Cosmological Economics: the argument for infinite growth.

00:00:00.000 The universe is growing.
00:00:03.000 When on March 28, 1949, the great astrophysicist Fred Hoyle,
00:00:09.000 he largely single-handedly explained how the elements of the periodic table are almost all manufactured in the core of stars.
00:00:15.000 Attempted to mock the idea of an expanding universe,
00:00:19.000 he did so by calling it the Big Bang.
00:00:22.000 The jig was up.
00:00:24.000 It was found we are no longer in a static universe.
00:00:27.000 Now we know that not only is the universe getting bigger,
00:00:31.000 but the rate at which it's doing so is increasing as though trapped in perpetual adolescence.
00:00:38.000 Now I should just pause here to remind people that Fred Hoyle is often mocked himself for mocking the Big Bang.
00:00:47.000 He died thinking of a static universe and people sometimes remember him solely for that.
00:00:55.000 Fred Hoyle was an astrophysics genius.
00:00:59.000 He is one of the most accomplished astrophysicist ever,
00:01:02.000 because he almost single-handedly explained how all the elements on the periodic table are manufactured in the core of stars.
00:01:11.000 He explained stellar nuclear synthesis.
00:01:14.000 It was an amazing feat.
00:01:16.000 If you're interested, go looking at what Fred Hoyle contributed to astrophysics at astonishing.
00:01:22.000 And he need not be remembered solely for getting the Big Bang wrong paths.
00:01:28.000 But he was wrong about the Big Bang.
00:01:31.000 And now we know a lot about the Big Bang,
00:01:33.000 because we have a relatively new science of precision cosmology.
00:01:39.000 And it brings us not only a picture of a universe where space is growing,
00:01:43.000 but where the amount of matter,
00:01:45.000 both seen and unseen,
00:01:47.000 is at once vast and yet dwarfed by an even greater quantity of energy
00:01:52.000 that drives the accelerating expansion.
00:01:55.000 It would appear therefore that the contents of the universe
00:01:58.000 for all practical purposes are indeed infinite.
00:02:02.000 That's just a scientific fact.
00:02:04.000 And although the fine details are subtle and open to debate,
00:02:08.000 there is at least an argument that can be made given both the expansion of space
00:02:13.000 and the dark energy driving the acceleration, that the capacity to do work in the universe
00:02:19.000 is likewise increasing without bound.
00:02:22.000 So far as we know,
00:02:24.000 we people here on Earth may be the only things in the universe
00:02:28.000 looking out on the rest of it and attempting to form theories about it.
00:02:32.000 For more on that,
00:02:33.000 see a podcast that has been released almost simultaneously with this one
00:02:37.000 about the possibility of intelligent alien life out there.
00:02:41.000 It may be the case that we may be the only place in the universe
00:02:46.000 where knowledge of the universe is being created.
00:02:49.000 As David Deutsch has pointed out,
00:02:51.000 both in his talks and in his books,
00:02:53.000 this place, and no other, is a special hub.
00:02:56.000 In one respect, we are in the outer suburbs of a typical galaxy
00:03:01.000 among hundreds of billions.
00:03:03.000 But on the other,
00:03:04.000 we are a central hub of knowledge creation which contains
00:03:08.000 an increasingly high resolution,
00:03:11.000 explanatory reflection of the whole rest of the universe
00:03:15.000 and all of its contents from the smallest to the larger scales.
00:03:19.000 When we think of the word home,
00:03:21.000 do we think of our personal residents only?
00:03:24.000 What do we think of our town or nation?
00:03:26.000 Do we think of our planet?
00:03:28.000 All of these are actually exceedingly and needlessly narrow ways
00:03:33.000 of conceiving of our place in the cosmos.
00:03:36.000 For our home, in truth, is the universe.
00:03:40.000 The whole universe is the environment that we find ourselves in.
00:03:43.000 Our residents, along with the rest of civilization,
00:03:46.000 is our bull walk against the rest of the environment around us,
00:03:49.000 which is terribly hostile, both to us
00:03:52.000 and every other life form of the planet.
00:03:54.000 Of course, we may not be alone
00:03:57.000 and may yet discover that we share this cosmological environment with others.
00:04:01.000 But we do not know about them.
00:04:03.000 Whoever they are and where they might be,
00:04:06.000 we can know little about them for now.
00:04:08.000 But we can constrain some of their properties.
00:04:12.000 Whoever they are, they may not transgress the laws of physics.
00:04:15.000 And if they are capable of creating a civilization,
00:04:18.000 then they possess one very special property that we do too.
00:04:22.000 The ability to uncover those physical laws that govern them as much as us
00:04:27.000 and the rest of the universe.
