/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.5100270]

So Earth has limited resources, and as humans we spend a lot of resources trying to make our lives not suck. But our population is exploding exponentially, so the resources being spent on just humans is growing exponentially.

On top of that, it's the lower classes that are exploding, people who are currently providing no value, like Africa.

So as time progresses, are we going to end up wasting all of our resources on ourselves and never reach our potential as a species because we ran out of resources to venture into space and develop FTL travel?

[Anonymous No.5100274]

What do you mean by "wasting"? Most resources can be recycled easily. We just don't bother because it's cheaper to dig up new shit. When it gets to the point when it's more expensive to mine aluminum than to dig it out of landfills, guess what will happen?

No, not the apocalypse. We'll........ dig it out of landfills! And we can just keep using that same metal over and over forever.

Tell me OP, which SPECIFIC resource do you think we'll run out of?

[Anonymous No.5100281]

>>5100274
well, money for starters. There are too many leeches on this planet who are incapable of providing value and simply consume other's value, as a giant money drain.

yes I am directly blaming the loss of our space program to welfare, but that's for /pol/, I'm talking about the /sci/ aspect of it. Is there a critical level of resources that need to be at disposal in order to achieve the greatest feats?

[Anonymous No.5100285]

>>5100274
Helium.

[Anonymous No.5100296]

>>5100274
It already is cheaper to recycle aluminum than to mine it.

[Anonymous No.5100306]

I see overpopulation as a huge problem, just look at India for example. The streets are filled with excrement and diseases are everywhere. Or Johannesburg is the number one city with aids infected people,

[Anonymous No.5100307]

>>5100281

How do Americans manage to raise people to be this fucking retarded? Seriously, this shit ain't natural.
Money as a finite resource? Fucking hell.

[Anonymous No.5100321]

>>5100306
Wow, my grammatical structure sucks.

[Anonymous No.5100324]

>>5100285

Fair point. Helium leaks out of the atmosphere naturally when released, and we also launch kilograms of rare earths out into the universe, on satellites and probes, a lot of which won't be recoverable as the satellites eventually burn up on re-entry.

[Anonymous No.5100327]

>>5100307
it's not that money is finite, it's that an amount of money X is needed by each person on this planet, but the population of people unable to produce X money is exploding, and they are taking that money from people with extra money. meaning even though total money is increasing, a larger and larger percent of it is being tied up in keeping people alive. So we are still running out of it

[Anonymous No.5100329]

>>5100306

India has a lower population density than Europe, and its low latitude means it can easily produce far more crops than Europe. The problem isn't overpopulation, it's corruption, culture and lack of economic dominance opportunities.

Johannesburg does not have an extraordinary population, neither in count nor in density. Again, the causes are corruption, culture and lack of economic opportunities.

[Anonymous No.5100330]

Our population is going to level out at around 10 billion. This guy explains it really well.

http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/

[Anonymous No.5100332]

put down atlas shrugged and go to bed.

[Anonymous No.5100343]

>20000 years ago
>"6 billions people on the planet? That's impossible, there will never be enough mammoths to feed everyone."

[Anonymous No.5100351]

>our population is exploding exponentially
Full retard.

[Anonymous No.5100370]

>>5100281
Money doesn't exist. It's not a real resource the way aluminum or hydrogen are. If you need something to incentivise people, not dying would work.

[Anonymous No.5100366]

>>5100327
> an amount of money X is needed by each person on this planet

False. People need specific resources, many of which are independent of each other. These resources can be exchanged for money and each other in micro-economic models, but not in reality.

If you were to remove all those people, you wouldn't suddenly have a shitload of space resources to go around. Hell, without eugenics, you wouldn't even have enough scientists. All those resources would be in the ground and sold at almost the same price as now (lower because of more easily accessible sources, higher because of the lack of mass production).

[Anonymous No.5100371]

Don't worry, once the economy really starts to shit the bed the third world will cave in on itself. The major first world powers will no longer be able to provide support and we'll see a huge decrease in population.

[Anonymous No.5100381]

>>5100371

>Don't worry, once the economy really starts to shit the bed, Germania will cave in on itself. The Roman Empire will no longer be able to provide support and we'll see a huge decrease in population.

Do not expect three billion people to go down without a fight. Especially not when at least one of the nations involved has nuclear weapons (India).

It is in the self-interest of anyone who expects to be dependent on terran resources for the next fifty years to have the third world survive with minimal casualties.

[Anonymous No.5100388]

>overpopulation

I seriously hope you faggots dont believe in this myth.

Protip, earth's population will be falling in a century or less according to world health organization's predictions

[Anonymous No.5100402]

It's a fact that humanity would be far better off with no more than 2 billion people. It would delay the exhaust of resources, eliminate food shortages, eliminate drinking water shortages, and prevent anthropogenic damages to the planet.

[Anonymous No.5100404]

>>5100274
>Most resources can be recycled easily.

>implying petroleum can be "recycled"
>implying you understand thermodynamics

[Anonymous No.5100407]

>>5100404
>implying energy is at all hard to come by

everything is energy you lazy nigger, christ, first thing imma do when we run out of gas is throw you into some antimatter and use you to power my computer

[Anonymous No.5100411]

>>5100404
>implying energy is or ever will be a problematic ressource anymore
You shouldn't believe every fear-mongerer you hear.

[sage No.5100408]

>>5100296
Only because energy is so fuckof expensive. There is shitloads of ALUMINIUM (fucking amerifags) in earths crust but refining it takes massive amounts of energy.

Its not an aluminium shortage its an energy shortage.

[Anonymous No.5100418]

>>5100411
So far the only viable new way to get large amounts of energy is LFTRs, and even that is finite.

