We will use all the fuel in the end

[Plantagenet]

If our society completely collapses it is unlikely to rise again, because all the good deposits of near surface oil and minerals have been totally used up. There is so little left high grade mineral ore left on this planet that people are seriously considering mining asteroids.



We'd better keep this society going, because there is no way we can start over with picks and shovels and find enough stuff to build another advanced industrial society up from scratch.

[spot5050]

There is so little left on this planet that people are seriously considering mining asteroids.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17827347

[scas]

Peoples beliefs dictate reality.

If everyone agrees that we will burn all the fuel, we will probably end up collapsed in a 6+ degree anomaly world.

[Tanada]

If our society completely collapses it is unlikely to rise again, because all the good deposits of near surface oil and minerals have been totally used up. There is so little left high grade mineral ore left on this planet that people are seriously considering mining asteroids.

We'd better keep this society going, because there is no way we can start over with picks and shovels and find enough stuff to build another advanced industrial society up from scratch.

A) you need more historical perspective, every culture collapses sooner or later and resets to zero or hand labor agriculture.

B) the Mega corporations only exploit deposits big enough for them to make a massive profit on to pay for all those skip loaders and huge dump trucks. Thousands or tens of thousands of small deposits that are of the type mankind mined by hand exist scattered far and wide because they are 'too small to be economic'. Almost all of those will still be around to be exploited at a later date. Even all the old coal mines that were hand dug in the past with the room and pillar method, then abandoned still have half their coal in the ground. Mining into them from a different direction using different techniques just isn't economical in the massive machine era, but set things at a low pace and take away the machines and Voila suddenly they are valuable to the local population again.

[pstarr]

tanada you are describing a simple agrarian culture, Kunstler's 'World Made by Hand' of a few million people. Not a crowed planet of 7 billions. billions must die to live off the scraps we have left.

[Lore]

It's not coincidental that the exponential rise in human population coincides with the age of oil. The reset in population after we have depleted most all of the inexpensive fossil fuel resources that can be captured through mass industrialization will certainly be at a level commensurate with what can be pounded out by a few tribes that have rejiggered some of the mechanized skeletons of our past.

The survivors main problem is to overcome the crises coming at them from so many different converging future catastrophic events. Stripped of our once formidable technology it will be like taking a knife to a gun fight.

[ian807]

Humans are just nature's way of recycling organic chemicals back into the ecosystem (Sorry, feeling cynical today).

[SeaGypsy]

Biggest waster of compost ever. Flushing it out to sea or down the river all our lives then having our bodies burned because worms creep us out. How bizarre we are.

[DomusAlbion]

... billions must die to live off the scraps we have left.

And they will, Peter, they will.

We'll also see a return of slave labor. First it will be criminals from local prisons, then the unemployed then who ever is the PTB's favorite flavor of the persecuted.

Can't happen? Just look at recent history. During WWII those people in concentration camps weren't on vacation. They were making things for the 3rd Reich's war effort before they died.

[pstarr]

You two moderators (DomusAlbion, and Tanada) seem to agree that our dismal future will look like The Hunger Games with a wealthy powerful class that controls legions of hungry obedient poor. I kind of lean toward a Mad Max scenerio of complete chaos and population dieoff. My future is more reasonable for many reasons. We are armed. We are angry (and many are suicidal, as per 'Arab Spring') we communicate, and we see what is coming. They will not set up camps. The guards will slink on home.

IMHO there will be many fewer of us in the future living simple lives, with less industrial civilization. The stylish world portrayed in The Hunger Games depends on cheap fuel. I see folks dressed like medieval serfs, picking through their neighbors' orifices for vermin, before things play out in another dictatorship. Those slick costumes require such a fantastically complex industrial infrastructure. Centralized food production/processing/distribution (and waste management) requires an intact transport and refrigeration infrastructure---which is failing as we speak in 3rd-world countries. So does tertiary oil production. Fracting is a incredibly complex operation. Chaos is the rule on the downslope.

[dissident]

You two moderators (DomusAlbion, and Tanada) seem to agree that our dismal future will look like The Hunger Games with a wealthy powerful class that controls legions of hungry obedient poor. I kind of lean toward a Mad Max scenerio of complete chaos and population dieoff. My future is more reasonable for many reasons. We are armed. We are angry (and many are suicidal, as per 'Arab Spring') we communicate, and we see what is coming. They will not set up camps. The guards will slink on home.

IMHO there will be many fewer of us in the future living simple lives, with less industrial civilization. The stylish world portrayed in The Hunger Games depends on cheap fuel. I see folks dressed like medieval serfs, picking through their neighbors' orifices for vermin, before things play out in another dictatorship. Those slick costumes require such a fantastically complex industrial infrastructure. Centralized food production/processing/distribution (and waste management) requires an intact transport and refrigeration infrastructure---which is failing as we speak in 3rd-world countries. So does tertiary oil production. Fracting is a incredibly complex operation. Chaos is the rule on the downslope.

The Hunger Games is some elite wannabe's wet dream. They are not going to get it to come true. During the transition to smaller population there will be flowering of disease like we have not seen in history. The selection process will be based on whose genes are resistant to the new strains and not how much money they have in the bank. These survivors will have to find food which will be a real challenge due to the weather chaos that is already letting us know it is starting and that will get catastrophic by 2050.

[SeaGypsy]

As I just mentioned in the die-off thread, lack of anti-biotics is all it would take to transition to rapid die-off. I am with dissident and Pstarr on this, the elite wet dream concept of the future is as unrealistic as techtopia or the book of Revelations. However I don't doubt TPTB will try to manifest maintaining their status at any cost. I do doubt their ability in the long run to control what happens outside city gates.

[pstarr]

disease. google cholera haiti. And then consider your one hundred-year old crumbling waste-management system