And with respect to the Sun’s gravity well, your Ultimate Space Lord of the asteroids has the high ground in any conflict with Earth, literally. So too would any Lord of Mars. As Robert Heinlein observed in his “The Moon is Harsh Mistress” (Elon’s a fan), all your USL need threaten is to “roll” some of those rocks “downhill” and let orbital mechanics do the rest. Asteroids, the size of boulders becomes the equivalent of nuclear weapons when they enter the atmosphere at high velocity.
In space, it takes just as much energy to roll rocks "downhill" as "uphill". Ground operations are cheaper and would have the advantage over the Ultimate Space Lord.
There is no downhill in space. In order to go from orbit to the Earth, you need to reduce your speed relative to the Earth to zero. This takes just as much energy is getting to orbital speed in the first place. When the Space Shuttle used to push a satellite out of its hatch, the satellite remained in orbit, it did not plunge to Earth. This is basic physics.
Roger, you are bombarding Earth using kinetic missiles (rocks falling down). You don't want them to slow down, but just hit hard. The amount of energy released is comparable to a nuclear bomb.
But changing an asteroid's orbit still requires a lot of energy. It's virtually impossible to turn an asteroid toward Earth so that it will collide with it directly (except for rare asteroids that are already too close to Earth). In most cases, colliding with Earth will require changing the orbit, and after the asteroid has completed a few rotations, it will eventually collide with Earth. In other words, it will likely be a long and energy-intensive process.
But if you control the moon, it is easy (energetically) to simply hurl large rocks at Earth and direct them to hit what you want. Most of the energy cost is just getting escape velocity from the moon.
Interesting article and learned about asteroid mining and “AstroForge”, “involution”, and am curious about evolving “space law”. Good article and comments.
wikipedia article on space law is worth a read. big problems are consensus and enforcement. also not much consideration of the rights and obligations of our smart mind-children.
I follow you for a long time, and I've read some of your books.
It also happens that I'm a former R+D electronics engineer in Electric Vehicles, and now I'm working with so called "renewables". I have a good grasp on electricity and energy, and I wrote some articles explaining that, from an scientific point of view (and pretty simple logic), the spanish Zero Nothing Black Out of 28 April was to come, at tleast, from 2021.
So, as engineer, I miss a lot of analisys in your system about resources and energy. Afte all, Lotka - Volterra was about resources first of all.
And we are running out of resources (topsoil, food production, energy, particular materials that are needed for high tech, like disprosyum, neodymium, cobalt, etc,) and too low Energy Return On Energy Investment (EROEI) pretty fast.
All this applies to economy, and is a big part of the problems we are facing.
Of course, all of this is complementary to your excelent analisys (you can check my series about meritocracy, that explains part of the overproduction of elites, in my blog), but in this entry you are beginning to look like a Techno Optimist, Deux Ex Machina advocate, with lack of seriousness.
I wonder if adding resource and energy calculations to your systems will do some differences, and I bet they will be for the worse.
Limits to growth, besides being an excuse for power grab by thecnocrats, run on similar mathematical models, much simplified (1972!!), and give some real results that after 40 years had been quite accurate (check standard run updates from the Club of Rome).
I would like to see this part included into your cliodynamics.
And I bet others like Gail Tverberg (and some of my readers) will be glad to know about that.
I appreciate your point, but as a scientist I follow the famous Einstein dictum that models should be as simple as possible (but no simpler than that). I am also happy with people, like Gail (with whom I've corresponded) to add additional mechanisms and explore how they affect the results of the SDT model.
But the deeper I delve in the models for renewables and EV's (I work currently in renewables, and before that I worked in EV's at Continental GmbH), the more I see that there are many issues here.
My models on renewables (that I'm currently refining to include solar thermal water heating) show me that there is an economic buble in Europe, specially in Spain, and that is about to pop.
And this has been caused by a lack of finer modeling by those that have to take the decisions (mostly, due other spurious interests). So, this will backfire spectacularly, and is a big reason behind the interest of the EU to go into war.
The "funniest" of all this, is that those spurious interes are exactly what you describe in End Times. Renewables and EV's are wealth pumps to the (top) few at the expense of the (bottom) many. Those elites doesn't mind if it works or not. What is important to them is the wealth pump, not if solves the problem used as an excuse.
So, since I had been surprised (for the worst) with models and resources, then I tend to request more work to be done on this.
BTW, yesterday Gail's post is interesting in how resource depletion, specifically oil, works. She even mentions you (as I do in many of my posts).
