@Netraven 1) it is about shifting dominance of feedback loops. more people create more people create more people. hard limit is reached. people die, the ability to create more people exponentially is gradually lost until it drops below replacement rate and you have decline. 3) the degrading of regenerative capacity of the environment lowers the hard limit.
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@Netraven it IS a stock and flow story, and of course energy flows are most important to life. 3rd law of thermodynamics: if there is no free energy, meaning absolute thermodynamic equilibrium: everything stops. but that's acually not that deep. the interesting q is: how is life possible when entropy always increases and cant go negative?
@Netraven the answer: gibbs free energy or negentropy stored in large molecules. resources, the ability of the environment to sustain life, in other words. so all this intellectual sophistry about thermodynamics just brings you back to it being a resource and environmental issue. in other words: ecology.
@Netraven it is a bit like blaming thermodynamics for inflation.
@kali All I see is a natural cycle that explains why the universe isn't burgeoning with signals and signs of extraterrestrial life. Life was not designed to be durable because any form of durability eventually fails catastrophically, leaving almost nothing behind to reconstruct. Life however seems designed to fail while leaving behind fragments and tool marks that later, new life, can incorporate into their own environmental affordances and skills which inevitably leads life through the same process again, repeatedly. It's longevity and durability of the communication surface which life is optimized to preserve, not the organism itself.
It must be so relieving to think of it as a natural cycle, something inexorable and inevitable, innate to life itself. You don't have to do anything then, and can just smile sadly at the collapse, glad that it's happening because surely we live in the best of all possible worlds.
