With this sentence I guessed that Obama was reelected.  I just checked on wikinews.  I was not wrong.

The definition of rival fits into a road, as long as you consider a single use not being for the whole road, but for the actual surface on the road where your car is.   You can't stack cars one on top of an other, that's why the surface of the road is a scarce/rival ressource.

No.  I just don't live in a big chinese city.  The fact that pollution exists does not mean that air is scarce on earth.  Just as the fact that my bedroom is a mess doesn't mean that my town is not cleaned up often enough.

At most, you can say that air is scarce in some areas of China.  We talked about that already.  You can always make something scarce locally, sure.  But it would be a serious abuse of language to conclude that air or see water are scarce commodities.

Is see water scarce, according to you?
 

I thought this was the definition or rival

But ok, let's say "scarce" means "rival".  I'm not sure this world is used in the economic sense in english but it really is in my language, so that may be a source of our disagreement.  Also, in my language, "post-scarcity economy" is translated into "économie de l'abondance", so to me it was natural to think that scarcity is the opposite of abundance.


There is a problem with this definition, imho.   Scarcity *does* depend of quantity.  You just can't say  "regardless of its quantity".  If a resource is abundant enough, then it can be used by several people at the same time.  Not the same actual atoms or molecules, sure, but still the same ressource.

If I can dig into a stock without significantly consuming the stock, then this stock is still available for other uses.  So it is not scarce, by your definition.   Don't you agree that your definition can be understood this way?

It'd be interesting indeed.  Yet all plants suddenly disappearing is quite a extreme hypothesis.  I don't worry about it happening any time soon.  So I don't worry about the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere.  To me, it is abundant and it will likely stay so for a long time.   I can breathe it without stealing anyone.

If my robot does the work with the energy it gets from the sun, to me there is no cost.  There is the price I paid for the robot (and again the robot might have been built by another robot, we talked about it), but this has been paid already.  The aditional value is free (zero marginal cost).

You can, locally, turn any normally abundant resource into a scarce resource.  Nothing fancy about this.  It happens in some particular situation.  Water in a desert, oxygen in a spaceship, and so on.  That does not mean you can say that the concerned substance is a scarce substance per se.  It has been made so by a very particular situation.  In a sealed room, I also would worry if you're with me breathing some air.  But that doesn't tell you anything about the scarcity of oxygen on earth.

You wrote:  «because it is continually replenished by plants».  So you were talking about present plants.  I stressed out that current levels of oxygen are mainly due to prehistorical heritage of the plants activity. If all plants were to disappear, the oxygen levels would probably not drop to zero in a few days (yes, I'm exaggerating here)


Lol.  I'm not on Ceres myself.  I'm not even in space.  I stay on earth and I let my robots do all the work.


I'd like to ask you the question again:  do you seriously worry about other people breathing your oxygen?  Are you really going to insist on saying that air is a scarce commodity?

I can't help noticing from your signature that you provide a conflict resolution service.  If the above quote is representative of your way to deal with conflict resolution, I find it quite amusing.  

Not long in a sealed room.  But outside, I don't worry about you breathing oxygen.  There is a LOT of oxygen in the atmosphere, not just because of current plants activity, but because of the Great Oxygenation Event which occured 2.4 billion years ago.  I've never made the calculous, but I bet that if all plants were to disappear right now, all humans will die of hunger much before they die of suffocation.  So no, I don't consider that when you breathe you steal some of my oxygen.  Well, technically you do but I don't care at all because I consider oxygen to be abundant enough not to worry about it.

Self repairing systems need material indeed, that can be found in environment.  It does not vanish in the ether.   Organic life uses and recycles dead bodies.  It just needs energy to transform it into something that can be used again.  And once again, there is plenty of energy available.   If life can do it, machines could, at least theoretically, do it as well.  They'll do it themselves, which means that you won't have to sustain or help them, which means that there will be no cost.   Q.E.D.