I will check the Club of Rome updates, thank you. There are economists like Herman Daly who write about steady state economies. The weak points, IMHO, are that we have no democratic way to enforce sustainable behavior on criminals and corporations, or on criminal corporations.
You are right, there is no democratic way to do that.
In fact, there is no political system that survives degrowth.
Jared Diamond offer a good overview of "steady state" civilizations, and IMHO, they are limited by quorum. Bigger populations and bigger areas than Japan (Edo dinasty is the biggest "steady state" civilization known), specially if they are no islands (all other "steady states" were islands) are bound to fail, IMHO!
Toynbee and Spengler can offer some view about how this proces will unfold, and also some timelines (much longer that many predict).
Right now, I think some other cycles will made totalitarianism inevitable (I call that Rober Hare Dynamics, from the "Snakes in Suits, when psicopaths go to office), since the kind of PMC (political and managerial class) is exclusively based on B-Cluster/Dark Triad personalities: psicopaths, narcicists and machiavellian kind of people.
Incentives and real merits to climb the PMC ladder are such that only this kind of people are the only ones allowed to go up, while gifted people (except some rare and rotten personalties) are selectively targeted as "autistic (Asperger)" or ADHD kind of "fringe" people (the kind of guys selected to work at DOGE) that are marginalized because they are usually inmune to Asch and Millgram manipulations.
Complex societal dinamycs here at play are what assure that there will not be a real possibility to escape the demise of our current culture, civilization.
IMHO!
That doesn't mean extinction, neither the demise of other cultures or civilizations that are more adapted to this situation.
Even though I doubt that all “political and managerial class is exclusively based on B-Cluster/Dark Triad personalities: psicopaths, narcicists and machiavellian kind of people” I agree with your conclusion that totalitarianism (or rather authoritarianism) is inevitable. This is true. But it is also true that it will be followed by democracy. Why? Because authoritarianism and democracy are just different tools for adapting human societies to current conditions. And as the conditions change, the tools used also change.
Are you kidding? Predictions during the hysteria about peak oil, led by Gail Tverberg et al, have mostly been proven false (some of the longer-term ones wait for time to disprove them). Largely because they were based on a misunderstanding of how mineral dynamics operate. See a list of predictions and a debunking of the hysteria:
The real price of oil is roughly where it was in 2006, despite massive government investments in and subsidies of alternatives suppressing demand. The Oil Drum ran from 2005 - 2013.
The main issue behind those failed predictions was Shale Oil, that is a money glut. The fact that only USA has really worked on Shale Oil, a fact that cames on top of dollar being the international currency, thus exporting inflation outside is a big part.
Another reason is that this is not an apocaliptic kind of problem. Many peak oilers are wrong on that.
There will not be an "apocalipsys" due sudden oil disruption, not by far. But some countries will have issues with some distillates (check about diesel in some south american countries).
What Gails says, and I'm fully on this, is that economy is shrinking. We are already degrowing, at least, in Europe. The point here is not to look for the "cooked2 GDP, but to the Purchasing Power, that had been decreasin across all Europe since 2008 or even before.
That puts more pressure on the population, that begins switching priorities on where to spend money, and that is the reason why all the "far right" parties are rising: people perceive that they are loosing their purchasing power, that now they can afford less than 10 years ago. A look at the car market is really telling, is not only an issue with EV's or ICE's, is a problem with affordability.
Migration is also another what to pump wealth from the lower classes to the upper classes... and to mantain purchasing power by keeping food prices low due slave jobs and salaries, while mounting pressure on the lower classes, fueling public discontemps and making racism an inevitability,
Maybe some dinamics were wrongly perceived, but overall issues remain well stablished. I had been writing on this issues since 2014, and I had been proved right in almost every field, the spanish blackout the last one.
Oil price will keep being low. Why? because what is happening is that a big amount of people can't afford to buy it. With Europe, a big consumer of oil and other resources, going down economically (take a look at Germany and France econmies), in real economy (GDP is a fake value, if debt increases, GDP also increases, but economy didn't work, this is not a good way to check economy) terms, then those resources keep a lower price and are free to be used by others, like China.
But Peak Conventional Oil was by 2005, and Peak Oil, general, was in 2019 IIRC, and since then, oil consumption had not been increased.
Even worse, electricity consumption across all europe is falling since at least 2007, meaning that we are not electrifiying anything, except rich man's toys, also known as electric vehicles (the horses of the new Cavalier Class).
So, the Peak Oil game is really pretty alive and well, but its game is not really understood by many people. Gail explains that: the Peak Oil manifestates as economic stagnation by those countries without resources. And that is what keeps prices at bay.
