Slightly, very slightly pessimistic thoughts… You’re welcome to demonstrate this is utter bullshit, that would reassure me…
(11 votes, average: 4.18 out of 5)
Loading...It’s been first on Google Plus, but if you’re interested, I’ll paste it here.
This is a long story, without porn. And it would really take huge guts to manage to fap to this, even though I know there will always be people who can fap to the most bizarre things 
Oh well, if you care to read, I’ll paste it. I’m curious to read your reactions, and PLEASE, if you see anything allowing to consider this reasoning is bullshit, DO tell it !
Long story incomiiiiiiiiiiiiiing ! 
(the rest is pasted)
Adding something before I paste, that picture is now considered too optimistic :
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This is depressing !
The more I read, the more I realize our civilization is CRAZY, and we are ALL in denial because there is NO solution and we are ALL part of the problem.
I could shower you with links, but damn, google it yourself, okay.
Care for a long read ?
-> Summary before the long story : Before 2050, maybe before 2040, the TOTAL OFFER OF EVERYTHING, since EVERYTHING is based on energy, will SHRINK. And will shrink more and more, year after year.
Apart from the sun above the crops, EVERYTHING is based on consuming energy, or investing energy to produce things. Your food. Your clothes. Your car. Your books. Your computer. Your house’s walls, lighting, heating. And this available energy for human spending, its total amount on Earth, is going to shrink more and more. Less and less of everything. This is real. This is the real shit.
And this is no sci-fi or conspirationist madness.
The long story, now ?
(1) – Hydrocarbons : the HYPER BEST we can hope for is a plateau until 2025-2030 followed by a steady and fast fall. Example : all the hype in America about new resources amounts in total and in the best case for 5 years of their consumption, you can’t do much better worldwide with best hopes. There is no hidden miracle to come.
(2) – Metallic resources : several metals will have PASSED their peak by the end of the century, some of them before 2050, damn, some of them before 2025. That also means EASY to mine areas don’t exist anymore for several materials, mining now relies on extremely well-trained and experienced mining with lots of energy.
(3) – On the rest of the energy production area : let’s discard all environmental tolls and sense of realism, and imagine we multiply coal and nuclear energy production by 5, hydroelectric energy production by 2, and renewables by a wholesome 25 times factor (while it is considered that large-scale energy shifts take 60 years, remember my mention about realism). In that scenario, it wouldn’t be enough to make up for the shrinking in oil production and the follow-up fall in gas and coal production.
CONCLUSION : I’ll repeat the conclusion : before 2050, maybe before 2040, the TOTAL OFFER OF EVERYTHING, since EVERYTHING is based on energy, will SHRINK. And will shrink more and more, year after year.
Apart from the sun above the crops, EVERYTHING is based on consuming energy, or investing energy to produce things. Your food. Your clothes. Your car. Your books. Your computer. Your house’s walls, lighting, heating. And this available energy for human spending, its total amount on Earth, is going to shrink more and more. Less and less of everything. This is real. This is the real shit.
(4) – More trouble ?
. Less and less energy, even though the demography will bring billions more humans on Earth. And those humans will be brought up with dreams of adopting the good old western way of life. Nothing adds up.
. The rarer the resources, the more highly technical their extraction becomes, it doesn’t only consume more energy, it consumes more brains and facilities. The easy to extract materials in easy to exploit mines are gone for most of them : maintaining extraction will become even more sensible to political instability and energy costs. And for the next hundreds millions of years, Earth won’t be offering anymore easy access to hydrocarbons and metals to the beings coming next (except occasional lumps of mixed nuclear waste here and there, perhaps).
. political instability and wars may reduce the amount of production or waste energy production in non-crucial goods
(5) – False hopes ?
. Generic mistake of confusing reserves and resources. it’s not because there is something under the ground that you’ll always be able to extract it
. « As prices raise, extraction will become economically viable again ». Untrue. Prices can’t raise too high or they kill either demand or customers, activity won’t keep on with very high prices, it’s the activity that will stop or slow down when reaching certain prices. And there’s also the energy cost of extraction, if you spend 2000 joules of energy to extract 1000 joules from the ground, you’re doing it wrong (cf the line below) whatever the selling price is.
. Kerogen : falsely promising areas like the kerogen oil shales like America’s Green River are a mere illusion, extracting oil from this would consume more energy than it does produce energy. Same deal for uranium in sea water.
. Fission nuclear reactors : funnily, uranium’s depletion is a reality, and MOX raises meltdown risks and damages while not bringing much added reserves. As for breeder reactors, there might be a reason why France gave up on it and Japan is clueless with its half-broken test reactor : it might work someday, but there’s no telling if it will really work, and when, and then it would take several decades to spread largely enough, raising then urgent questions about global security and threats to the environment (do you imagine a breeder plant in a warzone ?). Lastly, thorium reactors might delay the problem, but delay it only, because if some day they work, every time their reaction is relaunched it consumes a lot of uranium to start up the reaction.
. fusion nuclear reactors : fusion reactors just don’t even work in labs, it’s only parts of them are are in testing in small scale units for labs, and the closest we can get fusion reactors to work on a large scale if EVERYTHING proceeds fine will be in 60 years.
. cold fusion is nothing but sci-fi apparently, and Andrea Rossi’s E-cat looks like a giant hoax sadly, that guy’s been telling several contradictory versions and been caught liying all around on various topics
. maintaining our level of energy consumption, but based on renewable sources : not doable, and if it were doable, we’d risk running short on some metals in the medium term
(6) – Ways to make it less dramatic ?
. reduce waste
. stop buying useless shit
. bring industries closer to the customers, produce food consumed locally
. stop making children
. buy more expensive products going to last longer
. encourage companies to produce better products that will last longer in order to reduce products turnover (for fuck’s sake, cf http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-11-is-your-stuff-falling-apart-thank-walmart/ )
(7) – Will the chapter (6) be enough to avoid real shit ?
