A (subtly different) version of this piece appears in video form here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlcQ4ZFKrKk
The universe is hostile. It harbours no ill-will against us - it has no will - but nor is it merely neutral. Mindless cosmological forces have conspired to create dangers known (comets, cancers, coronaviruses , coronal mass ejections, crust collapse, calderas &c) and more worrying: unknown. The catastrophes we are rushing headlong towards and which, by definition we have no words for yet. At least the terror of “he who must not be named” in principle could be, and so understood as a problem in need of a solution. But “that which cannot be named” lacks even that cold comfort, lurking, as it were, beyond our consciousness and so unfit even for nightmares. The unknown becomes known only through discovery: knowledge creation. That the universe is not merely neutral with respect to our existence is illuminated by the fact that without a relentless commitment to finding solutions, the universe will present us a problem that will extinguish us just as it has for every other species for billions of years. Why should we be an exception, and how? Only in this way: we understand all this. We, uniquely, recognise the dangers out that and around here. But we also know where hostility lurks so does opportunity and resources: our means of salvation. Wealth: the capacity to transform our locale from “hostile” into “home”. There is no upper bound to our wealth - no inherent physical limitation placed upon us by any law of nature preventing us from ever more effectively preparing for problems known and unknown by increasing our wealth for transforming what might have hurt us into what now helps us.
And the universe is growing. When, on March 28th 1949, the great astrophysicist Fred Hoyle (who largely single handedly explained how the elements of the periodic table are almost all manufactured in the core of stars) attempted to mock the idea of an expanding universe by calling it a “Big Bang” the jig was up: we were no longer in a static universe. Now we know that not only is the universe getting bigger but the rate at which it’s doing so is increasing: as though trapped in perpetual adolescence.
The relatively new science of precision cosmology not only brings us a picture of a universe where space is growing but where the amount of matter, both seen and unseen, is at once vast and yet dwarfed by an even greater quantity of energy that drives that accelerating expansion. It would appear, therefore, that the contents of the universe for all practical purposes are infinite. And although the fine details are subtle and open to debate there is at least an argument that can be made, given both the expansion of space and the dark energy driving the acceleration - that the capacity to do work in the universe is likewise increasing without bound.
So far as we know, we people here on Earth, may be the only things in the universe looking out on the rest of it and attempting to form theories about it. That is, we may be the only place in the universe where knowledge of the universe is being created. As David Deutsch has pointed out both in his talks and books: this place, and no other is a special hub. In one respect we are in the outer suburbs of a typical galaxy among hundreds of billions - but on the other we are a central hub of knowledge creation which contains an increasingly high resolution explanatory reflection of the whole rest of the universe and all of its contents from the smallest to largest scales.
When we think of the word “home” do we think of our personal residence only? Do we think of our town or nation? Do we think of our planet? All of these would be needlessly narrow ways of conceiving of our place in the cosmos. For our home, in truth, is the universe. The whole universe is the environment we find ourselves in. Our residence (along with the rest of civilisation) is our bulwark against the rest of the environment around us which is terribly hostile: both to us and every other life form on this planet.
Of course we may not be alone and may yet discover that we share this cosmological environment with others - but we do not know about them. Whoever they are and wherever they might be: we can know little about them yet but we can constrain some of their properties. Whoever they are, they may not transgress the laws of physics and if they are capable of creating a civilisation then they possess one very special property that we do: the ability to uncover those physical laws that govern them as much as us and the rest of the universe and so they too (like we) can form ideas (especially in the form of technology) which make clever use of those laws to control the matter and energy within the universe to do good work. Good work which is absolutely vital to survival in the face of all sorts of evils found in an unfriendly universe (evil which we define as: harmful problems we do not yet have solutions for).
The good work that people do comes in many forms: we provide food to ourselves and each other, supporting more people in good health now than ever before. We build structures to protect us from a terribly hostile environment. We are the only species to routinely attempt to protect the diversity of other species (often at great cost) rather than viewing almost all other life forms as competition. We have flown free in very large part from what our genes "code for". Our minds think beyond our own mere self interest - they can think and overcome genetic "desires" with ease. Indeed our minds can stretch the very limits of physical law (and, within the abstract world of our imaginations, can even easily exceed what physics allows to occur in the physical world).
Yet for all this infinite mental capacity that people possess we encounter a continuous stream of threats to both our happiness and even our very existence. Sometimes we even need to protect ourselves against each other and that requires us to make progress faster than those who would seek to do us harm. We find solutions to all manner of problems and in doing so uncover new problems that are better to solve than the ones that went before (think for example that the solution to what caused disease led to the solution of germ theory which opened up the problem of how to kill germs which led to the solution of antibiotics which opens up the problem of how to combat resistant strains of bacteria, and so on…)
But the creation of knowledge requires resources. The creation of knowledge - finding the solutions to the most pressing problems - requires us to transform matter from one form into another. The problem of how to keep warm requires us to take the raw material of cotton or fur and turn it into coats and socks and it requires us to take energy from one place to create heat in another place - often by burning some otherwise useless material like dead wood or buried oil. To solve problems faster still, we increasingly need computers to do some of the laborious drudge work and computers require energy too. That energy could come from the Sun - but if you want to work at night then you need to store that energy somehow. And that might take some fancy chemicals that require mining and more electricity - and more fuel and more specialised equipment. And to make the whole cycle work better one needs to make improvements: create knowledge again. Which requires more resources - and so on. The cycle of: discover and gather a resource -> fuel and facilitate knowledge creation -> discover and gather new resources to improve the old them must continue indefinitely because any almost any single resource is finite even if resources generally are infinite.
