Peak Oil News and Message Boards

thought I would liven up the Party
One point to clear up. By descent of civilization, I generally mean inability to access information and technology as I equate these with civilization

All of the above. A nuclear holocaust, of course, may short circuit the first three.

Let's be rational about this: We will NOT be missed.

The question is too vague. Who is this "we"? Since it could easily be a can kicking exercise for a very long time yet, the demographic here maybe none of the above, but our children & grandchildren possibly. There's too many exponential factors for it to wind down smoothly & there's no system available to replace the demand for growth implicit in the current one.

pstarr wrote:"None of the above" 3 count. AdamB, Asgy and outcast-searcher.

The rest: 4 count. Smart folks

Smart folks have it 4 to 3. We won yay!

Figures. By the way P, how did you identify the voters ?

The usual inaccurate strawmanning because in the minds of some, if you don't believe doom is nigh, then you don't believe in doom...ever.

We will become EXTINCT, probably within a 100 years, as Stephen Hawking suggests, but not until after the usual suspects embarrass themselves with a host of additional false end-is-nigh predictions.

It's only because doom is NOT here yet that people can amuse themselves with cult theories like ETP, POD, or "Demand Dearth". When it arrives, it will be unambiguous and the debating will cease.

It's possible that if technology progresses fast enough that some form of AI will take hold and be able to stick around through self-repair and replication, but it would preside over an earth that has returned to primal soup conditions ala The Matrix. It's a depressing enough future that I don't paticularly care whether AI or even a few Morlock-like cave dwellers or a pocket colony on Mars or the Moon hang on or not.

Oh, and just so I'm clear here, the main driver of the extinction will be AGW which will lead to the collapse of agriculture.

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

- Wordsworth

Global warming will continue unchecked until coastal cities are flooded and rich agricultural lands around the world are underwater and abandoned. Hundreds of millions of people will be displaced, becoming landless, starving hordes, demanding their governments "do" something.

Then it really will get bad, with conflicts over the remaining agricultural land leading to nuclear war.

Cheers!

Stephen Hawking is just a fringy spruiker for the space race. Funny someone who mocks doomers in general believes in human extinction in 100 years- isn't that exactly the same psychology just deferred? Appears so to me.

Somehow in the long distant past, life existed, thrived even, with a whole lot more CO2 in the atmosphere than now or than speculation has it going in the foreseeable.

Change is the only certainty. Human boondoggles will be around as long as humans can find something to eat.

Plantagenet wrote:Global warming will continue unchecked until coastal cities are flooded and rich agricultural lands around the world are underwater and abandoned. Hundreds of millions of people will be displaced, becoming landless, starving hordes, demanding their governments "do" something.

Then it really will get bad, with conflicts over the remaining agricultural land leading to nuclear war.

Cheers!

I give this a reasonably high probability as well. AGW is happening and will continue to have effects for centuries. Sadly a large proportion of humans are convinced change=death even though they themselves rush out to buy the latest version of whatever consumer product is popular. I do believe we will become extinct eventually, but this could be evolution to a different life form that is simply different enough to no longer be able to interbreed with humans alive today. The definition of evolution is gradual change with bursts of speciation and the difference between species is the inability to produce viable offspring.

Horses and Donkeys are different species because they can only produce sterile offspring. Yak and Cattle are sub species because half of the offspring born are re-productively viable, specifically the females are able to reproduce with males of either parent line. Dogs/Wolves are able to breed with Coyote and produce viable offspring even though in the past scientists thought they were so different that they were different species. It turns out from a genetic POV Coyote are just a sub species of wolf that specializes in survival in a different environment and when you remove the natural Wolf population the Coyote population fills back in the missing niche in the ecosystem. Both have no problem interbreeding with domesticated dogs because the fact is they are all one over arching species.

We have extensive genetic proof that Humans and Neanderthal produced viable children and that Humans and Denisovan also produced viable children even though initially both were designated different species. Gorilla, Chimpanzee, Bonobo and Orangutan are physiologically very close to humans but so far as we know none of them can produce a living offspring from cross breeding. However even though they are much more distant relatives Baboon organs have been successfully used for organ transplants that have survived for weeks in the new host body. All these factors have blurred the original definition of species a great deal, which was based on simple appearance and ecosystem niche environment.

So I believe humans will some day become extinct, and possibly this will mean no descendants continue to exist but it also may mean our descendants have developed into a truly separate species. To whit, that they can no longer produce re-productively viable children with humans. That is a very long view because Humans and Neanderthal were separated for about 350,000 years and yet we know they produced re-productively viable children when they started living in the same territory about 60,000 ybp.

For the fate of humanity and long term resilience of our species let us hope and pray that 7/8 of our population is reduced in the next couple of generations. Through attrition, disease, famine, reduced fertility rates, conscious planning, war, wisdom, compassion, hatred, pandemics, holocausts, genocides, compassionate humane distribution of resources. Note that the arsenal to get their is a basket of "solutions" mixing the sacred and profane. You can't get there without both being part of the solution.

History does repeat itself, there is no dark Dystopian landscape nor Utopian garden of eden awaiting us. Humans are apes and carry the mixed baggage of self interest and altruism mirrored in society at large. Both were honed through natural selection and both will be applied as part of the necessary solutions. That is our fate. Our destiny as a species, a constant.

SeaGypsy wrote:isn't that exactly the same psychology just deferred?

