THE SUSTAINABILITY OF MATERIAL PROGRES John McCarthy Computer - - PDF document

THE SUSTAINABILITY OF MATERIAL PROGRES John McCarthy Computer Science Department Stanford University jmc@cs.stanford.edu http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ 2006 May 25

• I’m not intentionally contrarian.
• Can human material progress continue for the indefin

future? Some questions remain, but the evidence stron supports yes. Maybe a few billion years.

• Does the high standard of living of the advanced co

tries prevent the backward countries from advancin The answer is no.

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• What possible obstacles exist to long term progre

Only big wars—not likely at present.

• Whose responsibility is the advance of the backw

countries? Only they can do it.

WHAT IS PROGRESS?

• Societies that people choose to migrate to.
• Increased access to material goods.
• Increased life span, reduced childhood death, and bet

health

• Women’s control of their fertility.
• Increased opportunities for education. See ad for tr

tor, Successful Farming, 1920.

• More individual choice of occupation, lifestyle and a

cations.

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• More opportunity to enjoy both culture and nature.
• Cleaner environment.
• Increased consideration for the values in nature, e.g.

the preservation of biological diversity.

• Increased concern for less advanced people and th

cultures.

• An increase in the minimum standard of living.
• More and more new goods and services available to m

and more people. Available novelty is a good. Comp sory novelty is often a nuisance or worse.

NATURE DOESN’T LOVE US

• It isn’t a law of nature that humanity will prosper. T

it can depends on many facts. Each of many poss problems must be discussed. I’ll treat the most imp tant in this lecture and treat more in the web pa www.formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/. In 1865 William Stanley Jevons had good reasons to wo that England would lose its prosperity from running

• f coal. Only since nuclear energy was developed ha

been possible to be confident that humanity won’t

• ut of something essential.

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• Does the continued progress of the advanced co

tries depend on the continued poverty of the backw countries? No! All natural resources and technology available to them.

• Fortunately, there’s no world government. The co

tries making bad decisions will eventually copy those do better.

• The greatest rate of progress in the daily lives of the

vanced countries was around the end of the 19th centur safe water, telephones, automobiles, electric lighting, h refrigeration.

• We will need some very large projects. Large proje

are temporarily out of fashion. Experiment with defle ing asteroids? Prevent the next ice age. Deal with p longed regional droughts.

• Very long term problems are best left to our descenda

who will be more capable than we are. They’ll have prevent the next ice age and prevent or compensate the major droughts and other climate changes like th paleoclimate studies tell us more and more about.

• Some rate “moral progress” above material progre

However, ideas of moral progress take hold only wh there has been material progress. Thus the anti-slav movement arose in the richest country first. Nature-fi movements exist only in prosperous societies.

ENERGY

• There’s plenty of nuclear energy. What’s plenty? A

billion population at several times present American capita energy use—for several billion years.

• Breeder reactors are needed for the medium term.

will have to face the risk of diversion of plutonium a do our best.

• Liquid hydrogen will work for vehicles without loss

range or performance. BMW deserves our gratitude demonstrating it.

• In the year 2100, will there still be cars—even SUV

Yes, if people want them.

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• Solar will also work, though it’s much more expens

than nuclear, because of the storage problem.

• Nuclear will almost surely be used when natural

runs seriously short. Countries that lag will learn fr the prompt.

FOOD

• Advanced countries have persistent agricultural s

pluses.

• In How much land can ten billion spare for nature?, P

Waggoner argues that 10 billion people can be fed and s give up considerable existing land using only technolo now in use. [I copied it on my web site.]

• The green revolution saved the backward countries fr
• famines. The world is still increasing in food per cap

and reducing the number of malnourished. 1600 million (1970) → 800 million (1996) → 400 mill (2010?). The problem is bad government.

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• Genetically modified organisms will give another

boost. Europe will get over its fit of panic, paran and protectionism

• Loss of topsoil is an immediate problem in a few pla

and a long term problem of unknown magnitude in m

• places. Very likely our descendants will have to figure

how to make more.

WATER

• Water supply is a localized problem because of the qu

tity required. It is also a time-dependent problem. Th was a 200 year drought in California.

• California used 43 million acre-feet in 1995 for 35 mill

people.

• If we spent per capita what L.A. spent in 1904 on Ow

Valley water, California would spend $8 billion.

• California could even afford to desalinate seawater.

$800 per acre-foot that would come to about $32 bill per year to supply all our water.

• Consider the Oglalalla aquifer. 16 million acre-feet

year are being mined. It will run out. What then?

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THE CO2 PROBLEM

• The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere may be harm

It isn’t clear yet.

• Nuclear energy is the most obvious way of avoid

CO2.

• It seems that the earth’s heat balance can be sig

icantly controlled by small quantities of aerosols in upper atmosphere.

• We could persuade the people clearing Amazon jun

not to burn the wood.

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• We could chop down Canadian and Siberian forest,

the wood in swamps, and replant with fast-growing tre Repeat as necessary.

• But probably we’d better wait and see how much war

ing there is and whether it’s good or bad.

POPULATION

• Population is a problem for each country separately.
• The world lucked out on population increase, but

people of the advanced countries are having too few c dren.

• The UN projects a world population peak of about

billion, to be reached in the middle of this century.

• Voluntary use of birth control technology seems to

winning out—even in the backward countries.

• At what population would the U.S., California, or L

cease to attract immigrants?

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NATURAL RESOURCES

• Oil and natural gas will run out. When?
• We will have to go to low grade mineral ores.

