
Lisp inventor John McCarthy on human progress and its sustainability - maxharris
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html
======
DaniFong
I feel like any such discussion must address the fact that, globally,
phytoplankton has declined by 40% in the past century. That's 40% of the base
of the food pyramid for all ocean life. That's 20% of the plant life in the
world, and accounts for 20% of the oxygen we breathe. Whatever is causing it,
something significant is happening to the ecosystems of earth.

[http://wormlab.biology.dal.ca/ramweb/papers-
total/Boyce_etal...](http://wormlab.biology.dal.ca/ramweb/papers-
total/Boyce_etal_2010.pdf)

------
zeteo
What a refreshing and extensive analysis, based on research and hard numbers.
You might not agree with John McCarthy, but at least he brings up clear,
verifiable points of discussion. It's too bad that strident alarmism will
always out-shout the more reasoned approaches to what is, fundamentally, a
very important problem.

~~~
pjscott
He's also provided my all-time favorite quote about how to think productively
about the environment: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk
nonsense."

~~~
cdavid
This is mostly a gimmick, though, because other people who uses arithmetic as
he says manage to go to near opposite conclusions. His website is written such
as his conclusions are claimed to logicallly follow the data, at least that's
how I read it, and I think this is slightly disingeneous. For example, David
Mc Kay and his website/book(<http://www.withouthotair.com/>) are mostly based
on data in a similar fashion, and his consequences are radically different.

~~~
uvdiv
His conclusions are the same; the difference is in how he reacts to them.

> _If fast reactors are 60 times more efficient, the same extraction of ocean
> uranium could deliver 420 kWh per day per person. At last, a sustainable
> figure that beats current consumption! – but only with the joint help of two
> technologies that are respectively scarcely-developed and unfashionable:
> ocean extraction of uranium, and fast breeder reactors._

[http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_16...](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_164.shtml)

------
froggy
Great article, but it might be more complete with a mention of the rising
acidity of the oceans and how as the ph drops, many of the shelled animals at
the bottom of the ocean food chain who depend on their shells for protection
will not be able to form shells (the acidity eats away at the calcium
carbonate) making a whole category of the food chain susceptible to
extinction.

I appreciate the optimism in this article that humans are "on the right path",
but the bottom line is humans have already caused a major disruption to the
biosphere via carbon emissions, and the carbon emissions are still increasing
which will have an effect of ocean life, thus humans.

I'd like to see more thought going into "helping people live better lives
while living in balance with nature", rather than "We can expand the human
species to 20 billion - let's do it!"

~~~
zeteo
>>I'd like to see more thought going into "helping people live better lives
while living in balance with nature"<<

Nature is inherently unbalanced:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature#Counter-
argum...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature#Counter-arguments)

For instance, the biosphere has managed to royally mess itself up at least
once:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event>

(see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth#During_the_froze...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth#During_the_frozen_period)
for some of the effects)

~~~
bellaire
Aside from semantic arguments about what "balance" means, it's true that
nature is a state of constant change.

When people talk about sustainability, they're acknowledging that humans can
have an impact on nature, or more to the point, on our ability to sustain our
own species. It's pretty fair to say that no matter how royally we mess things
up, the biosphere will probably eventually "recover"... it'll simply be
drastically different.

So, given that we can be agents of change in nature, it's not unreasonable to
consider not only whether we can simply survive as a species, but whether we
can or should show restraint with respect to the effects we have on the rest
of the natural world.

McCarthy seems to be of the opinion that efforts thus far have been not just
ineffective, but actually harmful to ourselves. That is to say, we're better
off allowing progress to happen naturally without "artificially" trying to
mitigate it. Others would appear to disagree, or at least still consider the
pursuit of sustainability, in the popular sense, worthwhile.

~~~
zeteo
>>It's pretty fair to say that no matter how royally we mess things up, the
biosphere will probably eventually "recover"

That's not what I've argued, please read my comment again. On the contrary, my
point is that the biosphere is a very unstable system, and there are no
guarantees of "recovery" from anything. It can kill itself on a whim, and has
come close to doing so in the geological past. In the long run, nature is a
chaotic, not a homeostatic system, and "balance with nature" is an oxymoron.

~~~
bellaire
>> It can kill itself on a whim, and has come close to doing so in the
geological past.

I'm not sure what you mean by "close to" killing itself. In the geologic past,
life itself has survived rapid toxic oxygenation, the complete freeze-over of
the planet's surface, and the complete sterilization of surface life including
boiling off the world's oceans. Microbial life still survived that last one in
insulated rock miles below the surface. What catastrophe are you proposing we
could induce that would do worse?

>> In the long run, nature is a chaotic, not a homeostatic system, and
"balance with nature" is an oxymoron.

Now I invite you to read my comment again.

