Modern Society is on an unsustainable course

[Falloutboy]

Originally posted by: Stunt
Humans are very adaptable. We can survive much further than this planet will allow. Space is full of solar, hydrogen and metals.
The number one thing you can do is get an education, learn of new ways to adapt and make things more efficient and productive.

GM crops were the most recent advance to feed the world...improvements like these will allow humans to survive.

Under today's standards it is looking grim...but by the time we get to that point...there will have been 200years of technology!!...look at what has been developed in just 50...i am not worry about this at all.

For instance once Fusion is perfected We'll never need another form of energy again.

and once we get fusion going space travel in our solar system becomes cheap so we can setup colonies on the moon and mars, and if minerals become short in supply we can always mine the astroid belt. thats the thing about the human race when we are pressured by something in our enviroment we come up with a way to overcome it.

one way to solve alot of the population social issues in the US and other countries is to make having a child a privlage and not a right. (if you can't show a stable income that can comfortable support a kid you either have to give the kid up for adoption / have an abortion)

 

[StormRider]

This is something that I've wondered about in the past. It really depends on whether technology will ever be able to develop a clean source of renewable energy. If we can do that then our civilization can continue to grow and expand as it has been doing.

If we can't do that, then we might have to develop a different culture and live in harmony with the planets. But then our civilization might just go the way of the dinosaurs. All it takes is one meteorite hit and boom, we're gone. Because that type of culture can't really develop the science necessary to save us from such a disaster -- only the consumer type culture can.

 

[dannybin1742]

So have no respect for your fellow human beings, and future generations. Continue plundering and wasting. What does it matter right? Do what you want whenever you want however you want and fvk the consequences.

i have met too many republicans in iowa that chare this mentality, they don't understand basic ecology pricipals, they don't understand why fvcking up the enviroment is bad, and the worst part is they say, oh well technology will eventually fix everything, consequently they are the ones that have never finished college or never went, and also bitch about about evolution in schools, i wish they would go live in thier fvcked up utopias somplace else.

its simple, don't sh!t where you eat; this carries over to the environment

 

[IGBT]

..Kenneth Boulding
"Anybody who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."



..way too many people selfishly having kids simply because it's the next thing to do. Exponential growth negates all conservation...

 

[judasmachine]

What I believe humanity will do is what it's done before this culture erupted in Mesopotamia (Read: Iraq) some 10,000ish years ago. Boom and Bust, the population rises and falls with amount of food and other resources availible to them. We will run very low on energy someday soon or someday later. Many will perish, some will survive. The survivors will recognize what went wrong and never attempt totalitarian agriculture again. The natives of Central America (notably were the Mayans) are a prime example, we find several differant cultures underneath other abandoned cultures. They recognized that their present system didn't work, or make them feel fufilled so they abandoned them, to try again some other day, some other way.

 

[OS]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
Supertool

So have no respect for your fellow human beings, and future generations. Continue plundering and wasting. What does it matter right? Do what you want whenever you want however you want and fvk the consequences. That's how we are in this situation.

I drive a fuel efficient car, live close to work, recycle as best as I can, keep frivolous expenditures to a minimum and such. But people are dumbasses. If you tell them to live the same, they'll bitch about socialism, tree hugger nanny state, environmental weenies as big brother, their rights to Hummers and sh*t. Fair enough. If humanity blows itself up, we had it coming and I really don't give a f*ck these days. This is like the ultimate test of if humans are dumbf*cks are not.

 

[CycloWizard]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
There is a solution.

1. Stop buying sh!t you don't need. That fancy new 19" LCD is not needed. Nor is that 4th car or that new yacht or that new 9.1 stereo system or another electric toothbrush. What you need is a good family, a satisfying job, a roof over your head, clean water, some entertainment and three meals. Everything else is superflous.
2. Sell your house and move closer to work.
3. Sell your car and start establishing links in your neighborhood.
4. Buy "environmentally-friendly" food. Look for food specifically grown organically and with minimal loss of topsoil.
5. Don't have kids. If you do, have one child and stop. 2.1 children per family is replacement level. With our current momentum in population, going at replacement would surge us to 8 billion people before dropping to 7 billion by 2050 or so. We don't need ot be at replacement, we need to be under.
6. Quit investing. The majority of companies are on an exploit or die mentality. Very few want to live commensurately with the environment.
7. Advise 10 people to do the same.

