[DesuMaiden]

I made this video illustrating the biggest mistake mankind has ever made. And that mistake is to make our society totally and utterly dependent on fossil fuels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEBG0c1 ... e=youtu.be

[Karle]

Thank you, the main point for me about what you say in the video is about those 100,000 square miles of solar panels to replace fossil fuels. They would not help when there is a winter period with 6 weeks grey weather and no sunshine.

The main problem is storage. If we had the perfect storage all our problems would be solved

[MonteQuest]

Naw, I believe it was agriculture coupled with a failure to grasp the exponential function.

“Anyone who perceives a linear rate of growth, but who is actually up against an exponential rate of growth, is likely to be very surprised at how the end comes very quickly and seemly out of nowhere.

They will be completely blindsided.”
-Dr. Albert Bartlett

[basil_hayden]

DesuMaiden is a guy? There's your first problem!
I accepted the overposting of "oh what about poor old me" but I assure you that phase is over.

Babies start crawling on hands and knees, and for a short time hands and feet, until they begin to walk upright. They may never crawl on their hands and feet ever again, but it was a necessary step to walking upright.

Fossil fuels are the same thing - a step that we needed to take and once past it we will probably never go back.
Eventually someone will realize that burning all of this oil is a waste of perfectly good lubricant or chemical feedstock.

Just remember - if it wasn't for petroleum, there wouldn't be a tree standing at this point in time.

And yes, energy storage is the key; it sure is convenient to have all of that fossil energy stored for us to unleash.

[dinopello]

I thought the big mistake was listening to that damn snake in the garden !

[Synapsid]

MonteQuest beat me to it.

No surprise that it was in the Middle East that the ball started rolling.

[basil_hayden]

Now I get it - he's just a spamming derailer who ought to toss off!

"Desu (Japanese: です) is a Japanese word that is used by both fans of Japanese culture and those who mock the former. In most situations, desu is used in spam attacks and thread derailments on forums and image boards alike."

You made me use my Google Fu.

[MonteQuest]

Here's what he looks like.

[ROCKMAN]

So many mistakes it's difficult to narrow it down to just one: antibiotics, modern farming techniques, democracy, the end of slavery, the internal combustion engine (which the end of slavery made even more necessary), home heating/air conditioning, etc. Without all these "mistakes" we would have a much lower global population with many of them requiring little ff consumptions since slaves don't really need much electricity, motor fuel, air conditioning, heating oil or coal.

Ohh...I forgot one big mistake: the Democrat party. LOL.

[MonteQuest]

On second thought; human hubris towards nature.

We presumed we could improve upon nature. We cannot.

[RepublicanfromEngland]

I don't think it was a mistake, it was what it was, and it is what it is. No particular moment in time remains for certain, we all know that.

[DesuMaiden]

On second thought; human hubris towards nature.

We presumed we could improve upon nature. We cannot.

The greatest arrogance of mankind is that he thinks he can defy the laws of nature and become god himself with his technology. But that's not true. Mankind cannot defy the laws of nature. If he tries to defy the laws of nature, he will be punished for it eventually.

Overpopulation is a prime example of this. The fact we have 7 billion people on this planet is a violation of the laws of nature. And we will get punished for this through famine and starvation when population overshoot is corrected by a population crash. Billions of people will die in the decades following 2020.

[dinopello]

I don't get all this talk of improving on nature and being above nature. We are nature, are we not ? Beavers divert rivers, locusts destroy whole areas, ants war with their neighbors, foxes reproduce and deplete all the local vermin until they die of starvation or mange and so on. It seems to me we are just smart enough to complain about it. If you think we should be smart enough to overcome our nature isn't that hubris ?

I'm just asking. And, I'm not suggesting this as an excuse not to try to not futz things up for ourselves but just asking what the thinking is.

[MonteQuest]

I don't get all this talk of improving on nature and being above nature.

Agriculture, for instance. We also kill off our predators. We destroy habitats in the name of progress. We breed beyond our limits. Animals practice limited competition. Human's hunt down their competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. Read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

[MonteQuest]

Overpopulation is a prime example of this. The fact we have 7 billion people on this planet is a violation of the laws of nature. And we will get punished for this through famine and starvation when population overshoot is corrected by a population crash. Billions of people will die in the decades following 2020.

You haven't read much of my writings on this site, have you?

If you had, you would know you are talking to Noah about the Flood.

Know your audience.

[dinopello]

I don't get all this talk of improving on nature and being above nature.

Agriculture, for instance.

We are not the first, nor the best species at farming. Such Hubris !

[DesuMaiden]

I don't get all this talk of improving on nature and being above nature.

Agriculture, for instance. We also kill off our predators. We destroy habitats in the name of progress. We breed beyond our limits. Animals practice limited competition. Human's hunt down their competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. Read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

We will eventually end up destroying ourselves when we deplete all of the natural resources on this planet. Man cannot live separately from nature forever. Eventually we will deplete all of the natural resources we depend on, causing our own extinction.

[basil_hayden]

Nothing lasts forever.

Nice story, bro.

[h2]

Naw, I believe it was agriculture coupled with a failure to grasp the exponential function.

I agree, no question, though it's easy to get caught into a single view of agriculture as a monolithic thing. Large scale agriculture that produces aa surplus beyond the needs of the coming year, I'd refine it to. Lots of examples of small scale ag that work ok. Maybe ag as the primary source of our daily calories, that's more accurate. Oil is just the nail in the coffin, just lets ag drive huge tractors/harvesters, then drive the food around, nothing intrinsically new or qualitatively different in that.

I can't help but follow the research on neanderthals, they had bigger brains than us, they were social, they talked, and they lived for about 250k years in EurAsia, I'd call them a heck of lot smarter than us, and they didn't have ag. Maybe not smart like we like to think of smart, but smart as in being able to follow natural sources without destroying their ecosystem. 250k years is enough to give some credit I think, it's better than we did here in the USA, we've knocked the ecosystem out in about 400 years. Some modern humans have also lived sustainably, maybe with some ag, but not if it gets too large scale. California first nations did very well, they left the place really nice for us, who have ruined it in about 100 years, they had been here for probably 10-20k years. So they get the gold star, maybe that vaunted 'instinctual egotism' some people insist on saying we suffer from is nothing more than a genetic aberation, at worst, or a genetic/social construct created by a resource extracting society?