.@naval: Are we running out of resources? No, we’ve never run out of a single resource, ever. There’s not a single resource you could point to that was a resource in the classic commodity sense that had any real value, where we ran out in some harmful way. Because technology is the act of substituting away from one resource to another. As we ran out of burning wood, we started burning coal. As we ran out of coal—we didn’t actually run out of coal, but we went from coal to oil. And before we could even run out of oil, despite all the peak oil nonsense around the year 2000, we’ve gotten nuclear, we’ve got solar, we’ve got wind. The universe is full of unlimited resources. The universe, the multiverse, whichever version you take, is staggeringly large, way beyond your ability to cause to run out of resources. We haven’t even wrapped a Dyson sphere around the sun and extracted all of that energy. There is unlimited energy. Even in the so-called empty cubic meter of space, there’s plenty of energy. It’s literally just a question of knowledge. Dark matter, dark energy, E=MC^2, nuclear fusion—there’s unlimited energy. The only thing that’s holding us back is knowledge. The same is true of any resource. Are we running out of wood? No. We can grow wood, we can grow unlimited trees. We can plant unlimited trees. So eventually, we might find a future civilization may be able to synthesize trees, maybe it’ll synthesize long-dead trees. So it is always a question of knowledge. So that should put the resource argument to rest, although it won’t. Because there are people who are dogmatically committed to the idea that we’re running out of resources and they’re not fallibilists, to use your earlier phrase, and they’re not going to revise their worldview based on mere logic.