by Electrocmatic me » Sat 26 Jun 2004, 21:35:34
My wife and I talk a lot about peak oil, or about dieoff; maybe that is better said that I talk to my wife about peak oil and dieoff, and she sometimes listens and sometime ignores me. Recently I said something about exponential growth curves being unsustainable because eventually they approach infinity which is impossible in the here and now in the real world of humans. In her brilliance she said something to the effect that, "Yea, human population growth is approaching infinity, while the earth itself is finite."
If I could transfer the contents of my brain effectively to your, then you would see the picture I have seen many times. This picture is of exponential growth curves collapsing. The stock market crash of 1929; the gold market crash of 1980; the recent NASDAQ crash. All have one thing in common and that is the data series gets too far above the longer term trend line to be sustainable and suddenly there is a massive move back toward the trend line.
It is possible to describe the future in mathematical terms. It is possible, if one had a sufficiently long data series to determine the trend in human population. It would be possible also to extract from the residuals from the trend the cyclical component. Randoms are meaningless since they have a tendancy to cancell out one another, so it is indeed possible mathematically to give an approximation of the future.
I do not have reliable data on the human population, nor do I have data on the oil production. What I can tell you absent the numbers to crunch is that over the very long term human population has run up the left side of an exponential growth curve. This is unsustainable. It will unwind in the right side of the exponential curve. Population must snap back to the long term trend and it will in all probability overshoot that trend before it stabilizes. I could be put in a vaccum of knowledge of human activity and just look at the long term trend in human population and the current population and I could conclude that a snapback in due.. The long term trend by just an "eyeballing" of the long term numbers at dieoff.com is barely above 300 million. It may by a stretch of the imagination be 1 billion.
As for Richard Duncan, he has seen spikes in electricity. He knows that they grow in an exponential fashion; he knows how they unwind. He understands how many systems are similar to one another, i.e, electrical spikes, stock market manias, and human population growth. I do not understand electricity, but I do understand market movements, and I tell you that Richard Duncan's ideas are not to be dismissed.
One of my good friends who happens to be "shrink" pointed out to me that denial is the first defense. I propose that those who deny should examine this possibility that they cannot accept the horror of a collapse of the human growth curve.