Just because the transaction balances doesn’t mean there wasn’t ‘winners’. If I stroll down the beach and purchase a frozen treat for $4, I am sated and the merchant gets to make a profit, pay their taxes, and sustain their supply chain. Who loses? The other sellers lose a potential customer, I gain some weight, and probably generate waste and carbon in the act. As we plod ever towards our future as dust, we’ll transact a stream of everything, making and taking and leaving our wake along the way. As it goes, it’s hard to ascribe goodness or badness or winners or losers without omission of some part of the transaction. Yet in that moment when my lips meet their first chilly bite, the universe might reveal a shimmer of its majesty, and I’ll call that good.
The point I am making is that the people making the transaction are not the losers in the game. You have to trace the origin of the product back to how it was produced and what limited resource was used to produce it.
The loser here is other person who could've potentially used that limited resource for his own gain.
No. Net gain is extracted from a pool of limited energy. All participants in such an exchange must lower the entropy of the universe to produce either a concrete or abstract product. This costs energy.
As long as the rate of extraction of energy is lower than the rate of replenishment of energy then that net transaction seemingly produces a net gain.
However the minute Rate of extraction of energy exceeds the rate of replenishment someone loses because the energy you use cannot be used by someone else. For example the entire population of the world using as much energy as the people in the United States is unsustainable.
In short the participants in the transaction didn't lose. Someone else outside of the transaction lost.
It's true that entropy eventually wins and in a hundred billion billion billion billion years the universe will run out, but in the meantime there's an incredible amount of energy all around us and we get more efficient at extracting it all the time. What does this viewpoint mean in a practical sense?
You talk as if the incredible amount of energy around us is unlimited. We pay for energy and we spend an inordinate amount of consideration towards thinking on how to "save energy"
Energy is therefore limited and, as illustrated above, a highly practical concept.
Energy on the earth isn’t limited. There is tremendous energy entering and leaving our sphere at all times. There are forms of energy stored in ways that we don’t understand how to harvest and distribute, yet lay latent. You could theorize that the total energy in the universe is fixed, yet incomprehensible vast and largely inaccessible.
You are correct that the about of energy available for human consumption is finite in a given moment in time. Every choice for how energy is distributed collapses other possibilities. Yet, the ability of humans to capture and direct energy ever grows with the passage of time.
Up until about 3-4 generations ago, our species depended on beating other creatures to move us around, and burning trees for warmth. Now the same planet with the same or less resources is able to provide ~250 times more usable energy.
But none of that energy is available to use. The only metric that matters is available energy. If all the energy you’re describing was available for use nobody would be paying for energy and we’d never have huge power outages.
Technological growth is luck and also likely limited. The zero sum nature of the economy comes from the context of a transaction.
Transactions and exchanges are zero sum, technological growth is not. But increasing technology is both a combination of luck and arguably limited.
You’re assuming all energy will have a productive use though and nothing is wasted. If 2 people decide to carpool they can save money on gas, and that’s not a zero sum transaction even if one party pays the other. Just because energy is expended doesn’t mean there was a productive use, after all the universe will burn up one day no matter how well or poorly humans treat it, entropy can only increase.
Are the stars' gases foolish to burn and radiate energy to the universe because they could have used that limited resource for their own gain?
It seems simpler to consider that those who give are more likely to receive. Even a primordial entity in nature understands that the act of helping others helps itself.