~~~
zeteo
I've invited you to read my comment again because I felt you were mis-
representing my point. Regarding the rest,

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_bias>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_mars#Liquid_water>

Considering that there have been very severe extinction events in the past;
that the best evidence we have for Mars indicates it sustained life in the
past, and then lost it; it is special pleading to argue that life on Earth, or
at least multi-cellular life, has some hypothetical property that will make it
go on forever. On the contrary, the multitude of documented dangers, the
suddenness and magnitude of shifts in the paleobiological record indicate that
life on Earth may yet go completely extinct within a relatively short
geological time span, even were all humans to commit suicide today.

~~~
bellaire
I see what you are saying, but I don't agree. You are reversing the evidence
in your assertions. There is no evidence that life has existed in the past on
Mars. If there were, that would be fantastic, and many people believe such
evidence will be forthcoming, but as of right now, there is none that is
accepted in the mainstream.

As to your other point, the very fact that life on Earth has come close to
extinction, and yet survived, so very many times indicates that there is an
empirical (not theoretical) basis for my claim that life (in some form) tends
to bounce back. The mechanism is the fact that bacterial and archael life
forms live deep within insulated areas of Earth's crust and retain relatively
(geologically speaking) modern genes for traits such as aerobic respiration.
Survivorship bias does not imply that in some situations there are no
survivors, that is a misapplication of the idea.

Now, it's certainly possible that life could be extinguished in a short
geologic time span, that I don't refute. And of course, in around a billion
years the sun's total radiative output will make life all but impossible on
Earth's surface. But in the mean time, evidence suggests life is incredibly
hardy.

I suspect, anyway, that we are talking at cross-purposes. The topic was
sustainability vis a vis human activity. You rightly point out that we are not
in total control, that things can go awry without our intervention. Nature is
indeed a chaotic system. However, I suspect you do not disagree that we can
choose to avoid certain paths that would inevitably lead to our own
destruction. We probably can't avoid all of them, as we are not omniscient,
but my main point is that it behooves us to think about it, and to attempt to
act responsibly, not in a sense of maintaining the natural state of the world
as a static equilibrium, but merely to survive as best we understand how.

------
ximeng
21901 hits since 1995 - little over 1000 hits a year. Let's see the HN effect
now. [One hour later - 22797, a little way off 900 in an hour.]

\---

Reocities link for the rebuttal linked at the bottom of the article.

<http://www.reocities.com/RainForest/Canopy/2265/no_prog.htm>

~~~
zeteo
He has a second counter that shows 350,000+ visits, but there's no explanation
for the discrepancy.

------
mtviewdave
A compelling article when it was written, and I think many of his potential
solutions to problem have promise. But the article really suffers from not
having been revised in the intervening years. For example, the view of oil is
very '90s: everything will be fine until oil stops coming out of the ground,
and then we'll have a crisis. But oil won't stop coming out of the ground for
decades, so we have plenty of time to deal with it.

But the idea behind peak oil is that even a relatively small decline in oil
can lead to drastic increases in prices, which would have devastating effects
on the world economy. Peak oil isn't even addressed in McCarthy's writing, as
far as I can tell.

Related is agriculture: McCarthy portrays it as an issue of water and arable
land. But it's also an issue of fertilizer, and fertilizer production is
dependent upon petroleum. So if we have a drastic spike in petroleum prices,
that will lead to a drastic spike in fertilizer costs, which would lead to a
drastic spike in food costs. See Egypt for an example of what happens when
that occurs.

Finally, the Ehrlich/Simon bet. Again, compelling at the time, but the bet
ended in 1990. 21 years ago. That's hardly a compelling statement on the state
of the world in 2011. What would the result of that bet been had it been
replayed from 2000 to 2010? From looking at this:
<http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/> it looks like all 5 metals in the bet
have risen in price over the last decade.

EDIT: I found one reference to peak oil on the Hydrogen page, but it's given
no serious analysis.

~~~
wmf
For a more detailed analysis, see Re-litigating the Simon/Ehrlich Bet:
[http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/02/re-
litigating_t.ht...](http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/02/re-
litigating_t.html)

------
asnyder
While it may be out of scope, it would be nice to see how he would address the
increasing level of automation and its factors on classes, labor, wealth, and
population.

~~~
johngalt
I think Bastiat beat him to it.

------
michaelchisari
I basically agree with the analysis, that technology makes human material
progress potentially sustainable well beyond our current numbers.

Our biggest challenges are social and economic ones. First and foremost, is to
push against the tides of conservatism on both the left and the right, which
see sustainability as either a matter of "going back" or as unworthy of a goal
at all.

~~~
brc
Or, as he points, out, idealogical threats are the largest threats to humans.
People blindly following idealogies and ignoring data is the most likely thing
to cause large-scale deaths.

~~~
spot
Or to put it more simply, humans are the greatest threat to humans. Always
have been. When people talk about evolution, they usually use the example of
running away from a lion or some such. But it's much more likely you were
running away from another person.