That is the real reason why Europe is imploding. Energy is too expensive for us. The real issue is EROEI, the energetic cost of energy. If you look at economy alone, than you will be trampled, that is how finances work, and many other economical tricks made this appear what it is not.
Economic growth by growing debt that will never be repaid is a fake, not real economic growth.
My view is that resources still matter, and quite a lot, but timelines are much more slower and timelines much further away than many apocaliptic previsions. Did Rome fall in one minute? Or did it take few centuries? My guess is about 200 to 300 years, with periods of fast decay in certain areaas (next one on the chopping block is Europe), while others even flourish (at the expenses of the fallen parts, the freed those resource consumption to them).
A good example of this is the issue with the oil and gas sanctions on Russia. Since Europe is forbidden to buy such energy, our energy costs soared a big deal, fuelling deindustrialization and economy stagntion, even recesion in industrial countries (Germany, France). But that lowered oil prices for others like India or China, allowing them to raise their econmy, even at the cost of traficking with russian oil and gas to Europe.
All this is added to many other cycles, though. Elite overproduction is an issue and has to be accounted for. But there are even more, like overfinaciarization and similar (check Martin Armstrong for other kind of cycles). All this also fed back onto the Peak Oil issue.
Many cycles have to be aligned in the right phase to see a fast collapse, and that means locally and only under certain circumstances.
Catabollic collapse by John Michael Greer is a good way to look at this.
“In a near future some corporations will start sending uncrewed space craft to the asteroid belt. The goal would be to start mining it for various elements.”
Not a good start for your claims. In no visible future, aka “near future”, will the cost of mining any element on Earth exceed the cost of building and operating the infrastructure of asteroid mining. For decades people have run the numbers, and it is not even close.
Mineral prices result from the interrelationship of cost of mining, cost of substitutes, available technology at that cost point, and demand. The supply does not “run out”, as been so often predicted for several vital minerals (eg, “peak oil” predictions re petroleum).
The logic is much the same as for colonizing Mars. Antarctica is a far more attractive territory than Mars in almost every way, especially travel cost, resources, livability). Similarly, the costs of mining & refining mineral resources unexploited today will remain far less than travel to the asteroids until the available technology for space travel advances radically more than that for mining (don’t assume only the former improves).
I think you are missing my main point. Space colonization and conquest is not a game in which the utility function is making profit. Quite the opposite.
There’s something you missed in your scenario, which may be good news. Most people fail to understand how important fluids are to mining, and the volumes used. Drilling = friction = heat. That’s a major limiting factor in space.
We can test most technical alternatives on earth, but it’s a very non-trivial engineering challenge.
Warfare is complex and infrequently winner take all. Space warfare most facilities are likely to be easier to attack than defend, so even a weak opponent could present a credible threat to a much stronger one leading to peace. Generally was required two things: a dispute, and a negotiating friction. Space warfare frequency will depend on those.
Quotes of an economist about business dynamics are best followed, like shots of tequila, with salt. The summary of Noah Smith’s analysis looks daft. His logic applies to most businesses, since few have a “moat.” Yet most earn a decent return despite his claim.
Noah’s “insight” joins the long list of risible claims by economists. John Stewart Mill said something similar in 1836, although not as extreme.
“On the face of the matter it seems absurd to suppose that both the Great Western Railway, and the London and Southampton, can pay, though it is just possible that either of them might, if the other did not exist."
Both were successful. By 1844 the L&S was paying 9.7% dividends on its pay-in (cost to investors), while long government bonds paid 3%. Both were eventually nationalized in 1947-1948.
The recent Sci-Fi miniseries “The Expanse” explored aspects of asteroid mining, that devolved into war between Earth/Mars/“Belters”. But a new reality intervened, leading to the same old rush to exploit resources.
AstroForge's goal is the extraction, refinement, and sale of platinum-group metals (PGMs) located within M-type asteroids near to Earth. These asteroids are generally quite small in comparison to main belt asteroids, being anywhere from around 20 to 300 meters in diameter. Mining near earth asteroids would involve less travel time and fewer communication issues and allow for faster iteration to prove out mining technology for space. Deep space communication is as major near-term challenge and Astroforge will have to rely on other companies to help with communications, at least initially. AstroForge has mentioned piracy as a possible long-term challenge.
At least publicly AstroForge takes a less dystopian view of asteroid mining. Terrestrial mining is dangerous, expensive and has a large environmental footprint. AsteroForge says asteroid mining aims to be safer, less expensive and less environmentally harmful. They also say there's a good chance they go broke before they ever successfully mine an asteroid. So far, none of their missions have been more than partial successes, but they are taking a relatively low-cost, iterative approach.
