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Re:The resource leak bug of our civilization by baq on Monday December 01, 2014 @06:32AM (#8680465)
economy, when confronted with physics and mathematics, always loses. exponential growth is not sustainable. i recommend thinking how much energy we can release before the oceans boil off and how long will that take assuming 3% growth yoy. (hint: sooner than you might think.)
Re:The resource leak bug of our civilization by sergiosgc on Monday December 01, 2014 @09:31AM (#8681103)
It depends. Any complex question gets a complex answer. If we release the energy in the form of heat, and if we let that heat get trapped in our planet, then you'll boil off the oceans in a predictable horizon. However, those two ifs are very big ifs. Two examples:

If you start using energy to bond complex molecules, you are using energy, but the energy is getting trapped in chemical bonds. You can easily achieve 3% YoY energy use growth without any ocean boiling in the predictable time horizon.

If you use the energy to finally expand away from Earth, then clearly you can achieve 3% energy usage growth with no ill effects whatsoever.

In the end, the fact of the matter is that civilization evolution is very highly correlated to the ability to manipulate energy, and consequentially to the amount of energy used globally. Locking ourselves out of increasing energy usage is paramount to locking ourselves out of pie-in-the-sky projects such as planet terraforming.

Re:The resource leak bug of our civilization by Retra on Monday December 01, 2014 @02:58PM (#8683338)
> Any complex question gets a complex answer.

Oh, but complexity is just another word for ignorance. There's a reason that mankind didn't learn to fly by mimicking birds -- it's because you don't solve a complex problem by mimicking complexity.

Re:The resource leak bug of our civilization by sergiosgc on Monday December 01, 2014 @04:02PM (#8683769)
Your point being...?
Re:The resource leak bug of our civilization by Retra on Monday December 01, 2014 @09:57PM (#8685437)
The complexity of a problem doesn't tell you anything at all about the complexity of a solution. Many problems that we face are "angels dancing on pins"-type problems, where the only 'complexity' involved is all the hoops you have to jump through to defend a flawed perspective. And on the other hand we have these coin-flip-prediction problems that only demand one bit of information, but are completely intractable by our most advanced methods.

Complexity is not a useful way to think about problem solving. Nobody solves complex problems.