. no
I'm sorry I don't have a plan of action to offer as a conclusion, we're not just part of the problem, we are the problem. Democracy and capitalism are failing big time, but being faced to truths like that can certainly obliterate the will to think too hard on this subject, and make you wish to forget about it asap instead.
Once again : I'd be really happy if someone managed to demonstrate everything I wrote is wrong, that would reassure me.
What I summarized here comes from several bits of information grabbed here and there from reliable sources, and it's only recently the grim complete "painting" started to make a whole in front of my eyes, I'm still myself in a state of shock.
The only real solution is widespread genocide.
Let's start with you!
I'm glad we already have people working on that (referring to militaries and militants worldwide).
Maybe not genocide, but something definitely needs to be done. Our overpopulation problem is spiralling out of control. Energy, food, materials and anything else we need is continually spread thinner with the increase in population, so decreasing the population is one of the easiest ways to fix this. This doesn't need to be done by killing people, so heres a quick scenario to show how it can be done (btw, no matter what, our economies will be fucked with ANY decrease i population)
Imagine the world is perfectly split in gender, 50/50 male/female. Now, everyone person in the world pairs off and has 2 kids (completely unrealistic, but lets go with for a moment) now imagine those kids grew up. Obviously our perfect gender split at the start would no longer be there, so in total, you couldn't possibly have as many kids as the last generation. But now let's take it realistically: imagine in the first generation that some people die in accidents or from disease before they have kids, straight away, you have a lower total population from before. Some people would also be naturally infertile, so again, a lower total output of population.
No matter what happens, if you enforce a maximum 2 child policy, population WILL decrease. No-one whose alive dies, and you simply de-sex people once they've had 2 kids to prevent "accidents".
problem solved
Ehm, you're wrong. When a child is born, it does not mean their parents die. So you have to count all the people living in the same moment. The growth curve will increase even if you have less than 2 babies per couple.
Families with many children should be taxed more.
I'm not talking about instantaneously, I'm talking about over a long period. By your logic, your parents never die? :S Eventually, even with every couple having 2 children, at some point the parents die, and your only left with the children. Over long periods of time, if your output is less than your input, you will always see a decrease. And even if those children had children of their own, the same thing occurs over long periods of time: the parents will eventually die, and the next generation must be slightly smaller.
Your right on families with many children should be discouraged, whether it be through a tax, or actual punishment, but then where does that money go? Is it invested in systems that actually research new types of energy sources, and renewable systems. Simply throwing a tax at something does not solve the problem. If the government doesn't put the money to good use, the tax is useless.
Take the Australian carbon tax, for example. Basically, all businesses (but mostly the big ones) are taxed based on their carbon output, as an incentive to output less carbon(oxides) in production. The energy companies are simply translating this tax to the people, by increasing the price of energy. The government is then giving out money to people to help them pay for this increase in energy. So in all, the government takes money from businesses, the businesses take more money from the people, and the government gives more money to the people to pay for the tax. There is no money from this tax currently put into research or construction of renewable energy systems. Totally useless.
I'm saying all this as an australian myself.
We could have world-mandated RISGU/Vasalgel to control population.
We'd need some way to enforce it though, and enforce countries to enforce it. I guess we just need a world government that can actually do shit.
I really wish you’d share some of your sources with us. I may search myself tomorrow but certainly not until then.
All of which assumes we're just using Earth for resources. Go watch some sci-fi!
Yeah, Executives care more about profit than environmental efforts. Expect a long string of devastating resource wars in the next decades. it is inevitable, especially with the rising use that India and China are consuming.
And to think that just a few humans besides me got scared when they heard in the news that our numbers had become 7 billion souls a few months ago, the planet and its resources just can't sustain this many people living the way we do, and governments just don't seem to give a shit because they're doing nothing about it. Maybe people will start to understand the dire state of things when having more than two children per family becomes a crime like in terranova, if governments wise up before it's too late.
Unfortunatly, this is humanities skeleton in the closet. Society has known for quite some time that are resources are dwindling, and at rates far higher then any "expert" ever predicted. As dramatic and sad as it is to say, we will eventually bury ourselves. Those in control will never change their ways. Profit will always hold sway over righteousness. Washington will forever follow its vicious circle of elections, falso promises and lobbyist/voter demands for more. Mark my words Oliver, the only end well ever see of this is if war breaks out or certain individuals take full control from everyone else, forcing their will upon the il content masses and crushing those who rebel. I realize its dramatization, but can you really expect the "1st world" to change for the greater good, and for the "3rd world" to except not gaining all the conveneinces of a "1st world" nation? No. Greed and violence will win out the day.
Saddly, you have only the energy part of the big problems humanity face now. The energy problem come from a relatively new thing in human history ( i'm a historian, so new is like 200 years at best), the consumption society. In our society, if the people buy things, the system will run smoutly, but if not, it crash, and it crash loudly. But this is utopia, people wont buy things forever and ever, someday the consumer's have all the things they needs. In the 1950's, the United States comes with a great idea, what if we reduce the life of objets, so that people will buy things forever. This decision came with a price, one they have not think. To build things we need ressources, but the world don't have infinite ressources.
Now come the economy problem, in the 1970, America and Europe knew the first petroleum crash, and a economic crisis follow. The states of occident decided to increase the cash flow so that people have the same way of life. This money did'nt appear randomly, for this they have make debt to others country's. So now in 2012, every country in the world have money from other country and vice-versa. What if a State refuse to pay? The consequences will be very catastrophic, in a optimist way, this could lead to the most horrible economic crisis in the history of mankind and put a end to the society consumption as we know it. In the worst cases, a nuclear apocalypse that will end humanity or WWIII.
