Re: ECON: Simon vs Ehrlich

Michael Lorrey (retroman@tpk.net)
Tue, 29 Apr 1997 19:19:40 -0400


Guru George wrote:
>
> On Sun, 27 Apr 1997 18:03:38 -0400
> Michael Lorrey <retroman@tpk.net> wrote:
> >Obviously there is plenty of oil that is too expensive to
> >recover right now, but as demand rises and prices inflate, those other
> >reserves become cost effective. This is one of the little lies that
> >environmentalists and conservationists tell to get support, because they
> >imply to the less intelligent people that there is ONLY 30 years worth
> >of oil at ANY price left. There is literally a HUGE supply of oil in
> >the ground, enough that it will be a few thousand years before we use it
> >all up at a minimum.
> >--
> An abstraction just occurred to me related to the above:- that the
> supply is virtually infinite because matter could, at the extremest limit,
> be transformed (recycled?) into oil, if we really wanted it, and had the
> technology.
>

Right on. AND, as market demand rises, inflation will eventually make
space travel, even using existing technology, cost effective. The day
you spend $1000.00 for a burger (and think you're getting a deal) will
be the day you can fly to the moon for a million bucks as part of a fare
ware among space lines. Once we reach that level, our resource base will
be infinite. Going the other way, using nanoassemblers takes recycling,
efficiency, and conservation to an extreme, which will make resources as
cheap and easy to obtain as air, while the tools that create them and
use them in ever increasing complexity will be costly at first, but will
be used like PCs to build better versions of succeeding generations of
themselves for less.

Please bear in mind that one can have inflation AND decreasing resource
costs at the same time in an economy, as more and more economic value
has to do with work, intellectual property, services. One can even have
rising resource costs in dollar value becomeing relatively cheaper over
time, as they become smaller and smaller parts of the economic pie.

-- 
TANSTAAFL!!!
			Michael Lorrey
------------------------------------------------------------
mailto:retroman@tpk.net		Inventor of the Lorrey Drive
Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com
Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com	http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/

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