"Sam Wormley" <
swor...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:YaqdnbPAaPjkd1_S...@mchsi.com...
I haven't watched this video, but the title sugests an excellent reason why
we shouldn't worry too much about running out of resources.
At various times in history, both whales (for indoor lighting) and wood (for
building ships) were critical resources, and their depletion was a cause for
great concern.
As it turned out in this and hundreds of other cases - starting with the
shortage of rocks in the correct shape to be stone axe heads - this turned
out to not be a problem at all, as technology provided substitutes. These
substitutes turned out to be better than the original materials -
electricity is better for lighting than whale oil, and steel is better for
building ships than is wood.
Technology creates useful resources much faster than people consume them.
That is why we have sufficient resources to provide good indoor lighting for
billions of people, but in the mid 19th century we only had the resources to
provide mediocre indoor lighting for tens of millions.
If the experiences of the last 200 years tells us anything, it is that
Malthus was dead wrong. You should learn from history (which is another way
of saying you should test theories against experiment).