We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata movie spoiler quote of the day This universe has finite resources, finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correcting.
Avengers: Infinity War spoilers below.
— Thus spoke Thanos, before killing half of the population of the universe. It is nice that the Malthusian, Club of Rome, socialist bastard is a bad guy in at least some movies. A very flawed (by over-complicating things and having too much sympathy for the notion of finite resources when the simple answer is that more people create more wealth) Forbes article discusses this further.
Update: A commenter reminded me that Thanos is also an environmentalist (something which did occur to me while watching the film). There is a Reason article about that.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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āThis universe has finite resources, finite.ā
Er, no. It doesn’t. Infinity is kind of the universe’s āthingā.
As always with a Hollywood film or a television show – when a leftist comes out with their ideas there is no real reply.
Yes the heroes oppose mass murder (good – that is something), but they have no real ideas or arguments to oppose the leftist. That is never the case in Hollywood films or in television shows – leftist ideas are the only ideas the entertainment media (and the “mainstream” news media and the EDUCATION SYSTEM) really know.
This lack of any ideas in their mental “universe” means that they can not reply to even a genocidal leftist.
Even so called “Classical Liberal” “Capitalist” publications have no real ideas and evidence with which to reply to a leftist, even a genocidal leftist. Witness the pathetic “Economist” magazine.
Sam, there is only one infinity! We need to be careful how it is managed! And if we start, by putting out the light at the end of the tunnel, and not giving ourselves big ideas, the Universe might just survive, so we can hand it on to our heirs. I think if we stay on depressants for a few generations, we’ll be able to do it.
I have to say that I thought it striking that the villain of this movie was a radical environmentalist, what I think of as a Black Green. I wondered if any of the people working on the movie realized what it was suggesting.
sortat like the nearest dictator will make sure there will be no people (or life) that disagrees with the
latest leader..
so infinite life will carry on..
So then you only need to kill the half that reproduces at more than replacement.
Wait, what did you just call me?
Behold, the finity of the universe!: https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/690957main1_p1237a1-673.jpg
Oh wait …
It was with some elation that I read one day that the distribution of matter in the universe seemed to suggest, (against all apparent probability given freedom to choose an initial density and energy) that the universe seems “flat”. Not closed and finite like many of the popular models proclaimed in the 90s, not hyperbolic and doomed to a short lifespan.
While mankind will probably never know the smallest fraction of what we can now survey, (even if our space-operatic dreams are realized), and while I’ll probably never personally travel outside our planet, it is (don’t have the word here) calming to know that it exists and that there is always something more.
I take my mentally handicapped relative to superhero films.
He loves them.
To me they seem longer than double German when I was 13.
I thought that Guardians Of The Galaxy (I) was the finest piece of mindless entertainment I’ve seen in years. It was funny, you could root for the clear good guys with no moral tricks or ambushes, and it reminded me of movies back when I was a kid.
I also loved the first two Thor movies, for the same reasons. I think I would get along nicely with your relative.
(I realize I’m not contradicting your main point here. Yes, this is my own personal mental handicap. But if you hang with people who adore Tolkien, you appreciate modern attempts at fantasy too. Sometimes you just get tired of thinking, and so you bury yourself in neato visuals accompanied by “here are the good guys – just root for them, and all will be well, with no moral quandaries or ambiguities.”)
(BTW, thanks to y’all, now I can’t get that damned “To Infinity And Beyond!” cry of Toy Story out of my mind.)
Infinity is not the same as ‘a very.very, very big number’.
I have seen this confusion on this site before; I have seen comments here that there is no need to be concerned about the growing population of Earth.
The Earth’s resources are very big,same for the Solar System, there is no point talking about what lies outside the Solar System. There is room for much further exploitation but the resources are not infinite. They are finite. With fewer people to share those resources there will be more usable wealth for people.
Gee, James, we’d better find a hyperdrive then! Or how to make convenient wormholes as in ‘Contact’ and ‘Interstellar’.
“With fewer people to share those resources there will be more usable wealth for people.”
Were we all much richer a hundred years ago, when there were a billion people, or now, when there are 7 billion?
Even assuming a closed, finite universe … when we are talking about resources on a cosmic scale we are talking about matter and energy. People don’t consume those, they just shift them from one to the other and back again. The only finite resource in the universe, in fact the only finite resource that can really be said to exist at all, is energy.
Thanos needs to bone up on his physics. The heat death of the universe will occur whether there are sentient beings in it or not.
People in more or less capitalist countries are rich beyond the possible imaginings of those 1 billion alive 100 years ago.That’s a tribute to markets, not population growth.