As David Deutsch has observed in “The Beginning of Infinity” - nothing whatsoever is a resource until someone has the knowledge of how to use it. There are parts of the universe around us today that we walk past and regard as worthless which at any moment some new piece of scientific knowledge could transform into a valuable commodity. A rock is just a useless rock until someone figures out how to get the minerals out of it. The vast salt lake of Uyuni, Bolivia was little more than a tourist attraction and source of, well, almost worthless salt for food flavouring until someone invented the lithium battery. The lithium in modern batteries found in computers and mobile devices comes from salt water or salt lakes (and in rare cases rocks) and the extraction is no easy process. It too requires both lots of knowledge and lots of energy and very specialised equipment (knowledge instantiated in resources). Half of the known lithium on Earth is found in the otherwise extremely poor country of Bolivia. A country that has been called “A pauper on a king’s throne” long before its lithium deposits were known about. Bolivia should hurry to extract as much lithium as it can and sell it fast at the best price it can get…for that lithium will power the computers of the foreseeable future upon which some child (Bolivian perhaps) who gets cheap internet access for the first time, learns about physics and electrochemistry and discovers a superior material, or alternative technique to lithium batteries for storing energy in computers. And when that happens, all that wealth that Bolivia now possesses will lose its value like so much asbestos did when scientific knowledge changed the value of that commodity. Sadly, for now, for Bolivia, a succession of nationalist and socialist governments have for decades stymied progress on this front. Bolivians may very well miss the boat (as they have on so many occasions) while governments argue about nationalising resources or worry excessively about small impacts on the environment. Lithium might not always be as valuable a resource as it is now. The chance for the Bolivian people to enrich themselves by selling this mineral could be lost forever if they don't find the will to make progress faster.
David Deutsch, in chapter 17 (‘Unsustainable’) of “The Beginning of Infinity” recalls a personal example of how at university some decades ago, he was told by some experts in the field that the end of colour display screens was in sight. At the time all coloured screens were of the cathode-ray type (CRT) and red pixels required (the physics was indisputable) the element “europium”. Just by happenstance this one element, when excited by electricity, produced just the right colour. But it was in terribly short supply. When it ran out there simply would be no way for a CRT to make red pixels. No red pixels: no colour screens. Now it’s true: no alternative element, no way of making pixels glow red *by that process* has been found to this day. But of course we have red screens aplenty and cheaper than ever. And how? Because we no longer use CRTs. Now I don’t know what else europium is used for today - the price could be up or it could be down. But the point here is: we simply cannot predict what new discoveries in science will completely change a market. What is a scarce and valuable resource one day might become useless trash the next. So it went with europium so it may become with lithium. And coal. But we need not “fix” markets - science fixes the problems of what a resource is or is not and how the damage of the use, if any, can be mitigated. Not economics.
Even if lithium is never replaced by something better in batteries (and one might argue that the end is far from in sight for lithium is exceedingly light and reactive: a wonderful combination for a portable energy source - but this is merely my prophesy) it must, one day, run out in Bolivia. And then we will have to turn elsewhere. The oceans contain much lithium: but it’s finite there too, of course. But in the universe? In the universe it is the third most abundant substance of all. The Big Bang created the universe and what “precipitated” out the primeval soup first was hydrogen and helium. And lithium. Sure, by the abundances of hydrogen and helium the amount of lithium was just a trace impurity - but on the scale of the universe it may as well be infinite so far as humans are concerned. But if we get to the point we are able to sweep intergalactic space for lithium: we probably won’t need to. For if we can do that we can probably just sweep up the hydrogen instead and use it in a fusion reactor.
Of course, lithium is just one thing we need. We need lots of other things too. And the Earth is finite. But the universe is not. The universe is, literally, infinite. And it is growing.
And it is hostile. Terribly so. There are dangers we know of: disease and drought, storms and earthquakes. Supernovae and asteroids, gamma ray bursts and solar flares. And perhaps worst of all: the things we do not even know about yet and so cannot possibly even begin to prepare for. We are at the Beginning of Infinity and we should expect to be startled one quiet Tuesday afternoon by an event as astounding, and inexplicable as, for example the appearance of a supernovae in the daytime sky was to the ancients (see for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supernova_observation). Happily those events were not harmful to our planet and are now relatively well understood. But nothing guarantees there are not similar strange (and lethal) phenomena lurking “out there” for which we have no explanation. So what we need is lots of knowledge and we need to generate it as fast as we can. And to do this we need everyone on board helping. And how? They need to solve the problems they are interested in as fast as they can so they can move on to better more interesting problems. And all this takes energy and resources. And typically lots of it. So we need to grow. If we don’t grow: if the population fails to grow, if civilisation fails to grow, if the economy fails to grow then knowledge will fail to grow fast enough to meet the challenges of a growing, hostile universe. Somehow our rate of solving the most deadly problems must exceed the rate at which they confront us. But that latter rate is not knowable: we cannot know how fast and of what sort - the problems of the coming days or years will be. So we must take David Deutsch’s advice: we need a stance of problem solving, not problem avoidance. We cannot avoid problems: we cannot avoid people who decide to suddenly and unexpectedly become violent - so we need a means of defence. We cannot avoid new strains of viruses and bacteria that could kill us: so we need a means of quickly finding antidotes when they do appear. We cannot avoid the next disaster that is found to be affecting our oceans or air: so we need a means to reverse the change. And we cannot avoid what might appear in the sky next: so we need people and institutions engaged in studying the world so we can quickly and cheaply determine if it might be harmful or not and how to reduce the harm. And all of this is to say we need lots and lots of resources and energy to fuel our problem solving.
