One idea advanced by some futurologists is the idea of a post-scarcity economy. The concept is that technological progress will produce a future in which there is plenty for everybody, and goods and services are perhaps even free or almost free.
Is this a credible concept, or is merely wishful thinking? Let us look at arguments for future abundance, pro and con.
Energy Abundance, Pro: Our supplies of crude oil may not last for many more decades, but there's a huge amount of other types of oil such as shale oil and tar sands oil, enough to last for centuries. Soon we will be able to start building cars that run on hydrogen, and we have an unlimited supply of hydrogen available (since each water molecule is two thirds hydrogen). There are more and more solar and wind installations, which will provide clean energy indefinitely. There are centuries of coal available. In addition, before long we will develop fusion power, which will give unlimited clean energy.
Proposed Fusion Power Plant
Energy Abundance, Con: Our future energy situation is grim. We have only decades left of crude oil, and the other types of available oil (such as shale oil and tar sands) are much harder to extract than crude oil. The EROI (Energy Return on Investment) for oil sands and shale oil is only about 5, which is only about 25% or less of the EROI from crude oil. So severe future oil shortages are likely. The “we have centuries of coal” claim has been made for decades, but is not accurate. Recent studies suggest coal production will peak in a few decades, and then sharply decline. In regard to hydrogen vehicles, hydrogen is an efficient way of storing energy produced from other sources, but hydrogen does not by itself provide energy. So a hydrogen vehicle infrastructure can't really be a replacement for our present oil vehicle infrastructure. Solar and wind power are growing rapidly, but still only provide such a small fraction of the world's power that even if their present growth rate continues, we won't have enough renewable energy to make up for fossil fuel shortfalls. As for nuclear fusion, it would solve many problems if we were to figure out how to make it practical. But people have been trying for sixty years to create nuclear fusion reactors, without success, so we shouldn't assume it will be available in our lifetimes.
Metals and Materials Abundance, Pro: Ever more efficient automated technology for mining should mean that we will have enough metals and minerals to meet any needs we may have in the future. More powerful and efficient sensor technology should allow us to find more and more metal deposits. There is a huge untapped potential for undersea mining, which should become feasible once robots are sufficiently advanced. Eventually we will master asteroid mining, and once that gets rolling we will have a basically endless supply of metals and minerals.
Metals and Materials Abundance, Con: Experts estimate that based on current reserves we have only ten to twenty years left of new production of some important metals, including strontium, argon, antimony, gold, zinc, tin, indium, zirconium, lead, cadmium, and barium. The outlook is only slightly better for metals such as mercury, tungsten, copper, thallium, and manganese. The graph below (and this article) highlight the situation.
Source: A.M. Diederen, The Oil Drum (see link above)
Thus from a metal and minerals we have
before us a future of scarcity, not abundance. Asteroid mining is no
panacea for this problem. There are huge technical difficulties and
dangers in asteroid mining, one being that if you divert an asteroid
to come near Earth, you run the risk of having it fall it on the
planet and killing millions or billions. As for the oceans, they
contain huge quantities of metals, but they are dispersed so much it is
not practical to do much mining of the oceans. It has been estimated
that the seawater in the oceans has enough gold to make everyone a
millionaire, but it doesn't do you any good, because it isn't
practical to mine that gold.
Food Abundance, Pro: The Green Revolution produced a huge increase in global food production, and this trend will likely continue. Genetic engineering and gene splicing will create new types of super crops that will allow for more abundant crop yields. Ever more efficient robots will make farms super-productive. We may even be able to produce food from its constituent elements by using 3D printers that are optimized for producing food.
Food Abundance, Con: The prospects of being able to feed all the world's growing population are grim. Global warming will lead to an increase in droughts that will hamper food production. Soil depletion is a gigantic little-discussed problem that threatens future food production. Our water resources and aquifers are being strained and stressed in many places, and we probably won't be able to supply adequate irrigation to insure adequate food production. In addition, our food production and food delivery system is largely based on oil (used in transporting and packaging food and producing fertilizers). But Peak Oil will probably cause shortages of oil that will limit food production.
Manufacturing Abundance, Con: 3D printers are great at printing out little plastic trinkets that people don't really need, but they can't print out things made of metal or wood or stone. So 3D printers won't result in some abundance of goods that will make much of a difference in people's lives. As for atomic manufacturing, the rosy forecasts of visionaries such as Eric Drexler have been disputed by other experts. Nobel Prize winner Richard E. Smalley disputes Drexler's claims, saying that there are physical reasons why we will never be able to create machines that can assemble things atom by atom. Smalley cites a “fat fingers” problem, which is that no matter how small we make tools to assemble matter, our tools will be too large, and we will be like a person trying to stack grains of sand with his fingers. As for industrial robots, some are very good at manufacturing, but they are very expensive, which means they won't allow for a cheap surplus of goods.
