At best a social relation.
Money doesn't stop at its first use. And debt is nothing more than allowing you to spend the real thing without selling it first.
Millions of years worth..... Like really of course you get blank stares it's not an issue that exists.
This is just one of the many resource limits we’re facing as a species, and this is how we address it today.
Just how great is the risc of filling them with hidrogen? I know it's flamable and leaks through many materials. But in the context of party balloons just how great is that risc? The quantity is very small. And no ones life depends on it. And in the case of fire, that quantity would burn almost instantly. I doubt it would even have the time to ignite anything other than another flamable gas.
Apparently 8%. But all of these industries waste it unnecessarily, due to our failing to price in or consider the future scarcity.
Helium as a waste product of fusion reactors is such a pipe dream, and will produce such tiny volumes should that ever happen, that it is not a remotely realistic solution to the problem.
(*) I'm more or less convinced that such a miracle technology is the only hope we have of avoiding catastrophic change. I'm baffled why there's not massively more funding into researching potential geoengineering solutions, given the stakes. Even fossil fuel companies would benefit!
What we do use helium for today are things like MRI machines that are medically invaluable, and we do so wastefully potentially denying future generations this technology.
Even if we eventually find alternatives, it may be inferior or we may otherwise deny them technological advantages of similar importance that would be more accessible through access to helium.
The problem is that today Helium is cheap enough we’re happy to boil an MRI machine’s worth off into space for a child’s birthday party.
Climate change is simply another face of the same coin of indifference to the costs we confer on others.
Apparently there's plenty on the moon...
At current rates, fossil fuels will last a few centuries, nuclear a few millennia.
Although geothermal would last for geological timescales, the estimated maximum output only covers current electricity use (~2 TW, well short of the ~17 TW total power use, and ideally we'd increase the minimum power use per person to get closer to European or American levels rather than keeping our current distribution).
The kinetic rotational energy of the earth would last us 400 million years.
Sun will last a few billion, but then we're no longer talking about extractive technologies.
> Yes. Because those you spent it with must have, or you wouldn't have been able to buy anything with it
This just means that the people that you paid have better lives but you haven't explained how things are better are better for yourself unless you have some way of paying that debt back.
The people doing the deal with you accepted your promise to repay. They don't do that for the fun of it.
Debt is just a way of spending things without selling them first. You can either borrow against your car to spend it, or you can sell the car to spend it.
Either way if you consume rather than buying another car, then you end up with no car.
Many people gave 'resources' to people who couldn't afford the debt, because with many layers of obfuscation, and perverse incentives for mortgage providers, they made it look like many more people could afford it than actually could.
Further...payday loans...loan sharks...people get money for things they can't afford, and can't realistically pay back, all the time.
Capitalism without the threat of bankruptcy is like Catholicism without the threat of hellfire.
Bankruptcy works on a small scale, as an act of grace, because the bankrupt party can bootstrap themselves back into productivity using the functional economy around them.
When too many people go bankrupt at once, the economy crashes.
When the whole planet runs out of ecological credit, and we all go bankrupt at once, where are we going to find another civilization to bootstrap from?
All the easy energy is gone, forever. There will never be another coal- or oil-driven industrial revolution on planet Earth. If we reach bankruptcy on the scale of a planetary ecosystem, it will most likely be permanent, as far as Homo sapiens is concerned.
> You must have a way of paying the debt back, or you wouldn't have been able to obtain the resource you did on a promise.
I am stating that some people _don't_ have a way of paying the debt back, and yet they have been loaned to, incurring debt, and thus ruined (as the parent you were originally replying to suggests)
This simply isn't true. On small scales, people lose their businesses and families declare bankruptcy. That's why I said this isn't a hypothetical. And on a large scale it causes financial collapses if many people go bankrupt at once.
We have system autostabilisers that rebalance the ship when the private sector has a blow up.
Bankruptcy is the reset mechanism. It's a mechanism that actually works, unlike the debtors' prisons we had previously.