In other countries – yes, richer but not unimaginably so. Happier? Arguable.
A major issue here is the very vague term “resources”. How important is Al now? Very. How important was it 150 years ago? As the old cliche goes the Stone Age di’t end because they ran out of stone. The only really “universal” resource is energy and we ain’t scratched the surface on that.
William H Stoddard: it occurred to me at the time that he was an environmentalist but I forgot about that when writing this post. See also https://reason.com/archives/2018/04/30/thanos-the-villain-in-avengers-is-just-a
By the way the Universe might not actually be infinite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
Bobby b: “I thought that Guardians Of The Galaxy (I) was the finest piece of mindless entertainment Iāve seen in years.” Agreed.
James Strong: more people => more thinking => more inventions => more growth. I suspect that’s a stronger effect than whatever the down-side to a larger population might be. There will be a tipping point somewhere but it doesn’t seem likely we will get there.
I skipped past the spoilers and also the comments (for fear of more spoilers) but I wanted to mention a post, elsewhere, that SWMBO brought to my attention.
In it, the author opined that the biggest disappointment with this movie was that at no point did either Robert Downey Jr or Benedict Cumberbatch say to the other “No shit, Sherlock?”
>Sam, there is only one infinity!
No! As Cantor showed, there’s an infinity of infinities.
(Then again, there’s only one infinity of infinities.)
You clearly have a good understanding of what ‘infinity’ actually means. You clearly have no idea whatsoever what ‘wealth’ actually means.
I mentioned this in an old comment, but I think it is apt enough to bear repeating.
Decades ago, a visiting professor stood up in the basement lecture room of the Oxford maths department and said, āIn this lecture, I will assert that the universe is closed and boundedā. With no warning, (the storm came on suddenly) a bolt of lightning struck a house on Rose Hill (more than a mile away), knocking it down, while thunder rolled around the town, sounding, in that basement auditorium, like an explosion. In the shocked silence that followed, a voice said, āPhil, see if you can get way with claiming the universe is of finite domain.ā
We spent the next few days making provocative scientific statements in the hope that further helpful heavenly hints would be vouchsafed, but none came. There was also much discussion whether the lightning meant that the universe was open and infinite, or whether it was indeed closed and bounded, but this dangerous knowledge was not to be bruited widely.
For myself, I’ll bet on the big crunch – but I’m not quite sure how to collect my winnings if I am right.
and, as is also stated in the movie by many of the heroes, thanos is insane and a murderer.
the belief that resources are finite never made much sense to me. we still live in a world where more than half our food rots on the shelves because we produce far more than we will ever need. we produce so much it’s considered more cost effective to deliver this surplus only for it to be wasted, than to not have enough.
āThis universe has finite resources, finite.ā
No it does not. A resource is in the imagination of Mankind, and the product of his invention and his innovation. Resources do not exist outside the imagination of Mankind and Mankindās imagination is infinite.
For example, coal (solar battery) existed in the Earth for around 300 million years but was not a resource until within the last 200 years after Mankind had invented it; ditto oil, gas, uranium, silicone. Electricity has always existed but Mankind made it a resource in just the last 100 years or so.
Therefore it is impossible to quantify the resources on Earth or in the Universe because we have not thought of all of them yet or know what they might be.
People who say that resources are finite or running out have a God complex, believing they know all things now and in the future.
So let me get this straight. Thanos offs half the population, right? And this is supposed to fix things permanently how? Wouldn’t the population (assuming it was growing, which after all was Thanos’ assumption) be back at pre-destruction levels in a generation or two? Poor ol’ Thanos is going to have to travel the universe perpetually to keep things under control. Dummy.
To get into infinities… …. (that feels right) ….. (as does that) infinity is a tricky thing. Rudy Rucker’s “Infinity and the Mind” is well worth a read on this score. There are loads of infinite set of numbers but my fave has to be the ineffable cardinals.
Anyway I am giving serious thought to blogging myself (again). I have a kick-ass domain parked but my wife reckons I ought to just use WordPress or something. I want my own space and I also want to hack the basement if you catch my drift – I have previous dating back to my Speccy days and this “configure your site in 15 mins” stuff leaves me cold – I want to be hurling (Geordie) cuss words at my Thinkpad at 5am and awaking the squirrels. So what do you think?
I know that is going OT but I reckon I can ask that here. If anyone is interested it will be very NickM which means not especially ostentatiously political but more about what really interests me ;-). I’ve only ever really been interested in politics as something to be put down like a rabid (or just minging) hound.
Anyway, your thoughts would be kindly appreciated.
