a psychohistorian responds

In response to: Which brings me back to the ubiquity of things. The heights of manufacturing and technology we've reached allow things to be all the more common. In 2009, we simply have more opportunity to paste ourselves onto objects. In doing so, we run the increasing risk of defining ourselves in impossible terms.

Indeed we do, it is a risky venture. You see, we've been on the upswing of an exponential increase in our capacity to create, and we appear to have tagged our consumption level straight onto this. We are beginning to level off onto the plateau of carrying capacity, or should be if our response function was, well, functional. But the coefficient of the negative quadratic term in the logistic equation that should control our consumption has creeped up dangerously close to zero, while the coefficient in the world-itself's equation has gone deep south. It's been well known after the fall-out of the Westermark Wars that the only trustworthy solution to such a dislinkage requires new inputs into the coefficients of consumption growth and control. Yours, HS