Growth is what is needed. Not stagnation. Those who argue for smaller populations or smaller economies because they are parochially concerned about their own tiny neighbourhoods (even when that tiny neighbourhood is planet size) fail to understand that we cannot protect ourselves by hibernating upon the Earth, or worse; in one small corner of it. We cannot protect even ourselves, let alone our families, endangered species or the environment because, as melodramatic as it might sound, it must be the case that the day of cosmological reckoning is coming: a problem we have not yet foreseen out of the clear blue sky (or perhaps the deep blue sea) that could exterminate us all. It has happened to countless species before us. It could be a solar flare. It could be an asteroid. It could be a cosmological event or it could be a microscopic one that threatens all life...or perhaps just ours. Great extinctions have happened many many times before. Why should we be so special? Well only in one way: by creating the knowledge to swiftly deal with what the hostile universe throws at us. And to do this takes wealth (the capacity to transform the universe into what we want or as David Deutsch defines the term with more precision: the repertoire of physical transformations that (we) would be capable of causing). Wealth requires turning resources into widgets and (technological) solutions. And it requires turning useless materials into resources. And that step takes knowledge. But it must happen quickly. Not so quickly as to carelessly cast aside all caution; but quickly enough that progress in science is matched by progress in philosophy: of knowing when to pursue some course rather than the alternatives.
Some people have always attempted to use science against science by arguing that in biology there is such a thing as a “carrying capacity” (or some analogous idea) - the finite number of organisms that some area of land or volume of space can support given the finite food, water or other resources available. So the argument goes: because this lake is only so big, it can only support so many fish. And so it must be with people: Tasmania is only so many square kilometres - so it must be able to support some limited number of people. But this is false. Science changes the numbers continuously. As we learn more about how to support more people so the carrying capacity increases. People are unique.
Yet prominent thinkers and public intellectuals since mathematician Thomas Malthus in 1798 have argued that the carrying capacity for humans on our planet is limited and they have always been proved wrong. Malthus made his prediction based upon a rigorous mathematical analysis of the growth of human population (which he rightly knew was exponential) compared to the production of food (which he observed was linear). Exponential functions outrace linear ones and so it seemed mathematically watertight that sooner or later (Malthus predicted the 1930s) that humankind would reach a tipping point where famine would proliferate across the globe. Things would get worse, he argued. Upheavals, starvation and finally perhaps extinction would come for our species as we were unable to simply appreciate the logic that a finite planet could not support a forever growing population. Of course Malthus made this prediction over a century before the Haber process was discovered: the idea that hydrogen and nitrogen gases could be used to create ammonia and so artificial fertilizer and make previously barren land useful as farmland. And he made the prediction before modern irrigation and genetically engineered crops. In short he attempted to predict the content of future scientific discoveries and his prediction was: there’d be none. But we know knowledge can continue to grow if we people continue to solve problems as we always have. It’s what we do. It’s what we are best at. We are, as David Deutsch explains: Universal Problem Solvers. Whatever the problem, if it’s interesting enough, it can be solved and we can solve it.
But the lesson of the parable of Malthus has been slow to be learned by our culture. Indeed it seems never to have been learned no matter how many prophets of doom have argued in just the same way. Let's not catalogue a history of errors but rather just look at one of the most recent and one of the louder voices on the stage that uses precisely Malthus arguments. Some readers outside Australia might not know "Dick Smith" but he is an Australian entrepreneur (and "adventurer") of sorts who still can command the ear of the public and governments.
Once he was awarded "Australian of the Year" (for services to the community) but has supported The Greens and has even attempted to get others into Parliament on "population control" platforms (see "Dick Smith" ) He, and thinkers like him, promote some version of the Malthusian fallacy: populations are too great and growth is “unsustainable”. For a taste of this pessimism perhaps avoid his book but read his own article summarising the Malthusian arguments of the 21st century: http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/the-idiocy-of-endless-growth-20110529-1fata
He calls endless growth “idiocy”. He writes at that article, “No one can confidently predict where we will find the food, energy, water and resources needed to supply even the basic needs of so many people.” and quite right too. No one can “predict” what new scientific discoveries tomorrow will bring: that would be prophesy. But equally no one can predict (confidently or not) that the equivalent of the Haber Process won’t be uncovered by a chemist working diligently behind a computer screen or in a lab which would see even deserts become fertile places to grow food. Turning barren wastelands into gorgeously green crops is hardly a challenge that is beyond us - you might even choose to use solar power to green the desert: just Google examples of agriculture in the Negev Desert in Israel. That's is what you can do if you are optimistic about problems.
Of course if you think that deserts simply cannot be a place to grow food or if deserts can’t “support” a human population or, worse, if there’s nothing we can do to change the facts about how much land is needed to support some number of people you are liable not to search for solutions. You are liable instead to call for restraints on freedom. Minds that have decided to imprison themselves inside static walls and so unwilling to consider options are liable to not want other minds to be free to consider solutions either. Indeed, they are liable to call such minds “idiotic” (or worse). What these minds want to do is to suppress the very means of making progress: they want to call into question the very project of even considering how progress (and therefore growth) can be unbounded. They want to label as “wrong” or even “evil” the very good, optimistic philosophy that to solve problems we must increase our knowledge, our resources and - therefore - our people. For people are themselves resources of creativity and new knowledge. More people to do more creative work solve the problems of humanity faster. They are not the problem, as people like Dick Smith see, but the solution. The problem is the hostile world around us - and we need to do what we can to understand and thereby control it so we can protect the parts of it we care about: like ourselves. Now Dick Smith is very concerned in his book and article about how finite the planet is. Many people are. And, of course, it is true that the planet is finite. Many things are finite. Your house is finite in size. Your nation is. The planet is. Depending on how you define it: the solar system is. By definition, any 100 square meter block of land is finite. But finiteness of physical size is not much of a guide to anything unless you have some further assumptions. Consider for a moment: how many people can fit on a 100 square meter block of land? Let’s just guess for a moment. Pause and think. Imagine each person needs 1 square meter (to be comfortable). How many? 100? Well you need an assumption to get to that answer.