Anyway I am giving serious thought to blogging myself (again). I have a kick-ass domain parked but my wife reckons I ought to just use WordPress or something. I want my own space and I also want to hack the basement if you catch my drift ā I have previous dating back to my Speccy days and this āconfigure your site in 15 minsā stuff leaves me cold ā I want to be hurling (Geordie) cuss words at my Thinkpad at 5am and awaking the squirrels. So what do you think?
For my own website, I use bluehost.com. It’s a hosting service that provides an SSH interface to an account on a linux server. I pay about $15ish a month for it, and use it to experiment with a lot of the web software. (For the blog portion of my site, I do use wordpress, but it’s my wordpress set up on my server. I can back it up to my PC if need be.)
The other thing you could do is set up a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL) – that will let you do most things. Configure the apache server to talk out at a certain port, configure your router to forward that port to port 80 externally, and set up your domain to point to your home IP address. This should let you see your home server from the internet. Then you can do whatever. I also do this. I run a minecraft server on an old tower. I also run a WebDAV server that synchronizes my library of papers between computers.
Very interesting MRS. Thank you. I have my domain parked at 1&1 (in Germany – Angela Uber Alles! and all that). I just need about 30 quid for two years so that is not an issue. My wife’s issue was mainly that it wouldn’t get traffic at what is essentially an indy site with its own URL as opposed to a one of those quicky things where people stick-up pictures of their cat. I no longer have a cat anyway :-(. That brings up the secondary issue – does anyone want to read my musings on (mainly) philosophy of science, culture, SF and aircraft.
So is an indy blog worth the candle these days. I think so. Anyhow it is probs worth a pop. All I really need is the tech to add the twitter et al stuff to posts and to make it friendly for phones etc. Then it is me just trogging on using AceHTML.
During a trip to TESCO I decided to make it so. Partially because I have a lot to say but also because both technically and otherwise I will enjoy the learning process. There was a time when I couldn’t talk to girls without making a right tit of myself and I am now married.
Anyway, as I said “Make it so”…
It’s invisibletigers.net.
But give it a bit before I become click-bait.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what Iāve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
– Robert Frost.
Whatever happens it’ll be One Hell of a Ride(TM).
Build it and they will come…Nick.
NickM, blog away please. But can’t you just point your fancy domain name at WordPress? I concluded that LAMP servers are for people who want to administer web servers, not for people who want to blog. I remember the CountingCats server was hopeless… š
Back on topic: http://www.didthanoskill.me/
Assume population growth at 0.69%/year, which is not very much. That means 1,000x growth in 1,000 years, which is not very long in geological terms, or in the history of our species.
Could the Earth support seven trillion people?
Space habitats filling the entire solar system could house that many, but wait another 1,000 years: now there are seven quadrillion people.
Forget about interstellar expansion: if it was possible, someone else in the multi-billion-year history of the universe would have done it already and we wouldn’t be here.
Or possibly, somebody else already did it … which is why we are here. :>)
Rob,
This is not CCinZ rejiggled. I will not be running the server. I do have ideas that way (and something wicked this way comes…) but this is technically hosted by the biggest server site in Europe and not in a shed in Brisbane.
I am not asking for ideas here. If I’m honest (and I usually am) I’m advertising. If I’m really honest… We shall have to wait and see. The only reason I announced this so publicly was to make me do it.
I am now stuck with my invisible tigers. Like so many things they date way back.
“Finite”…is often invoked by the zero-sum thinkers, those of “primitive mind” (i.e. think in hunter-gatherer tribal terms) who don’t understand that the productive word is positive sum.
“Renewable” is a real thing, but infinity is not. Infinity is an unreal mathamatical concept.
Even time itself, in a practical sense, isn’t infinite. (In a heat-dead universe, time is completely irrelevant, and it seems that time had an origin.)
Infinity does not exist; there are no infinite “things”. Things or systems might be unbounded, but in any given instance, there is X-amount of it. Which is why infinity is used as a limit in mathematics. Yes, there is a bit of irony in infinity being a limit.
Graveyards are full of people who extrapolate linearly, Rich….
Thanos doesn’t seem to understand why we’re not all knee-deep in bacteria. And the reason is not that one very powerful super-bug decided to “off” half of all other bacteria in the world. It’s the reason that the world won’t have 100 billion people tripping over one another, suffering from over-population created famine. The OBVIOUS truth (that even smart Leftists like Carl Sagan missed) is that population growth is related to environmental factors, and that organism behaviors change in accordance with environmental factors.
