[Subjectivist]

What Ibon said over in his hardening-narratives-with-increased-external-consequences-t69356.html thread struck a chord with me this morning and caused me to look up an old favorite of mine for discussion. I saw this lecture way back when it came out and always thought it was a much more believable scenario than the Hollywood Mad Max collapse theories.

http://youtu.be/hN7Z95cqZx0

Please watch it and really think about the trap our paradigm of civilization has become.

[Tanada]

James Burke is a genius at presenting things like this. It might feel a bit dated, but if anything it is more true today than it was in 1980.

[Subjectivist]

Those who do not know history repeat the exact same mistakes over and over. Civilizations fade because of those mistakes, often because what is flashy is more interesting than the basic work of maintaining the infrastructure.

We are not investing in upkeep, this year th City of Toledo, one of the top 100 in the US, had hundreds of water mains rupture because many of them are a hundred years old and the climate is not gentle on infrastructure. The streets in many places are nothing but potholes and in other places the asphalt is worn through to the old brick paving below.

Toledo is still home to major GM and Fiat/Jeep manufacturing plants, but the port and rail, airport and road are all falling into disrepair. The police department is under strength by at least 15% and the fire department can barely keep up with emergency calls. Take away even more infrastructure money by raising the fuel costs of the Police and Fire Department and things will get even worse very quickly.

[ralfy]

The global population, resource and energy consumption and requirements, arms production and use, extent of environmental damage, etc., were much lower during the 1970s.

[Poordogabone]

I had forgotten about this series. I watched this one and admit it is brilliant, however, early cultivators could sustain themselves with out the use of plows but would get dominated by tribes that could produce surplus food.
Food = Energy = Power = greed. Civilization is a by product of greed (you can quote me on that).
Native americans and other cultures did well with out bothering with plowing the land at least until the plowers showed up at their doorsteps.

[Tanada]

I had forgotten about this series. I watched this one and admit it is brilliant, however, early cultivators could sustain themselves with out the use of plows but would get dominated by tribes that could produce surplus food.
Food = Energy = Power = greed. Civilization is a by product of greed (you can quote me on that).
Native americans and other cultures did well with out bothering with plowing the land at least until the plowers showed up at their doorsteps.

True enough, but I wonder how much of this had to do with lack of draft animals? The largest domesticated animals in the America's was the Llama, and you would need a large unwieldy team of them to draw even a single fork plow through the surface. Giving the peasants hoe like implements was probably a more cost effective solution for the Indigenous Americans up until the Norse and Spaniard arrived.

[Subjectivist]

The global population, resource and energy consumption and requirements, arms production and use, extent of environmental damage, etc., were much lower during the 1970s.

Well at the time this was made human population was 4,750,000. Not much more than 60% of our current figure of 7,150,000.

Add in all the environmental damage and we are more dependent on our technology than ever before.

[Pops]

We are not investing in upkeep, this year th City of Toledo, one of the top 100 in the US, had hundreds of water mains rupture because many of them are a hundred years old ...

Interestingly, if you go back a hundred years technology was rough but strong so the service life was long. As you move forward in time technology advances but so do cost and privatization and tax revolts (because "I built that" and ".gov does nothing for me") and the increase in the replacement of manufacturing with the "financial" economy . . . so infrastructure life gets shorter - improvements 30 years ago had a design life of 30 years.

The result is it's all falling apart at once.

[Pops]

P.S. Should have mentioned social and defense spending sprees as well..

[Subjectivist]

We are not investing in upkeep, this year th City of Toledo, one of the top 100 in the US, had hundreds of water mains rupture because many of them are a hundred years old ...

Interestingly, if you go back a hundred years technology was rough but strong so the service life was long. As you move forward in time technology advances but so do cost and privatization and tax revolts (because "I built that" and ".gov does nothing for me") and the increase in the replacement of manufacturing with the "financial" economy . . . so infrastructure life gets shorter - improvements 30 years ago had a design life of 30 years.

The result is it's all falling apart at once.

So basically sounds like we need a system reboot and rebuilding spree and it is coming due just in time or Peak Oil.