Everything turns on how creative you might be in coming up with an answer. How many dimensions one is thinking in certainly has a bearing. Skyscrapers fit many more people than you expect on 100 square meters. So might underground car parks. Whatever limit you think there is depends entirely on what assumptions you are making and what effect knowledge might have on the problem. Whatever the number is: it’s liable to change. But let us stick to the point Malthus (1798) to Smith (2011) and beyond are agitated by: all these people (possibly stacked one on top of another in apartment blocks) need food and resources to survive. Oh no! What now? What a terrible predicament we are now in: the knowledge that enables us to stack people is just exacerbating things. Well no. Again: however much land you need to grow food is itself subject to change. Far less people work in farming now than ever before but they can grow, on the same land, food to feed many many times more people than ever before.
But the amount of land is finite for growing food! Fine, we haven’t shown any sign of running short of farming land to feed everyone. And I like to imagine there could be skyscrapers of a sort for growing food, anyway. Food like any other resource we might want evolves and what was once finite might become infinite. Imagine if we found useable energy not only in sunlight but in empty space. We know it’s there - but we don’t know how to use it. It is very hard to estimate how many resources how many people on how much land might require: the numbers change with every new discovery.
Yet whole political parties are now in large part devoted to the very idea that people are the problem and “nature” is the solution. They are concerned about things like the “carrying capacity” of the planet and the destruction of the environment by people. The truth is these same people should be concerned about the destruction of people by the environment. The uncaring, soulless, mindless environment - it is forever thoughtlessly flooding, burning, infecting, blasting, starving, drowning, suffocating, freezing, or otherwise maiming or killing the loving, caring and creative people that eeek out an existence on its surface.
Now personally, I do care about gorgeous rivers and forests, birds, trees and koalas. I really do: I love to hike and run and swim when I can in what I think of as the beauty of nature. But we can preserve some places for some creatures - and ourselves - of natural beauty - without risking the existence of all of it. People are not evil: but some ideas are and some problems are a source of great suffering. And those problems come from our environment as much as from our fellow inhabitants of this planet. And despite what some scientists say: no - life on this planet would not be fine without us. Even the bacteria cannot flourish into the indefinite future. Without us: without the knowledge that humans have, the bacteria, like the cockroaches and everything else on the planet - even the planet itself - will be engulfed by the dying Sun as every astronomer who has ever had a podium has told us. So the difference between whether we, and all other life on this Earth survives is not a matter of whether we will exterminate it all (we don’t have the means) but whether the environment will. But even if we think the death of the Sun is too far off for Greenpeace to be concerned about there is the matter of all other manner of purely natural disasters that will kill our fellow travellers as much as us: all those treasured dolphins, tigers, whales and wolves of the wild cannot themselves solve the problems of dolphin viruses, droughts that kill wolves or floods that kill tigers. Yes, some people do silly things (like killing almost-extinct rhinoceros to harvest a horn that has absolutely none of the purported uses whatsoever) - but the solution to these types of problems is not to blame the growth of civilisation but to bemoan the lack of civilised ideas in the mind of some people. We need more civilisation in some places, not less. If you want to save rhinos (or whales or whatever else) then it is scientific and philosophically enlightened ideas - that are needed. Not the stagnations of growth.
The cosmos is an infinite place. Literally. It contains infinite resources. Literally. And what is a resource changes as our knowledge grows and the growth of knowledge is unbounded. But we need to fuel the growth of knowledge: that takes a mixture of energy (which requires resources) and freedom (to provide the environment in which creativity can flourish). But forces are arrayed against us. Anytime someone calls for restraints on freedom: they are arguing for less creativity. Anytime someone argues against the wise use of some resource: they are arguing against that which fuels the growth of knowledge. Those forces have always been with us and so then must be the response: freedom and resources need to be maximised to find solutions to the most pressing problems as fast as possible so that knowledge grows. Without this then because problems are inevitable it is possible that a problem will arise, from the clear blue sky, that we have insufficient knowledge to solve in sufficient time. So if someone argues for us to “slow down” or “stop growing” or “restrict” - take it personally. Because that speed hump might just be the one that causes us to miss the chance to save one life or many or find the solution to what some better resource might be or some way to support more people more cheaply on even less land with less resources.
What is wisdom today may be foolishness tomorrow. Once it was known that penicillin should be used to cure bacterial infections. Today that could be considered terrible foolishness given how many other antibiotics there are more properly suited to infection than penicillin ever was. One day it could be the case that resistant strains of bacteria make all penicillin stocks in the world rather useless. So what is a resource today many not be a resource tomorrow. Problems evolve as indeed knowledge does because the world is not static and people are constantly making progress at a rate that is faster or slower depending on the conditions they find themselves in. What changes useless matter into a valuable resource is knowledge and that must continue to grow.
But the growth of knowledge depends upon intelligently designed creativity. That is to say: the unique capacity of human minds. And as Karl Popper has taught us: “we are all equal in our infinite ignorance.” What is before us all is a constantly growing horizon which brings into focus ever more clearly the reality in which we find ourselves. But we need help: we can’t do it all alone. So we need each other - more people, not less. Of course: not so many that we all begin to suffer. But no one is suggesting that! More people, like me writing this and you reading this that have the wealth, the electricity, the energy and information to create the knowledge we all need.
So let us grow wealth and populations so that we may grow knowledge. Knowledge forms a web where the solutions that are found by one person in one area can have a profound effect upon the problems encountered by someone else in a completely different area. For though we cannot know what sort it will be we do know that one day a problem is coming that will either newly compete with or perhaps even dwarf our present concerns about climate change, tropical viruses, terrorism or whether AI will take our jobs. Problems are inevitable. And when that day comes we want to hope that we have put all the resources at our disposal into the hands of the problem solvers of the planet. For problems are soluble: but only if we have the knowledge.