T technologies haven’t been developed—for lack of nec

• sity. Would people be reassured by development of te

nology for low grade ores—50 years before any need?

• The US and Europe are ok for wood products, mos

in managed forests. Backward countries can’t suppor decent standard of living on fuel wood.

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MENACES

• Asteroid
• Climate change
• A stop in the Gulf Stream
• A super disease
• Super terrorism?
• Nuclear war—the worst menace but much less lik

now that the Soviet Union has collapsed.

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WHAT ABOUT THE BACKWARD COUNTRIES?

• The technology that made the West prosperous is av

able worldwide.

• Success in advancing has been mixed.
• Their success is fundamentally their own problem.
• Blame-the-West ideology has been harmful, especi

in providing excuses for their own politicians.

• Religions have often been harmful.

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OTHER PROBLEMS—discussed on web site

• waste disposal
• pollution
• biodiversity,
• disasters
• wars. Outside the scope of this lecture.

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DOES IT MATTER WHETHER WE BELIEVE PROGRESS IS SUSTAINABLE?

• Yes, because important policies depend on it.
• If progress were not sustainable, we’d be making thi

last as long as possible, and there would be real compet for the remaining scraps of resources.

• As it is, the poor countries can follow the paths p

neered by the rich.

• The current energy religion is a mistake.

Conserv energy pays when it saves money.

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REFERENCES

• Details on all these questions are in

www.formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ and its subsid pages.

• Bjorn Lomborg’s recent The Skeptical Environmenta

makes most of the same points, but he doesn’t ment nuclear energy. He has taken tremendous flak from pessimists in the scientific community.

• The State of Humanity, edited by Julian Simon ma

many of the same points. He seems to have believed t population could not be a problem. I think it could but it isn’t except in a few countries.

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ADVICE

• Develop prosperity, science and technology.
• Help backward countries get more technology.
• Help them get birth control technology; but maybe t

already have it.

• I’m an extreme optimist.What’s that?

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• An extreme optimist is one who believes the world

probably survive even if it doesn’t take his advice.

SUPERSTITIONS AND PREJUDICES

• The intellectual world today is rife with superstitio

Some are prevalent among scientists.

• Many believe organic food is healthier, but its ad

cates resist the idea of testing the proposition scient

• cally. The bans on GMOs and radiation sterilization w

added to the official organic specifications purely a trarily, because the organic enthusiasts have additio prejudices.

• The anti-nuke movement is a superstition.
• The anti-GM food movement is a superstition.
• However, the superstitions common in advanced co

tries haven’t recently led to large scale violence.

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QUOTATIONS We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error w tell us that society has reached a turning point, that have seen our best days. But so said all before us, a with just as much apparent reason . . . On what princ is it that, when we see nothing but improvement beh us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1830 in Edinburgh Revi ”The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 197 and 1980’s hundreds of millions of people will starve death in spite of any crash programs embarked up now.” - the first sentence of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 “T Population Bomb”

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At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial crease in the world death rate. - Paul Ehrlich, Populat Bomb, p.11 “We can and should seize upon the energy crisis a good excuse and great opportunity for making some v fundamental changes that we should be making anyh for other reasons.” - Russell Train, Science 184 p. 10 7 June 1974. Train was EPA Administrator at the tim and soon thereafter became head of the World Wild Fund.

Farmers...can no longer keep up with rising demand; t the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices (Le Brown 1974); Global food insecurity is increasing...the slim excess growth in food production over population is narrow (Lester Brown 1981); Population growth is exceeding farmers’ ability to k up...Our oldest enemy, hunger, is again at the door (Le Brown 1989); Humanity’s greatest challenge may soon be just mak it to the next harvest. (Lester Brown 1995) - all quo from the Worldwatch annual State of the World by Vac Smil in his Feeding the World.

Rewards for tight seals are high: young Holsteins co gain between 100 and 200g more a day when fed alfa from a tightly covered silage as opposed to feed co ing from uncovered silos (Staples 1992). - Vaclav Sm There are thousands of such micro-improvement. ”I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough say that man is immortal simply because he will endu that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged a faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in last red and dying evening, that even then there will s be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible vo still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that m will not merely endure: he will prevail.” - From Willi Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, delivered 1950.

IDEOLOGIES

• As a phenomenon in human affairs, ideology requ

analysis just as much as climate. See my http://ww formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ideology.html.

• An 11th century analysis

Now this religion happens to prevail

• Until by that one it is overthrown,

Because men dare not live with men alone,

• But always with another fairy tale.

—-Al Maari, about 1040

• The enlightenment ideology, to which I adhere, do

inated discourse by scientists until 1960. Maybe it s does.

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• In contrast to widespread opinion, I believe that

Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eightee centuries got it mostly right. The assumptions they ma about a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of kno edge, and the potential for indefinite human progress the ones we still take most readily to heart, suffer witho and find maximally rewarding as we learn more and m about the circumstances of our lives. - E. O. Wilson his 1998 Consilience.

• Pessimistic ideologies, emphasizing punishment for

manity’s sins, have had their ups and downs. Which s depend on the era The last 40 years has been an up

• pessimism. Jared Diamond’s latest book Collapse rese

bles 19th century fire and brimstone preaching.

Perhaps there’s a genetic tendency to pessimism— schizophrenia.

• Is a green Hitler possible? No sign as yet, but I wor
• Will people have SUVs in 2100 if they want them?
• Are there specific worries I should discuss?