See how hard this is? No one will want to do even half of that list. Hell, I don't all of them (specificially #4). It business as usual for everyone until the sh!t hits the fan.

All good suggestions. I think the problem is not so much global overpopulation as it is local overpopulation. Therefore, if I have 10 kids, I'm not really contributing to any problems (or, at least very little relative to having them elsewhere), whereas someone in India having 10 kids would be. I think this is the case because nature is extremely talented at dissipating smaller disturbances, but insanely large ones is a struggle, as with any system.

As far as energy sustainability goes, I think we're generally moving in the right direction. The planet receives more energy than it consumes on a daily basis (radiation absorbed > chemical depleted). Current research aims to allow us to harness a greater fraction of the incident energy, primarily through increased efficiencies. Oil is the stopgap that allows us to work our way towards this goal. Hopefully we'll achieve it before we see the end of oil. 😛

I think (not know, as I'm not terribly familiar with agriculture, despite being a redneck from Indiana) that the US could supply sufficient food for the better part of the world's population. The problem is not so much the technology to grow the food, but the technology required for distribution. The advent of this technology would allow us to end subsidies for farmers and ship crops to everywhere in the world. The effect on worldwide hunger would be dramatic (assuming we didn't run into problems with warlords a la the SNL skit 😛).

I guess I'm basing all of this on some pretty basic assumptions: conservation of mass and energy. Energy is readily available, but needs to be harnessed. Mass is available, but also needs to be harnessed. We are very wasteful in landfilling everything. Not sure that there is necessarily a simple solution to sorting out the jillions of tons of trash produced every day, but itemizing it would allow the recovery of just about anything we need. It's not really consumed so much as it is input then output (sounds like I've been in the labs too long this weekend :x).

 

[0marTheZealot]

^ Good points.

Local overpopulation has led to global overpopulation IMO. Unfortunately, there aren't super reliable numbers on how much the Earth can really carry; all we have are estimates, conjectures and the like.

While we could grow tons of food, most of those practices would erode topsoil to an even further degree. We work the land so hard that I think it'll be a miracle if we still have teh same amount of arable land in 30 years.

And yes, while hte earth does receive a net influx of energy, most of it is unrecoverable economically due to it being so dilute in a single area and consisting of solar energy. Given enough time, I think humanity possesses all the cognitive powers to solve any problem. However, we don't have time and the inertia of the past is about to break through the final barriers holding this current wasteful society in place. Humanity will survive, so will society and civilization. I doubt that any of would recognize the society of the future. In 100 years, I can at least hope we learned from the mistakes made today.

 

[redly]

Originally posted by: miketheidiot

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
There is a solution.

1. Stop buying sh!t you don't need. That fancy new 19" LCD is not needed. Nor is that 4th car or that new yacht or that new 9.1 stereo system or another electric toothbrush. What you need is a good family, a satisfying job, a roof over your head, clean water, some entertainment and three meals. Everything else is superflous.
2. Sell your house and move closer to work.
3. Sell your car and start establishing links in your neighborhood.
4. Buy "environmentally-friendly" food. Look for food specifically grown organically and with minimal loss of topsoil.
5. Don't have kids. If you do, have one child and stop. 2.1 children per family is replacement level. With our current momentum in population, going at replacement would surge us to 8 billion people before dropping to 7 billion by 2050 or so. We don't need ot be at replacement, we need to be under.
6. Quit investing. The majority of companies are on an exploit or die mentality. Very few want to live commensurately with the environment.
7. Advise 10 people to do the same.

See how hard this is? No one will want to do even half of that list. Hell, I don't all of them (specificially #4). It business as usual for everyone until the sh!t hits the fan.

#6 Buy land.

#6.2 - Buys lots of guns to defend said land

 

[datalink7]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
There is a solution.

1. Stop buying sh!t you don't need. That fancy new 19" LCD is not needed. Nor is that 4th car or that new yacht or that new 9.1 stereo system or another electric toothbrush. What you need is a good family, a satisfying job, a roof over your head, clean water, some entertainment and three meals. Everything else is superflous.
2. Sell your house and move closer to work.
3. Sell your car and start establishing links in your neighborhood.
4. Buy "environmentally-friendly" food. Look for food specifically grown organically and with minimal loss of topsoil.
5. Don't have kids. If you do, have one child and stop. 2.1 children per family is replacement level. With our current momentum in population, going at replacement would surge us to 8 billion people before dropping to 7 billion by 2050 or so. We don't need ot be at replacement, we need to be under.
6. Quit investing. The majority of companies are on an exploit or die mentality. Very few want to live commensurately with the environment.
7. Advise 10 people to do the same.