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So there you have the case for and the case against a super-abundant future. My own opinion is that there is a chance of both a future of abundance and a future of scarcity. So how should the average man behave? The prudent morality is to conserve, and limit consumption.
To give an analogy, imagine you are on a ship traveling across the Pacific, and the ship sinks. You and five others jump into a life boat, on which you have a limited number of supplies. Now in such a case you can be optimistic, and assume that your life boat will be picked by a big ship with lots of food for you. But given the large possibility that you will be facing a grave scarcity of food and water, the only moral way to act is to limit consumption. If your lifeboat had enough food to feed all 5 people for ten days at 1500 calories per day, it would be immoral for you to consume 3000 calories on one of those days, even if you had a hunch that before the tenth day you would be saved by the lucky arrival of a passing ship. Our whole planet is like the lifeboat in this analogy. There is a large chance that we will be suffering great scarcity within a few decades, as well as a significant chance that we will avoid such scarcity through technological wonders (the equivalent of the passing ship that saves the people in the lifeboat). The moral way to act is to conserve and limit consumption, to minimize the pain that will occur to others if the more pessimistic outcome occurs.
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Scientists have long been bothered by why the physical conditions, laws and fundamental constants of the universe seem to be so fine-tuned to allow the existence of planets such as ours and living beings such as us. On page 235 of his book Chaos and Harmony, a University of Virginia professor of astronomy (Trinh Xuan Thuan) stated this:
"The evolution of the cosmos is determined by initial conditions (such as the initial rate of expansion and the initial mass of matter), as well as by fifteen or so numbers called physical constants (such as the speed of the light and the mass of the electron). We have by now measured these physical constants with extremely high precision, but we have failed to come up with any theory explaining why they have their particular values. One of the most surprising discoveries of modern cosmology is the realization that the initial conditions and physical constants of the universe had to be adjusted with exquisite precision if they are to allow the emergence of conscious observers. This realization is referred to as the 'anthropic principle'...Change the initial conditions and physical constants ever so slightly, and the universe would be empty and sterile; we would not be around to discuss it. The precision of this fine-tuning is nothing short of stunning. The initial rate of expansion of the universe, to take just one example, had to have been tweaked to a precision comparable to that of an archer trying to land an arrow in a 1-square-centimeter target located on the fringes of the universe, 15 billion light years away!"
One excellent book is the rather poorly titled book “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith” by Stephen M. Barr, a physics professor at the University of Delaware (which doesn't at all brush away religious thinking as an ancient relic, despite the title). In that book there is an interesting discussion of “anthropic coincidences” that are necessary for our existence. One example given is that of a parameter called v. On pages 126-127 the book makes these interesting comments:
"The long technical name of the parameter v is 'the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field.'....The value of v is a great puzzle to particle theorists; in fact, it is one of the central puzzles of physics. What is puzzling is that in reasonably simple theories v seems to want to come out to be, not 1, but a number like 1017, i.e, 100,000,000,000,000,000...As far as the possibility of life emerging in our universe is concerned, it would be a disaster for v to be 100,000,000,000,000,000. It would also be a disaster if it were 100,000,000,000,000, or if it were 100,000,000, or if it were 100,000, or if it were 100. Indeed, it would be a disaster if it were 10, or 5, or even 1.5. It would probably be a disaster if v were even slightly different from the value it happens to have in the real world."
So nature “hit the bullseye,” a very distant bullseye, it would seem. This is only one of many astonishing “coincidences” required for our existence. Barr lists seven other such cases, one of which is even more dramatic: the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant. As Barr puts it on page 130 of his book:
"In order for life to be possible, then, it appears that the cosmological constant, whether it is positive or negative, must be extremely close to zero – in fact, it must be zero to at least 120 decimal places. This is one of the most precise fine-tunings in all of physics."
It would be very hard to overestimate how thoroughly all major objects in our universe depend upon the fundamental constants being just right. It is not merely that the existence of extremely organized things such as mammals depends on a fine-tuning of fundamental constants. It is also that the existence of objects such as stars and planets depend on such a fine-tuning. On pages 64-65 of his book "The Symbiotic Universe," astronomer George Greenstein (a professor emeritus at Amherst College) said this about the equality of the proton and electron charges (which have precisely the same absolute value):
"Relatively small things like stones, people, and the like would fly apart if the two charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Large structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion."
In fact, experiments do indicate that the charge of the proton and the electron match to eighteen decimal places. Because of the dependency of stars on a very delicate fine-tuning of fundamental constants, you can state it this way: a random universe would be both lifeless and lightless.
