[DesuMaiden]

Read this article...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... osion.html

I kinda don't agree with the belief that the human race will become extinct within 100 years. However, a drastic reduction in the world's population will most likely happen. Perhaps only 1.5 to 2 billion people might exist in the 22nd century with a technology level similar to people in the 17th century? I don't believe humans will become extinct in 100 years (unless we have a thermonuclear war), but a massive die off is inevitable. A die-off, however, does not mean we become extinct. A die-off simply means the majority of the population disappears.

That's my two cents.

[rdberg1957]

I think it is quite certain that the human race is headed for trouble, but it is very hard to predict specific outcomes. Population growth + habitat destruction + mass extinctions + resource depletion + climate change + widening economic inequality=deep trouble. Any one of these problems would be daunting, but together the prospects are quite overwhelming, especially since actions to correct resource depletion may negatively impact climate change and vice-versa. The choices which will result in survival become fewer and harder. Not impossible, but highly improbable since our collective wisdom is rather weak.

[Peak_Yeast]

Actually I think the nuclear war is the best case scenario for having more than a few people left after TSHTF. There is a fair chance that some parts of nature will be left alone and able to regenerate within a reasonable time while supplying some food. Lets just hope that TPTB are clever enough also to target all the defenceless towns in third world countries.

If we continue the BAU we will exterminate all living things - including our selves. And to a large extent we will be successful. Look at the link i posted some days ago about wildlife in Russia after their mini-crash.

[Dybbuk]

The only way I see extinction happening within 100 years is either a science fiction destructive technology like nanotechnology or malevolent AI, or else a worst-case scenario on climate change which causes the human food supply to disappear (and not merely shrink).

Otherwise, we'll muddle through with whatever people are left, though the long-term prospects are dim and extinction will probably happen eventually, maybe a few millennia down the line. Humans can damage the environment without modern technology...witness the megafauna extinctions in North America after the first people arrived. The post-apocalyptic human population will probably see several waves of increase and die-back, each time making the planet less livable.

[GHung]

Then again, if humans manage to push the planet out of the habitable "Goldilocks Zone", it's game over. Venus and Earth will be more like twins than sisters. Impossible? Remote possibility? Unthinkable?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldilocks_planet

New definition of the "Goldilocks Zone" puts Earth right on the edge of habitability:

http://io9.com/5980232/new-definition-o ... bitability

Whoops!

[radon1]

Human race may be extinct much sooner as long as His Indispensability is in charge of the things.

[BobInget]

Fossile fuels on Venus got used up by the planet's last humans.

If the current race of humans manage to extend life expectance
100%, you bet we would care.

[h2]

The human race is not likely to go extinct in the next 100 years. The brief spike in population beyond carrying capacity is highly likely to normalize however. Note that the doubling of population did NOT begin with coal/oil, despite people citing that untrue statement as fact in doomer/peaker circles, that doubling began much earlier (with ag), I think about 5 thousand years ago. The impression it was steady state in relatively recent times was caused by a fairly long plateau (but slowly rising) point of population about 0-1000 years ago, plus using the wrong scales for viewing populations. Look up logarithmic human population growth (I'd put in the image but the site software still hasn't been corrected for image widths).

There's some worst case scenarios with feedback loops, particularly with ocean death, that could severely impact all life forms on the planet, but those are worst case.

Since it was being said in 2000 or so that the human race was going to go extinct 100 years from then, we're already at 85 years to go, and we're bumbling along as usual, things worsen slightly, as they will continue to do, until the overreach of the human species pulls back to what is actually biologically viable, I think that's around 1 billion, depends on many factors, then we'll see how it goes.

However, keep in mind that prior to about 1450, ALL of the Americas were populated by roughly 20-40 million people. The estimates vary but have been trending upwards as they take into account the massive dieoffs caused by disease / Euro contact. The entire Comanche Empire, for example, which occupied a big chunk in the middle of North America, had a population of about 40k, about 10k warriors if I remember right. In other words, human ag fed population in say, 1200, only included a few regions of the Americas at that point, which is a huge land area. And Australia was still relatively empty at that point. That was about 500 million people, with huge land masses that were not farmed, so 1 billion is not unrealistic, though with ecosystem degradation, maybe it will be closer to 500 million.

A few things appear certain: all the oil we can produce will be burned/consumed, all the coal, etc, so there's almost no chance of actual CO2 reduction, which means all the methane feedback loops in melting arctic regions will kick in more intensely, which means we will be heading towards the more bad scenarios of global heating, which means, reduced agricultural areas, ie, less food, and since every single human ever created has been made out of food, that will mean less humans.

Longer term, this event could form a similar trigger as happened apparently in early hominid evolution, some type of climate change triggered a rapid evolution in what they think was a quite small group in Africa, so I'd expect the bottled up evolutionary adaptations in our species to be free to act again, so maybe it's correct to say that 'we' will become extinct, if by 'we' we mean our specific genetic set of adaptations and mal-adaptations, but that's not a disaster, that's just normal biology at work.

