Knowledge Makes the Existence of Resources Infinite

Knowledge is the thing that makes the existence of resources infinite. The creation of knowledge is unbounded. We're just going to keep on creating more knowledge and thereby learning about more and different resources.

There's this wonderful parable of europium in the beginning of infinity where David talks about 60 years ago or so when first color television started to be manufactured. They were cathode ray tube type, where you'd fire a stream of electrons at a phosphorescent screen. The phosphorescent screen had these pixels, three different colors, one of which was red, and those red phosphors on the screen were filled with the element europium.

The interesting thing about europium is that when you put electricity through it, when you excite it, it glows with this red color. The extra interesting thing about europium is it is the only such element on the periodic table. It's the only chemical that will do that. If you fire electrons at it, it will glow the red that you need to have color television.

Now, it was calculated that there's only a certain amount of europium on the Earth, and that amount of europium was quickly being consumed by cathode ray tube manufacturers. So, the scientists had a perfectly robust mathematical theory about how the number of cathode ray tubes was finite. Therefore, they're going to run out of cathode ray tubes.

It's true, in a very narrow sense, that for any given resource you're going to have a finite amount on planet Earth. Of course, there's going to be europium in outer space, and you could probably mine it there. But the deep point is no one has cathode ray tubes anymore. The whole idea of color television has nothing to do with the excitation of europium these days.

We've all got LCD screens, we had plasma screens, and there'll probably be something else coming in the future as well that will have absolutely nothing to do with the technology we have today. But we're still going to have color television or color screens.

This is true for absolutely any resource that we can think of. You might very well make a perfectly good Malthusian calculation: we can't keep on burning wood if you happen to be living on the African savanna because eventually all the forests are going to be burned down. Obviously, we're going to run out of wood.

There's a finite amount of wood, even if you can grow more wood. Eventually, the consumption of wood is going to outstrip the amount that's there. This is the argument that's made for coal, oil, and everything else that we happen to be consuming.

Even so-called empty space has a lot of matter and a lot of things that could be converted into energy. There is no limit to the amount of resources out there; there's purely a limit to knowledge.

Unfortunately, there's a pessimistic assumption here that people make: that human creativity is bounded. I think it's the people who themselves have not built things, who have not created new things from scratch, who seem to feel this the most.