Not in the context of sustaining a daily debate on a forum powered by the 24-hour news cycle, no.

The core argument is not doom yes/no as much as doom when.

The passtime of some is to seize upon news in order to try to convince other posters that doom is nigh rather than, let's say, 10-20 years from now. That is definitely a different psychology from emotionally decoupling from the need to sort get this story over-with and gain cassandra validation. When you try to look at the data dispassionately, the timeline spreads out a bit more. Still alarming, but it doesn't necessarily provide the sort of near-term validation that doomers crave so much.

There is a fundamental communication gap where fast-crash doomers are so fundamentalist in their viewpoint that they see any difference of opinion on timing or circumstance to be tantamount with cornucopianism. It's that sort of mentality that leads to different religious sects founded on the backs of some minute difference in dogma. "Sorry, you're not part of our club because you don't think doom will arrive tomorrow". It's just tribalism again and again.

pstarr wrote:You seem to conflate our innate genetic propensities with some sort of ultimate state, our so-called 'destiny'. But there are possible outcomes that could result from neither of those conditions. We could be all transported by a higher alien intelligence to another world for a lab experiment or a zoo attraction? Or possibly raptured up? just sayin' though I am not sayin' lol

I am only saying that as Homo sapiens the cards have been dealt as to the tools we have available to adapt. We are an ape selected for aggression, altruism, self interest, compassion. We have this suite of tools, always have, always will. Of course given enough time we may evolve into another type of ape but this would require deep disruptions and external forces that would drive natural selection. In biogeography you learn that populations separated by geological features long enough start to drift genetically into separate species driven by the selective forces of their natural ecosystems. This would apply to modern humans if and when the correction took us down to isolated pockets in different continents with no interchange. Also very small genetic numbers does tend to enhance accelerated speciation because of the reduced gene pool.

You are hoping and praying for pain. With only one exception ('planning', 'wisdom', 'compassion' are all necessary together) all the other 'solutions' are terrible tragedies for those being 'solved.' By itself your 'solution' is the fate you say you want to avoid. So why not just accept what is?

Hence the thread I started a few years back Worshiping the Overshoot Predator. The word worship is key here.

Call it the dark side or whatever once we greatly exceed carrying capacity and overshoot manifests into draconian consequences then yes those "threats" that we always tried to "solve" then become the "solutions"

If you are checkmated you resign to the forces or throw a temper tantrum and start screaming..... ( this is what we are witnessing the early stages of in American culture today). If on the other hand you embrace the "checkmate" for what it is you then accept the all these "terrible tragedies" as you mentioned as your brother. As your savior.

The will to fight against the inevitable is noble and heroic but at some point futile. Up until that point sure it is worthy to fight the good fight but at some point most all of us here know that the Day of Capitulation is coming. If not the Day then the Century !

pstarr wrote:I have chosen to hone my humor.

You've got a long way to go on that front.

asg70 wrote:

pstarr wrote:I have chosen to hone my humor.

You've got a long way to go on that front.

Glad I wasn't drinking a beer. I would have spewed everywhere. Well done. asg70

pstarr wrote:Ibon, it seems you have chosen to worship the Predator. I have chosen to hone my humor. I guess you are a Christian from the Midwest? And perhaps I am a Jew from New York?

I am an atheist. My father raised me with all his Anabaptist Mennonite roots of agrarian hard work so I do carry many christian attributes.

You combine the salt of the earth agrarian christian values I received from my dad and merge this with my deep understanding of ecology and this explains a lot of my world view. Throw in the irreverence of my Italian mother and you get even closer to understanding who I am. We are all an amalgam these days.

What if- all the incremental changes going on are adding up to eventually balance out without a global catastrophe? Is that possible?

Everywhere with decent living conditions, people are breeding less. Look at the panic knee jerk responses in parts of Europe, Australia & NZ- jack immigration like mad to keep population growing- people being the basic economic unit- capitalism being dependent on overall growth.

People choosing to live more simply with less consumption, riding bikes & catching PT- I'm seeing this a lot in the city I'm living in Australia- more bicycles are sold than cars.

People opting for greener lifestyles- simpler more plant based diets, solar roofs, working from home, hobby farming etc.

People who aren't making these choices leading by bad example- ending up with arms full of starving dying children at one end of the spectrum, obesity, cancer, heart & lung disease at the other.

None of us here are blind to the state of affairs as they are. I'm not going Utopian, just noting that our view is skewed by our perception of time.

For argument sake, I'm saying what's at threat is not humanity itself, but primarily capitalism as it stands. I'm certainly not going to argue against free trade & barter being natural evolutions, or for Marxist revolutionary government- which I trust as little or less than the system as it stands. I'm arguing that evolution is taking place constantly, that natural selection though thwarted, still bubbles away under the surface, that human nature is still incredibly resilient & may just find ways to muddle through & become better at living on a finite planet- just maybe this is already happening, just lost in the noise on both sides- doom vs capitalist globalist OWG Utopianism.

Eventually we go extinct, like everything else does, including the planet, the sun, the whole shebang. But for me, the Stephen Hawking's are the ultradoomers, reprehensible cowards. His physical state has nothing to do with how I perceive his message aside from seeing him as a strange pawn of an obscure aspect of the f'd up system, eliciting a weird mix of pity & awe from the not so bright, pity & scorn from the nothing to see here, move along crowd.