00:04:28.000 So they too, like we, can form ideas,
00:04:31.000 especially in the form of technology,
00:04:33.000 which make clever use of those laws
00:04:35.000 to control the matter and energy within the universe to do good work.
00:04:40.000 Good work, which is absolutely vital to survival
00:04:43.000 in the face of all sorts of evils found in an unfriendly universe.
00:04:48.000 Evil, which we define as harmful problems we do not yet have solutions for.
00:04:53.000 The good work that people do comes in many forms.
00:04:56.000 We provide food to ourselves and each other,
00:04:59.000 supporting more people in good health now than ever before.
00:05:02.000 We build structures to protect us from a terribly hostile environment
00:05:06.000 where the only species to routinely attempt
00:05:09.000 to protect the diversity of other species,
00:05:12.000 often at great cost to ourselves,
00:05:14.000 rather than viewing almost all other life forms as competition.
00:05:18.000 We have flown free and very large part from what our genes code for.
00:05:23.000 Our minds think beyond our own mere self-interest.
00:05:26.000 They can think and overcome genetic desires with ease.
00:05:30.000 Indeed, our minds can stretch the very limits of physical law,
00:05:34.000 and within the abstract world of our imaginations
00:05:36.000 can even easily exceed what physics allows to occur in the physical world.
00:05:41.000 Yet for all this infinite mental capacity that people possess,
00:05:44.000 we encounter a continuous stream of threats
00:05:48.000 to both our happiness and even our very existence.
00:05:51.000 Sometimes we need to protect ourselves against each other,
00:05:54.000 and that requires us to make progress faster than those who would seek to do a farm.
00:05:58.000 We find solutions to all manner of problems,
00:06:00.000 and in doing so, uncover new problems that are better to solve than the ones that went before.
00:06:06.000 Think, for example, that the solution we found
00:06:10.000 to the problem of what caused disease led to the solution of germ theory,
00:06:15.000 which opened up the problem of how to kill germs,
00:06:18.000 which led to the solution of antibiotics,
00:06:21.000 which opened up the problem of how to compact resistant strains of bacteria,
00:06:24.000 and so on, it goes on and on.
00:06:27.000 Problem, solution, better problem, better solution.
00:06:32.000 But the creation of knowledge requires resources.
00:06:35.000 The creation of knowledge, finding the solutions to the most pressing problems,
00:06:39.000 requires us to transform matter from one form into another.
00:06:43.000 The problem of how to keep warm requires us to take the raw material of cotton or fur
00:06:48.000 and turn it into coats and socks, and it requires us to take energy from one place
00:06:53.000 to create heat in another place, often by burning some otherwise useless material like dead wood or buried oil.
00:06:59.000 To solve problems faster still, we increasingly need computers to do some of the laborious,
00:07:04.000 grudge work, and computers require energy too.
00:07:07.000 That energy could come from the sun, but if you want to work at night,
00:07:10.000 then you need to store that energy somehow,
00:07:12.000 and that might take some fancy chemicals that require mining and more electricity and more fuel,
00:07:16.000 and more specialized equipment, especially if you want to do it fast,
00:07:19.000 and to make the whole cycle work better, one needs to make improvements to create knowledge again,
00:07:24.000 which requires more resources and so on, the cycle of discover and gather a resource.
00:07:29.000 Use it for fuel and facilitate knowledge creation, discover and gather new resources to improve the old,
00:07:34.000 then must continue indefinitely, because any almost single resource is finite,
00:07:40.000 even if resources in general are infinite.
00:07:43.000 Because David Deutsch has observed in the beginning of infinity, nothing whatsoever is a resource,
00:07:48.000 until someone has the knowledge of how to use it.
00:07:52.000 There are parts of the universe around us today that we must walk past in regard as completely worthless,
00:07:57.000 which at any moment, some new piece of scientific knowledge could transform into a valuable community.
00:08:02.000 A rock is just a useless rock until someone figures out how to get the minerals out of it.
00:08:06.000 The vast salt lake of Eugenie Bolivia was little more than a tourist attraction,
00:08:11.000 and source of, well, almost worth the salt for food flavoring until someone invented the lithium battery.
00:08:18.000 The lithium, in modern batteries, found in computers and nogol devices,
00:08:22.000 comes from salt water, or salt lakes, and in rare cases rocks,
00:08:26.000 and the extraction is no easy process.
00:08:29.000 It, too, requires both lots of knowledge and lots of energy, and very specialized equipment.
00:08:34.000 Knowledge instantiated in resources.
00:08:37.000 Half of the known lithium on earth is found in otherwise extremely poor Bolivia,
00:08:43.000 a country in South America, a country that is being called a pauper on a king's throne,
00:08:49.000 long before its lithium deposits were known about.