Planetary Resources was a company backed by some of Google's founders and James Cameron that aimed to mine near earth asteroids.
If AstroForge or another company is able to mine asteroids before going broke, that would mean astronomical corporate profits and the wealth pump would jump into overdrive.
Thanks for the links. In any radically new tech, pioneers will get burned, until at some point somebody succeeds. Think of Teledisc and OneWeb -- and now Starlink.
There must be incredible quantities of gold deep underground, since Au is transported by hydrothermal fluids. The problem is detecting it. If you can do that somehow, drilling for gold becomes possible.
There could be large quantities of gold deep underground and you are right about the detection problem.
Here's some more speculation. Companies are trying to develop technology to drill, or laser, or fire high speed projectiles into the rock deep underground to make geothermal energy cost effective in more places.
This company https://www.hypersciences.com/ is developing technology to fire projectiles down to "drill" for geothermal energy, horizontally underground to tunnel through rock (no need for soft dirt), and up into space for payloads that can survive the rapid acceleration. Hypersciences was also working on underground ultrasound (each impact sends shockwaves that would bounce around depending on what they hit) to help guide the "drilling". That *might* be able to detect gold that happens to be near a geothermal "drilling" site.
If these companies succeed with geothermal drilling, they'll learn more about deep geology and perhaps develop ways to detect gold, like they found ways to detect fossil fuels.
What skyzyks said in the comments was exactly what came to my mind but instead with the result being accidental asteroids hitting earth as a result of fighting in space. I wouldn't believe too much of what people like Altman and Musk are saying at least in regards to timelines as there ultimate goal right now is still to convince investors to give up billions of dollars and help inflate the value of their companies. I know very very little about AI but I see more headlines about how poorly things are going than anything. But all of this "space production " nonsense especially if based on old science fiction novels (though I am a huge fan of them) doesn't seem to take into account how quickly we are destroying this planet and what the chances of apocalyptic ns to real disasters occurring are. Thanks in no small part to guys like Musk and Altman who I seriously dislike (they are both psychopaths and pathological liars despite whatever genius they may actually possess)this planet doesn't have much time left in its current state. It basically sounds to me like all these theorists don't take into account the harshness of these ideas and the utter lack of humaneness. It's just survival of the fittest and if we happen to slaughter a billion people, oops oh well! My bad, I'll just artificially inseminate a bunch of women who by that point probably don't even want my sperm inside them! Sounds like a pretty scary future to me! Resource depletion, population growth/density and a rapidly changing global environment are all contributing to a race to the bottom IMO. I really wonder what the world will look like in fifty years!
Let's assume they can get the energy this would require. But they would still be completely dependent on earth.
First, the resources to continue business will be dependent on sales of the products. And these must be done on earth. Second, the financial reserves must be kept in earthly banks or other reserves on earth. And finally, the people who would run this business must stay on earth; I bet they will not move to the asteroids.
So they will still be vulnerable to revenge from earth if they try to be nasty. Perhaps this will require a modicum of unity among the victims. But isn't it enough if only one of the emerging global centers feels enough threatened? There is no legal protection on the asteroids.
Although space and in particular the asteroid belt will inevitably be militarized, it will not be an anarchic Darwinian war of all against all because an asteroid mining firm will have to sell its products to customers who are ultimately earth-bound. They will be dependent on earth society & authorities and won't be able to do whatever they want.
As for the threat of a tyrant with a space laser, I would argue that nuclear weapons already present this apocalyptic god-like power and space militarization wouldn't change this dynamic, only expand the frontiers. You will likely have Russian, American, Chinese, European military space assets that will balance each other out and prevent any corporations or single powers from holding a monopoly on space power.
And with respect to the Sun’s gravity well, your Ultimate Space Lord of the asteroids has the high ground in any conflict with Earth, literally. So too would any Lord of Mars. As Robert Heinlein observed in his “The Moon is Harsh Mistress” (Elon’s a fan), all your USL need threaten is to “roll” some of those rocks “downhill” and let orbital mechanics do the rest. Asteroids, the size of boulders becomes the equivalent of nuclear weapons when they enter the atmosphere at high velocity.
In space, it takes just as much energy to roll rocks "downhill" as "uphill". Ground operations are cheaper and would have the advantage over the Ultimate Space Lord.
It doesn't take energy to roll rocks downhill...
