[Cog]

The entire human population would fit into a cubic mile square. No fatties.

[SRSroccoReport]

Cog..... When I thought you couldn't say anything more ignorant... you OUT DID yourself once again.... LOL.

SRSrocco Report

[onlooker]

SRS, Cog is a treasure trove of ignorance today!

[Tanada]

Cog is correct, it you ignore needs for food and toilet facilities and you stack the floors say 8 feet apart you could pack people in like sardines without the sauce and fit them all in a cubic mile.

Clearly they would not live long under such conditions.

On the other hand with a thousand Arcologies each housing each housing 7.5 million people you could have them all housed in tidy 100 square meter apartments and use the surrounding land to supply the food they would need. Inside the arcologies recycling would be extremely important to allow only food being imported. For power you would need a MOHO style well drilled through the crust to the edge of the mantel where heat the helium or other non reactive gas used to generate your power. The arcology building itself would stay warm just from the body heat of the population and by using heat pumps that body heat would be harvested for heating water and perhaps even some of the cooking but would likely not be enough for the industrial services like lighting, moving heavy water through piping for all the levels and so on and so forth.

This plan would require most of the land in North America to feed the Arcologies but it would leave all the other continents free to return to a nature preserve type of existence. Our old abandoned cities would quickly be decayed into piles of rubble growing trees and shrubs if the climate was rainy like most of Europe, South America and Asia. Mostly desert locations like Saudi Arabia or Australia would have some cities preserved for a long time by the conditions in their surrounding locations. Others like the cities of the Brazilian rain forest or the Congo or Indonesia would go very quickly as the wood would decay and metal rust in the warm humid conditions.

[Hawkcreek]

vtsnowedin said,
Well the 110 sq. yard figure is correct but even if you have garden on the roof your only going to grow one third of your food on 110SY so your going to need roads to import food and no food is going to grow on the roads. You might have to annex Oklahoma Kansas and Nebraska which would make it a lot more roomy and get you closer to the corn from Iowa.

From what I have read, it is possible to get better than 500 calories per sq meter/per month of garden - not claiming it is probable, but possible. That comes out to about 1600 calories per day per individual. That seems like plenty, for the near starvation, death camp of the future.
If you placed narrow gauge rail tracks on a 10 mile grid, both north/south, and east/west, anyone could walk to a distribution center in less than one and a half hours. No roads needed, just foot paths between plots. The distribution centers would just be to pick up toilet paper, cover material for the composting toilets, and maybe a little salt and pepper. As people died, they could be placed under the compost pile for each plot, so no soil nutrients would ever leave the plot.
So if you took an area about 150% the size of Texas ( maybe along both sides of the Mississippi river?), this should be easy to achieve. Pull the irrigation pipes and other stuff you need from the deserted towns in the remainder of the continent, and you have the perfect place to store the global deadwood.
And like I said before, that would give the elite all of the pretty places to enjoy whenever they wanted.
This kinda reminds me of "A Modest Proposal", by Swift.
I'm too old, I guess.

[Squilliam]

Of course the major problem with the idea that people should be concentrated in X area is this. The poor may approve due to a gain in living standards etc, but those relatively wealthier people that stand to lose would object. The dilemma isn't the approval of the poor, but in the disapproval of the relatively wealthy. However rational the actual action is does not seem to matter. The fact that people are more motivated to prevent losses than they are to go for hypothetical gains makes this even more difficult than it appears at first. It would be nearly impossible to dictate something like this.

On the other hand if people were to somehow manage to create a sort of 'utopian' style society whereby people only had to opt in rather than choose to opt out it might be manageable. Think of the competitive advantage a happy, motivated and intelligent group of people living in an extremely energy and space efficient habitation? If we consider that most people hate their jobs, the economic system sucks and we need to expend so much energy wastefully or to actually get people to do 'what they are told' then perhaps it could be pulled off. I don't know if it is possible to create the type of habitat Tanada is talking about, but all it takes is for it to succeed once. Agriculture took over the planet not because it was better than hunter gathering lifestyles, but because hunter gathering lifestyles could not compete with the density of agricultural societies. If you can create a society that operates significantly better than what the current paradigm is then you can defeat the current paradigm. The only issue is figuring out how to do it just once, and getting the money/resources together to pull it off.

