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Kaj_Sotala comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong
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It's an argument based on false premises. Limitations on resources have, in past, proven to be fairly meaningless, and there's no particular reason to believe this will change going forward. Every time we think we've hit a wall(running out of wood in the 18th century, whales in the 19th century, food in the 20th century, or oil in the 21st century), we've come up with new technologies to keep going without much trouble(coal, oil, GMOs/agricultural chemistry, and tar sands/fracking respectively). Limitations on space are even less relevant.
Conversely, we've built first-world societies on a governmental safety net that only actually works with an increasing population. If we don't grow, then pension plans will start detonating like someone's carpet-bombing the economy. (Yes, worse than they are already). I think the people who created those pyramid schemes should be taken out behind the woodshed for a posthumous beatdown, but it's a bit late to fix it now.
If you want to know what a negative population growth rate looks like, look at what will happen to China over the next couple decades. It's the biggest demographic time bomb in human history.
Also, if you're bringing sustainability into this, IMO the only truly sustainable option is to advance technology so fast that we can defeat the Second Law somehow. Anything else just delays the inevitable.
As far as I can tell, this argument seems to be the same as "technology has improved before, letting us overcome resource limitations, and there's no particular reason to believe that the new innovations will stop coming".
But that sounds much more suspect. There have been cultures that collapsed due to resource limitations before, and the current trend of very fast growth in our ability to extract more resources or replace them with more easily extractable ones has only been going on for some hundreds of years. "We will always be able to come up with the kinds of innovations that will save us" is a very strong claim, implying that observed cases of diminishing returns in various extraction techniques (e.g. taking advantage of tar sands requires a much larger energy investment and is much less efficient than traditional sources of oil, AFAIK) don't matter since we'll always be able to switch something completely different. There don't seem to be any strong theoretical arguments in support of that, as far as I can tell - only the observation that we've happened to manage it of late.
It's a somewhat weaker claim. Society isn't really dependant on any single resource - oil is the closest we come, and even oil is only really essential in aviation and certain chemical processes(and it can be synthesized for that). My claim is closer to "No essential combination of resources will run out before replacement technology is available". Still strong, admittedly, but weaker.
That said, I will freely agree that we're going to take a financial hit as certain supplies run low. Oil will likely never again be as cheap as it was 20 years ago, because the extraction of our reserve oil supplies is so much more complex and expensive. It won't be pleasant. But our society has a technological mindset, huge diversification, and a larger base of wealth than all of humanity before living memory combined. I think we'll do better than Easter Island did.
And yes, there's no theoretical reason it has to be true. But the accumulated evidence that it generally is is pretty strong. How many of the catastrophes predicted in recent centuries have actually come to pass, if society has had 5+ years to prepare? Peak oil, the population bomb, nuclear war, Y2K, expansionist Germans(twice!), the collapse of the Internet, and on and on. All of those were perfectly real concerns, and had the potential to be devastating if left unchecked. But we saw them coming, took steps to deal with it, and beat back all of them, many so thoroughly that nobody even noticed that they'd been and gone.