The universe is hostile. It harbours no ill-will against us - it has no will - but nor is it merely neutral. Mindless cosmological forces have conspired to create dangers known (comets, cancers, coronaviruses , coronal mass ejections, crust collapse, calderas &c) and more worrying: unknown. The catastrophes we are rushing headlong towards and which, by definition we have no words for yet. At least the terror of “he who must not be named” in principle could be, and so understood as a problem in need of a solution. But “that which cannot be named” lacks even that cold comfort, lurking, as it were, beyond our consciousness and so unfit even for nightmares. The unknown becomes known only through discovery: knowledge creation. That the universe is not merely neutral with respect to our existence is illuminated by the fact that without a relentless commitment to finding solutions, the universe will present us a problem that will extinguish us just as it has for every other species for billions of years. Why should we be an exception, and how? Only in this way: we understand all this. We, uniquely, recognise the dangers out that and around here. But we also know where hostility lurks so does opportunity and resources: our means of salvation. Wealth: the capacity to transform our locale from “hostile” into “home”. There is no upper bound to our wealth - no inherent physical limitation placed upon us by any law of nature preventing us from ever more effectively preparing for problems known and unknown by increasing our wealth for transforming what might have hurt us into what now helps us.
And the universe is growing. When, on March 28th 1949, the great astrophysicist Fred Hoyle (who largely single handedly explained how the elements of the periodic table are almost all manufactured in the core of stars) attempted to mock the idea of an expanding universe by calling it a “Big Bang” the jig was up: we were no longer in a static universe. Now we know that not only is the universe getting bigger but the rate at which it’s doing so is increasing: as though trapped in perpetual adolescence.
The relatively new science of precision cosmology not only brings us a picture of a universe where space is growing but where the amount of matter, both seen and unseen, is at once vast and yet dwarfed by an even greater quantity of energy that drives that accelerating expansion. It would appear, therefore, that the contents of the universe for all practical purposes are infinite. And although the fine details are subtle and open to debate there is at least an argument that can be made, given both the expansion of space and the dark energy driving the acceleration - that the capacity to do work in the universe is likewise increasing without bound.
So far as we know, we people here on Earth, may be the only things in the universe looking out on the rest of it and attempting to form theories about it. That is, we may be the only place in the universe where knowledge of the universe is being created. As David Deutsch has pointed out both in his talks and books: this place, and no other is a special hub. In one respect we are in the outer suburbs of a typical galaxy among hundreds of billions - but on the other we are a central hub of knowledge creation which contains an increasingly high resolution explanatory reflection of the whole rest of the universe and all of its contents from the smallest to largest scales.
When we think of the word “home” do we think of our personal residence only? Do we think of our town or nation? Do we think of our planet? All of these would be needlessly narrow ways of conceiving of our place in the cosmos. For our home, in truth, is the universe. The whole universe is the environment we find ourselves in. Our residence (along with the rest of civilisation) is our bulwark against the rest of the environment around us which is terribly hostile: both to us and every other life form on this planet.
Of course we may not be alone and may yet discover that we share this cosmological environment with others - but we do not know about them. Whoever they are and wherever they might be: we can know little about them yet but we can constrain some of their properties. Whoever they are, they may not transgress the laws of physics and if they are capable of creating a civilisation then they possess one very special property that we do: the ability to uncover those physical laws that govern them as much as us and the rest of the universe and so they too (like we) can form ideas (especially in the form of technology) which make clever use of those laws to control the matter and energy within the universe to do good work. Good work which is absolutely vital to survival in the face of all sorts of evils found in an unfriendly universe (evil which we define as: harmful problems we do not yet have solutions for).
The good work that people do comes in many forms: we provide food to ourselves and each other, supporting more people in good health now than ever before. We build structures to protect us from a terribly hostile environment. We are the only species to routinely attempt to protect the diversity of other species (often at great cost) rather than viewing almost all other life forms as competition. We have flown free in very large part from what our genes "code for". Our minds think beyond our own mere self interest - they can think and overcome genetic "desires" with ease. Indeed our minds can stretch the very limits of physical law (and, within the abstract world of our imaginations, can even easily exceed what physics allows to occur in the physical world).
Yet for all this infinite mental capacity that people possess we encounter a continuous stream of threats to both our happiness and even our very existence. Sometimes we even need to protect ourselves against each other and that requires us to make progress faster than those who would seek to do us harm. We find solutions to all manner of problems and in doing so uncover new problems that are better to solve than the ones that went before (think for example that the solution to what caused disease led to the solution of germ theory which opened up the problem of how to kill germs which led to the solution of antibiotics which opens up the problem of how to combat resistant strains of bacteria, and so on…)
But the creation of knowledge requires resources. The creation of knowledge - finding the solutions to the most pressing problems - requires us to transform matter from one form into another. The problem of how to keep warm requires us to take the raw material of cotton or fur and turn it into coats and socks and it requires us to take energy from one place to create heat in another place - often by burning some otherwise useless material like dead wood or buried oil. To solve problems faster still, we increasingly need computers to do some of the laborious drudge work and computers require energy too. That energy could come from the Sun - but if you want to work at night then you need to store that energy somehow. And that might take some fancy chemicals that require mining and more electricity - and more fuel and more specialised equipment. And to make the whole cycle work better one needs to make improvements: create knowledge again. Which requires more resources - and so on. The cycle of: discover and gather a resource -> fuel and facilitate knowledge creation -> discover and gather new resources to improve the old them must continue indefinitely because any almost any single resource is finite even if resources generally are infinite.