They next years will be crucial for humanity, this is certain. The energy problem is a big part of it. But for me, I think that humanity in itself is the problem. Will you stop having a hot shower? An Electric stove? A refrigirator? A computer? I don't think people will abandon their nothern comfort just to save the world. Humaniy is now a slave to technology and canno't live without it.
Thx for reading me, and sorry, english is not my primary language.
But life will go on…. maybe not with humanity, but it will find a way!
Energy problem?
Here’s a hint: wiki “Dyson sphere”
Stuff like this makes me not want to ever make a kid. And also makes me digusted by seeing families of 3+ kids. I hope that one day the governments of the world will stop caring about what kind of policies make one better than the other and in stead think about "hey there are a lot of mouths to feed on this planet, advisors could that become a problem?" Its like hello, already was when we passed 6 billion and kept going.
It's about time to look for imulsion… and locust
I mentioned something along these lines–about the scarcity of food and the booming population–to a pen pal of mine in Alaska.
Since my wife and I can't have children, we won't produce. (Not too say that my brothers are already popping them out like Tribbles left and right…?)
We buy, recycle, and re-use a lot of stuff that we have. In fact, we make it a *point* to keep a hold of our old shit and not throw it out–for reason that we may need it again. (SNES who knows? lol)
We don't own a car, can't afford it. So we walk or we bike. I laugh every time someone asks money for gas or is bitching about the price of gas. (Little people–when will you ever LEARN…?)
Being on limited income, we have to save up in order to buy expensive stuff.
And on and on the list goes…
i will leave this problem to the future me…
Anonymous a dyson sphere is a type 2 technology in the Kardashev scale while our current technology doesn't reach rank 1 which we are predisted to hit in a century or two, a type two technology like thee sphere would take a predicted millenia we don't really have anywhere near the time to make anything to help this energy crisis.
if this has not been extremely obvious for years based on the most basics of physics and chemistry, than I don't know what plagues humanity, We all knew and know this is going to happen. Prepare for it. I haven't cared about a thing in life for a long time, long term wise. Enjoy what you can while you can and live your life for you and those you love, because pretty much it will all amount to nothing in the future. And this is long after we're gone. One day there won't be an earth. So what? Is it said that nihilism is based on the absolute most basic principle of physics? (the sum of all vectors is 0).
Ah, this will be fun. And by that I mean not at all.
@Schuyler Population is on a decline for parts of the world that aren't a third world country. Scarcity of food is also most prevalent in third world country mainly for one reason…WAR! War in these countries such as African countries make it impossible to instill a food production and distribution system fairly.
Research a little more there about the energy crisis. Most of those numbers are skewed and taken out of context. Yeah there is a high consumption rate of these energy sources, but they are not as finite as this chart makes you believe. If all else fails then just mine the moon or the asteroid belt by Mars.
Truth is that we don't know and I prefer the worst-case scenario and prepare for it, instead of hoping for best case scenario (miracle happens and we can live off imagination instead off food) and getting the worst case scenario. Fact that resources are wasted globally for decorative trinkets called "money" is undisputable. That people prefer to ignore problems instead of doing the hard thinking necessary to solve them is another undisputable fact.
WWIII breathing into our backs is also unavoidable, because people never learn fast enough. Well maybe in fiction they suddenly see the light when faced with excintion. But in reality people would choose the lifestyle from one of recent fap'n'go School of the Dead scenarios. Zombies everywhere ? Lets fuck to forget it all.
2050?! Shit, I hope that by then 60 will be the new 30!
On a serious note: Vertical Farming FTW indeed. Why would you need big-ass farming procedures if you could master the technologies to make VF a very valuable way to feed cities with… I also hate all those goddamned plastic toys meant for little kids for the same reason you pointed out: Waste of resources. Every single time I see a useless plastic toy meant to be forgotten by a 3 year old a few days after it's been bought does pain me so.
And making less babies? Hmmm. I don't see that a viable way going forward. Just saying.
Space is the answer. Thankfully there are many countries working toward the goal of putting men and equipment into space cheaply and safely. Once that is accomplished we can mine other plantary bodies for resources and we can also use the power of the sun to produce electricty for manufacture.
Yeah.. the thing about space is that it takes a crap ton of energy for us to escape the earth's gravity, especially when were taking enough supplies to build a mining colony. The only way wed ever make space travel cost effective is to build a giant orbital elevator and space dock, which is never going to happen because it would be a huge drain on our already stricken world (which is what were trying to avoid in the first place).
And even then were subject to luck of whatrescources are closest, how much energy it takes to bring them back, and how long it'll take to bring them here. The faster we bring it back the more energy it takes up and the worse off we are.
Besides, electricity cant power a space ship without chemical reaction boosters, which take a crap ton of energy to manufacture. So even if we do consider solar power to move our space ships, were still in need of more traditional energy sources to create actual thrust.
Add all this talk of lack of energy to global warming and you already have a solution to knocking out a HUGE chunk of life on earth, so technechly this shit WILL take care of itself… just not in a way that anyone who has a shred of conpassion will like. We all just have to make sure were prepared for the eventual, cause stopping this is IMPOSSIBLE. Just the very act of talking about this on the internet takes up ALOT of energy.
Humanity just has to acept the fact that the twilight of our race is now. Acept the beauty that surrounds you now and prepare for the night that will consume us all. And if youre that conscerend about the futurre your leaving for your children, either dont have any or invest heavily in wilderness survival programs.
I hope that our children won't remember our time as the period of great waste.
We need another world war. But without the nukes… Just old fashioned killing with guns. I'm all for dying along with 2-3 billion others for the sake of the planet.
Well, here in the US we've been having one or more for 11 years now. It's really done little other than to waste money. Loads of money.
Hi Oliver… longtime reader of hentai, thank you for making this site. Some thoughts:
* We live on a carbon based planet, with carbon based life, and exhale what the elites want to tax. The only way to really get rid of the 'gross polluters' (humans & animals who 'pollute continuously' is megadeath.
