Die-off = significant population decline (time line may vary)

Die-off does not = extinction

Or am I confused?

Welcome to the forum and way to swing for the fences with your first post!

I'm a doomer. I think I've put it together and am hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. I look at this American Idol nation and abandon hope.

kpeavy has the most concise reply I've seen in awhile so I'm not going to foist my opinion on you. I would say this, though: as you scan these pages, you'll start to get a flavor for the open-minded doomers, the cranky old people with nothing new to contribute but vitriol, and the whackos that can't wait for a dieoff to happen so they can be the first to say, "I told you so!" before they starve to death because they spent too much time on these boards than, say, starting a garden. There are a couple of warmongers here, too, who offer no opinion, just post up faux 'news' articles about anything remotely violent. That's why they invented the Ignore button.

Also, since you seem sharp, I'd be interested to see if your outlook has changed in, say, six months after really digging in to this PO mess. If you feel like it, start a thread in December and let us know. I'll be the first to read it.

An analysis of history, biology, mathematics and current events (and others), and I see that collapse looks highly likely. By "collapse" I don't mean an overnight descent into a Mad Max world - it will probably take decades, and different people and different countries will suffer differently. Historically, the collapse would be pretty damn rapid but it would seem fairly drawn out to us.

There is no way the planet can support 6.7 billion people indefinitely, that's for certain, and environmental damage and resource use is reducing this all the time, so the population must come down. How and how quickly is another matter, but I see a slow decline beginning in perhaps 10-15 years.

I also think that resource wars will be inevitable. It's no secret that throughout history wars have been fought over resources and I can't see it not happening again.T he 20th century was the most bloody century by far in human history, and this was in the boom times of this civilisation. The 21st will see the decline and so one would expect this century's wars to far outdo anything in the 20th. Nuclear exchanges I see as inevitable considering the increasing amount of countries with nuclear weapons.

I'd put myself at 8 or so on the doomerosity scale.

I'm about an 8 or so on the lowem scale, myself.

"You can possibly stretch that context to bring up the extinction of 99% of all species which have ever existed on the planet Earth. But if you do then you are getting into the whacko world of global warming or global cooling or global whatever."

Whacko? Worrisome, yes...but whacko?

Bottom line for me: the more I study PO, the more inescapable and ineluctable the conclusion that we've run out of time and options, and we are facing catastrophic consequences.

Greenland Vikings
Die off does not mean extinction, it means a catastrophic collapse of population, usually fairly sudden.

The classic biological example is the reindeer on St Matthew Island.

Some die offs do lead to extinction of that population, such as the St Matthew reindeer, and the Greenland Vikings. This doesn't mean that all reindeer or all Vikings went extinct.

Proudfossil wrote
-Mayan Empire
-Greenland Vikings
-1620-21 Plymouth Colony Pilgrims
-Anasazi Indians
-Ireland, Potato Famine
-St Matthews Island, reindeer population
Granted, they are not human, but humans are animals after all

Ludi, add a section to your plan:

3.1 a whole lot of people flipping their lid

I'm hoping that we merely decline into a lifestyle that resembles a cross between 30's depression /40's rationing /coldwar eastern Europe. I don't know if I can prepare for much worse than that.

Being poor and living simply isn't the quite the unspeakable horror that our compulsive consuming society fears, as long as you got somewhere to live and something to eat. If you have those things, you will be as content as you make up your mind to be.

I honeymooned in the Yucatan area. I road buses with hundreds of Mayans. They did not die off. They are still there.

1620-1621 colony. So losing 100 people is a die off. Then our rural areas having been dying off for the last 100 years even though our population has grown by three fold.

Anasazi Indians. I live in New Mexico. There are thousands of Anasazi still living here, only they live in Pueblos along the Rio
Grande now.

And some of my wife's ancestors came from Ireland. They did not die off, they moved. Yes 1/3 of the population did die, but that was because the land owners, basically the British, were exporting their grain stocks to Europe and not feeding the local population.

And if you want to start on animals, there are lots of die offs, it is a natural process called extinction and has caused the loss of 99% of all species ever existing on this planet.

I still want an example of where a HUMAN population loses a resource and simply sits down to die rather than adapting or moving. THERE is none, at least none on a large scale and most of you doomers are predicting it will be world wide. I might possibly grant the Easter Island disaster but that is the only one I can think of.

Your examples are all predicated on the idea that a crucial resource, having become scarce or exhausted in one location, prompts a population to move on, presumably to find it elsewhere -- but this begs the question: if, in the 21st century, the population in question is the entire human race, and the exhausted resource is the global supply of oil, to where to you propose people up and move?

You speak of adaptation. I'm curious if you can provide the people here who don't see alternative energy pulling a deus ex machina with examples of a culture that was about to "lay down and die" but for adapting instead, rather than moving or actually dying.

So ppl can still continue business are usual. That's not adapting, that's reacting. The happy motor culture continues as normal.

Too little too late. We need to change our entire lives - ain't gonna happen until we are forced.

"Die off" is a process of a large population declining sharply when some factor supporting its numbers is removed. You're thinking of extinction, when species "die OUT".

An example of die off in human terms occurred in the Americas between the initial contact with European explorers at the end of the 15th century and the beginning of colonialization in earnest later in the 16th, without the Europeans even being aware of it. Estimates I've seen suggest that diseases from Europe may have reduced the population of the Americas from something like a hundred million down to only ten million within generations. Imagine the human misery and disruption to culture, trade, and the infrastructure of settled areas. Little wonder European settlement was managed relatively easily... most of the people who might have objected were already long gone when it started. Including most of the ancestors of your Mayan survivors.

I think that's the kind of thing they're talking about.

where's their original civilization?

are you serious? it is if your population was only around 150.

where's their original civilization?

that's what a die off is! it really doesn't matter why the limiting resource became scarce, and btw it was more complicated than you state as there was also a pathogen involved.

and human beings are... that's right, say it w/me, an animal.

who said people just lie down? i am sure in every case they fought like hell--it just didn't matter in the end.

seriously my friend, your reasoning is highly flawed. taking the descendents of the surviving remnants of populations that collapsed hundreds of years ago as evidence that no die off occurred is beyond silly.