(December 31, 2022 at 3:25 pm)LinuxGal Wrote:(December 31, 2022 at 8:10 am)Jehanne Wrote: Sagan has been dead now for almost 30 years, and controlled nuclear fusion has, ostensibly, happened just one time, in 2021, and the researchers have failed to reproduce their results. What happens if nuclear fusion is never realized? We will go on burning fossil fuels until either they are all gone, or, we've destroyed ourselves.
I consistently find that everything is, ironically, binary with you. One and zero. All or nothing. In reality, the price of fossil fuels will rise as they become scarce, which will signal the market to invest in alternatives long before they are completely gone. By the same token, if we can't find all the resources we need in our niche our population will decline to reach equilibrium with the resources we do have. So everything is sliding around and you need to solve the problem with a hella complicated differential equation and not some straight-line extrapolation everyone else likes to throw out there.
You're pounding on open doors when you claim that fossil fuels ("ancient sunlight") is finite. But, who, say in 1995 would have predicted this:
As you know, Marion King Hubbert forecasted a normal ("bell-shaped") curve in his 1956 presentation to American Petroleum Institute, predicting that US peak oil production would occur in 1970 or thereabouts.
And, so, who's to say how much fossil fuel reserves are out there waiting to be discovered?? But, hey, let the free market decide things! I am willing to go down that road in lieu of being accused of obtuseness by trusting the A6 models with all of their sets of partial differential equations and all.