[Anonymous No.5100426]

>>5100270

Population isn't exploding exponentially, in fact national birthrates have either slowed their growth or stopped entirely, and there are projections out from the UN that say it's possible we'll have a massive decline in population by 2050.

Because I know somebody is going to point out that countries like Niger and Zambia have extremely high birthrates, they also have extremely high infant mortality rates, AND birth rates were even higher in decades past.

[Anonymous No.5100429]

>>5100407
Are people really this stupid? This is up there with "money as finite resource" guy.

[Anonymous No.5100431]

There is no shortage of resources on this planet.

Current mining efforts suck, to put it plainly. We are literally just scratching the surface.. there are so many resources beneath your feet right now that its basically not worth worrying about.

You do realize the earth is a giant liquid ball of metal with the exception of the surface, right?

[Anonymous No.5100434]

>>5100408

It could also be a failure of humans to extract aluminium from the crust efficiently, in general human industry is not very energy efficient.

[Anonymous No.5100436]

>>5100418
>so far the only viable new way to get large amounts of energy is coal, and we will soon run out of coal
>so far the only viable new way to get large amounts of energy is oil, and we will soon run out of oil
>so far the only viable new way to get large amounts of energy is conventional nuclear reactor, and we will soon run out of fissile matter

[Anonymous No.5100438]

>>5100431
>earth
>liquid
ahah, yeah no

[sage No.5100439]

>>5100434
Don’t get me started about how free market capitalism promotes profits over real efficiency. I cant get mad just before bed.

[Anonymous No.5100445]

>>5100438

[Anonymous No.5100448]

>>5100439

You can take solace in the fact that companies are catching on to the fact that they're letting lots of cash leak out of their companies by way of wasteful industrial processes. Capturing and using waste heat alone will save close to a trillion dollars.

[Anonymous No.5100447]

>>5100445
Look at all those resources vs how dig we deep for minerals (basically not at all)

[sage No.5100453]

>>5100436
Waiting for graphene based solar myself, though we will need more efficient energy storage and a redesigned power grid to make a majority solar generation system work. Also we would still need powerplants for industry.

[Anonymous No.5100460]

>>5100447
It takes quite a bit of energy to drill that deep.

[Anonymous No.5100461]

>>5100453

Why not use electric cars as excess storage capacity? Shitload of batteries sitting there idling in a parking lot? That's dumb.

[Anonymous No.5100478]

>>5100460
So?

What resources do people really need anyhow? You could take all the metal and plastic you own, and fit them into a cube less than the size of a car.

[Anonymous No.5100504]

>>5100270
>our population is exploding exponentially
> my face when

[Anonymous No.5100526]

>>5100448
>Capturing and using waste heat alone will save close to a trillion dollars.

[citation needed], and you're using the wrong units. A trillion dollars in what period of time?

>>5100453

Why limit ourselves to solar power? There's plenty of hydrogen in the universe, and the CNO cycle is clean and easy to contain the radiation of. Solar power has an absolute limit of 150 W/m^2 on the earth's surface. As for geothermal - I kind of like the earth's current average temperature.

[Anonymous No.5100541]

>>5100526

Because we can't replicate the CNO cycle well enough to generate energy from it.

[Anonymous No.5100546]

>>5100461
Because chemical batteries are not efficient for energy storage.

Also this is already done.

[Anonymous No.5100548]

>But our population is exploding exponentially

Please go read about this before further contemplating Malthusian scenarios, OP.

[Anonymous No.5100551]

>>5100270
Most resources do not waste; they are recyclable.
But you are quite correct that they need to be divided between the number of people that there are, and this division is never done equally.

That being said, we still do venture into space occasionally, and there are still intelligent people capable of creating new things.
If FTL travel is possible, we will eventually achieve it as a species, and having more people can only increase our odds of finding this more quickly.

[Anonymous No.5100558]

>>5100526
>CNO cycle
We already have a star, why do we need another one.

Also this thread is talking about solutions pre-interstellar travel. If we have enough energy to collect free hydrogen from all over space I think we have the energy problem sorted.

[Anonymous No.5100575]

>>5100558

You do realize the CNO cycle can be done in any plasma with a temperature over 20 MK? And that the greatest limit on easy recycling is that it costs tremendous amounts of energy to invert chemical or entropic reactions?

>Also this thread is talking about solutions pre-interstellar travel.

He-3 fusion will be feasible by 2050, a maintainable CNO cycle probably by 2080. We don't need interstellar travel, or even interplanetary travel.

[Anonymous No.5100603]

Exactly OP.

This has been on my mind for so many years now. and it absolutely SHOCKS me how few people think about that, and how almost nobody I explain it to sees the picture.

I think the problem is everyone just looks at the money. We think as long as money is good then there aren't problems, and if we have economic problems we just have to get "smart" people to think of ways to get money circulating again.
But they don't realize that it's the RESOURCES that are important, if we could measure the circulation of money it would be a direct measure of the amount of resources being drained:
<div class="math">\nabla\times money=-\frac{d Resources}{dt}</div>

It's a joke, I couldn't resist :p
But seriously though, our economic models could probably use something like that.

[Anonymous No.5100610]

>>5100575
If it turns out to be feasable I'll be all for it, I am by no means some solar fanatic. That said I cant find any info on google that even suggests the CNO cycle can be used for terestrial power generation.

[Anonymous No.5100623]

>>5100610

That's because He-3 is ten times as easy and still half a century away because of technological limits.

[Anonymous No.5100629]

>On top of that, it's the lower classes that are exploding, people who are currently providing no value, like Africa.

what is the root cause of exploitation of the third world? in order for there to be haves there must be have nots. eventually, society will evolve to a point at which the global proletariat becomes so outraged with the excesses of capitalism that it will throw off the oppressive chains of the market.