When money tokens were adopted by the ancient Greeks, there was anxiety that their acquisition and multiplication would ruin society.

Science and technology adoption by industrial society created an ever growing supply of accessible resources from nature, which gave value to money for their exchange. Money piled up with ownership and control of resource supply chains, adding to it the machines of industrial capital, and the energy fuels to feed them.

It is interesting that Europeans learned to use the milk of cows, process it and store it in their colder climate conditions, and selectively evolved the life-long duration of production of our lactose digestive enzymes necessary to take advantage of it for nutrition. Cows, land and milk processing became capital. Sheep and wool became capital. Nature became capital.

Nature won’t allow the human kind of exponential growth for very long. In nature all species growth must reset. All components must be recycled and reused. There are limits to growth and allowed energy density in living organisms.

Fossil fuels broke those barriers temporarily, but only for as long as they can be profitably extracted. Already we find their rising costs of fossil fuel extraction, delivery and burning exceed their energy benefits. Global warming and extinctions are our extreme long term cost, indicating nature will take everything back from us in its long postponed reset.

Science promotes the illusions that we can escape growth and energy bounds. The really hurtful law uncovered by science is the law of entropy. Which says that things always run down, and so all complex systems require resets. We still think Science can find a way to leave behind the circle of birth, growth and death. We ignore the findings that say it cannot. We must think we can do better than evolution, because we are wiping out all of its works. We think we can make immutable digital life, and call it living.