* Don't count on the elites to do the right thing. Count on them to cash in. They're not 'capping' carbon, they're 'exchanging' it. This is a worldwide scam.
Every time there's hysteria about something running out, something else replaces it. The problem comes comes with corporate greed. Example: Nuclear was supposed to be safe. It was MBAs & business executives that forced kilowatt projects to become megawatt ones, as well as skimp on safety. That's why we had 3 Mile Island in the USA, as well as Fukushima in Japan. See Adam Curtis' "Pandora's Box" Documentary, I think the one on nuclear energy is 'A is for Atom'.. it's at archive.org.
Yes, there's a problem, but there's ALWAYS been a problem. I also don't have any children (I see war with the BRIC countries coming as the old of the US & EU make a last grab for resources)… But I also see a need for MORE young folks to out vote and then take power away from the greedy old. This is YOUR world… not 'Ours' (meaning older elites who want perpetual war & to further their own agendas).
-Drunky
I only skimmed the post, but what I'm seeing boils down to another retread of the Malthusian catastrophe scenario doomsayers have been repeating for the last 200 years.
Wikipedia is not a genuine academic source, etc etc, but it summarizes the basic framework: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrop… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Malthus
Malthus was a highly educated mathematician, and according to his model of population grown the human race was presumed to starve itself to death no later than 1850. Obviously that didn't happen. Malthus's models couldn't predict the industrial revolution. They couldn't have predicted the invention of electricity. Or the refrigerator. Or vaccines. Or automobiles. Or airplanes. Or the internet. Or any of the other changes that two centuries of human development can be expected to bring. Malthus really is a cautionary tale against overextending statistical models too far into the unforseeable future.
You rush to condemn democracy and capitalism for global growth and consumption concerns, so perhaps it would surprise you to discover that history's most influential socialist figures, Marx and Engels, happened to be Malthus' biggest critics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrop… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Malthus#React…
"Friedrich Engels also criticizes the Malthusian catastrophe because he[vague] failed to see that surplus population is connected to surplus wealth, surplus capital, and surplus landed property. Population is too large where the overall productive power is too large. Engels also states that the calculation that Malthus made with the difference in population and productive power is incorrect because Malthus does not take into consideration a third element, science. Scientific 'progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population'."
More than 200 years have passed since Malthus and his followers started espousing these views, and humanity has not starved itself out of existence as they predicted. We may manage to shift enough carbon into the atmosphere in the next 50 years to cook ourselves to death… But that's not the warning Malthusians, or your source, are sounding. It seems to me that they, much like the Malthusians, need to be reminded that the complete profile of human history can't be summed up in a growth chart, and that focusing too long and hard on pessimistic thoughts of humanity's failings has blinded some of the highest caliber of intellectuals to humanity's burgeoning achievements for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Additional reading Oliver may find gratifying, articulated far more intelligently than I ever could: http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=671&issue…
"Please, please wake up and look at the signposts around you"
Well, I'm not a pessimist, but not an optimist either. Mankind is the less adaptative species of nature. But instead of adapt himself to the envoirment, mankind adapt the environment to his needs. The proof is the development of cities. Now, the mankind is in a crossroad. Depending of the path we choose, we could redempt and save ourselves, or condemn us once for all. But nothing will change if we waste our time running in circles yelling "OMG! THE END IS NEAR! WE ARE DOOMED!" You want to change anything? Just leave your comfy couch and start to do something,
Some years ago I read an article about the hydrogen engine. It consumes hydrogen, the resultant product is steam (H2O) and you can split water into hydrogen and oxygen again; repeat to the infinite. I can't find that article again. It's like it vanished and never existed. Coincidence? I don't think so.
The hydrogen stuff (I can't remember the name) require a lot a energy to split H2O. So yes it doesn't pollute by itself but we need clean and powerful source of energy to make it relevant.
Aah, the end of the world by lack of energy … To think that Amish would outlast us ^^
You can make electrolysis with a AAA batery… Get the Hydrogen is VERY easy (and doesn't needs as much energy as you say), and we have LOTS of water. The problem is the Hydrogen efficiency, because some studies says is about the 50% and some other studies says is about the 86%. And these studies are very influenced by the interest of both parts, the oil tycoons and the ecologists.
Those total reserve numbers dont really show the whole picture…
The USA has no real incentive to deal with the problem because it isn't really OUR problem…
It's the rest of the planet that is going to be fucked, not us.
The USA is well positioned geographically to minimize the effects of global warming, we have huge hydrocarbon reserves to give us extra time to deal with the energy crisis, and we are extremely UNDERpopulated.
1. The USA has 200 years of coal at current mining rates, and coal is our largest source of hydrocarbon energy. All we will have to do is stop exporting…
2. The USA has enough cropland to feed 2 billion people, but our population is only 330 million.
This gives a huge reserve of solar -> hydrocarbon conversion to create biofuels. (biodiesel being the most effifcient) All we will have to do is stop exporting….
key words, when the shit hits the fan… America is going to cut anyone we dont like off, and they are going to STARVE. This is why china has been willing to put up with our debt shenanigans. They need to stay on our good side to SURVIVE.
Dunno where you get your facts, but that info on coal was BS'd from a misrepresented report by the (wait for it) coal industry that failed to account for the following – increased population, increased consumption, increased ease of mining, etc… it assumed that growth would remain constant or not occur (unlike the way growth works in reality, exponential) and generated some serisouly false numbers.
Nor do I think the US can support 2 billion on its cropland. And eve if it did, you forgot to figure that 330m in the US eat like they are 1Billion. Fattest country on the planet.
we are currently feeding 2 billion people. America is the worlds largest agricultural exporter.
Take a quick look at north america on google maps… See that green there in the middle?
That's 1,029,000,000 acres of agricultural land.
You really think that a billion acres of agricultural land can't feed 2 billion people?
