Plantagenet wrote:There is so little left on this planet that people are seriously considering mining asteroids.
Plantagenet wrote: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.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
pstarr wrote:... billions must die to live off the scraps we have left.
pstarr wrote: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.
SeaGypsy wrote: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.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Lore wrote:It's not coincidental that the exponential rise in human population coincides with the age of oil.
eastbay wrote:Yup, we'll use all of it. It's well underway, folks. The easy to get NG, coal and oil's nearly gone. So we've moved on to what's next on the list of what we can burn:
* We burn half the US corn production in America's cars.
* We've clearcut half of the Malaysian rainforests so palm oil plantations can grow green renewable fuel to burn in bio-diesel trucks and cars.
* We're setting fire to the Indonesian rainforests to clear that land so palm oil can be grown and burned in Europe's cars.
* We're clearcutting the Amazon to, you guessed correctly, grow sugar to make green biofuels for cars and trucks. (and to grow soy and raise cows and plant other food for us and the 80 million people annually added to humanity)
* We now pump unpronouceable chemicals into the ground everywhere to frac out the last of the hydrocarbons.
* We scrape the topsoil off Alberta, and we'll next move on to Colorado and everywhere else to get at and burn the bits of oil trapped in topsoil.
* We'll start some wars over a few islands in the China Sea in order to see who owns the oil there.
* We'll nuke and radiate the oceans with leaks from coastal atomic energy plants because burning coal is too costly.
* We've started wars in all sorts of Islamic countries so the Muslims know who's really boss over the oil under their lands.
* We're well on our way to killing all non-human life on the entire surface of the Earth so we can burn fossil fuel to make people fatter and lazier.
Subjectivist wrote:The real legacy of humanity will be all the legacy of extinct species we are taking out of the ecosystem every day from no into the future.
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