In biology class we all learned that "winning the game of life" means that you leave more hardy offspring than your competitor. That is the goal of all life - to propagate and expand; to leave tons of children running all over the world.
Humans, more than any other species, strive for growth and expansion. We've all seen the human population growth curve, with it's exponential line of doom pointing towards the heavens.
By and large, most of our technology and culture aims at growth - prolonging and preserving human life, expanding human knowledge, creating music, art, and literature, spreading a country's influence and boosting it's economy, inventing robots that will allow us to produce more Hershey's Kisses than we can eat. Such growth, though, sadly, is not without consequence. This main consequence being that we do not live in a world of infinite resources, and that our production and growth rate (read: overpopulation and overconsumption) is certainly out-pacing our ability to gather enough resources (any RTS player knows that this usually leads to an early loss). Anyway, not that any of you didn't know this already or that there aren't a billion articles written about this...
What brought this topic to my attention was this editorial in Chemical & Engineering News, titled "Addicted to Growth", that puts forth that the human addiction to growth stems from our greediness. In our greed we have destroyed our planet, and instead of pushing forth to overcome our problems with technology and more growth "we should be able to create social structures and an economic system that do not depend on growth." The author reviews positively a book with the opinion that "Growth is a religion...that flies in the face of physical reality, and as such, cannot be maintained". Really?
First of all, the assumption that growth is bad and is a consequence of some inherent human greediness is inaccurate, to say the least. When you look on a smaller scale, maybe your neighbor buying five flat-screen TV's and driving that Hummer and not giving a crap about the "problems of tomorrow" is greedy. I'm not saying that greed doesn't exist in the world. But isn't the growth and expansion of human civilization a result of something else other than greed? Isn't it, like I mentioned earlier, simply the driving force of life? Can any of you envision a society that you'd want to live in that did not want to grow and expand in the many domains of life? It would be a boring and stagnant society, a society without a greater purpose - one that I certainly wouldn't want to live in.
I think the problem that the author has with all this growth and expansion is the fact that it is often unchecked and it's consequences are not realized until it is too late. On the grand scale, humanity wants to advance itself and expand wherever possible, but on an individual scale, people can be greedy, ignorant, and plain stupid. It's often a much easier life to live where you only care about your own good today (and in the near future) and not think whether your actions will have a negative impact on others in the future. Indeed, it is our nearsightedness that often blinds us to the problems that could be avoided if only we took the time to think things through, play some possible outcome scenarios, and just plain keep technological, economic, and population growth in check.
As a scientist, I may find all those "ethics committees" frustrating, as they will be the ones evaluating whether my cyborgs could take over humanity or not, but ideally they would be making the best decision for the long term. This job, of course, currently rests with all of humanity as well to a much larger degree.
What the author lauds is the idea that we should "focus not on growth but on maintenance". Now, I didn't read the book that he reviews/cites this from, so I can't say what these suggestions really are, but if they indeed forgo any growth, then I certainly disagree with them.
The whole "green movement" is not something that I disagree with, however, as I do think that overconsumption and wastefulness is a problem and should be kept in check by individuals as well as groups. But that is not the answer to our dwindling resources. The answer lies in finding new resources and in finding ways to expand the use of resources we already possess. Scaling everything down and settling back into some sort of "maintenance" mode is going to lead to decline (back to horse and buggy, I guess). We need to strategically scale down on use and pump money into energy research as well as travel to nearby planets for resources. It's pretty much inevitable.
I don't think humans will ever stop growing and expanding, and suggesting that these are the result of greed is like smacking all the progress in science, the arts, economics, (and pretty much every other domain) very hard in the face. The long term solution (once we get over this fossil fuel and sorta-overpopulation hump) is to try to have more stringent control on consumption and production (of everything from energy, to information, to babies [production of babies, not consumption]). Will this work? Does this sound too much like all those dystopian sci-fi movies and novels? Who knows... We will certainly need to be more considerate, but never stop cultural, technological, and physical growth and expansion, as that is what makes us human.