00:08:52.000 Bolivia should hurry to extract as much lithium as it can and sell it far to the best price it can get,
00:08:58.000 for that lithium will power the computers of the foreseeable future upon which some child,
00:09:04.000 Bolivian, perhaps, who gets cheap internet access for the first time,
00:09:08.000 learns about physics and electrochemistry, and discovers a superior material,
00:09:12.000 or alternative technique to lithium batteries for storing energy and computers,
00:09:16.000 and when that happens, all that wealth, that Bolivia now possesses in the form of lithium,
00:09:21.000 will lose its value, like so much asbestos did when the scientific knowledge changed,
00:09:26.000 the value of that commodity, sadly for now, for Bolivia, a succession of nationalist
00:09:31.000 and socialist governments have the decade stymied progress on this front.
00:09:36.000 Bolivians may very well miss the boat as they have on so many occasions,
00:09:40.000 while governments argue about nationalizing resources,
00:09:43.000 or worry excessively about small impacts on the environment.
00:09:47.000 Lithium might not always be as valuable a resource as it is now,
00:09:50.000 the chance for the Bolivian people to enrich themselves by selling this mineral
00:09:54.000 could be lost forever if they don't find the will to make progress faster.
00:09:58.000 David Deutsch in Chapter 17, Unsustainable, of the beginning of infinity,
00:10:02.000 recalls a personal example of how university some decades ago,
00:10:06.000 who was told by some experts in the field that the end of colour display screens was inside.
00:10:11.000 At the time, all coloured screens were of the cathode ray type,
00:10:16.000 and red pixels required, the physics was absolutely indisputable, the element European.
00:10:21.000 Just by happenstance, this one element, when excited by electricity, produced just the right colour.
00:10:27.000 But it was in terribly short supply.
00:10:30.000 When it ran out, there would simply be no way for a cathode ray tube to make red pixels.
00:10:35.000 No red pixels, no colour screens.
00:10:37.000 And it's true, no alternative element, no way of making pixels,
00:10:41.000 glow red by that process has been found to this day.
00:10:45.000 But of course, we have red screens of plenty, and cheaper than before.
00:10:49.000 And how?
00:10:50.000 Because we don't use cathode ray tubes anymore.
00:10:53.000 Now I don't know what else European was useful today.
00:10:56.000 The price could be up or the price could be down, but the point here is,
00:10:59.000 we simply cannot predict what new discoveries and science will completely change a market.
00:11:05.000 What is a scarce and valuable resource one day might become useless trash the next.
00:11:11.000 So it went with European, so it may become with lithium and coal.
00:11:16.000 But we need not fixed markets.
00:11:18.000 Science fixes the problems of what a resource is or is not and how the damage of the use they cause,
00:11:23.000 if any, can be mitigated, not economic central planning,
00:11:27.000 even if lithium is never replaced by something better in batteries.
00:11:31.000 And one might argue that the end is far from insight for lithium,
00:11:35.000 for it is exceedingly light and reactive, a wonderful combination for a portable energy source.
00:11:40.000 But this is merely my prophecy.
00:11:42.000 It nonetheless must one day run out in Bolivia.
00:11:46.000 And then we will have to turn elsewhere.
00:11:48.000 The oceans contain much lithium, but it's finite there too, of course.
00:11:52.000 But in the universe, in the universe it is the third most abundant substance of all.
00:11:57.000 The big bang created the universe that we see today.
00:12:00.000 And what precipitated out from that primeval soup first was hydrogen and helium.
00:12:05.000 And lithium.
00:12:06.000 Sure, while the abundances of hydrogen and helium, the amount of lithium was just a trace impurity,
00:12:10.000 but on the scale of the universe, it may as well be infinite so far as humans are concerned.
00:12:15.000 But if we get to the point where we are able to sweep into galactic space for lithium,
00:12:20.000 we probably won't need to. For if we can do that,
00:12:23.000 we can probably just sweep up the hydrogen instead and use it in the fusion reactor.
00:12:26.000 Of course, today lithium is just one thing we need.
00:12:29.000 We need lots of other things too.
00:12:31.000 And the earth itself is finite, but the universe is not.
00:12:35.000 The universe is literally infinite.
00:12:37.000 And it is growing.
00:12:39.000 And it is hostile.
00:12:41.000 Terribly so.
00:12:42.000 There are dangers we know of, disease and drought, storms and earthquakes,
00:12:47.000 supernovae and asteroids, gamma ray bursts and solar flares,
00:12:51.000 and perhaps, worst of all, the things we do not know about yet,
00:12:55.000 and so cannot possibly even begin to prepare for.