There is no downhill in space. In order to go from orbit to the Earth, you need to reduce your speed relative to the Earth to zero. This takes just as much energy is getting to orbital speed in the first place. When the Space Shuttle used to push a satellite out of its hatch, the satellite remained in orbit, it did not plunge to Earth. This is basic physics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_mechanics
Roger, you are bombarding Earth using kinetic missiles (rocks falling down). You don't want them to slow down, but just hit hard. The amount of energy released is comparable to a nuclear bomb.
But changing an asteroid's orbit still requires a lot of energy. It's virtually impossible to turn an asteroid toward Earth so that it will collide with it directly (except for rare asteroids that are already too close to Earth). In most cases, colliding with Earth will require changing the orbit, and after the asteroid has completed a few rotations, it will eventually collide with Earth. In other words, it will likely be a long and energy-intensive process.
But if you control the moon, it is easy (energetically) to simply hurl large rocks at Earth and direct them to hit what you want. Most of the energy cost is just getting escape velocity from the moon.
You are hitting with just as much energy as you used to launch it. The Law of Conservation of Energy still applies.
Interesting article and learned about asteroid mining and “AstroForge”, “involution”, and am curious about evolving “space law”. Good article and comments.
wikipedia article on space law is worth a read. big problems are consensus and enforcement. also not much consideration of the rights and obligations of our smart mind-children.
Bravo
Hi, Mr. Turchin.
I follow you for a long time, and I've read some of your books.
It also happens that I'm a former R+D electronics engineer in Electric Vehicles, and now I'm working with so called "renewables". I have a good grasp on electricity and energy, and I wrote some articles explaining that, from an scientific point of view (and pretty simple logic), the spanish Zero Nothing Black Out of 28 April was to come, at tleast, from 2021.
So, as engineer, I miss a lot of analisys in your system about resources and energy. Afte all, Lotka - Volterra was about resources first of all.
And we are running out of resources (topsoil, food production, energy, particular materials that are needed for high tech, like disprosyum, neodymium, cobalt, etc,) and too low Energy Return On Energy Investment (EROEI) pretty fast.
All this applies to economy, and is a big part of the problems we are facing.
Of course, all of this is complementary to your excelent analisys (you can check my series about meritocracy, that explains part of the overproduction of elites, in my blog), but in this entry you are beginning to look like a Techno Optimist, Deux Ex Machina advocate, with lack of seriousness.
I wonder if adding resource and energy calculations to your systems will do some differences, and I bet they will be for the worse.
Limits to growth, besides being an excuse for power grab by thecnocrats, run on similar mathematical models, much simplified (1972!!), and give some real results that after 40 years had been quite accurate (check standard run updates from the Club of Rome).
I would like to see this part included into your cliodynamics.
And I bet others like Gail Tverberg (and some of my readers) will be glad to know about that.
Beamspot.
I appreciate your point, but as a scientist I follow the famous Einstein dictum that models should be as simple as possible (but no simpler than that). I am also happy with people, like Gail (with whom I've corresponded) to add additional mechanisms and explore how they affect the results of the SDT model.
Yes, I agree.
But the deeper I delve in the models for renewables and EV's (I work currently in renewables, and before that I worked in EV's at Continental GmbH), the more I see that there are many issues here.
My models on renewables (that I'm currently refining to include solar thermal water heating) show me that there is an economic buble in Europe, specially in Spain, and that is about to pop.
And this has been caused by a lack of finer modeling by those that have to take the decisions (mostly, due other spurious interests). So, this will backfire spectacularly, and is a big reason behind the interest of the EU to go into war.
The "funniest" of all this, is that those spurious interes are exactly what you describe in End Times. Renewables and EV's are wealth pumps to the (top) few at the expense of the (bottom) many. Those elites doesn't mind if it works or not. What is important to them is the wealth pump, not if solves the problem used as an excuse.
So, since I had been surprised (for the worst) with models and resources, then I tend to request more work to be done on this.
BTW, yesterday Gail's post is interesting in how resource depletion, specifically oil, works. She even mentions you (as I do in many of my posts).
Thanks for your reply.
Guillem.
I will check the Club of Rome updates, thank you. There are economists like Herman Daly who write about steady state economies. The weak points, IMHO, are that we have no democratic way to enforce sustainable behavior on criminals and corporations, or on criminal corporations.
You are right, there is no democratic way to do that.
In fact, there is no political system that survives degrowth.
Jared Diamond offer a good overview of "steady state" civilizations, and IMHO, they are limited by quorum. Bigger populations and bigger areas than Japan (Edo dinasty is the biggest "steady state" civilization known), specially if they are no islands (all other "steady states" were islands) are bound to fail, IMHO!
Toynbee and Spengler can offer some view about how this proces will unfold, and also some timelines (much longer that many predict).
