Viper wrote: It will always take less energy to have a robot doing work than to keep a human alive 24 hours a day to do 8 hours of the same work.
More technology
William Catton wrote:People continue to advocate further technological breakthroughs as the supposedly sure cure for carrying capacity deficits. The very idea that technology caused overshoot, and that it made us too colossal to endure, remains alien to too many minds for"de-colossalization" to be a really feasible alternative to literal die-off. There is a persistent drive to apply remedies that aggravate the problem.
To summarize,
Less energy
Not the end of the world as we know it
More technology
Most of your children will wonder what the big deal was
More leisure for human beings
Viper wrote: I do realize that every time technology allows us to go past another overshoot milestone, we have further to fall if we screw it up.
Viper wrote:@MonteQuest:
Assume for some reason we need to break a rock. Which of the following requires more resources (read energy) to operate and maintain for an equal amount of rock breakage?
1 man with a jack hammer?
1 artificially intelligent jack hammer?
Some number of men (maybe 5?) with an equal number of sledge hammers required to break the same amount of rock?
I do realize that every time technology allows us to go past another overshoot milestone, we have further to fall if we screw it up. I also think that we'll never run out of sun. So we'll burn up everything we can on this planet until the only thing left is sunlight and then we'll collect all of that. (hence the Dyson Sphere...)
@pstarr:
I can just as easily get to my job with 50 pounds of steel and maybe a few pounds of plastic as I can with my 2 tons of steel. We can also move large quantities of stuff much more efficiently with electric rail and blimps than we can with 18 wheelers. Is there going to be an adjustment period? Sure there will. And if you're smart and able, then you make sure that you're in the blimp building industry during the transition, but it's a far stretch from some powering down to calling for the end of the world. It might be annoying to have only 12 hours of electricity for a while (whether it's due to a coal shortage or a money shortage) but that's not the end of civilization. And eventually, enough stuff will have been replaced and enough solar power stations will have been built that you'll be back to forgetting to turn off the lights when you leave the room. Heck, if you've got 12 hours with no TV and no internet, what are you going to do besides donating your time to infrastructure reconstruction. What is your city going to spend its money on that year? Repaving the roads or buying more local solar capacity?
@Cashmere:
Please let's leave Iran in Geopolitics where it belongs.
I am not a cornucopian, I'm a technologist. I do believe that oil is running out, and I do believe that it's going to hurt as it goes away. Probably more than that trillion $'s we lost on Y2K. I also know however, that we've solved the fusion question. Yes, we can have fusion... all you need is a sun, and it works like magic. So... we're going to base our energy future on the sun. The theoretical full collection potential of our sun is 3.3x10^13 times our global 1998 total power consumption. Now, obviously we don't have a dyson sphere yet, but until we do, I predict we'll just keep building our way to one. It's the obvious direction to head in... why let all of that sunlight just escape into space?
Viper wrote:Peak Oil is an economic problem in much the same way that Y2K was...
Viper wrote:the US is going to wait until the last possible moment ... before replacing their entire infrastructure.
I am not a cornucopian,
Viper wrote: Obviously there are a lot of population and technology stairs along the way from where we are today to that scenario, but what reason do we have to stop at any particular step and call that the highest one?
Viper wrote:So I really should have known better, and after spending a few years watching Peak Oil, now I think I do. I've heard a lot of people compare the Peak Oil issue to Y2K and point out that Y2K was a non-event so Peak Oil will be a non-event. I've also heard the refrain from the Peak Oilists defending their position by mentioning that Y2K was a technical problem and Peak Oil is a geological problem. Having spent the later part of the 90's working on Y2K bugs and communicating with other developers who were also fixing Y2K issues, I can tell you it was anything BUT a non-event. It also was not a technical problem. It was an economic problem. In short, the world spent $1 trillion to fix the Y2K issue, and if they had not done so, the TS would have HTF on a truly grand scale. Had the world not caught on to the problem when they did (a little late in the game which is part of the reason that it cost so much) Jan 1 of the year 2000 would have looked very different than it did. However, humanity fixed the problem and disaster was averted. (To such an extent that most of the world thinks nothing happened.)
Why do I bring this up? Because we're doing it again. Peak Oil is an economic problem in much the same way that Y2K was, and just like with Y2K, there are solutions that might be a little late in coming so there will almost certainly be some pain, but humanity is most definitely smarter than yeast. Is liquid fuel important? Of course it is. It allows us to move 2 tons of steal with us any time we want to get around. Do we need to push that much steel around? No, but it's a neat trick that impresses the neighbors and as long as the stuff is so cheap that we think the best way to fly around is to jettison it out the back of an airplane, we'll keep burning it just to show we can. Is the supply of sweet crude going down? For the moment it seems to be, and even if we find some more, long term it's going away eventually unless we find another planet with life on it. Either way, we're going to need to get used to getting the majority of our energy from the sun sooner or later.
Yes, I understand that everyone would feel better if the US had started addressing this issue 20 years ago, but a lot of progress has been made in the past 20 years, and the US is going to wait until the last possible moment in part to make sure that they pick the best possible option before replacing their entire infrastructure. We don't want to have to replace all of that stuff twice, right? Coincidentaly, if you've been reading some of the reports, apparently it's all reaching its expiration date at just the right time, so we have to pay for replacements anyway.
I do think that the horse is out of the barn on sea level change, so we kinda messed up on that one. So, the next 40 years? We're going to be relocating a lot of construction and associated infrastructure to slightly higher ground (only a little higher, because it seems most people would risk almost anything to get to live next to water.) That means that we're going to have a building and recycling boom that will continue into the indefinite future. Stock market will bounce up and down as the world is constantly trying to figure out which markets deserve our reduced levels of energy and which ones are complete wastes. Over time I expect we'll change our minds quite a bit, so it means that people will have lots of interesting investment opportunities. Me personally? I'm betting on blimps for transport and travel and robotics for labor and security. It will always take less energy to have a robot doing work than to keep a human alive 24 hours a day to do 8 hours of the same work. It's not that I think the population needs to fall, I just think that business will become more robot centric and less people centric. People will probably find they have a lot more value in the creative fields since for the moment that's one of the few human computing problems we haven’t solved.
To summarize,
Less energy
Not the end of the world as we know it
More technology
Most of your children will wonder what the big deal was
More leisure for human beings
Eventually Dyson Sphere (Sun is our best power source, might as well collect all of it, no?)
Thoughts? Am I wrong? Why?
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