00:12:58.000 We are at the beginning of infinity,
00:13:00.000 and we should expect to be startled one quiet Tuesday afternoon by an event
00:13:05.000 as astounding and inexplicable as, for example,
00:13:09.000 the appearance of a supernova in the daytime sky was to the ancients.
00:13:13.000 Happily, those events were not harmful to our planet so far as we know,
00:13:17.000 and are now relatively well understood.
00:13:20.000 But nothing guarantees there are similar strange and lethal phenomena
00:13:24.000 lurking out there for which we have no explanation.
00:13:27.000 So what we need is lots of knowledge,
00:13:29.000 and we need to generate it as fast as we can.
00:13:31.000 And to do this, we need everyone on board helping.
00:13:34.000 How?
00:13:35.000 They need to solve the problems they are interested in,
00:13:38.000 as fast as they can, so that they can move on to better,
00:13:41.000 more interesting problems.
00:13:42.000 And all of this takes energy and resources,
00:13:44.000 and typically lots of it, so we need to grow.
00:13:47.000 If we don't grow, if the population fails to grow,
00:13:50.000 if civilization fails to grow, if the economy fails to grow,
00:13:53.000 then knowledge will fail to grow fast enough to meet the challenges
00:13:57.000 of a growing hostile universe.
00:14:00.000 Somehow, our rate of solving the most deadly problems
00:14:04.000 must exceed the rate at which they confront us,
00:14:06.000 but that latter rate is not knowable.
00:14:09.000 We cannot know how fast and of what sort the problems
00:14:12.000 of the coming days or years will be.
00:14:14.000 So we must take David Deutsch's advice.
00:14:16.000 We need a stance of problem solving.
00:14:19.000 Not problem avoidance.
00:14:20.000 We cannot avoid problems.
00:14:21.000 We cannot avoid people who suddenly decide
00:14:24.000 and unexpectedly to become violent.
00:14:26.000 So we need a means of defense.
00:14:28.000 We cannot avoid new strains of viruses and bacteria that could kill us.
00:14:32.000 So we need a means of quickly finding antidotes
00:14:34.000 when they do appear.
00:14:35.000 We cannot avoid the next disaster
00:14:37.000 that is found to be affecting our oceans or air.
00:14:40.000 So we need a means to reverse the chains
00:14:42.000 and we cannot avoid what might appear next in the sky.
00:14:46.000 So we need people and institutions engaged in studying the world
00:14:50.000 so we can quickly and cheaply determine
00:14:52.000 if it might be harmful or not.
00:14:54.000 And how to reduce the harm.
00:14:55.000 And all of this is to say, we need lots and lots of resources
00:14:59.000 and energy to fuel our problem solving.
00:15:02.000 Growth is what's needed, not stagnation.
00:15:04.000 Those who argue for smaller populations or smaller economies
00:15:07.000 because they are parochially concerned
00:15:09.000 about their own tiny neighborhoods.
00:15:11.000 Even when that tiny neighborhood is planet size,
00:15:14.000 fail to understand that we cannot protect ourselves
00:15:17.000 by hibernating upon the earth
00:15:19.000 or worse in one small corner of it.
00:15:21.000 We cannot protect even ourselves,
00:15:23.000 let alone our families in dangerous species or the environment.
00:15:27.000 Because as melodramatic, as it might sound,
00:15:29.000 it must be the case that the day of cosmological reckoning is coming.
00:15:33.000 A problem we have not yet foreseen out of the clear blue sky
00:15:37.000 or perhaps the deep blue sea that could exterminate us all.
00:15:40.000 It has happened to countless species before us.
00:15:43.000 It could be a solar flare.
00:15:44.000 It could be an asteroid.
00:15:45.000 It could be a cosmological event.
00:15:47.000 It could be a microscopic one that threatens all life
00:15:50.000 or perhaps just ours.
00:15:51.000 Great extinctions have happened many, many times before.
00:15:54.000 Why should we be so special?
00:15:56.000 Well, only in one way.
00:15:57.000 By creating the knowledge to swiftly deal with
00:16:00.000 what the hostile universe throws at us.
00:16:02.000 And to do this, take wealth, the capacity to transform the universe
00:16:06.000 into what we want or as David Deutsch defines the term
00:16:09.000 with more precision, the repertoire of physical transformations
00:16:13.000 that we would be capable of causing.
00:16:16.000 Wealth requires turning resources into widgets
00:16:19.000 and technological solutions and it requires turning useless
00:16:22.000 materials into resources.
00:16:24.000 And that step takes knowledge, but it must happen quickly.
00:16:27.000 Not so quickly as to carelessly cast a side or caution,
00:16:30.000 but quickly enough that progress in science is matched
00:16:33.000 by progress in philosophy of knowing when to pursue some course,
00:16:36.000 rather than the alternatives.