As David Deutsch has observed in “The Beginning of Infinity” - nothing whatsoever is a resource until someone has the knowledge of how to use it. There are parts of the universe around us today that we walk past and regard as worthless which at any moment some new piece of scientific knowledge could transform into a valuable commodity. A rock is just a useless rock until someone figures out how to get the minerals out of it. The vast salt lake of Uyuni, Bolivia was little more than a tourist attraction and source of, well, almost worthless salt for food flavouring until someone invented the lithium battery. The lithium in modern batteries found in computers and mobile devices comes from salt water or salt lakes (and in rare cases rocks) and the extraction is no easy process. It too requires both lots of knowledge and lots of energy and very specialised equipment (knowledge instantiated in resources). Half of the known lithium on Earth is found in the otherwise extremely poor country of Bolivia. A country that has been called “A pauper on a king’s throne” long before its lithium deposits were known about. Bolivia should hurry to extract as much lithium as it can and sell it fast at the best price it can get…for that lithium will power the computers of the foreseeable future upon which some child (Bolivian perhaps) who gets cheap internet access for the first time, learns about physics and electrochemistry and discovers a superior material, or alternative technique to lithium batteries for storing energy in computers. And when that happens, all that wealth that Bolivia now possesses will lose its value like so much asbestos did when scientific knowledge changed the value of that commodity. Sadly, for now, for Bolivia, a succession of nationalist and socialist governments have for decades stymied progress on this front. Bolivians may very well miss the boat (as they have on so many occasions) while governments argue about nationalising resources or worry excessively about small impacts on the environment. Lithium might not always be as valuable a resource as it is now. The chance for the Bolivian people to enrich themselves by selling this mineral could be lost forever if they don't find the will to make progress faster.
David Deutsch, in chapter 17 (‘Unsustainable’) of “The Beginning of Infinity” recalls a personal example of how at university some decades ago, he was told by some experts in the field that the end of colour display screens was in sight. At the time all coloured screens were of the cathode-ray type (CRT) and red pixels required (the physics was indisputable) the element “europium”. Just by happenstance this one element, when excited by electricity, produced just the right colour. But it was in terribly short supply. When it ran out there simply would be no way for a CRT to make red pixels. No red pixels: no colour screens. Now it’s true: no alternative element, no way of making pixels glow red *by that process* has been found to this day. But of course we have red screens aplenty and cheaper than ever. And how? Because we no longer use CRTs. Now I don’t know what else europium is used for today - the price could be up or it could be down. But the point here is: we simply cannot predict what new discoveries in science will completely change a market. What is a scarce and valuable resource one day might become useless trash the next. So it went with europium so it may become with lithium. And coal. But we need not “fix” markets - science fixes the problems of what a resource is or is not and how the damage of the use, if any, can be mitigated. Not economics.
Even if lithium is never replaced by something better in batteries (and one might argue that the end is far from in sight for lithium is exceedingly light and reactive: a wonderful combination for a portable energy source - but this is merely my prophesy) it must, one day, run out in Bolivia. And then we will have to turn elsewhere. The oceans contain much lithium: but it’s finite there too, of course. But in the universe? In the universe it is the third most abundant substance of all. The Big Bang created the universe and what “precipitated” out the primeval soup first was hydrogen and helium. And lithium. Sure, by the abundances of hydrogen and helium the amount of lithium was just a trace impurity - but on the scale of the universe it may as well be infinite so far as humans are concerned. But if we get to the point we are able to sweep intergalactic space for lithium: we probably won’t need to. For if we can do that we can probably just sweep up the hydrogen instead and use it in a fusion reactor.
Of course, lithium is just one thing we need. We need lots of other things too. And the Earth is finite. But the universe is not. The universe is, literally, infinite. And it is growing.
And it is hostile. Terribly so. There are dangers we know of: disease and drought, storms and earthquakes. Supernovae and asteroids, gamma ray bursts and solar flares. And perhaps worst of all: the things we do not even know about yet and so cannot possibly even begin to prepare for. We are at the Beginning of Infinity and we should expect to be startled one quiet Tuesday afternoon by an event as astounding, and inexplicable as, for example the appearance of a supernovae in the daytime sky was to the ancients (see for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supernova_observation). Happily those events were not harmful to our planet and are now relatively well understood. But nothing guarantees there are not similar strange (and lethal) phenomena lurking “out there” for which we have no explanation. So what we need is lots of knowledge and we need to generate it as fast as we can. And to do this we need everyone on board helping. And how? They need to solve the problems they are interested in as fast as they can so they can move on to better more interesting problems. And all this takes energy and resources. And typically lots of it. So we need to grow. If we don’t grow: if the population fails to grow, if civilisation fails to grow, if the economy fails to grow then knowledge will fail to grow fast enough to meet the challenges of a growing, hostile universe. Somehow our rate of solving the most deadly problems must exceed the rate at which they confront us. But that latter rate is not knowable: we cannot know how fast and of what sort - the problems of the coming days or years will be. So we must take David Deutsch’s advice: we need a stance of problem solving, not problem avoidance. We cannot avoid problems: we cannot avoid people who decide to suddenly and unexpectedly become violent - so we need a means of defence. We cannot avoid new strains of viruses and bacteria that could kill us: so we need a means of quickly finding antidotes when they do appear. We cannot avoid the next disaster that is found to be affecting our oceans or air: so we need a means to reverse the change. And we cannot avoid what might appear in the sky next: so we need people and institutions engaged in studying the world so we can quickly and cheaply determine if it might be harmful or not and how to reduce the harm. And all of this is to say we need lots and lots of resources and energy to fuel our problem solving.