Imagine if some government bureaucrat came up with the “necessary” plan to suddenly kill off half the deer population in the world because forested area on earth is “finite”. The very concept is absurd.
But then…you know…comic book. Right?
Indeed. I find it very interesting that the net momentum of the entire universe is zero. And the net total energy of the universe is precisely zero. A battery, charged or uncharged, has a net energy of zero. (Uncharged: zero plus (-)zero is zero. Charged 12v battery, -6 + 6 = 0). Voltage is simply a relative difference of charge between two reference points.
Certain (sloppy) astronomers like Laurence Krauss, like to say that the universe’s “flatness” suggests that it “could have came from nothing”, but this is a torture of logic.
“Nothing” doesn’t exist. Indeed, only “somethings” exist. Nothing and existence are opposite, incompatible concepts. There was never an existent nothing, for the same reason there have never been five-cornered triangles.
OK, I’ve seen the movie now. My two takeaways from this post are:
a) I’m with bobby b on Guardians Of The Galaxy (I).
b) If the universe was flat, wouldn’t cats have knocked everything off it by now?
Thailover @ May 5, 2018 at 9:25 pm:
Or increased population results in greater predation, or collapse of food sources leading to mass starvation, or lethal pandemics.
Government agencies regularly come up with and carry out plans to kill off substantial parts of the deer population in areas where there is a finite amount of forest. Such culling is needed to avoid having swarms of starving deer wandering into people’s back yards, or obstructing roads.
Rich,
What do starvations result in? Lethal pandemics? And wouldn’t such events have an effect on human reproduction as well? Avoiding such disasters is a pretty good incentive to come up with coping technologies and practices, no? What I’m saying is there are optimal and sub-optimal self-correcting mechanisms to the population bomb.
And while culling deer does exist it certainly can’t be described as greater predation. At least in my area culling of deer is needed to prevent them dying from sudden SUV collision, not to help the forest. And people demand the government do the killing since the government owns the deer. In areas designed specifically for people to kill deer for sport the population is precisely what the owner intends it to be. Essentially too many deer is a 1st world problem.
What population bomb?
Finally, i got around to watching the movie: i could have watched it last week for 3 euros, but the Scottish side of my personality insisted on waiting for an opportunity to watch it for 2 euros.
The first thing to say is that the spoiler in the OP is very mild: i would not have minded reading it before watching the movie. (In fact, i had already been “spoiled” at PJM.)
The next thing about the OP is to ask a question:
What’s the difference between being a Malthusian, Club of Rome bastard, and an environmentalist?
OTOH Malthus was definitely NOT a socialist afaik.
I’ll add remarks about the movie, and the comments in this thread, as they come to mind.
One thing to say is that this is certainly not the first movie in which the main villain is hell-bent on population control via mass murder. To the best of my knowledge, the first was Kingsman: the Secret Service; although the villain in there only wanted to cull the human race, not all the races in the entire Universe.
Two more reasons why people with our political attitudes should like the movie:
* It implicitly endorses constitutionalism and the separation of powers: as long as the Infinity Stones are kept in different hands, there is little to fear; the real trouble starts when they are all in the same hand.
* It praises “toxic” masculinity, as demonstrated by this quote, taken from IMDb:
That Drax line was one of the bigger laughs of the movie š
Rob: agreed. Although, i would not have laughed so much before installing a pullup bar at home.
One more remark before i sleep on it. This is just so that i can later say: i told you so. And if you don’t want to risk a potential spoiler, stop reading RIGHT NOW!!
Did you notice how many of the characters risk the fate of the Universe to save just one person dear to them? Loki, the Scarlet Witch, Gamora, and most inexplicably, Dr Strange.
Consider also this dialogue:
Taken together, these facts suggest that Dr Strange’s strategy has not actually failed. But we shall see.
True for the unproductive who live in a zero-sum environment like hunters and gatherers and wolves and Deer. For those of us who come after the Neolithic period, We have economy and barter. (Human) Famine isn’t caused by overpopulation, is caused by War and disease and corrupt Warlords and corrupt governments. When an economy is healthy, if you have a local scarcity, prices go up and others will bring the the commodity to the market where scarcity is, thus eliminating the scarcity. (“Greed”, ie profit seeking is good.) It’s good to know the difference between a shortage and scarcity.
The entire human population of the world could populate a land mass the size of Texas and the average population density would be less than current-day New York City.
The “the world’s overrun by people” perspective is largely fueled by the fact that a lot of people view of the world as being swarmed with people because a lot of people are themselves in the midst of small localized swarms of people IE heavily populated cities. Worldwide, people are spread pretty thiny.