Actually, per capita, the US is third, and European countries are catching up(Germany and UK). Not disagreeing that Americans are fat, just saying other First World's are catching up). Although, if the time came, the US could just have rationing again(like in World Wars). No snack foods, no fast foods, just what is required to survive
What a convenient position, especially coming from a country responsible for 25% of all the pollution produced on the globe.
And the money you get from those exports, you don't want it? With the second most complex economy in the world, good look trying to survive when your not making any money from any other countries. And good luck importing anything from those countries that you cut off. You hardly produce anything in america, it's all done in china. The only reason you put up with each other is that you NEED each other.
Unhappy policies of the Future, that may be required to save the future:
1.) Zero Population Growth – World wide population needs to become 2.4 chlildren per couple (replacement level) or lower. A goal of 1.7 would really help. If we can reduce the planetary population (without wars, disease, disaster) to 6 billion or less it would really help.
2.) Zero Fossil Fuels – They will run out, sooner or later. It would be wiser to move off of them as soon and as fast as possible. There are plenty of other energy sources; solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal, nuclear, giant hamster wheels…
3.) Mining Landfills – Those garbage dumps of the present are gold, copper, tin, lead, zinc, plastic, titanium, nickle, etc mines of the future. The flating garbage island in the Pacific, thats a mine also.
And those are just a few…
The joke on genocide is so stupid that saying that is already too much attention.
The idea on stopping making children is problematic, as the world population will age, anyway. The idea of "one couple, one son", as we saw in China, is too dangerous. In any human tribe, with the exception of China, the ordinary is to have more females than males (Did I say human? Bah! Even the wild beasts, as far as I know, work that way). In China there are more males than females simply because, as everyone had to opt, everyone opted for male children… and now there is a shortage of pussies. Even in Europe, women want sons before wanting daughters. Well, It is good if you want to decrease population, as the next generations will have less uteri for reproduction.
If the resources are really in such a problematic situation, we will have to learn how to survive without the comforts of civilization. Considering that our ancestors did it, it is possible. The great problem is that we ourselves created our way of life. Forgetting it will no way be easy.
The reason in China for choose a son instead of a daughter is the dowry. In china, the dowry is a practice still used nowadays. So the family think "Hey, let's have a boy, because if we have a girl, the dowry will makes us more poor." And that's why China is making profits with the little chinese girl adoption business. Very few people wants to have a daughter.
The dowry is just one reason more, but the preference for sons instead of daughters is universal, if I am not mistaken. At the same time, nature prefers to generate females – and not only among humans.
Actually, that is a good solution for governmental policy. If you have less women than men, the next generations will automatically be reduced. One men is able to impregnate ten women or even more at the same time, while a woman will have a pregnancy at a time, no matter how many men fuck her. That said, the shortage of pussies is a positive point, even because the big shots in the Communist Party (Is that really communism? What a joke, in the most savage capitalism on the planet.) will always have pussies available, anyway.
Well, that's a good point. My grandma allways said "A barn with lots of hens and a rooster works perfectly, but a barn with one hen and lots of roosters… that can`t work". I prefer to think that chinese goverment "sugest" the families to have boys instead of girls in order to have better soldiers for the chinese army.
All this ruckus consumption'll probably be forgotten once mankind discover a new way to produce energy or a new resource, or even a more effective way to recicling (or it's recycling?). Meanwhile, mankind's biggest problem it's their economic models and their goverments (all of them corrupted to the bone). Maybe after this second crack (like the same one of 1929) must make us think about the economic model we want to use.
We really only have one problem: growth. It's grade school mathematics and has nothing to do with Malthus. Nothing can grow forever in a finite space. Every child who's blown up a balloon knows this. So do cancer patients. That is the nature of our universe, our planet. If something *requires* growth to function, then it's only a matter of time before it consumes its resources and stops. Now we can temporarily solve whatever resource shortages we're facing, as we thankfully have in the past, but so long as we continue to grow, so long as our system requires increased consumption, then we will eventually hit a limit to growth that we cannot pass and then the system collapses, same as the rest.
A few links relevant to the discussion:
Paul Gilding: The Earth is full via Ted.com http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/paul_gilding_the…
Arithmetic, Population and Energy by physics professor Albert Bartlett http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOrvGDRLT7A
The Thirty Theses by Jason Godesky http://rewild.info/anthropik/thirty/
If anything, I encourage you to watch the Albert Bartlett lecture, since I think it's the core issue – how little people understand exponential function.
Exponential growth -IS- Malthus, explicitly and categorically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_growth_mo…
Where the ideology goes wrong is the assumption that the human development of the past 200 years are "temporary solutions to resource shortages". Consider what life was like when Malthus and his followers lived and wrote on this subject: It was the colonial period. America had just won its independence. Canada was still under British rule. France was in the grips of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Life expectancy was less than 40 years. Microbiology was unknown to the world. Bleeding was still the preferred treatment for illness. The steam engine was cutting edge technology in transportation. Electricity didn't exist. The telephone didn't exist. Indoor plumbing was new to the general population. Beethoven was the height of popular culture. Babbage was just building the mathematical and mechanical groundwork for computer science.
Malthusians believed that "temporary solutions" would allow the society they lived in to avoid starvation for at least 25 years, but no longer than 50. (~1848) Take a moment to reflect and appreciate just how far we've come since 1798 and how much we take for granted just how comfortably we live today in comparison. The species' perseverance isn't merely good fortune. It is the foreseeable result of two centuries of human development, which has been documented since civilization began 14,000 years ago.
Understanding growth and the challenges overpopulation can cause is important, and I don't fault anyone for being aware and concerned about these issues. But trying to capture the whole of human history in a graph, and panicking when it fails to account for future events is the height of foolishness. It is not a problem whose solution can be arrived at through grade school mathematics, and it hasn't been for over 200 years.