[dohboi]

Squil, man, good to hear you are still alive.

I guess this fits into the population thread, since if you had been wiped off the face of the earth by a GW juiced cyclone, that would have microscopically altered the pop figures!

Is everything alright with you and yours down there? Do you have anything to report on general conditions, attitudes, prognoses...???

[Squilliam]

Squil, man, good to hear you are still alive.

I guess this fits into the population thread, since if you had been wiped off the face of the earth by a GW juiced cyclone, that would have microscopically altered the pop figures!

Is everything alright with you and yours down there? Do you have anything to report on general conditions, attitudes, prognoses...???

Overall we were pretty lucky. It missed the major population centre of Auckland by only 50km, and it moved through the country pretty fast. Mostly took down a bunch of trees (knocked out our power for a couple of hours) and closed quite a few major roads temporarily. The rain wasn't too bad because of the way it moved so fast. It was through the ~1500km length of the country in less than a couple of days.

Attitude wise there was actually a few complaints made that it wasn't 'impressive' enough given the number of warnings given.

Haha It'll take a bit more than a storm to take me out. We've had a bunch of major earthquakes though over the last few years -- just gotta tie that to climate change somehow?

[Hawkcreek]

On the other hand with a thousand Arcologies each housing each housing 7.5 million people you could have them all housed in tidy 100 square meter apartments and use the surrounding land to supply the food they would need. Inside the arcologies recycling would be extremely important to allow only food being imported. For power you would need a MOHO style well drilled through the crust to the edge of the mantel where heat the helium or other non reactive gas used to generate your power. The arcology building itself would stay warm just from the body heat of the population and by using heat pumps that body heat would be harvested for heating water and perhaps even some of the cooking but would likely not be enough for the industrial services like lighting, moving heavy water through piping for all the levels and so on and so forth.

This plan would require most of the land in North America to feed the Arcologies but it would leave all the other continents free to return to a nature preserve type of existence. Our old abandoned cities would quickly be decayed into piles of rubble growing trees and shrubs if the climate was rainy like most of Europe, South America and Asia. Mostly desert locations like Saudi Arabia or Australia would have some cities preserved for a long time by the conditions in their surrounding locations. Others like the cities of the Brazilian rain forest or the Congo or Indonesia would go very quickly as the wood would decay and metal rust in the warm humid conditions.

Here is another version of compressed living that grows food on site, rather than truck it in.
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-embrace-urban-apocalypse.html

[dohboi]

Squil wrote: "...earthquakes...climate change..."

There actually have been a number of papers on possible interconnections, and much other intelligent speculation:

http://climatestate.com/2014/10/16/meth ... tal-shelf/

Waking the Giant: Climate Force and Geological Hazards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xndhx7KpSU0

Interaction between climate, volcanism, and isostatic rebound in Southeast Alaska during the last deglaciation

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... glaciation Summary posted here http://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.p ... 952.0.html

Climate change may prevent volcanoes from cooling the planet
November 16, 2016

https://phys.org/news/2016-11-climate-v ... lanet.html

(Thanks to prokaryotes at neven's site for these; but this is getting a bit off topic, so we should probably take further such discussion elsewhere)

[dohboi]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/16/europe/mi ... is-europe/

The crises just keep unrolling.

[Squilliam]

I fear that there will be a return to conditions more akin to 1930's Europe. If enough migrants come, or there are enough incidents, then there will be a change in the political climate. They will find themselves very unwelcome at some point because in so many respects they are alien. The more pressure the people are under then the more their baser instincts reassert themselves.

[onlooker]

I fear that there will be a return to conditions more akin to 1930's Europe. If enough migrants come, or there are enough incidents, then there will be a change in the political climate. They will find themselves very unwelcome at some point because in so many respects they are alien. The more pressure the people are under then the more their baser instincts reassert themselves.