------
sseefried
I have read through these pages. Undoubtedly many of the things he states,
particularly with respect to how long nuclear energy could supply us, are
correct but _only_ under the assumption that we don't continue to increase our
usage of energy. It's hard to see how that assumption holds in a world that is
continually growing its economies. Exponential functions grow very fast. (See
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY>)

You may then counter that a decoupling of economic growth from its material
and energy underpinnings is possible. This has yet to be effectively proven.
We have only seen partial decoupling so far. For more information on this see
the writings of Tim Jackson in his book Prosperity without Growth.

I also urge you to download this spreadsheet (from the BP website) showing the
growth in usage of fossil fuels (<http://tinyurl.com/2yhx7d>). We may find
alternatives to these but if we do, we will have to bring the alternatives
online at roughly the same level to supply our societies with the energy they
now require to function. This is no easy feat. It's good know, quantitatively,
just what's required.

------
Luyt
That's how web pages were back in 1991, and how they should look again in the
future: just plain raw content and links, no frills and graphic fluff.

~~~
sfphotoarts
why?

the readability of many modern pages is considerably improved over plain text.

~~~
mquander
Oh, is that so? Last I checked, people frequently install browser plugins just
to turn modern pages back into single-column plain text pages.

~~~
robryan
This page is no exception, looks way better in readability than it does by
default. The main issues are the 100% width and the font/size.

~~~
mquander
Sure, but the font and size are exactly what you are free to control as you
please with your browser.

------
wazoox
I remember reading through these pages back when I learned about McCarthy,
probably 10 years ago or so. I think he's a born optimist, like I'm a born
pessimist. He fails to mention fresh water shortages around the world, too.
And a couple of other huge pending problems of the sort. I'd like to see
convincing information that we are not currently in overshoot...

------
jackfoxy
In the tradition of the late Julian Simon
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon> This will make John McCarthy
reviled in some fashionable circles. I wonder if he speaks with Stanford Prof.
Paul Ehrlich.

~~~
michaelchisari
Although I come from a very different economic and social perspective, I can
appreciate the effort that went into this page, regardless. There seems to be
some good information here, no matter if you agree completely with his
perspective.

------
sseefried
I'd also be interested to see what the people of HN think about this essay I
wrote about long term energy needs:

<http://seanseefried.com/blog/files/22-june-2008.html>

~~~
wazoox
Looks interesting. You should submit it on its own. In fact combined with The
prof. Bartlett videos (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY>) it makes
quite a good usage of arithmetic to counter McCarthy point of view.

------
VladRussian
all these human progress discussions imply, or bounded by, one hypothesis -
there will exist only one species of humans. Is divergence of the species into
2 or more is such an unprobable event?

~~~
jerf
No, no they really aren't. There is essentially no dependence on "humans" in
that discussion. "Intelligent species" can be substituted with no loss or even
substantial change in meaning. The point is that an intelligent, active
technological civilization is not intrinsically unsustainable. Bringing up
your point would just open a distracting side discussion not terribly relevant
to the author's point.

~~~
VladRussian
>an intelligent, active technological civilization is not intrinsically
unsustainable.

that would be bad. No need to evolve in any cardinal way. Only needed changes
would be minor adjustments to fit humans most comfortably into the
tecnological civilization cradle. Just like dinosaurs who evolved to fit most
comfortably into their Earth dominating niche ... until the meteor stroke,
super vulcanos erupted , etc...

Anyway, i don't agree that technological civilization is not intrinsically
unsustainable. The civilization has already established its exponential
nature. Good thing about exponentially increasing speed is quickly hitting
whatever natural limits are there, and that induces need for change. Yes, in
many cases we naturally prognose (McCarty incl.) the response to be a new
improved technology. Yet, artificially limiting human species response to a
need for change only to technological type of responses seems ... artificial.

~~~
sseefried
The problem with running up against the limits is that it isn't always pretty.
I've heard it said that "all exponential functions are really S-curves" which
in this situation would correspond to a civilisation gracefully decreasing its
growth as it approached the limits.

However, other curves are possible too. Overshoot and collapse can also occur.

The S-curve scenario can only happen under the following circumstances. a) the
limits are recognised by us b) they are responded to immediately with no
delay.

Another scenario, called "overshoot and oscillation" occurs when: a) there is
a delay in the response b) AND the the limits that we have exceeded recover
quickly. i.e. the limits are no erodable.

"Overshoot and collapse" occurs when we erode some resource that does not
recover quickly. Unfortunately, I can think of many resources that are very
erodable. The most obvious being fossil fuels which take millions of years to
replace themselves. Top-soil and biodiversity are also examples of highly
erodable resources.

~~~
cma
[http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/3246/201102stmatthewislan...](http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/3246/201102stmatthewisland.png)