I’m a pessimist wrt all this, but Sing si lip yan hit on one valid reason for optimism, which is the future impact of innovations yet to be innovated. If you look at your graph, for instance, the ‘renewable resources’ component maxes out and then stays pretty much the same after 2040. I think it is reasonable to hope that someone will figure out a way to tap into renewable resources in a new or more efficient way. There is plenty of light energy to swamp out the requirements of the human population for the foreseeable future, the trick is to get better at harvesting it.
I once took a course from Julian Simon, an economist who was passionate on this topic, and who won a famous bet with the Ehrlichs about it. Ehrlich chose the five commodity metals (copper, gold, etc) that he thought would become scarcer and more costly over a ten year period as a result of population growth. Simon bet that those resources would DECREASE in value, chiefly as a result of human innovation. He won, on all five metals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
PS I use this site all the time, and it is funny to me that this is what moved me to jump in and comment.
Take a look here: http://www.vhemt.org/
In my not so humble opinion, they are completely crazy, but many must consider them wise.
I am Petroleum engineer and that chart it had time but nobody do anything for that…the companies only care for the profit…and nothing else…"stop making children" that a good way to star do something…
I would remind people of the following:
There are lies.
There are damn lies.
And there are statistics.
And then there are people who do not understand statistics and assume that statistics are lies… They are far more common than people who can actually read and understand stat, adn they make up pithy sayings.
an interesting opinion: http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_gilding_the_earth_i…
and… become vegetarian
Despite all the lecture on vegetarianism, man is, indeed, a carnivorous animal.
I understand the point against torturing animals, but if you are radical, vegetables are also living beings and, as vegetarians love to say, the don't eat corpses. In short, they masticate living beings. Thus, the cow still can try to react, the lettuce cannot. And, honestly, I still believe that eating a corpse is better than devouring a living being.
1/ You can' t seriously compare eating a fruit or vegetable with eating an animal.
2/The point is not about unethical treatment of animals, but more the total inefficiency of the process.
Indeed producing one animal protein require 7 vegetal protein (vegetable protein we could directly eat instead of wasting them by feeding animals), plus enormous quantities of water and fuel/energy, and finally generate enourmous quantities of pollution.
3/It' s very bad for human health, not only red meat but all animal based protein, yeah even milk.
Useless unethical cruelty + enormous waste of energy + pollution creation + bad health for the consumer = it' s a bit expensive for the sole "pleasure" of eating a steak.
I say pleasure but it' s more an habit/tradition.
Because Man is absolutely NOT carnivorous but more omnivorous.
The REAL carnivorous animals have different teeth and digestive system that allow them to eat and digest meat.
Men CAN eat meat, it' s completely different.
I'm not an expert (far from that), but it seems to me you're unauthorizing world medicine.
World what ?
Medicine. Have you never heard about that science?
I can' t see what medicine have to do with the waste of energy and resources from the meat.
Do you know that an animal protein has more energy efficiency than a vegetal protein? In terms of energy consumption and production, for the human body is cheaper eat animal proteins due to the lesser quantity of energy needed to transform the protein in something useful for the body.
Humans can eat both vegetals and animals, but medicine says they HAVE to eat both if they want a healthy life because meat and vegetals have different properties and human body needs both of them. Vitamins, proteins, aminoacids… they are VERY different if they come from animal or vegetal food.
animal protein require larger energy and reject larger quantities of pollution than vegetal protein for it' s production, for the same result.
For the human body animal protein are less healthy.
Human don' t HAVE to eat them BOTH.
You can eat only meat= not recommended
You can eat only vegetables= no problem at all
You can eat them both=better than only meat but less than only vegetable
Meat is only eated for pleasure and traditions and fake believes, but meat is absolutely NOT necessary.
I do NOT reply to the comments, just adding a note, a historical context.
Tthere’s a good reason we are homnivorous animals, with teeth made for both veggies and meat. Veggies are easy to catch but low on energy, while meat requires brains and muscles but rewards us with a high concentration of energy with every mouthful.
The discovery of fire turned tables, before this, it was estimated that over a third of humans wake hours were spent on mastication, and meat was really a pain in the ass to chew until it could be digested. Then came fire and that point where meat got as easy to eat but kept on providing superior nutrition.
I don' t deny hunting and killing animals for their meat was an easier way to provide food in the stone age, before mankind managed to grow and cultivate vegetables.
But now, in our "civilized" and "enlightened" century, meat is only an useless waste of valuables resources, food, water, fuel, etc.
Producing meat is heavily inefficient ecologically speaking, the environmental footprint of one animal protein produced is way larger than the footprint of one vegetal protein, nobody can deny that.
We know now that eating meat is unhealthy, even "organic" meat. Even animal subproducts like milk.
These are scientific facts from serious studies.
Industrial meat and gmo milk are obviously wayyy more toxic.
Veganism is really one of the most efficient ways to reduce our environmental footprint.
But people believe it' s so difficult to change that they will continue to forcefully believe that it' s "natural" and "better" or that they "couldn' t survive without meat" or whatever lame excuse.
All here rage against this stupid and blind mankind that don' t want to see his obvious tragic end coming fast and refuse to change or adapt; but nobody will stop eating meat, because of these same old myths, based on the same faulty and illogical fear mechanisms of self preservation coming straight from these stone age.
I'm starting to think we are speaking of different energies.
-You are talking of the energy used to breed animals in a farm.
-I'm talking about the energy used by your own body to process the food and transform it into energy.
And the fact you say of only eat vegetables and no problem is false. A lot of vegetarians (if not all of them) have to take nutritional supplements due to the lack of aminoacids, vitamins and proteins which can't be found in vegetables and are necessary for the human body. Did you know those nutritional supplements are made with (drums) MEAT? Yes, the vitamins, proteins and aminoacids from the meat and your body needs.
And I can say that because I've studied medicine (at least 3 years), so yes, I can speak properly about what's healthy and what's not.