Without having read the source material, I suspect it would ultimately boil down to the depressing fact about capitalism creating extraordinarily greedy and powerful institutions. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0 )
ReplyDeleteCertainly, one can have mere population growth without real indicators of progress (technological growth and infiltration; quality of life) improving. In fact, given a Gross Planetary Product growing at some fixed rate, and the current state of wealth distribution and quality of life disparities found worldwide, I think it's fairly straightforward to argue that we'd be better off attempting to use finite resources to feed, clothe, shelter, and most importantly, educate those in the world who did not have the great skill and perspicacity required to win the birth lottery. Granted, this overlooks that the money we currently devote into blowing each other up could be better used for that as well, but that's a sidebar to the central resource-management issue.
The problem, then, is one of scarcity. If every person on Earth lived like an American does today, the "apparent" population would be equivalent to 33 billion (give or take a few hundred million) people alive today. Already we have seen resources straining under load (Indium for LCD screens, phosphorous for crops) and I don't think it is a stretch to suggest that the writing is on the wall that Earth can't support a much larger overall population. Technologies like in vitro meat, aquaculture, and improved energy generation schemes may help bump the carrying capacity by a few billion, but I am still not sure that the conscientious limiting of population growth can be anything but good. As of right now anyway, I'm convinced there is simply not enough resource to provide an adequate standard of living for everyone alive today.
I think that as long as the number of educated people with their basic needs met increases, scientific progress should continue unchecked.
(Apologies for the disjointed structure of above comment)
People have visions of grandiose tomorrows and KNOW they should care about the future of the world, their impact on it, and the well-being of their children. In reality, our nature (eg. dopamine-controlled behavior), wants us to have the highest reward NOW, and wants us to have the highest status among our peers NOW etc. These two WAY too often come in conflict.
ReplyDeletePerhaps raising the average standard of living across the board would be more humanitarian (if it was possible, all cultural and political problems aside), but like you say, it would just put more strain on the resources. If overpopulation cannot be controlled, and our ability to harvest more resources from our or other planets cannot catch up, would we just out of necessity revert to a lower average standard of living? This would of course be a hard bullet to bite for some nations (looking at you US), whereas countries already with lower standards of living would just continue the way that they are. (This brings up the issue of whether having “social castes” or just different levels of quality of living is beneficial in such a case??)
Anyways, definitely if the number of educated people increases, we are more likely to come up with solutions to our problems. Though stepping aside and looking at the big picture, I don’t think the full adoption of every scientific discovery is or technology is necessarily wise until the consequences are at least thoroughly explored.
I think we need to take a closer look at the exponential growth curve and try to understand what has supported the massive increase in human population. There is always a catalyst that drives population growth whether it's increased food supply more sunlight etc. What could it be that has allowed humans to grow at an unprecedented rate?
ReplyDeleteMost people look at the modern industrial age and pinpoint a couple reasons: Mechanized farming has increased the food supply, modern medicine saves lives that would previously have been lost and advances in technology allow us to do more with less effort. However, these aren't the root cause of the population growth. The real underlying driver of it all is OIL.
Oil is the life blood of mechanized farming. It powers the machines and is a key component of all pesticides and fertilizers. Without oil the food production of the world would never be able to support it's burgeoning population. Oil is used in everything. I could name 20 things on my desk right now that were made using oil. All plastics, computer components just about every manufacturing process needs oil in some capacity. Even electric cars use oil heavily. All the interior components/plastics are made using oil. Tires use 6 gallons of oil each. It's just not as simple as changing the energy source.
The population death drop will happen when we wind up running out of oil. Take away the catalyst in any overpopulation scenario and the population will drop precipitously. See you at the bottom!
It's true that oil has been the catalyst for the production explosion that has allowed us to create more with less effort and thus feed and save millions. Now that it's starting to run out the population death drop is indeed a threat, but lets face it, this is something we are going to fight tooth and nail for. First, we will try to extract every single droplet from the Earth - screw the consequences (for a lot of the oil companies, you all know this is very likely...). Then we will work our hardest to replace oil as an energy source with something that will allow us to still make the most with the least amount of effort. I really don't think we are going to be happy with less than what we are able to do now. Us humans get used to a certain level of living, and either remaining there or going up is great, but dropping down is usually unacceptable. It's just part of our neuroanatomy - losing just hurts us more. Just like trying to force population growth decrease, for the majority of the world, it's just going to be very hard to try to cut back on production etc. Basically, I think we will just find a new catalyst to help us at least maintain our growth, be it linear or exponential.
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