00:16:38.000 Some people have always attempted to use science against science
00:16:41.000 by arguing that in biology there is such a thing as carrying capacity
00:16:45.000 or some analogous idea, the finite number of organisms
00:16:49.000 that some area of land or some volume of space can support
00:16:53.000 given the finite food, water or other resources available.
00:16:56.000 So the argument goes because this lake
00:16:59.000 is only so big, it can only support so many fish
00:17:02.000 and so it must be with people.
00:17:04.000 Tasmania is only so many square kilometres,
00:17:06.000 so it must be able to support some limited number of people.
00:17:09.000 But this is false.
00:17:11.000 Science changes the numbers continuously
00:17:14.000 as we learn more about how to support more people,
00:17:17.000 so the carrying capacity for people increases.
00:17:20.000 People are unique.
00:17:22.000 Yet prominent thinkers and public intellectuals
00:17:25.000 since mathematician Thomas Malthus in 1798 have argued
00:17:30.000 that the carrying capacity for humans on our planet is limited
00:17:33.000 and they have always been proved wrong.
00:17:37.000 Malthus made his prediction based upon a rigorous mathematical analysis
00:17:40.000 of the growth of human population,
00:17:42.000 which he rightly knew was exponential.
00:17:44.000 Compared to the production of food,
00:17:46.000 which he observed was linear.
00:17:48.000 Exponential functions out race linear ones,
00:17:50.000 and so it seemed mathematically watertight
00:17:52.000 that sooner or later Malthus predicted the 1930s.
00:17:55.000 That humankind would reach a tipping point
00:17:57.000 where famine would proliferate across the globe.
00:18:00.000 Things would get worse he argued.
00:18:02.000 Our people, starvation, finally perhaps extinction
00:18:05.000 would come for our species as we were unable
00:18:07.000 to simply appreciate the logic that a finite planet
00:18:10.000 could not support a forever growing population.
00:18:13.000 Of course Malthus made this prediction over a century
00:18:16.000 before the harbour process was discovered.
00:18:18.000 The idea that hydrogen and nitrogen gases
00:18:21.000 could be used to create ammonia and so artificial fertilizer
00:18:24.000 and make previously barren land useful as farmland.
00:18:28.000 And he made the prediction before modern irrigation
00:18:30.000 and genetically engineered crops.
00:18:32.000 In short, he attempted to predict the content
00:18:35.000 of future scientific discoveries
00:18:37.000 and his prediction was, they'd been done.
00:18:40.000 But we know knowledge can continue to grow.
00:18:43.000 If we people continue to solve problems as we always have,
00:18:47.000 it's what we do, it's what we are best at.
00:18:49.000 We are, as David Deutsch explains,
00:18:52.000 universal problem solvers.
00:18:54.000 Whatever the problem, if it's interesting enough,
00:18:56.000 it can be solved and we can solve it.
00:18:59.000 But the lesson of the parable of Malthus
00:19:01.000 has been slow to be learned by our culture.
00:19:04.000 Indeed, it seems never to have been learned
00:19:06.000 no matter how many profits have done
00:19:08.000 have argued in just the same way.
00:19:10.000 Let's not catalog a history of errors,
00:19:12.000 but let's just look at one recent and prominent example.
00:19:16.000 One of the loud voices on the stage that uses Malthus' arguments
00:19:20.000 just the way that Malthus did.
00:19:22.000 Now, some people watching or listening to this
00:19:24.000 outside of Australia might never have heard of Dick Smith.
00:19:28.000 But he is an Australian entrepreneur and an adventurer.
00:19:31.000 And actually a science popularizer of a sort
00:19:34.000 that he still commands the ear of the public in Australia
00:19:38.000 and of governments.
00:19:39.000 We have a highest award in Australia,
00:19:41.000 it's called Australian of the Year for services
00:19:44.000 to the community.
00:19:46.000 And once upon a time, Dick Smith was awarded
00:19:48.000 Australian of the Year.
00:19:50.000 He has supported green parties and environmentalists
00:19:53.000 and attempts to get others into parliament
00:19:56.000 on the basis of population control platforms.
00:19:59.000 He and thinkers like him promote some version
00:20:02.000 of the Malthusian fallacy.
00:20:05.000 Populations are too great and growth is unsustainable.
00:20:09.000 It's very easy to get a taste for his pessimism.
00:20:12.000 Just Google his name, Dick Smith and perhaps type in population.
00:20:16.000 And of course, recently we have had prominent people like
00:20:20.000 Greta Thunberg making similar noises on this topic.
00:20:24.000 Dick Smith calls endless growth idiocy.