This scenario is perfectly compatible with an infinite universe.

It's a common mistake to think that the big bang theory means that the whole universe was at some point concentrated in a singular point.  It was not necessarly.  All we know from the cosmological observation is that galaxies move away from one another according to Hubble's law.  By extrapolating this law in the past, we can deduce that about thirteen billion years ago the universe was extremeley dense and hot.  But it could very well be still infinite!   It could have been hot, dense, and yet still infinite.  However close you go to the crucial moment, it was getting hotter and denser, but always staying infinite.

No, I reject the notion that it matters as much as you think it does, or that it can be interpreted as a loss or a cost.  If we are enclosed in a 100m^3 room I can understand that the air I breathe might be a loss (or cost) for you, but this loss is twice smaller if we are in a 200m^3 room,  ten times smaller in a 1000m^3 room and virtually null outside.



Indeed I neglect them.  Marginal cost for extracting sun's energy might be so low that I wonder how you would take account for it.  Say this cost is 1MBTC.  After everything is developped and something similar to a Dyson sphere is functional, you create 1TJ of energy per year.  You can neglect maintenance cost since the system self-repairs.   So the cost of your annual production is 1mBTC/J after one year.  After two years, this cost has halved (because you produced twice the energy for the same cost).  Ater n years, the cost is 1/n mBTC/J.  The more time passes, the less is the importance of the initial investment in the cost.  Because you paid for the construction of the production system, you don't pay for the energy it produces.

I never said that a post-scarcity economy was certain in the future.  I just said it was possible.

I'm afraid I just ignore it because from what you've been describing I just don't agree with the idea.  You tell me I have to understand it but maybe I do and I just think it's wrong.   To me, not winning something is not a loss. (PS.  and also, as mentionned earlier, the fact that if it's a cost, it's inversely proportional to the amount of the resource, so it's virtually zero for an abundant resource such as air).

Yes, a lot of matter is needed indeed.  Maybe using the entire mass of Jupiter would not be enough.  I don't know.  But we weren't discussing the feasibility of a Dyson sphere, we were discussing whether it would make sense to use the energy of the sun to build it if it were possible.  I think it does providing you have enough matter and that your machines can self-replicate (yes indeed I insist on that, because it's totally necessary imho).


I genuinely don't know.  But again, it seems that the more advanced a society is, the less children it makes.  Will humanity keep expanding exponentially for centuries?  I don't know.  But it's absolutely not certain.

You've probably already seen it, but just for reminding:



The sun is big and powerful.  I know that humanity is kind of egocenric and megalomaniac, but hell, I think it's a reasonable assumption that we will never need more energy than what the sun can provide.

Also, myrkul initially wrote, and even underlined:  "Infinity does not exists".   Then we tell him that it is very much possible that the universe is actually infinite.   So yeah, infinity might very well exist and saying that "it does not matter because we can not measure it" is very much contradictory with his initial underlined statement.

Plus, there are plenty of infinite things in maths and physics.  I actually wonder what myrkhul means when he says that infinite does not exist.  If there was no Planck length, I'd say that any distance contains an infinite number of subdistances, for instance.

It doesn't require much for a self-replicating machine.   Consider a tree seed.  It's just a tiny thing which costs almost nothing.  Put it in the ground in a place where it has room to grow and a few years later you have a whole forest.  It would be the same with a self-replicating machine.  It could gather a substantial fraction of the sun power (with a dyson sphere or something) with very little initial investment.

I don't understand what you mean, here.

Indeed.

They are not even fringe theories, either.   We tend to forget it since Einstein has accustomed us to curved space times, but a globally flat, euclidian and thus infinite universe is totally compatible with current cosmological knowledge.

