dohboi wrote: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!![]()
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Is everything alright with you and yours down there? Do you have anything to report on general conditions, attitudes, prognoses...???
Tanada wrote: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.
Squilliam wrote: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.
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.
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“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"...
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