I think we are already seeing that

[Squilliam]

Yes. Yes we are. Being so far from it gives a different perspective. Sometimes when you shelve your morality and think of people as just animals responding to different and difficult circumstances it makes sense even if it offends other cultural sensibilities. Outsiders are always made to feel unwelcome when the times get harder. I guess the leftist elites in Europe forget that they are humans and humans are also animals too.

[onlooker]

Lifeboat ethics will be front and center in this century

[Ibon]

What is required is to try to embrace at the same time what seems contradictory. In times of human overshoot what is good for the species is not good for the individual since the resiliency of the species requires that we reduce the number of individuals. From a cold ecological sense we can understand this especially when decisions might one day soon be made to close the door to immigrants or restrict the sending of aid. This does not exclude compassion since there will always be enough dislocation in times of human overshoot to extend ones compassion to those displaced. It is just all about compartmentalizing your compassion and directing it wisely, almost with an ecological eye. The sword of wisdom will just have to cut off certain aid and support and closing the door to immigrants in certain circumstances might be the wise thing to do.

That post Dohboi just posted about how the rescuers actually created a "pull effect" whereby their presence encouraged more immigrants to leave in anticipation of getting rescued.

Onlooker yes, life boat ethics are already here or we are right at the doorstep. We have not been able to morally consider options of withholding aid yet there are clear cases when shutting doors will be the only tenable solution.

[onlooker]

That same link by Dohboi seems to suggest that some tough lifeboat decisions are already being made. These immigration impediments also seem to suggest a widespread closing of Europe's borders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoE9q51qtyA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyfDOl2eTGs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmqOlxNQABI

[Squilliam]

@Ibon with respect to the pull factor there can also be a push back factor. I have always thought that the idea of massive migration due to climate change to be flawed based on one main factor: If there was sufficient hardship to cause people to want to move, there would be sufficient hardship to cause the destinations to want to keep them out.

[dohboi]

I'm not sure I follow that last part, but there are certainly plenty of reasons to think that tensions are going to increase, as we have already seen them do.

Meanwhile, it turns out that social stratification all by itself can prompt collapse,even if ecological collapse wasn't a factor, according to this study, anyway. (Apologies if this has already been linked)

The linked article, entitled "How Western Civilization Could Collapse," discusses how the appetite of the economic elites to hoard resources, not only damages the environment, but also stratifies our socio-economic fabric; both of which appear to be on track to lead to a collapse of Western Civilization in the 2050-2060 timeframe. As this timeframe comes after the 2045 date for Ray Kurzweil's 'Technological Singularity', I attach an image from The Matrix of what the Machine City looks like after the Machine Wars.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2017041 ... d-collapse

Safa Motesharrei, a systems scientist at the University of Maryland, uses computer models to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that can lead to local or global sustainability or collapse. According to findings that Motesharrei and his colleagues published in 2014, there are two factors that matter: ecological strain and economic stratification. The ecological category is the more widely understood and recognised path to potential doom, especially in terms of depletion of natural resources such as groundwater, soil, fisheries and forests – all of which could be worsened by climate change.

That economic stratification may lead to collapse on its own, on the other hand, came as more of a surprise to Motesharrei and his colleagues.

Under this scenario, elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with labour. Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour.
…
“The world will not rise to the occasion of solving the climate problem during this century, simply because it is more expensive in the short term to solve the problem than it is to just keep acting as usual,” says Jorgen Randers, a professor emeritus of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, and author of 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. “The climate problem will get worse and worse and worse because we won’t be able to live up to what we’ve promised to do in the Paris Agreement and elsewhere"...

(Thanks, as often, to ASLR at neven's site for link and text.)

I suppose that if automation goes far enough, the elites may be able to get by with a lot less labor from the hoi poloi (the rest of us)?

[Newfie]

I'm still trying to figure out how many people we need.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ul-ehrlich


"How many you support depends on lifestyles. We came up with 1.5 to 2 billion because you can have big active cities and wilderness. If you want a battery chicken world where everyone has minimum space and food and everyone is kept just about alive you might be able to support in the long term about 4 or 5 billion people. But you already have 7 billion. So we have to humanely and as rapidly as possible move to population shrinkage."