Right now, I think some other cycles will made totalitarianism inevitable (I call that Rober Hare Dynamics, from the "Snakes in Suits, when psicopaths go to office), since the kind of PMC (political and managerial class) is exclusively based on B-Cluster/Dark Triad personalities: psicopaths, narcicists and machiavellian kind of people.
Incentives and real merits to climb the PMC ladder are such that only this kind of people are the only ones allowed to go up, while gifted people (except some rare and rotten personalties) are selectively targeted as "autistic (Asperger)" or ADHD kind of "fringe" people (the kind of guys selected to work at DOGE) that are marginalized because they are usually inmune to Asch and Millgram manipulations.
Complex societal dinamycs here at play are what assure that there will not be a real possibility to escape the demise of our current culture, civilization.
IMHO!
That doesn't mean extinction, neither the demise of other cultures or civilizations that are more adapted to this situation.
(You can check my hipotesys here: https://beamspot.substack.com/p/meritocracia
, IN SPANISH, though).
By the way, my view on the issue of degrowth and resoureces:
https://beamspot.substack.com/p/destilado-de-petroleo
Even though I doubt that all “political and managerial class is exclusively based on B-Cluster/Dark Triad personalities: psicopaths, narcicists and machiavellian kind of people” I agree with your conclusion that totalitarianism (or rather authoritarianism) is inevitable. This is true. But it is also true that it will be followed by democracy. Why? Because authoritarianism and democracy are just different tools for adapting human societies to current conditions. And as the conditions change, the tools used also change.
Are you kidding? Predictions during the hysteria about peak oil, led by Gail Tverberg et al, have mostly been proven false (some of the longer-term ones wait for time to disprove them). Largely because they were based on a misunderstanding of how mineral dynamics operate. See a list of predictions and a debunking of the hysteria:
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2016/02/10/retrospective-peak-oil-hysteria-93927/
The real price of oil is roughly where it was in 2006, despite massive government investments in and subsidies of alternatives suppressing demand. The Oil Drum ran from 2005 - 2013.
No, I'm not kidding.
The main issue behind those failed predictions was Shale Oil, that is a money glut. The fact that only USA has really worked on Shale Oil, a fact that cames on top of dollar being the international currency, thus exporting inflation outside is a big part.
Another reason is that this is not an apocaliptic kind of problem. Many peak oilers are wrong on that.
There will not be an "apocalipsys" due sudden oil disruption, not by far. But some countries will have issues with some distillates (check about diesel in some south american countries).
What Gails says, and I'm fully on this, is that economy is shrinking. We are already degrowing, at least, in Europe. The point here is not to look for the "cooked2 GDP, but to the Purchasing Power, that had been decreasin across all Europe since 2008 or even before.
That puts more pressure on the population, that begins switching priorities on where to spend money, and that is the reason why all the "far right" parties are rising: people perceive that they are loosing their purchasing power, that now they can afford less than 10 years ago. A look at the car market is really telling, is not only an issue with EV's or ICE's, is a problem with affordability.
Migration is also another what to pump wealth from the lower classes to the upper classes... and to mantain purchasing power by keeping food prices low due slave jobs and salaries, while mounting pressure on the lower classes, fueling public discontemps and making racism an inevitability,
Maybe some dinamics were wrongly perceived, but overall issues remain well stablished. I had been writing on this issues since 2014, and I had been proved right in almost every field, the spanish blackout the last one.
Oil price will keep being low. Why? because what is happening is that a big amount of people can't afford to buy it. With Europe, a big consumer of oil and other resources, going down economically (take a look at Germany and France econmies), in real economy (GDP is a fake value, if debt increases, GDP also increases, but economy didn't work, this is not a good way to check economy) terms, then those resources keep a lower price and are free to be used by others, like China.
But Peak Conventional Oil was by 2005, and Peak Oil, general, was in 2019 IIRC, and since then, oil consumption had not been increased.
Even worse, electricity consumption across all europe is falling since at least 2007, meaning that we are not electrifiying anything, except rich man's toys, also known as electric vehicles (the horses of the new Cavalier Class).
So, the Peak Oil game is really pretty alive and well, but its game is not really understood by many people. Gail explains that: the Peak Oil manifestates as economic stagnation by those countries without resources. And that is what keeps prices at bay.
That is the real reason why Europe is imploding. Energy is too expensive for us. The real issue is EROEI, the energetic cost of energy. If you look at economy alone, than you will be trampled, that is how finances work, and many other economical tricks made this appear what it is not.
Economic growth by growing debt that will never be repaid is a fake, not real economic growth.
