Re: Science and Unemployment...
Kevin Sterner (sterner@sel.hep.upenn.edu)
10 Jul 1995 15:16:34 GMT
In article <mls-3006952340280001@mls.dialup.access.net>, mls@panix.com (Michael L. Siemon) writes:
> The lesson (one Jared Diamond urges strongly in _The Third Chimpanzee_)
> is that WHEN humanity finds a resource to exploit, it does so to the utter
> destruction of the resource. This is what economists call "rationality."
Yup, we sure did eat up all that wheat. Too bad we used up that resource.
As for water resources, once the natural limitations of the "easy" water
resources start to pinch, we can develop alternatives to that resource:
pipe in water from the Great Lakes, pipe in water from a large-scale
desalinization plant, condense some out of the air, that sort of thing.
Every organism will expoint a resource until it fails, if it's an
exhaustible resource (like the aphids that just sucked one of my
tomato plants dry). Humans are the only ones capable of recognizing
(and preventing) the failure before it happens, and are the only ones
capable of creating new resources to replace them if necessary. That
is what *I* call rationality.
-- K.
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Kevin L. Sterner | U. Penn. High Energy Physics | Smash the welfare state!
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