But eating only meat it's not healthy either. A healthy diet must have both, vegetables and meat in the correct proportions. Fish, eggs, bread, and fresh fruit too. Those are all good.
That is exactly the point. If someone says he is vegetarian because he respects animals, I can respect his point. If he says he is vegetarian because that is human nature, he is simply lying, nothing else. I can accept any principle, but I don't believe it is necessary to invent points to justify points. Actually, everything that has to be justified is naturally wrong.
Justify eating meat.
Eating meat is 100% from :
-traditional false myth and old beliefs buried deeply into human uncounsciousness, like "human can' t live without meat, or will be weak without meat".
-pure pleasure of eating something we eat since we were kids without any questioning. And about that there is many "fake" meat that look and taste exactly the same as real meat.
It' s only an absolutely unnecessary luxury.
PS: So you said that human nature is NOT to respect animals ? Weird.
"everything that has to be justified is naturally wrong."
So nothing is right ? I don' t understand very well.
Either my English is bad or you are illiterate. I never said human nature is NOT to respect animals. If you were able to read, you would have seen that I said "if someone says he is vegetarian because he respects animals, I can respect his point". The text is clear, for God's sake. But when someone says he is vegetarian because eating flesh is against human nature (or something like it is a "false myth and old belief deeply into human unconsciousness"), I have to disagree. I do believe you have the right to defend your ideas. You don't have the right to lie.
Yes, everything that has to be justified is naturally wrong. You don't have to justify if you like football or not, if you like ice cream or not, if you are hetero or homo. I believe you agree with such points. If you say you are vegetarian because you prefer not to torture animals, it is perfect (I have to repeat myself) simply because it is a philosophical position, and it has its logic. If you invent that eating flesh is against human nature ("false myth", for God's sake), It is impossible to keep a debate.
If you haven't understood yet, I give up.
I' m talking about global energy efficiency and pure logic.
It' s a LOT more efficient to eat directly vegetable protein instead of using them to feed animals, and then eat these animals.
It' s the exact same false reasoning that make people can' t even think they could live without petrol, or couldn' t live out of their fantasy lifestyle.
"aminoacids, vitamins and proteins which can't be found in vegetables "
Are you joking ?
You are telling me that , in fact, there is NO living human vegetarian on planet Earth because it' s impossible to survive without eating even a little meat ?
Statistics aren't bad, you just need the right ones. I think the picture is absolutly missleading. I.e. nuclear power is a more or less infinite energy source you could easily increase if there comes a demand for it. It's a dangerous source but still the best we have and we will have it into eternity (more or less, we talk about hundreds of millions of year). The point is, of course the mines for uranium can deplete but there is still uranium in the oceans and of course in the crust of the earth. And no, the point is you can quarry it for a reasonable price. I read something like 300$/Kg. Since we still have decades to come it is easily possible zu decrease this price through more and more advancing technologies.
Then of course we have the fusion energy, a clean and absolutly secure energy source which could solve all our problems. We research the fusion energy for decades now and there will come a few but talking about the 22nd Century I don't think that matters. I am sure, many of us will see the human build sun in our lifetime.
A peak for renewable energy is absolutly weird. It's renewable, it has no peak. It could stagnate but not fall.
Humanity won't grow forever. Anyone of you know Bismarck? He was a famous german leader, our first chancellor, little bit too conservative but the man who united us to the German Empire. He gave us the national insurance, a system that over time included health insurance, accident insurance and the pension. It was great, with this step Germany was a pioneer in social questions. The people gave money into a fund and the olds could live from it. Of course, they forgot one thing – there is no infinite grow. Today we suffer from the shortsightedness of the politicians of the past decades, because they never questioned the concept. The population stagnates, respectively drops. So while back then there were four for one old, it's now two old for one young.
This will happen to other states as well. Wealth is leading to less birth. Mankind just can't grow forever ESPECIALLY if wealth increases in third world countries.
Reading scienceblogs and magazines from the EU who report the latest results (one of it is even called reasearch results magazine) and studying geology, I really don't see a frightening future before us.
@neto592
The melting arctic can't effect the sea level since there is no ground under the ice. If ice melts in water, the height stays the same. Also, the artic is melting the whole time anyway, just look at the development over the past centuries.
I'd say cold fusion. As far as I know they are building a first test power plant in France. Sure, it's still decades before it will be usable, but I believe humanity can manage somehow. We did so far.
Oh, here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
Problem solved ! http://depositfiles.com/files/mdp9z35kh
hm…..
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
Guess how much coal the Chinese is having, they have been buying coal at tremendous rate since 1970. It's the same with rare earth material, the chinese will get them all and sell them at much fucking higher price.
We are not in crisis or anything. Heck, Australia have 2800 years worth of energy for the whole world just on liquid gas and I haven't mentioned Indonesia, Philipine, and many other country with huge amount of liquid gas.
About oil, we are not in crisis or anything, it's just tose OPEC assholes and greenpeace make it sound like the oil gonna run out soon. Nope, it's not gonna run out for another 1000 years. Not too mention our greatest invention, the nuclear energy
So yeah Oliver, all of those stats is false.
That needs evidence, your comment is the very first one making me want to write "this is a heapload of bullshit"
OK, HYPERLOL
« A 2008 CSIRO report estimated Australian stranded gas reserves to be around 140 trillion cubic feet. That is enough to power a city of 1 million people for 2800 years. » http://www.pacetoday.com.au/features/shell-to-bui…
1 000 000 !== 7 000 000 000 000
Don't laugh Oliver, maybe this person just doesn't know what the population of the earth is
the really scary thing is fresh water.