Growth is what is needed. Not stagnation. Those who argue for smaller populations or smaller economies because they are parochially concerned about their own tiny neighbourhoods (even when that tiny neighbourhood is planet size) fail to understand that we cannot protect ourselves by hibernating upon the Earth, or worse; in one small corner of it. We cannot protect even ourselves, let alone our families, endangered species or the environment because, as melodramatic as it might sound, it must be the case that the day of cosmological reckoning is coming: a problem we have not yet foreseen out of the clear blue sky (or perhaps the deep blue sea) that could exterminate us all. It has happened to countless species before us. It could be a solar flare. It could be an asteroid. It could be a cosmological event or it could be a microscopic one that threatens all life...or perhaps just ours. Great extinctions have happened many many times before. Why should we be so special? Well only in one way: by creating the knowledge to swiftly deal with what the hostile universe throws at us. And to do this takes wealth (the capacity to transform the universe into what we want or as David Deutsch defines the term with more precision: the repertoire of physical transformations that (we) would be capable of causing). Wealth requires turning resources into widgets and (technological) solutions. And it requires turning useless materials into resources. And that step takes knowledge. But it must happen quickly. Not so quickly as to carelessly cast aside all caution; but quickly enough that progress in science is matched by progress in philosophy: of knowing when to pursue some course rather than the alternatives.
Some people have always attempted to use science against science by arguing that in biology there is such a thing as a “carrying capacity” (or some analogous idea) - the finite number of organisms that some area of land or volume of space can support given the finite food, water or other resources available. So the argument goes: because this lake is only so big, it can only support so many fish. And so it must be with people: Tasmania is only so many square kilometres - so it must be able to support some limited number of people. But this is false. Science changes the numbers continuously. As we learn more about how to support more people so the carrying capacity increases. People are unique.
Yet prominent thinkers and public intellectuals since mathematician Thomas Malthus in 1798 have argued that the carrying capacity for humans on our planet is limited and they have always been proved wrong. Malthus made his prediction based upon a rigorous mathematical analysis of the growth of human population (which he rightly knew was exponential) compared to the production of food (which he observed was linear). Exponential functions outrace linear ones and so it seemed mathematically watertight that sooner or later (Malthus predicted the 1930s) that humankind would reach a tipping point where famine would proliferate across the globe. Things would get worse, he argued. Upheavals, starvation and finally perhaps extinction would come for our species as we were unable to simply appreciate the logic that a finite planet could not support a forever growing population. Of course Malthus made this prediction over a century before the Haber process was discovered: the idea that hydrogen and nitrogen gases could be used to create ammonia and so artificial fertilizer and make previously barren land useful as farmland. And he made the prediction before modern irrigation and genetically engineered crops. In short he attempted to predict the content of future scientific discoveries and his prediction was: there’d be none. But we know knowledge can continue to grow if we people continue to solve problems as we always have. It’s what we do. It’s what we are best at. We are, as David Deutsch explains: Universal Problem Solvers. Whatever the problem, if it’s interesting enough, it can be solved and we can solve it.
But the lesson of the parable of Malthus has been slow to be learned by our culture. Indeed it seems never to have been learned no matter how many prophets of doom have argued in just the same way. Let's not catalogue a history of errors but rather just look at one of the most recent and one of the louder voices on the stage that uses precisely Malthus arguments. Some readers outside Australia might not know "Dick Smith" but he is an Australian entrepreneur (and "adventurer") of sorts who still can command the ear of the public and governments.
Once he was awarded "Australian of the Year" (for services to the community) but has supported The Greens and has even attempted to get others into Parliament on "population control" platforms (see "Dick Smith" ) He, and thinkers like him, promote some version of the Malthusian fallacy: populations are too great and growth is “unsustainable”. For a taste of this pessimism perhaps avoid his book but read his own article summarising the Malthusian arguments of the 21st century: http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/the-idiocy-of-endless-growth-20110529-1fata
He calls endless growth “idiocy”. He writes at that article, “No one can confidently predict where we will find the food, energy, water and resources needed to supply even the basic needs of so many people.” and quite right too. No one can “predict” what new scientific discoveries tomorrow will bring: that would be prophesy. But equally no one can predict (confidently or not) that the equivalent of the Haber Process won’t be uncovered by a chemist working diligently behind a computer screen or in a lab which would see even deserts become fertile places to grow food. Turning barren wastelands into gorgeously green crops is hardly a challenge that is beyond us - you might even choose to use solar power to green the desert: just Google examples of agriculture in the Negev Desert in Israel. That's is what you can do if you are optimistic about problems.
Of course if you think that deserts simply cannot be a place to grow food or if deserts can’t “support” a human population or, worse, if there’s nothing we can do to change the facts about how much land is needed to support some number of people you are liable not to search for solutions. You are liable instead to call for restraints on freedom. Minds that have decided to imprison themselves inside static walls and so unwilling to consider options are liable to not want other minds to be free to consider solutions either. Indeed, they are liable to call such minds “idiotic” (or worse). What these minds want to do is to suppress the very means of making progress: they want to call into question the very project of even considering how progress (and therefore growth) can be unbounded. They want to label as “wrong” or even “evil” the very good, optimistic philosophy that to solve problems we must increase our knowledge, our resources and - therefore - our people. For people are themselves resources of creativity and new knowledge. More people to do more creative work solve the problems of humanity faster. They are not the problem, as people like Dick Smith see, but the solution. The problem is the hostile world around us - and we need to do what we can to understand and thereby control it so we can protect the parts of it we care about: like ourselves. Now Dick Smith is very concerned in his book and article about how finite the planet is. Many people are. And, of course, it is true that the planet is finite. Many things are finite. Your house is finite in size. Your nation is. The planet is. Depending on how you define it: the solar system is. By definition, any 100 square meter block of land is finite. But finiteness of physical size is not much of a guide to anything unless you have some further assumptions. Consider for a moment: how many people can fit on a 100 square meter block of land? Let’s just guess for a moment. Pause and think. Imagine each person needs 1 square meter (to be comfortable). How many? 100? Well you need an assumption to get to that answer.