See how hard this is? No one will want to do even half of that list. Hell, I don't all of them (specificially #4). It business as usual for everyone until the sh!t hits the fan.

You're asking people to do something horrible. You would ask people to get rid of their dreams. Dreams are more important than you give them credit for. Dreams give us hope, and I wouldn't want to live life without hope.

 

[Siddhartha]

Malthus wrote about this almost two hundred years ago. He thought that the collapse due to population growth would have happened quite awhile ago.

I am suggesting that people are more flexible in their behavior than these models allow.

 

[chess9]

Food and minerals won't be the major limiting factors. Air and water quality and obesity will kill billions of people. Air quality is already killing millions worldwide each year. COPD is now the fourth leading disease and rising rapidly. Within 20 years, 50% of you will have emphysema/asthma/chronic bronchitis and many of you will be on portable oxygen simply to go for a walk with your wives.

November is national COPD month, by the way.

-Robert

 

[Orsorum]

Originally posted by: Siddhartha
Malthus wrote about this almost two hundred years ago. He thought that the collapse due to population growth would have happened quite awhile ago.

I am suggesting that people are more flexible in their behavior than these models allow.

I'm not just suggesting, I'm saying that we are.

 

[Stunt]

Originally posted by: CycloWizard
I think the problem is not so much global overpopulation as it is local overpopulation. Therefore, if I have 10 kids, I'm not really contributing to any problems (or, at least very little relative to having them elsewhere), whereas someone in India having 10 kids would be. I think this is the case because nature is extremely talented at dissipating smaller disturbances, but insanely large ones is a struggle, as with any system.

This statement is crap and a huge misunderstanding with people. You think 10 kids in the US isn't a problem, but 10 kids in india is.

According to "International Energy Agency (IEA), 2004" Link

Americans consume 7,920.9 metric tons oil equivalent per capita.
India is a measly 514.3 metric tons

An East Indian can have 15 kids and still consume less than the average american. Our lifestyles are totally different and beyond comparison. Having 10 kids in a first world nation is ridiculous.

Populations should be reduced yes, focusing on slowing populations like india is one way, another is reducing our consumption. Consumption reduction will be much more effective in the long run as places like india switch to our style of living and want creature comforts as well.

 

[ciwell]

Originally posted by: chess9
Food and minerals won't be the major limiting factors. Air and water quality and obesity will kill billions of people. Air quality is already killing millions worldwide each year. COPD is now the fourth leading disease and rising rapidly. Within 20 years, 50% of you will have emphysema/asthma/chronic bronchitis and many of you will be on portable oxygen simply to go for a walk with your wives.

November is national COPD month, by the way.

-Robert

Yet even with these diseases and various ailments, the world population continues to grow...

 

[GrGr]

I recently heard an environmentalist claim that if all the people of the world were to have the same living standard as Americans it would require the resources of 12 Earths to sustain them. Now that may be a convenient slogan and an exaggeration but there is propbably more than a kernel of truth there.

 

[0marTheZealot]

Originally posted by: datalink7

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
There is a solution.

1. Stop buying sh!t you don't need. That fancy new 19" LCD is not needed. Nor is that 4th car or that new yacht or that new 9.1 stereo system or another electric toothbrush. What you need is a good family, a satisfying job, a roof over your head, clean water, some entertainment and three meals. Everything else is superflous.
2. Sell your house and move closer to work.
3. Sell your car and start establishing links in your neighborhood.
4. Buy "environmentally-friendly" food. Look for food specifically grown organically and with minimal loss of topsoil.
5. Don't have kids. If you do, have one child and stop. 2.1 children per family is replacement level. With our current momentum in population, going at replacement would surge us to 8 billion people before dropping to 7 billion by 2050 or so. We don't need ot be at replacement, we need to be under.
6. Quit investing. The majority of companies are on an exploit or die mentality. Very few want to live commensurately with the environment.
7. Advise 10 people to do the same.

See how hard this is? No one will want to do even half of that list. Hell, I don't all of them (specificially #4). It business as usual for everyone until the sh!t hits the fan.