00:20:27.000 He writes in an article printed in the age newspaper,
00:20:30.000 quote,
00:20:32.000 No one can confidently predict where we will find the food,
00:20:36.000 energy, water and resources needed to supply
00:20:39.000 even the basic needs of so many people.
00:20:42.000 End quote.
00:20:44.000 And he's quite right there too.
00:20:46.000 No one can predict what new scientific discoveries
00:20:49.000 tomorrow will bring.
00:20:50.000 That would be prophecy.
00:20:52.000 But equally, no one can predict confidently or not
00:20:55.000 that the equivalent of the harbour process
00:20:58.000 won't be uncovered by a chemist working diligently
00:21:00.000 behind a computer screen or in a lab
00:21:03.000 which would see even deserts become fertile places to grow food.
00:21:07.000 Turning barren wastelands into gorgeously green crops
00:21:10.000 is hardly a challenge that is beyond us.
00:21:12.000 You might even choose to use solar power to green the desert.
00:21:15.000 Just Google examples of agriculture
00:21:17.000 in the Negeve desert in Israel.
00:21:19.000 That's what you can do if you are optimistic about problems.
00:21:23.000 Of course, if you think that deserts simply cannot be a place
00:21:26.000 to grow food or if deserts can't support a human population.
00:21:30.000 Or worse if you think there's nothing we can do
00:21:32.000 to change the facts about how much land is needed
00:21:34.000 to support some number of people.
00:21:36.000 You are liable not to search for solutions.
00:21:39.000 You are liable instead to call for restraints on freedom.
00:21:42.000 Mines that have been decided to imprison themselves
00:21:45.000 inside static walls and unwilling to consider options
00:21:48.000 are liable to not want other mines to be freed
00:21:51.000 to consider solutions either.
00:21:53.000 Indeed, they are liable to call such mines idiotic or worse.
00:21:57.000 What these mines want to do is to suppress
00:22:00.000 the very means of making progress.
00:22:02.000 They want to call into question the very project
00:22:04.000 of even considering how progress and therefore knowledge growth
00:22:07.000 can be unbounded.
00:22:08.000 They want to label as wrong or even evil.
00:22:11.000 The very good optimistic philosophy
00:22:14.000 that to solve problems we must increase our knowledge,
00:22:17.000 our resources and therefore our people.
00:22:20.000 For people are themselves, resources of creativity
00:22:23.000 and new knowledge, they are the ultimate resource.
00:22:26.000 People, more people to do creative work
00:22:30.000 solve the problems of humanity faster.
00:22:33.000 They are not the problem as people like Dixmancy
00:22:36.000 but the solution.
00:22:38.000 People are the solution.
00:22:40.000 The problem is the hostile world around us.
00:22:42.000 And we need to do what we can to understand
00:22:45.000 and thereby control it so we can protect the parts
00:22:48.000 of what we care about like ourselves.
00:22:50.000 Now Dixmancy is very concerned in his book
00:22:52.000 and his articles about how finite the planet is.
00:22:55.000 Many people today are.
00:22:57.000 It is the common opinion of intellectuals in this space
00:23:01.000 that the finite size of the planet
00:23:03.000 is an important problem that we have to confront,
00:23:06.000 that the global community must confront.
00:23:08.000 And it is trivially true.
00:23:10.000 Of course it's true that the planet is finite.
00:23:13.000 Many things are finite.
00:23:14.000 Your house is finite in size. Your nation is finite.
00:23:16.000 The planet is finite.
00:23:18.000 Depending upon how you define it, the solar system is finite.
00:23:21.000 By definition any 100 square metre block of land is finite
00:23:24.000 but finiteness of physical size is not much of a guide
00:23:27.000 to anything unless you have some further assumptions.
00:23:29.000 Consider for a moment.
00:23:30.000 How many people can fit on 100 square metre block of land?
00:23:33.000 How many?
00:23:34.000 Let's just guess for a moment.
00:23:35.000 Paulson, think. Imagine each person needs one square metre
00:23:38.000 to be comfortable. How many?
00:23:39.000 100?
00:23:40.000 Well, you need an assumption to get to that answer.
00:23:43.000 Everything turns on how creative you might be
00:23:45.000 in coming up with an answer.
00:23:46.000 How many dimensions one is thinking in certainly has a bearing?
00:23:49.000 Skyscrapers fit many more people than you can expect
00:23:53.000 on 100 square metres of land,
00:23:55.000 somewhat underground car parks.
00:23:56.000 Whatever limit you think there is
00:23:58.000 depends entirely upon what assumptions you are making
00:24:00.000 and what effect knowledge might have on the problem.
00:24:03.000 Whatever the number is, it's liable to change.