Everything turns on how creative you might be in coming up with an answer. How many dimensions one is thinking in certainly has a bearing. Skyscrapers fit many more people than you expect on 100 square meters. So might underground car parks. Whatever limit you think there is depends entirely on what assumptions you are making and what effect knowledge might have on the problem. Whatever the number is: it’s liable to change. But let us stick to the point Malthus (1798) to Smith (2011) and beyond are agitated by: all these people (possibly stacked one on top of another in apartment blocks) need food and resources to survive. Oh no! What now? What a terrible predicament we are now in: the knowledge that enables us to stack people is just exacerbating things. Well no. Again: however much land you need to grow food is itself subject to change. Far less people work in farming now than ever before but they can grow, on the same land, food to feed many many times more people than ever before.
But the amount of land is finite for growing food! Fine, we haven’t shown any sign of running short of farming land to feed everyone. And I like to imagine there could be skyscrapers of a sort for growing food, anyway. Food like any other resource we might want evolves and what was once finite might become infinite. Imagine if we found useable energy not only in sunlight but in empty space. We know it’s there - but we don’t know how to use it. It is very hard to estimate how many resources how many people on how much land might require: the numbers change with every new discovery.
Yet whole political parties are now in large part devoted to the very idea that people are the problem and “nature” is the solution. They are concerned about things like the “carrying capacity” of the planet and the destruction of the environment by people. The truth is these same people should be concerned about the destruction of people by the environment. The uncaring, soulless, mindless environment - it is forever thoughtlessly flooding, burning, infecting, blasting, starving, drowning, suffocating, freezing, or otherwise maiming or killing the loving, caring and creative people that eeek out an existence on its surface.
Now personally, I do care about gorgeous rivers and forests, birds, trees and koalas. I really do: I love to hike and run and swim when I can in what I think of as the beauty of nature. But we can preserve some places for some creatures - and ourselves - of natural beauty - without risking the existence of all of it. People are not evil: but some ideas are and some problems are a source of great suffering. And those problems come from our environment as much as from our fellow inhabitants of this planet. And despite what some scientists say: no - life on this planet would not be fine without us. Even the bacteria cannot flourish into the indefinite future. Without us: without the knowledge that humans have, the bacteria, like the cockroaches and everything else on the planet - even the planet itself - will be engulfed by the dying Sun as every astronomer who has ever had a podium has told us. So the difference between whether we, and all other life on this Earth survives is not a matter of whether we will exterminate it all (we don’t have the means) but whether the environment will. But even if we think the death of the Sun is too far off for Greenpeace to be concerned about there is the matter of all other manner of purely natural disasters that will kill our fellow travellers as much as us: all those treasured dolphins, tigers, whales and wolves of the wild cannot themselves solve the problems of dolphin viruses, droughts that kill wolves or floods that kill tigers. Yes, some people do silly things (like killing almost-extinct rhinoceros to harvest a horn that has absolutely none of the purported uses whatsoever) - but the solution to these types of problems is not to blame the growth of civilisation but to bemoan the lack of civilised ideas in the mind of some people. We need more civilisation in some places, not less. If you want to save rhinos (or whales or whatever else) then it is scientific and philosophically enlightened ideas - that are needed. Not the stagnations of growth.
The cosmos is an infinite place. Literally. It contains infinite resources. Literally. And what is a resource changes as our knowledge grows and the growth of knowledge is unbounded. But we need to fuel the growth of knowledge: that takes a mixture of energy (which requires resources) and freedom (to provide the environment in which creativity can flourish). But forces are arrayed against us. Anytime someone calls for restraints on freedom: they are arguing for less creativity. Anytime someone argues against the wise use of some resource: they are arguing against that which fuels the growth of knowledge. Those forces have always been with us and so then must be the response: freedom and resources need to be maximised to find solutions to the most pressing problems as fast as possible so that knowledge grows. Without this then because problems are inevitable it is possible that a problem will arise, from the clear blue sky, that we have insufficient knowledge to solve in sufficient time. So if someone argues for us to “slow down” or “stop growing” or “restrict” - take it personally. Because that speed hump might just be the one that causes us to miss the chance to save one life or many or find the solution to what some better resource might be or some way to support more people more cheaply on even less land with less resources.
What is wisdom today may be foolishness tomorrow. Once it was known that penicillin should be used to cure bacterial infections. Today that could be considered terrible foolishness given how many other antibiotics there are more properly suited to infection than penicillin ever was. One day it could be the case that resistant strains of bacteria make all penicillin stocks in the world rather useless. So what is a resource today many not be a resource tomorrow. Problems evolve as indeed knowledge does because the world is not static and people are constantly making progress at a rate that is faster or slower depending on the conditions they find themselves in. What changes useless matter into a valuable resource is knowledge and that must continue to grow.
But the growth of knowledge depends upon intelligently designed creativity. That is to say: the unique capacity of human minds. And as Karl Popper has taught us: “we are all equal in our infinite ignorance.” What is before us all is a constantly growing horizon which brings into focus ever more clearly the reality in which we find ourselves. But we need help: we can’t do it all alone. So we need each other - more people, not less. Of course: not so many that we all begin to suffer. But no one is suggesting that! More people, like me writing this and you reading this that have the wealth, the electricity, the energy and information to create the knowledge we all need.
So let us grow wealth and populations so that we may grow knowledge. Knowledge forms a web where the solutions that are found by one person in one area can have a profound effect upon the problems encountered by someone else in a completely different area. For though we cannot know what sort it will be we do know that one day a problem is coming that will either newly compete with or perhaps even dwarf our present concerns about climate change, tropical viruses, terrorism or whether AI will take our jobs. Problems are inevitable. And when that day comes we want to hope that we have put all the resources at our disposal into the hands of the problem solvers of the planet. For problems are soluble: but only if we have the knowledge.