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2026-11-09

Pollution is linear, self-replication is exponential

Disclaimer

• Quick Note

Main

• Stating a bunch of obvious known ideas in a different mental frame.
• Creating pollution costs a lot of money because pollution typically has linear effects. If you want to pollute the whole earth, you need a lot of the pollutant. This typically costs billions of dollars to manufacture even if the manufacturing process is scaled up and reaches efficiency close to physical limits.
• Examples
  • Climate change has required burning literal trillions of dollars of fossil fuels over a century, all to cause a measly 1.5 degrees of warming. See also: Wikipedia on climate change
  • Sulfur geoengineering requires billions of dollars per year to inject enough sulfur to counteract climate change. See also: Wikipedia on Sulfur aerosol injection
  • Chemical weapons aimed at the environment (not at humans) require pretty large quantites to actually make a difference. See also: Gwern on highly potent drugs and psychological warfare, Wikipedia on chemical weapons in world war 1
  • Ocean plastic pollution costs billions of dollars to both create and remove. See also: Wikipedia on Ocean cleanup project
  • The ozone hole required billions of dollars worth of CFCs to create. See also: Wikipedia on ozone depletion
• Self-replication, however, lets you do exponential stuff. A small amount of initial volume can eventually take over the entire Earth
• Examples
  • Biological weapons are self-replicating, as are gene drives, or hypothetical mirror life.
  • Nuclear weapons have non-linear effects in terms of how much uranium mass produces how much energy (and hence soot), although once the soot enters the atmosphere its effects are again close to linear.
  • Humans themselves are famously self-replicating, albeit at the slow speed of a few children per 20 years. You can imagine why human genetic engineering or artifical wombs or anti-aging could therefore be a big deal.
  • Supernova and black hole formation involve non-linear processes. See also: Wikipedia on gravitational collapse
  • Hypothetical future technologies in this category include artificial superintelligence, nanotechnology, von neummann probes, etc
  • Spread of human memes and culture follows exponential growth curves, just track youtuber statistics.
• In general, the takeaway from this post is to look for things that are self-replicating, if you want to maximise impact on the environment per unit cost.

Side Note

• I do ofcourse have the opinion that artificial superintelligence is uniquely powerful (and dangerous) out of all these because it is intelligence + self-replication. Intelligence allows the self-replicating processes to adapt to a wide variety of environments in real-time.

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