Well we'll in 2148 we'll find this prothean device on Mars and then all our problems are solved anyway ;-)
I think the next if not the last option for us if nothing is done is what they did in the Matrix. Turn a human being into a Battery. Sad I know but looking at it from a different angle than the one in Matrix. Human energy can be used to generate electricity remove some of the burden from Electric plants. Making for energy effecient machines that can be powered by human strength. I know it may sound far fetched and heck maybe even impossible but at least its better than just letting ourselves use up everything that the Earth has to offer. Btw I charge my phone and other mobile devices with a hand cranked charger, its what i call my exercise in the morning. Its not much but at least it helps my body.
I think in the end the winners of this Energy non~sense will be the power hungry establishment politicians, the corrupt elitist group organizations and corporations, and the corrupt corporate media.
and who are the real losers? US, the little people, whos been spoonfed lies and fattened up with all thier bullshit, and when the shit hits the fan they will lead towards the slaughterhouse ultimately we will all be F*(ked. in the ass ofcourse. lol
Most of this doom and gloom is essentially a hoax.
Molten salt/liquid metal reactors for electric power is the future. Both reactor types consume almost 100% of fuel. Solar and Wind from an engineering and cost standpoint are unusable for baseline power generation (they actually LOL present the higher maintenance cost of renewables as an advantage). We have several hundred years of fossil fuel in various forms that will gradually be harder to get at and more expensive.
But we are 20-30 years from moving all heat/cooling/transportation to electricity. And we need to get those fission plants in the ground now.
By the way – all the AGW and Low CO2 people are delusional, lying, or uninformed. Low CO2 is bad for plants.
The core of the problem is overpopulation, as I hae grown, I've seen how people doesn't care about this matter, at least in my country people doesn't seem to realize that having lots of kids is literally killing the planets surface, 100 years ao in the city where i live was common to have more than 10 kids!!, 50 years ago 7, now 2 or 3 but its still too high, we need to reduce population not making more, and although genocide or something like that is doubtfull, the only solution for the humanity would be a reset, restart of things so a war that kills 3-4 thousand million or a pandemic preferently would do that, 1 year ago i though that the new H1N1 virus would be effective and i live really near to it, but its only a stronger virus that kills almost anybody, WTF!!
LONG STORY SHORT WORLDS PEOPLE LIMIT IS 4.5-5 THOUSAND MILLION PEOPLE AND WE ARE WAY OVER THAT LIMIT CAP!!!!
Hi!
While it is true, that the resources on our planet, especially in the energy sector, are dwindling, the graph you use to underline your argument is a bit of a problem in itself. This graph essentially shows the energy consumption and energy production, if everything including the growth rate of consumption and the known resources remain as is. However, the truth is, there are many regions not yet explorated on energy resources, therefore it is highly probable there are still unknown deposits of crude oil and other resources. Secondly, consumption will not grow beyond a certain point and where and when exactly that point is reached is strongly disputed. Besides, a similar graph was produced, I think, in the mid 80's, with the production peak somewhere around 2005.this should tell you something about this kind of graph. Nonetheless, the true problem remains: energy resources will dwindle and how the production of energy will be secured is a big question. Many people, especially politicians, want to believe, that renewable resources like wind, solar energy and others are *the* one true solution. I would like to remind those, that the materials needed for the production of wind generators and photovoltaics units also are resources, many of those generating thousands of tons of toxic waste to be produced, for example rare earth elements. What can be done? This remains to be seen. I sure hope a solution will be found soon, because however civilized our world now may be, in the event of diminishing resources, the true, egoistical nature of man will show through, and no old treaty will stop the following wars.
There is no such thing as a limit for our population. The problem we have with too many people is polution, feeding, consume but a problem isn't an apocalypse, it is challenge. There are ways to feed more people, there are ways to fight polution and there are ways that everyone can consume more. It's a myth, that the planet has a limit for human beings, that is just another grossing up but that is everything but scientific. We don't need a war, especially not a genocide, that is absolutly perverted. What we need is wealth. Would we have achieved wealth, the birth rate would've never reached this far. The reason for giving birth is often a culture were women aren't worth much and are merely breeding machines, because the children feeding the elderly. A civiliziation were you don't need many kids for a living forces you to think about giving birth instead of just doing it again and again and again.
15 billion, 18 billion, 20 billion humans are absolutly unlikely, especially because it is highly possible that you would have a huge starvation before you're even near that point.
OMG xD
I’ve just come from reading Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind and it basically talks about that stuff, but we all know Miyasaki has always been an apocaliptic guy on that matter.
Dunno, I don’t think we’d be ALL that fucked up. After all, there was a problem with crops productivity around the 60s, and they overcame it with technology (Better crops, more production with the same grounds). Maybe that’s going to happen again. Not saying it’s gonna be magical, but think about any kind of tech that could become mainstream (and save energy, or produce more energy, or food, or whatever is needed) in the coming years and add power-saving measures, a little less of stupid consumerism, and we’ll all set.
I hope…
I just read this post and I am amazed. It gives me hope to see that there are other people thinking it through, in both ways, because once you see the problems, you can (should) think about possible solutions. Although usually I am more pessimistic about these things, I think if you give up and just accept your defeat, you defenitely won't search for a solution anymore, even if there might be one. So with so many people being concerned about our future (which is great) we should not give up despite all the dark clouds but try. I doesn't hurt us, if we don't succeed we can still put our heads in the sand and wait for doomsday. I think this kind of talk is brilliant and should take place everywhere. Thank you Oliver for creating this thread, as I think it already made a difference!
Solution. Forget about materialism. Sell everything. Star living in the nature. Get together with nature again.
we can help the world significantly, as we know US is the biggest oil consumer in the world, also the biggest pollution maker in the world.. and to make worse US has not ratified the treaty of Kyoto Protocol.. How about US makes the moves first, make everything efficient, then followed by other developed countries, since only them who had the capability (resources and technology) to make differences to our world? Not just make some public service ads that promotes to live green.. we need real actions not just symbolic act like turning off your lights once a year for one hour during Earth Day only..