Last time I heard someone defend this idea, it was Brian Green in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkoUSFk9lM0

Reminds me of a discussion I had once about lotery.  I was trying to convince someone that playing lotery is just a waste of money.  He kept telling me that as long as there is a chance, however small it is, to win the jackpot, it is worth playing.  I asked him if he would play if the odds to win was one against one billion.  He would.  one thousand billion?  He would.  I didn't asked him but if I had mentioned a googol, I guess he would have played as well.

Sometimes when numbers are really big, it makes sense to consider them infinite.  Physicists do that all the time.


Demographics prospective, based of empirical observation that in developed countries, the fertility rate tends to decline below the replacement rate.  It seems that being educated is not much compatible with having children.

4e26 Watts.  A nuclear power plant is about 200 MW.  So the sun has the power of 2e15 20th-century-technology-styled human power plants.  That's two million billions power plants.   Let me remind you that there are currently seven billion human beings, and there are several reasons to doubt humanity will ever count more than ten billion members. So the sun could, in a type I civilization of 10 billions human beings, provide the power of almost one million power plants per inhabitant.

Tell me:  is there a number for which you think it is reasonable to consider it is infinite?  What power would it take for you to consider that humanity would have more than enough?  A whole galaxy?

I don't buy this.  Yes, that reduces the supply of that resource, but by a proportion that is all the more negligible that the resource is abundant.  When people around you breathe, do you honestly think they are reducing the amount of oxygen available to you?  Does it really bother you?


Energy is not the issue.  The sun is insanely big.   For all intents and purposes, we can consider that it provides a free and infinite source of energy.


LoL

I was just thinking that if I send some robots in the solar system, I could worry about my robots being stolen by some other crazy guy, so I could give them quite a bit of artificial intelligence and an evolutionary algorithm for reproduction so they can defend themselves.  But if I do so, they could became self-aware and start wondering why they should obey me in the first place...

So that's your opportunity cost again.  I definitely don't get this thing.  Maybe I miss something and I'll read this wikipedia article someday.  But right now, to me there is no cost as long as you don't exhaust the resource.  Even if I make a lot of robots, I probably won't exhaust resources in the solar system.  Not because I can't (I probably could), but because I don't have to.  So in a nutshell, there is no cost since there is enough resource for everyone(*).
Hell, even if I did mine all the asteroids and planets and moons of the solar system, the matter is still here, in the robots.  I'll probably have more than enough (jeez I know human greed is enormous, but not that much), so I won't bother if other people destroy some of my robots to build some for them.  But well now maybe someone will try to destroy all of them and we'll have a crazy interplanetary war, so in this case you might be right.  Yet I don't think the solar system is not big enough to satisfy all human greed.


Oh yeah, the grey goo, funny concept I heard about recently, I forgot where.  IIRC, I heard or read a conclusion from a scientist on this subject, according to which there is nothing to worry about.  Won't happen.


*:  PS and again, at least from a theoretical point of view, you can create matter out of pure energy.  The sun radiates about 4e26W, that's four million tons of matter per second.  A very advanced civilization could make lots of stuff with that.

Say I buy an autonomous, post-scarcity-style robot for 100 bitcoins.   I tell him:  "go and figure out a way to multiply yourself".  Then the robot starts extracting minerals from the ground, builds a factory and make copies of himself.  Then they build a spaceship, travel to the asteroïd belt (I know this is wild SF, but that's the subject),  extract more minerals, build even more factories, more spaceships and so on.  After ten years one million of them come back to earth, waiting for my orders.

It's just as if I had bought, with only 100 bitcoins, one million robots.  With a ten years delivery delay, though.   Notice that it's an exponential law.  If I give the same instruction to each of the robots now, ten years later each of them will have created one million new robots.  So in twenty years I'll have one thousand billion and one million robots (10e12+10e6).   That's much less than a satoshi per robot.

What I mean is that once you have self replicating machines, the price (or cost, if you want) of the initial units does not matter at all.  By allowing the machines to multiply themselves, you can make the price per unit arbitrary low.   And to me, when something is arbitrary close to zero, it is zero.