00:24:06.000 But let us stick to the point Malthus in 1798
00:24:09.000 and Dick Smith in 2011 and beyond agitated by.
00:24:13.000 All these people possibly stacked one on top of another
00:24:16.000 in apartment blocks.
00:24:18.000 Need food and resources to survive.
00:24:20.000 Oh no, what now? What a terrible predicament we are in.
00:24:23.000 The knowledge that enables us to stack people
00:24:25.000 up is just exacerbating things. Well no, again,
00:24:28.000 however much land you need to grow food is itself
00:24:31.000 subject to change.
00:24:32.000 Far less people work in farming now than ever before,
00:24:35.000 but they can grow on the same land,
00:24:37.000 food to feed many, many, many times more people than ever before.
00:24:41.000 But the amount of land is fine out for growing food,
00:24:44.000 Brett, don't you understand? Fine.
00:24:46.000 We haven't shown any sign of running short of farming land
00:24:49.000 to feed everyone and as I like to imagine
00:24:51.000 there could be skyscrapers of a sort for growing food anyway.
00:24:54.000 Food like any other resource we might want evolves
00:24:57.000 and what was once fine out might become infinite.
00:24:59.000 Imagine if we found usable energy, not only in sunlight
00:25:02.000 but in empty space. We know it's there, but we don't know how to use it.
00:25:05.000 It's very hard to estimate how many resources,
00:25:07.000 how many people on how much land might require
00:25:10.000 the numbers change with every new discovery.
00:25:13.000 Yet, whole political parties are now in large part devoted
00:25:16.000 to the very idea that people are the problem
00:25:19.000 and nature is the solution.
00:25:22.000 They are concerned about things like the carrying capacity
00:25:25.000 of the planet and the destruction of the environment by people.
00:25:28.000 The truth is, these same people should be concerned
00:25:31.000 about the destruction of people by the planet,
00:25:33.000 the uncaring, soulless, mindless environment.
00:25:36.000 It is forever thoughtlessly flooding, burning,
00:25:38.000 infecting, blasting, starving, drowning, suffocating,
00:25:42.000 freezing, or otherwise maiming or killing,
00:25:44.000 the loving, caring and creative people
00:25:46.000 that eke out an existence on its hostile surface.
00:25:50.000 Personally, I do care about gorgeous rivers and forests,
00:25:54.000 birds, trees and koalas.
00:25:56.000 I really do. I love to hike and run and swim
00:25:59.000 when I can in what I think of as the beauty of nature.
00:26:02.000 But we can preserve some places for some creatures
00:26:05.000 and ourselves of natural beauty
00:26:08.000 without risking the existence of it all.
00:26:10.000 People aren't evil, but some ideas are
00:26:13.000 and some problems are the source of great suffering.
00:26:15.000 And those problems come from our environment
00:26:18.000 as much as from our fellow inhabitants of this planet.
00:26:21.000 And despite what some scientists say,
00:26:23.000 no, life on this planet would not be fine without us.
00:26:27.000 Even the bacteria cannot flourish into the indefinite future
00:26:30.000 without us, without the knowledge that humans have,
00:26:33.000 the bacteria like the cockroaches
00:26:35.000 and everything else in the planet, even the planet itself,
00:26:38.000 will be destroyed.
00:26:39.000 It will be engulfed by the dying sun
00:26:41.000 as every astronomer who has ever had a podium has told us.
00:26:45.000 So the difference between whether we and all other life
00:26:48.000 on this earth survives is not a matter of whether we will exterminate it.
00:26:52.000 We don't have the means to exterminate it all,
00:26:54.000 but whether the environment will.
00:26:56.000 And even if we think the death of the sun is too far off
00:26:59.000 the green piece to be concerned about,
00:27:01.000 there is still the matter of all the other
00:27:03.000 kinds of purely natural disasters
00:27:05.000 that will kill our fellow travelers as much as us.
00:27:08.000 Well, there's treasure dolphins, tigers,
00:27:10.000 whales and wolves of the wild
00:27:12.000 themselves solve the problem of dolphin viruses,
00:27:15.000 droughts that kill wolves or flabs that kill tigers.
00:27:18.000 Yet some people do silly things like killing almost
00:27:21.000 extinct rhinos to hover to horn
00:27:23.000 that has absolutely none of the purported superstitious uses whatsoever.
00:27:28.000 But the solution to these types of problems
00:27:30.000 is not to blame the growth of civilization,
00:27:33.000 but to bemoan the lack of civilization
00:27:36.000 and civilized ideas in the minds of some people.
00:27:39.000 We need more civilization in some places, not less.