Maybe this really is Peak Everything after all. I can only take comfort that as long as someone remain after the population crash Ibon talks about so much we will recover. Of course none of us will be alive in a thousand years to see it. When the Roman Empire fell in the 480 AD period it took almost 500 years for the population of Europe to recover to prior levels and another 500 years to exceed Roman technology.

Will the Human race be that lucky again?

[Pops]

No doubt we've ridden this paradigm into the dirt and need a change. I hope the Energy Fairy is starting to beat us about the head and shoulders with her PO-wand to force us to come up with some great new idea, fusion maybe or DiLithium Crystals or heaven forbid: conservation. LOL

The population explosion has been about the death rate falling faster than the birth rate. Personally I'd like to see the birth rate continue to fall rather than the death rate start to rise:

[Tanada]

Imagine what the world would be like if energy resources followed the Sigmoid curve instead of the bell curve. Oh wait, Nuclear and Solar do follow the sigmoid function, they are effectively so large in potential that our entire civilization consumes a trivial amount of the potential available.

Too bad we decided to go with the easy make a fire out of chemicals formula of energy supply.

[Poordogabone]

I had forgotten about this series. I watched this one and admit it is brilliant, however, early cultivators could sustain themselves with out the use of plows but would get dominated by tribes that could produce surplus food.
Food = Energy = Power = greed. Civilization is a by product of greed (you can quote me on that).
Native americans and other cultures did well with out bothering with plowing the land at least until the plowers showed up at their doorsteps.

True enough, but I wonder how much of this had to do with lack of draft animals? The largest domesticated animals in the America's was the Llama, and you would need a large unwieldy team of them to draw even a single fork plow through the surface. Giving the peasants hoe like implements was probably a more cost effective solution for the Indigenous Americans up until the Norse and Spaniard arrived.

I can't speak for american natives but it seems that if they had the urge to plow the land, well a lama is better than a human, and through selective breeding Lamas would have became robust enough to do the job right.
I think they liked to keep things simple and not necessarily want to fix anything that wasn't broken.

[Perfector]

The population explosion has been about the death rate falling faster than the birth rate. Personally I'd like to see the birth rate continue to fall rather than the death rate start to rise.

It will probably be both that will halt and then reverse population growth. When the limits to growth become brutally apparent, the death rate will rise. But people will decrease their fertility sharply, even more so than the small decreases we've seen recently. Once people become used to the new reality, after three generations maybe, fertility will rise up to approximately replacement level.

Throughout most of history people have carefully matched their fertility to the deathrate to ensure population stability. They did this without modern contraception, using many methods. The widespread idea that in pre-modern times people had as many children as humanly possible is incorrect.

[Subjectivist]

The paradigm of peak oil is, if we lose our current civilization it will tke centuries to recover. We have used up all the easy to access raw materials, other than scavanging our descendents won't have much to work with.

[Subjectivist]

Regarding the blackout; the phones worked, wouldn't now. And those people in the subway with the birthday cake, candles, cheap wine? The outcome would be very very different today. Not a 'Blackout Party' but rather a bloodbath. Many now have concealed weapon carry permits.

I was a kid then, just home from school/friends house and alone. The power went out, the house went dark, and the TV and radio turned off. I lived 33 miles from NYC (east out on Long Island) and was aware the TV/radio transmitters were in NYC. My tiny rational mind concluded that only a nuclear war could cause such widespread electrical damage. I went up to the attic to look west expecting to see a mushroom crowd. I was alone. It was scarwieeee.

Well at least there wasn't a mushroom cloud when you looked out the window.

Hopefully we can all die of ripe old age without seeing one except in old movies.

[Tanada]

I think the modern generation is much more fearful of losing their electronic connection to reality because they have always had it from childhood. I fear not having a car because for my generation a car was freedom, the opportunity to just drive over the horizon and start all over if I really made a mess of my life. For my parents who grew up during the Great Depression it was fear of not having enough to eat, ever. I don't know about my Grandparents fears they all died before I was old enough to be accepted as an adult discussing adult topics. I think disease was probably the major fear because their siblings had gotten illnesses like Polio and been crippled for life, or outright died from childhood illnesses we immunize against now.

Take away the technology and we will go back to fear of disease, no complex civilization means no immunizations, no economic collapses, no cars and no electronics. We would be back on an equal footing with a century ago, at best.