My view is that resources still matter, and quite a lot, but timelines are much more slower and timelines much further away than many apocaliptic previsions. Did Rome fall in one minute? Or did it take few centuries? My guess is about 200 to 300 years, with periods of fast decay in certain areaas (next one on the chopping block is Europe), while others even flourish (at the expenses of the fallen parts, the freed those resource consumption to them).
A good example of this is the issue with the oil and gas sanctions on Russia. Since Europe is forbidden to buy such energy, our energy costs soared a big deal, fuelling deindustrialization and economy stagntion, even recesion in industrial countries (Germany, France). But that lowered oil prices for others like India or China, allowing them to raise their econmy, even at the cost of traficking with russian oil and gas to Europe.
All this is added to many other cycles, though. Elite overproduction is an issue and has to be accounted for. But there are even more, like overfinaciarization and similar (check Martin Armstrong for other kind of cycles). All this also fed back onto the Peak Oil issue.
Many cycles have to be aligned in the right phase to see a fast collapse, and that means locally and only under certain circumstances.
Catabollic collapse by John Michael Greer is a good way to look at this.
Tainter too.
That is an impressive reply, in a way: 805 words, almost every paragraph based on an error of fact. A monument of pseudoscience, beyond fact-checking.
It would have gotten applause at The Oil Drum!
I guess you don't fact check what you want to fact check.
The same way of many other techoutopians that said that we can power our civilization by PV and wind alone.
And the blackout is a fact check, although I guess you will not accept it.
For more fact checking, you can check this about the issues powering the world with so called "renewables":
https://beamspot.substack.com/p/indice-de-lavadoras
But again, I'm pretty sure you will not fact check what I wrote.
This is fun sci-fi, but slapping the cliodynamics label on it just makes your solid work look less serious.
I don't think so
“In a near future some corporations will start sending uncrewed space craft to the asteroid belt. The goal would be to start mining it for various elements.”
Not a good start for your claims. In no visible future, aka “near future”, will the cost of mining any element on Earth exceed the cost of building and operating the infrastructure of asteroid mining. For decades people have run the numbers, and it is not even close.
Mineral prices result from the interrelationship of cost of mining, cost of substitutes, available technology at that cost point, and demand. The supply does not “run out”, as been so often predicted for several vital minerals (eg, “peak oil” predictions re petroleum).
The logic is much the same as for colonizing Mars. Antarctica is a far more attractive territory than Mars in almost every way, especially travel cost, resources, livability). Similarly, the costs of mining & refining mineral resources unexploited today will remain far less than travel to the asteroids until the available technology for space travel advances radically more than that for mining (don’t assume only the former improves).
I think you are missing my main point. Space colonization and conquest is not a game in which the utility function is making profit. Quite the opposite.
There’s something you missed in your scenario, which may be good news. Most people fail to understand how important fluids are to mining, and the volumes used. Drilling = friction = heat. That’s a major limiting factor in space.
We can test most technical alternatives on earth, but it’s a very non-trivial engineering challenge.
Any good news are welcome!
Warfare is complex and infrequently winner take all. Space warfare most facilities are likely to be easier to attack than defend, so even a weak opponent could present a credible threat to a much stronger one leading to peace. Generally was required two things: a dispute, and a negotiating friction. Space warfare frequency will depend on those.
To answer Smith, energy inputs are a very hard natural limit to AI entry and growth; limits that we are even now beginning to encounter.
Quotes of an economist about business dynamics are best followed, like shots of tequila, with salt. The summary of Noah Smith’s analysis looks daft. His logic applies to most businesses, since few have a “moat.” Yet most earn a decent return despite his claim.
Noah’s “insight” joins the long list of risible claims by economists. John Stewart Mill said something similar in 1836, although not as extreme.
“On the face of the matter it seems absurd to suppose that both the Great Western Railway, and the London and Southampton, can pay, though it is just possible that either of them might, if the other did not exist."
Both were successful. By 1844 the L&S was paying 9.7% dividends on its pay-in (cost to investors), while long government bonds paid 3%. Both were eventually nationalized in 1947-1948.
The recent Sci-Fi miniseries “The Expanse” explored aspects of asteroid mining, that devolved into war between Earth/Mars/“Belters”. But a new reality intervened, leading to the same old rush to exploit resources.
Sounds like fun! On my list.
https://www.astroforge.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AstroForge
AstroForge's goal is the extraction, refinement, and sale of platinum-group metals (PGMs) located within M-type asteroids near to Earth. These asteroids are generally quite small in comparison to main belt asteroids, being anywhere from around 20 to 300 meters in diameter. Mining near earth asteroids would involve less travel time and fewer communication issues and allow for faster iteration to prove out mining technology for space. Deep space communication is as major near-term challenge and Astroforge will have to rely on other companies to help with communications, at least initially. AstroForge has mentioned piracy as a possible long-term challenge.