00:27:42.000 If you want to save the rhinos or the whales
00:27:44.000 or whatever else, then it is scientific
00:27:47.000 and philosophically enlightened ideas that are needed,
00:27:50.000 not the stagnation of growth.
00:27:52.000 The cosmos is an infinite place, literally.
00:27:56.000 It contains infinite resources, literally.
00:27:59.000 And what is a resource changes as our knowledge grows
00:28:02.000 and the growth of knowledge is unbounded.
00:28:04.000 But we need to fuel the growth of knowledge
00:28:07.000 that takes a mixture of energy, which requires resources,
00:28:10.000 and freedom to provide the environment
00:28:12.000 in which creativity can flourish.
00:28:14.000 But forces are arrayed against this.
00:28:16.000 Anytime someone calls for restraints on freedom
00:28:19.000 they are arguing for less creativity.
00:28:21.000 Anytime someone argues against the wise use of some resource
00:28:25.000 they are arguing against that which fuels the growth of knowledge.
00:28:28.000 Those forces have always been with us
00:28:31.000 and so then must be the response, freedom
00:28:34.000 and resources need to be maximized
00:28:36.000 to find solutions to the most pressing problems
00:28:38.000 as fast as possible so that knowledge grows without this.
00:28:41.000 Then because problems are inevitable,
00:28:43.000 it is possible that a problem will arise
00:28:45.000 from the clear blue sky that will have insufficient knowledge
00:28:48.000 to solve it in insufficient time.
00:28:50.000 So someone argues for us to slow down
00:28:53.000 or stop growing or restrict or take precautions,
00:28:57.000 take it personally.
00:28:59.000 Because that speed hump might just be the one
00:29:02.000 that causes us to miss the chance to save one life
00:29:05.000 or many or find the solution to what some better resource
00:29:08.000 might be or some way to support more people
00:29:11.000 more cheaply on even less land with less resources.
00:29:14.000 What is wisdom today may be foolishness tomorrow.
00:29:18.000 Once it was known that penicillin
00:29:20.000 should be used to cure bacterial infections.
00:29:22.000 Today that could be considered terrible foolishness
00:29:25.000 given how many other antibiotics there are
00:29:27.000 and more properly suited to particular infections
00:29:30.000 than penicillin ever was.
00:29:32.000 One day it could be the case that resistant strains of bacteria
00:29:36.000 make all penicillin stocks in the world rather useless.
00:29:39.000 So what is a resource today may not be a resource tomorrow.
00:29:42.000 Problems evolve as indeed knowledge does
00:29:45.000 because the world is not static
00:29:47.000 and people are constantly making progress
00:29:49.000 at a rate that is fast or slower
00:29:52.000 depending upon the conditions they find themselves in.
00:29:55.000 What changes useless matter into a valuable resource
00:29:58.000 is knowledge and that must continue to grow.
00:30:01.000 But the growth of knowledge depends upon
00:30:03.000 intelligently designed creativity.
00:30:05.000 That is to say the unique capacity of human minds.
00:30:08.000 And as Karl Popper has taught us
00:30:10.000 we are all equal in our infinite ignorance.
00:30:13.000 What is before us all is a constantly growing horizon
00:30:16.000 which brings into focus ever more clearly
00:30:19.000 the reality in which we find ourselves.
00:30:22.000 But we need help.
00:30:23.000 We can't do it all alone.
00:30:25.000 We need each other.
00:30:26.000 We need more people, not less.
00:30:28.000 Of course not so many that we all begin to suffer
00:30:31.000 but no one is suggesting that.
00:30:33.000 More people like me saying this
00:30:35.000 and you're listening to this
00:30:36.000 that have the wealth, the electricity, the energy
00:30:39.000 and the information to create the knowledge we all need.
00:30:42.000 So let us grow wealth and populations
00:30:45.000 so that we may grow knowledge.
00:30:47.000 Knowledge forms a web where the solutions that are found
00:30:50.000 by one person in one area
00:30:52.000 can have a profound effect upon the problems
00:30:55.000 of someone else in a completely different area.
00:30:58.000 For though we cannot know what sort it will be
00:31:01.000 we do know that one day a problem is coming
00:31:04.000 that will either newly compete with
00:31:06.000 or perhaps even dwarf our present concerns
00:31:08.000 about climate change, viruses, terrorism
00:31:12.000 whether AI will take our jobs, etc.
00:31:15.000 and so on.
00:31:16.000 Problems are inevitable.
00:31:18.000 And when that day comes
00:31:20.000 of the super problem that dwarfs all others
00:31:23.000 we want to hope that we have put all the resources
00:31:26.000 at our disposal into the hands
00:31:28.000 of the problem solvers of the planet
00:31:30.000 for problems are soluble
00:31:32.000 but only if we create the knowledge.