You're asking people to do something horrible. You would ask people to get rid of their dreams. Dreams are more important than you give them credit for. Dreams give us hope, and I wouldn't want to live life without hope.

Pursuing your dreams is fine. However, we need to re-define happiness. Right now, people get happiness from material things and less from social interactions. No doubt many people do enjoy socializing, but a great deal of people just love to buy things. Leaving each to his own and pursue his/her dreams is why we are in this situation. Unfortunately, there comes a time when the greater good is more important than personal desire. Did you read the articles? Can you see what sort of troubles may emerge in a scant decade or two? Don't you want your grandchildren to live in the same sort of prosperity you do? Needs should be viewed as survival needs; to survive in this world, one needs a good family, a satisfying job, entertainment of a sustainable level (ie not nascar), shelter and three meals. Everything afterwards is superflous.

Each pursuing his dreams individually with little or no respect to his/her common man leads to overfishing of fisheries. Why should I fish at a sustainable level, when I can fish more and pass the costs to everyone in the fishery? I am pursuing my avarice for wealth by doing so and as a result EVERYONE suffers. Or why limit consumption when the other 50 people on the block are not doing so? My share of conservation pales in their avarice for energy. Therefore, I shouldn't lower my standard of living (which is usually still miles above anything resembling modesty) because no one else is. This is why I forsee much suffering and pain in the next couple decades. No one wants to be the first (in this sense, the notion of a country, not an individual). Why should China limit her consumption when the US has been the King Glutton for the last 60 years? This sort of thinking dooms us all and will present an ugly world for our children and grandchildren to live in.

One has to remember that technology will only alleviate (or hasten) the decline. Much of technology is to blame in the first place, for overfishing, over-planting, over-harvesting, over-foresting, over-polluting, over-production, over-everything. Technology, in this sense, is like an extension of human avarice. The machine doesn't know right from wrong. The operator has a clouded notion of right and wrong. Wrong = less profits, right = more and damn the consequences. And remember, despite hundreds of millions of dollars, we still don't have technology (nor the fundemental research) for many of the problems of today. Despite 20-30 years of knowledge that CFCs deplete the ozone, we still haven't fixed the Ozone layer; we ceased destroying it, but we haven't fixed it. We haven't fixed the destruction of the forests around the world. We haven't fixed the noxious chemicals in the air, we haven't fixed the exploitation of resources that we use. We haven't fixed disease that runs rampant like herpes, AIDs, Malaria and other infections. We still haven't fixed erosion of topsoil, nor have we fixed world hunger. While yes, technology has improved many of our standards of living; they do so at the expense of other peoples. Slavery, resource wars, colonization, puppet governments, genocides, international strife and exploitation of resources are all used to fuel the 1st world's consumption. We are running on inherited capital and sooner or later it will run out. Then mother nature will be here to collect and she always collects. Unless we make a dedicated and sustained move to a sustainable society, I doubt that we can survive in our present state.

 

[0marTheZealot]

Originally posted by: ciwell

Originally posted by: chess9
Food and minerals won't be the major limiting factors. Air and water quality and obesity will kill billions of people. Air quality is already killing millions worldwide each year. COPD is now the fourth leading disease and rising rapidly. Within 20 years, 50% of you will have emphysema/asthma/chronic bronchitis and many of you will be on portable oxygen simply to go for a walk with your wives.

November is national COPD month, by the way.

-Robert

Yet even with these diseases and various ailments, the world population continues to grow...

Because of population inertia, not because of resource availability. In nature, populations often out grow their resource base and then crash.

 

[piasabird]

Maybe we should outlaw a few medical practices like giving someone over 60 a heart bypass that just dies a few years later anyway. Everyone is going to die.

If you imagine that when or if we run out of resources that the thinning out of the population in that way will be good, then you obviously need to study history. You can look for rampant disease and starvation. Just look at North Korea.

 

[alent1234]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
There is a solution.

