[FPSPACE] New book on lunar resources

[Brett Harrison]

[slightly off-topic]

Dwayne:

Much as I admire many of your scholarly contributions, you have stepped into the
traffic without looking this time.

Unless you are being deliberately disingenuous, your portrayal of the "Limits to
Growth" study by the The Club of Rome is simplistic & inaccurate.  They didn't
predict a miserable life by "say, 2004" - rather, they kept talking about the
year 2100, and "100 years on the future".  They didn't ignore technological
optimism, they just pointed out that it doesn't solve the long-term problem of
growth producing ever-increasing demands on finite resources, no matter how
increasingly well those resources were used.

A vital thing that you yourself have ignored is that studies like Limits to
Growth are themselves part of the equation. Rather than being the useless
rankings of "doomsday cultists", they significantly influence decision making
which in turn influences our ever evolving situation: they are part of the
experiment.  One reason that population growth, for example, has not continued
as before is because decision-makers, from the high to the low, took notice of
these arguments and ones like them.  The influence of these studies has also
resulted in cleverer use of resources, (recycling, reducing pollution, less
wasteful processes etc.), better long-term planning and so on.  The world-wide
Green movement, which has had considerable influence over social & industrial
processes, is another result.

Whether or not you recognise it, you (and the rest of us) are living in a world
which has been considerably changed from the the world of 1972 by the thinking
behind "Limits to Growth".
To regard Limits to Growth and studies like it in isolation from everything else
and to pretend that it has had no influence in the last 30 years is just wrong.

If you would care to actually read the study, a summary version is available:

http://www.clubofrome.org/docs/limits.rtf

cheers,

Brett Harrison


DwayneDay wrote:
> (A sidenote:  Wingo has a decent discussion of the old "Limits of Growth" study from 1970.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it is a fascinating little bit of future-doom history.  The simple story is that in 1970 a group of social scientists--I believe they were mainly economists--predicted that humanity was doomed.  We were quickly going to run out of oil, natural resources, and food within a couple of decades, and life would be pretty miserable for all of us by around, say, 2004.  The reasons were simple--population kept increasing and resources were finite.  The slightly big problem with this thesis is that population growth slowed considerably in the next few years, and both technology and substitution play a major role in negating resource constraints.  If you run out of some resource, you switch to something else.  The group that made these awful predictions should have just disappeared permanently, embarrassed by how incredibly wrong they were.  But like all good
> doom cultists, they simply revised their projections and produced another report in 1992, which I think says that we're still doomed unless we change our evil ways, they've just moved the date of Armageddon to the right.  

---
Brett Harrison

"You should never hit a man with a closed fist.  But it is, on occasion,
hilarious!"
 - Malcolm Reynolds, FIREFLY