At least publicly AstroForge takes a less dystopian view of asteroid mining. Terrestrial mining is dangerous, expensive and has a large environmental footprint. AsteroForge says asteroid mining aims to be safer, less expensive and less environmentally harmful. They also say there's a good chance they go broke before they ever successfully mine an asteroid. So far, none of their missions have been more than partial successes, but they are taking a relatively low-cost, iterative approach.
Planetary Resources was a company backed by some of Google's founders and James Cameron that aimed to mine near earth asteroids.
https://www.space.com/15395-asteroid-mining-planetary-resources.html
Planetary Resources gave up on mining asteroids, was sold, and pivoted to something-blockchain-in-space-something-something.
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/one-year-planetary-resources-faded-history-space-mining-retains-appeal/
If AstroForge or another company is able to mine asteroids before going broke, that would mean astronomical corporate profits and the wealth pump would jump into overdrive.
Thanks for the links. In any radically new tech, pioneers will get burned, until at some point somebody succeeds. Think of Teledisc and OneWeb -- and now Starlink.
There must be incredible quantities of gold deep underground, since Au is transported by hydrothermal fluids. The problem is detecting it. If you can do that somehow, drilling for gold becomes possible.
There could be large quantities of gold deep underground and you are right about the detection problem.
Here's some more speculation. Companies are trying to develop technology to drill, or laser, or fire high speed projectiles into the rock deep underground to make geothermal energy cost effective in more places.
This company https://www.hypersciences.com/ is developing technology to fire projectiles down to "drill" for geothermal energy, horizontally underground to tunnel through rock (no need for soft dirt), and up into space for payloads that can survive the rapid acceleration. Hypersciences was also working on underground ultrasound (each impact sends shockwaves that would bounce around depending on what they hit) to help guide the "drilling". That *might* be able to detect gold that happens to be near a geothermal "drilling" site.
If these companies succeed with geothermal drilling, they'll learn more about deep geology and perhaps develop ways to detect gold, like they found ways to detect fossil fuels.
What skyzyks said in the comments was exactly what came to my mind but instead with the result being accidental asteroids hitting earth as a result of fighting in space. I wouldn't believe too much of what people like Altman and Musk are saying at least in regards to timelines as there ultimate goal right now is still to convince investors to give up billions of dollars and help inflate the value of their companies. I know very very little about AI but I see more headlines about how poorly things are going than anything. But all of this "space production " nonsense especially if based on old science fiction novels (though I am a huge fan of them) doesn't seem to take into account how quickly we are destroying this planet and what the chances of apocalyptic ns to real disasters occurring are. Thanks in no small part to guys like Musk and Altman who I seriously dislike (they are both psychopaths and pathological liars despite whatever genius they may actually possess)this planet doesn't have much time left in its current state. It basically sounds to me like all these theorists don't take into account the harshness of these ideas and the utter lack of humaneness. It's just survival of the fittest and if we happen to slaughter a billion people, oops oh well! My bad, I'll just artificially inseminate a bunch of women who by that point probably don't even want my sperm inside them! Sounds like a pretty scary future to me! Resource depletion, population growth/density and a rapidly changing global environment are all contributing to a race to the bottom IMO. I really wonder what the world will look like in fifty years!
Let's assume they can get the energy this would require. But they would still be completely dependent on earth.
First, the resources to continue business will be dependent on sales of the products. And these must be done on earth. Second, the financial reserves must be kept in earthly banks or other reserves on earth. And finally, the people who would run this business must stay on earth; I bet they will not move to the asteroids.
So they will still be vulnerable to revenge from earth if they try to be nasty. Perhaps this will require a modicum of unity among the victims. But isn't it enough if only one of the emerging global centers feels enough threatened? There is no legal protection on the asteroids.
Although space and in particular the asteroid belt will inevitably be militarized, it will not be an anarchic Darwinian war of all against all because an asteroid mining firm will have to sell its products to customers who are ultimately earth-bound. They will be dependent on earth society & authorities and won't be able to do whatever they want.
As for the threat of a tyrant with a space laser, I would argue that nuclear weapons already present this apocalyptic god-like power and space militarization wouldn't change this dynamic, only expand the frontiers. You will likely have Russian, American, Chinese, European military space assets that will balance each other out and prevent any corporations or single powers from holding a monopoly on space power.