In an attempt to explain such things, physicist Lee Smolin long ago advanced a groundless theory he calls cosmological natural selection, a theory it seems no other scientist endorsed. It's a theory of a cyclical universe in which the laws of the universe change in each cycle. At the center of the theory is black holes.
In his book Time Reborn, Smolin describes the theory as follows:
"The basic hypothesis of cosmological natural selection is that universes reproduce by the creation of new universes inside black holes. Our universe is thus a descendant of another universe, born in one of its black holes, and every black hole in our universe is the seed of a new universe. This is a scenario within which we can apply the principles of natural selection."
Smolin claims to have a theory of how the physics of the universe could evolve through natural selection. But how on earth can we get anything like natural selection out of the idea of new universes being created by the formation of black holes? Smolin gave the following ridiculously strained reasoning: (1) he claimed that the physics that favors a habitable universe are similar to the physics that favor the production of black holes; (2) he claimed that a new universe produced by a black hole might have slightly different physics from its parent universe; (3) he claimed that random variations in physics that would tend to produce universes that produce more black holes would cause such universes to produce more offspring (more universes); (4) he claimed that as a result of this “increased reproduction rate” of some types of universes, we therefore would gradually see the evolution of physical laws and constants that tend to favor the appearance of life and also the production of black holes.
The speculations described above hinge upon the linchpin claim that a new universe can be produced from the collapse of a huge star to form a black hole. Some analysts let Smolin get away with making this claim, but there is no reason why that should be done. The idea that a new universe can be produced from the collapse of a black hole is a complete fantasy, with no basis in fact. We have no observations to support such a theory. Nor is there any physics or mathematics to support such a theory. There is no way to write an equation in which you put a new universe on the right side of an equal sign.
The idea of universes being produced from black holes is a very silly one. A typical black hole arises from the collapse of a star with only about 20 solar masses. A universe like ours has a mass-energy of at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 solar masses. Claiming a new universe can arise from a black hole is like claiming a planet can arise from a grain of sand. Black holes don't create universes; they are instead something that arise when the biggest stars die.
Also contrary to observations is Smolin's groundless speculation about a black hole collapse causing a local fluctuation in fundamental constants of a universe, a speculation essential to his theory. Our universe has plenty of black holes. But we see no local fluctuations in the fundamental constants of the universe anywhere.
Smolin claimed that one advantage of his theory of cosmological natural selection is that it makes a falsifiable prediction. In a 2004 paper (page 38) he lists one such prediction:
“There is at least one example of a falsifiable theory satisfying these conditions, which is cosmological natural selection. Among the properties ...that make the theory falsifiable is that the upper mass limit of neutron stars is less than 1.6 solar masses. This and other predictions of CNS have yet to be falsified, but they could easily be by observations in progress.”
But by now this prediction has proven to be incorrect. In September 2019 a science news story reported on observations of one of the most massive neutron star ever found. We are told, “The researchers, members of the NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center, discovered that a rapidly rotating millisecond pulsar, called J0740+6620, is the most massive neutron star ever measured, packing 2.17 times the mass of our Sun into a sphere only 30 kilometers across.” A 2021 story lists the mass of this neutron star as 2.14 solar masses.
Later there was a science news headline of "Black Widow Pulsar Sets Mass Record." A Sky and Telescope story tells us this:
"The pulsar PSR J0952-0607, which is some 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Sextans, already holds the title of second-fastest-known rotator, spinning around its axis 707 times per second. Now, it has also shattered the record for most massive neutron star known, weighing in at 2.35 solar masses."
A CNN story confirms; it states, "The PSR J0952-0607 star is 2.35 times the mass of the sun."
So the theory of cosmological natural selection has been falsified. Its creator Smolin told us exactly what observations would falsify it; and just such observations occurred. The theory of cosmological natural selection has attracted very little attention from physicists, and a search for the term on the Cornell physics paper server produces only five matches, none published later than 2013. Smolin (the creator of the theory) rather seems to have lost interest in it. A search for his papers on that same server shows none in the past 13 years that advocate for the theory. Smolin has moved on to some other theory he calls "biocosmology," one I discuss in my post here.
But recently there appeared an article trying to revive the dead horse that is the theory of cosmological natural selection. It's an article by some CEO, one entitled "The universe is fine-tuned for technology, not just life."
Shainline confesses this:
"There are problems with CNS [cosmological natural selection] as Smolin originally formulated the idea, since it states that parameters should be optimized to maximize production of black holes made by stars. Empirically testing the claim suggests that this is probably not the case. The parameters of the universe don’t appear especially finely tuned to maximize black-hole production via stars."
