Citation needed - tons of resources are finite while consumption growth through population is exponential.

The other planets, moons, and the rest of the solar system has tons of resources too.

That’s a classic tech will fix it narrative. The likelihood of us making it off the planet at a scale that matters to common people is basically zero.

It’s arguing on faith that we will move of the planet to defer living sustainably on the one we have which is a classic ruse to e able people to rationalize not changing lifestyles.

How much biomass and quality of life do they support? Moving metals onto the earth is "resources" but not the ones that sustain human populations.

Exponential does not mean infinite?

Resources and population will both remain finite, fear not.

Even here on only Earth, there are more than enough resources for several times more human beings, and more resources are produced on a regular basis thanks to the sun.

> more resources are produced on a regular basis thanks to the sun.

The biomass resources that our growing population is shrinking?

How is it bad for the species?

How do you define "easily"?

Sorry, I'm asking two questions that each deserve comprehensive answers.

Population decline is bad for the species because the endgame of population decline is population == 0.

That's a slippery slope argument which doesn't hold up. There are many endgames and goals. Managed properly, the human population will equal 0 someday because we will have further evolved into something else.

> the human population will equal 0 someday because we will have further evolved into something else.

Ah, there are other possible paths. 1) Extinction (which has happened to many species) without any evolutionary successors. 2) Artificial life (it evolves without us). 3) Something else evolves (long after we are gone) and becomes the dominant species on the planet.

Humanity has limited options, but nature doesn't and we can't count on it doing us any favors.

"...there are other possible paths..."

Hence @quantified's "managed properly" caveat.

I don't want that. I'm a Human supremacist and I don't want to be an em.

> Managed properly

What makes you think it's being managed properly? Fertility rate 0.78 in Korea signals uncontrollable plummet to 0. TFA: 1.2 million small businesses have owners aged about 70 with no successor, prime minister Fumio Kishida: "Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions" - sounds anything but managed properly

The fact that people enjoy sex means we will never hit zero. Plenty of people will always remain.

Hmm, is population decline inevitable? With sufficiently large time scale. If it is, would it be better for species to exist longer time or peak at larger numbers. Or maybe some per specime x time total?

I would argue peaking hard and crashing hard by overshooting is worse than peaking slower and then steady very long decline.

We have burned through approximately 70 million years' worth of carbon and hydrocarbon resource [1] in less than 200 years, certainly enough that any anthropologist will tell you the rebuilding of our civilisation would be impossible. We have additionally created a mass extinction [2], and already drastically changed the climate of, for example, Europe, created unprecedented wildfires [3] - a Europe which is also, coincidentally, rapidly deindustrialising now Vlad's turned off the spigot [4]. Living standards have already declined [5], with the obvious answer: we no longer have the abundance of resource per person. That,not money, as every economist on the planet is supposed to know, is wealth.

No, we are not being supported. You are coping.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction [3] https://greekreporter.com/2022/07/20/greece-wildfires-2022/ [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2022/09/11/europe-is-... [5] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/there-s-a-generation-...

Petrochemical resources, I believe, will turn out to be some of the least important ones, all told.

Solar and fusion will, in the long run, be vastly more important. Talking about the how and the what of oil in terms of human advancement is sort of talking about printing ink production in 2023.

Belief is a powerful drug. What do you think goes into making solar cells?

Nothing, absolutely nothing in the modern world works without fossil fuels being part of the production chain.

A future where fusion and solar are the main energy sources we tap into would be beautiful, but to get to that point we are still going to burn a lot of fossil fuels to sustain the current modern amenities we got used to. The question is: how much longer do we have to completely shift our energy dependency? The clock is ticking at a very fast rate, we are not doing enough to be independent from our energy needs supplied from fossil fuels.

Believing that "someone will eventually figure it out" is a form of illusion of continuity, there's nothing in the Universe guaranteeing we will continue human advancement, there's no continuity if we don't work for it. Working for it means: facing that we are in very uncharted territory, which as far as we can predict seems to be leading to a catastrophic outcome.

The "long run" part depends on changes to be done right now to allow a "long run" to exist, if we continue the path we are there's absolutely no guarantee there will be a long run where solar and fusion are powering civilisation...