1. Stop buying sh!t you don't need. That fancy new 19" LCD is not needed. Nor is that 4th car or that new yacht or that new 9.1 stereo system or another electric toothbrush. What you need is a good family, a satisfying job, a roof over your head, clean water, some entertainment and three meals. Everything else is superflous.
2. Sell your house and move closer to work.
3. Sell your car and start establishing links in your neighborhood.
4. Buy "environmentally-friendly" food. Look for food specifically grown organically and with minimal loss of topsoil.
5. Don't have kids. If you do, have one child and stop. 2.1 children per family is replacement level. With our current momentum in population, going at replacement would surge us to 8 billion people before dropping to 7 billion by 2050 or so. We don't need ot be at replacement, we need to be under.
6. Quit investing. The majority of companies are on an exploit or die mentality. Very few want to live commensurately with the environment.
7. Advise 10 people to do the same.

See how hard this is? No one will want to do even half of that list. Hell, I don't all of them (specificially #4). It business as usual for everyone until the sh!t hits the fan.

and don't forget to throw out that computer and to stop sucking up electricity surfing the internet and OC'ing. you are sucking up valuable resources just by posting here

 

[alent1234]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
For evidence I present the follow:

http://www.dieoff.org/page174.htm
http://www.dieoff.org/page102.htm
http://www.dieoff.org/page36.htm
http://www.dieoff.org/page157.htm
http://www.dieoff.org/page165.htm


Based on this and other evidence (declining fisheries, destruction of forests and habitats, natural resource depletion, the institution of a broad welfare state, erosion of soils, pollution), modern society is unsustainable. Presently, we are living off inherited capital from eons ago. As soon as that capital runs out, we will be left with the bill and mother nature collects every bill one way or another.

Forget terrorism, meaningless policy changes, hybrid cars and all the other little novelties of modern society. Anyone with a background in science or engineering should be able to see that our course is suicide. Unchecked growth, unsound economic policies and belief in technology fuels this. For example, we still don't have technological solutions to many problems in modern society, such as pollution removal, disease, resource depletion, and a host of other problems. Blind belief in technology is the same as blind belief that a savior will solve all our ills.

This is a problem that is 100 or 200 years away. This is a problem that has already shown it's ugly head around the world and will continue to do so for the next couple generations. And within 20-30 years, the problems will come to a head where standards of living around the world could potentially crash, which in turn may lead to a population crash. Most young people here and a large number of middle aged individuals would be directly effected. Jobs, health, and safety are all under attack here.

how old are you? i've been reading crap like this going back to the 1970s. By now we were supposed to be in an ice age, until the early 1990's when the same people decided that it was really global warming. and now the global warming is supposed to result in an ice age again.

 

[0marTheZealot]

^

What are you talking about. Most, if not all, of the predictions made in the '70s have come true. Look at the primary literature and not what the newspapers say; they are notoriously bad at reporting scientific information.

The primary literature states that CO2 emissions, O3 depletion, global climate change, agricultural yield decline, and the like will continue to escalate, until it severly impacts human welfare around 2025. We have spent the last 30 years ignoring this.

Remember, these cycles are not on a human time scale. To us, 30 years is a long time. For the cycles of the earth, it is less than a blink. We have disrupted the cycles in a short amount of time. Obviously, this can not continue.

Do you propose we continue business as usually and damn the consequences? A consensus of scientists have agreed that the Earth has a finite capacity of human beings, and currently, that finite number has been exceeded for the most part.

There was no ice age predicted in the primary literature. They said that alteration of the global climate cycles may result in a large scale disturbance. And do you think that business as usual will continue. We will hit a limiting resource soon and then nature will control our growth. There is no such thing as infinite growth. There are consequences for these actions. There are limits to growth. Either we implement our own limits or nature will do it for us.

Alent, my personal impact is lessened. I don't drive, I don't live in a house, I don't run heating gas and I live close to work. I have exactly two bulbs in my apartment and only one of them is on at night and the other is for when I have company over. Also I am not overclocked 🙂

 

[Infohawk]

Science can help us sustain what we have. But a lot of work is required. We have to fight the zealots who try to stop progress at every chance...

 

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: Infohawk
Science can help us sustain what we have. But a lot of work is required. We have to fight the zealots who try to stop progress at every chance...

Even the scientists do not understand that humanity has a deeply hidden death wish. The reason that nothing works not even science, is because of that. Humanity is asleep living a false life as a false ego constructed out of deep and unconscious self hate. Humanity is doomed because it would rather die than awaken to the feeling of self hate because humanity falsely believes deeply that the feeling is true, that we are each the worst in the world. People choose real death over psychic death any day. Nobody wants to be the worst person in the world, especially when we spend our lives causing the other person to feel like that. Who wants to be beaten at his best game.