But then Shainline tries to offer an "epicycle" to patch up the already falsified theory. He refers us to the 2008 paper "POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS OF THE QUANTUM THEORY OF GRAVITY: An Introduction to the Meduso-Anthropic Principle" that you can read here. It's a paper that starts out like this: ""If we assume that the constants of nature fluctuate near
the singularity when a black hole forms (assuming, also, that physical
black holes really do form singularities) then a process of evolution
of universes becomes possible." Such a statement should have been something like this: "If we assume that the constants of nature fluctuate near the singularity when a black hole forms (assuming, also, that physical black holes really do form singularities) -- and if we also assume senselessly that a black hole destroying a star would create a new universe, and we also senselessly assume that such a new universe would have some fluctuations of the universe's fundamental constants arising at just one spot in the old universe merely because some black hole had formed -- then a process of evolution
of universes becomes possible."
The quotation below from the paper gives a passage that seems laughable:
"The conjecture which I believe modifies Professor Smolin’s conclusions is the following:
SUCCESSFUL ADVANCED INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATIONS WILL EVENTUALLY CREATE BLACK HOLES.
The synthesis of this with Smolin’s two conjectures is what I call the meduso-anthropic principle. Before exploring the implications, let us consider the plausibility of this conjecture.
SUBCONJECTURE 1: SUCCESSFUL ADVANCED INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATIONS WILL EVENTUALLY WANT TO MAKE BLACK HOLES
and
SUBCONJECTURE 2: SUCCESSFUL INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATIONS WILL EVENTUALLY BE ABLE TO PRODUCE BLACK HOLES.
It is fairly clear, at least, that the conjecture follows from the two subconjectures. (This paper is not on the mathematical level of rigor)."
No, it does not make sense at all to think that successful advanced industrial civilizations would want to make black holes. Black holes do not serve any purpose. And the creation of a black hole would be beyond the power of any civilization. It would require gathering up and concentrating twenty solar masses, which is the same amount of matter as in about 600,000 Earth-sized planets. That would be beyond the reach of any imaginable technology.
The paper Shainline has referred us to is nonsense. But at least Shainline has got one thing right. His title is, "The universe is fine-tuned for technology, not just life." And that is correct.
My diagram below illustrates the point. A barely habitable universe (allowing only the simplest of life, and only short-lived organisms) requires much less fine-tuning than a moderately habitable universe. And a luxury-permitting universe like the one we live in requires much more fine-tuning than a universe that is merely moderately habitable.
Our universe is not just a universe that allows some type of life. It is a universe allowing the existence of high-tech technological civilizations, and creatures that have long lifetimes in stable environments. That type of universe (allowing the existence of elements such as gold, silver, iron, copper and the "rare earth" elements used in computers) requires much more fine-tuning than a universe merely allowing the simplest life and organisms with short lifetimes.
For an in-depth discussion of why luxury results such as we have in our universe defeat all multiverse explanations of our universe's habitability, read my post "Our Luxury Results Debunk the Multiverse As an Explanation."
With a speculation such as Smolin's, you cannot simply start out by imagining a universe like ours with black holes, and then speculate that when such black holes are created, they produce other universes. To explain cosmic fine-tuning by appealing to black holes, you would have to first start out with some random universe that has no fine-tuning. Then you might ask yourself: would such a random universe ever have black holes in the first place? The answer is: no, it would not.
Just as living beings require a universe with incredibly high fine-tuning, black holes themselves require a universe with incredibly high fine-tuning. Study the infographic visual at the beginning of this post (discussing how black holes are formed), and also study Greenstein's quote about the fine-tuning needed for the existence of stars. Black holes only arise when stars much more massive than the sun finish burning up their nuclear fuel. But the existence of such stars requires very special physics fine-tuning fantastically unlikely to exist by chance. As I once stated in another post, random universes are both lifeless and lightless.
So what would happen if you started out with a random universe? There would be no stars brightly burning by thermonuclear fusion (which requires very precise fine-tuning), and no black holes arising when such stars entered the last stage of their lifetimes. So Smolin's phantasmagorical sequence of events could never get started.
The reasoning above is based on assumptions of black holes forming as they form in our universe, from the collapse of super-massive stars. But there's another way to get black holes in random universes. If the vacuum energy density can have random values in random universes, then you would have universes in which empty space would be far denser than steel, because of a cosmological constant gigantically many times larger than the convenient "almost nothing" cosmological constant we have. In such universes, black holes might be forming all the time, because of the collapse of super-dense concentrations of matter. The problem is that once you consider this way of forming black holes, then you destroy a crucial pillar of Smolin's theory of cosmological natural selection -- that universes producing black holes would be like universes compatible with life.
Trying to recruit black holes to explain the universe's fine-tuning is like trying to recruit a rock to be your university's next physics professor.
A theory of a physicist may be very much a "castle on a cloud"
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