[DesuMaiden]

The only way I see extinction happening within 100 years is either a science fiction destructive technology like nanotechnology or malevolent AI, or else a worst-case scenario on climate change which causes the human food supply to disappear (and not merely shrink).

Otherwise, we'll muddle through with whatever people are left, though the long-term prospects are dim and extinction will probably happen eventually, maybe a few millennia down the line. Humans can damage the environment without modern technology...witness the megafauna extinctions in North America after the first people arrived. The post-apocalyptic human population will probably see several waves of increase and die-back, each time making the planet less livable.

You are right. Humans without modern technology have been able to damage the environment in profound ways. For example, the people on Easter Island destroyed the habitat they lived on with only stone age technology. They decimated the entire forest and most of the island's species of fauna and flora with only stone age technology. I only wish the human race eventually learns to live in harmony with the planet, because not living in harmony with the planet has not brought us any good.

But with fossil fuels, we were able to start destroying the environment at a much larger scale because with fossil fuels, we were able to increase our populations to levels that were previously not possible or imaginable. And with this umimaginably large population, we destroy the planet with anything we do. Pretty much just our sheer numbers is enough to overwhelm all of the other species on this planet to extinction. Plus, the materialistic culture of the West even overwhelms the planet's species even more.

[americandream]

GHung is closest to the risk if we do not put a halt to capitalism, soon.

[ennui2]

GHung is closest to the risk if we do not put a halt to capitalism, soon.

Two things. First, capitalism is not going away. And second, even if it did, there is no -ism that can prevent us from dealing with the mess that we've already baked into the cake with overshoot and environmental degradation. It's all just about how fast we hit the brick wall, but it's gonna be messy even if we all just stop short, join hands, and create some Permaculture commie utopia.

[BobInget]

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... story.html

[h2]

Two things. First, capitalism is not going away. And second, even if it did, there is no -ism that can prevent us from dealing with the mess that we've already baked into the cake with overshoot and environmental degradation. It's all just about how fast we hit the brick wall, but it's gonna be messy even if we all just stop short, join hands, and create some Permaculture commie utopia.

The idea that we will create a rational plan to handle this situation, when that has never happened in human history before, makes no sense, that's magical thinking, so I don't even consider that as an option. Capitalism, based on endless growth, which itself is based on continuously expanding resource extraction/consumption, is most certainly going away, it's only about 300 years old, less in most of the planet, quite a bit less. The assumption that what is today must be for all time, even though we are at the peak of everything in terms of consumption, waste production, and population, strikes me as one of the most bizarre mental errors I see in peaker type scenarios. As a reminder, out of about 1/2 a million years of advanced hominid history, we have had capitalism as a global form of resource control for about the last 100 years, if that. We have had first world always on electricity for about 80 years. Maybe 90, depends on where you look. We've had reliable cell phone coverage for what? about 20 years, maybe only 10. Internet for about 20 years, in its publicly useful form.

You don't look at peak behaviors to get a sense of a non peak life, you look at pre peak technologies, as JM Greere keeps noting (this weeks thread covers this well). The idea that growth based economic systems will be the same as decline based economic systems is simply absurd, as is the idea that we will cleanly organize ourselves into the next one. Or that we will elegantly restore our growth based population numbers to decline based ones, nature and disease will take care of that for us, you don't need to plan for it, you can't.

Whatever it will become is probably already around us in very early forms, just like the very early creation of single purpose corporations to fund various trade systems in early Europe were a nascent form of organized capital, but nobody would have thought in 1650 that capital would become the dominant form of government and resource distribution only 200 years later.

It's a kind of basic thing really to understand: if a system built on the assumption of endless expansion of raw material use and consumption, aka, growth, and which relies on the return of interest on capital debt, which is possible because the overall consumption / production base expands enough to cover that, hits a point where expansion of consumption is no longer viable, what will happen is what is happening: first the system begins to cannibalize itself, that's for example big oil buying littler oil as the only way to grow big oil. That's been with us now for years already. Or big airlines merging to build bigger airlines. Or amazon growing by eating up local economies and retail. Or using population growth as the only way to grow/expand your market. That's how I see most of the high tech 'miracle', simply pulling out economic sources like local retail and merging them into one megaretail outfit, or pulling out local newspapers, which were in part funded by their want ads, and merging that entire system into craigslist and ebay ads, plus forming a backbone to organize a fully non sustainable globalized 'free trade' (sic) system. In the early 2000s, I remember reading careful analysis of chip fabrication costs that hinted that in fact already at that point, it was actually not economically viable, ie, the companies were not actually making money, not unlike, by the way, many fracking outfits. But the society needed the benefits so it masked that fact.

You can't endlessly cannibalize an economy however, and that is also not real growth, it's just a tightening of control over existing resource flows in the system. That's happening now, so it can't keep happening since there will be nothing more to organize under single 'winning' flow controllers like amazon, newegg, craigslist, ebay, etc. It's not an accident that this year the 1% who control these tightening resource flows came to control 50% of the world resource flows, a new event, that's what a system cannibalizing itself looks like, as previously distributed things like retail are controlled by a small group, like the amazon/newegg etc sites, that flow of money is now in far fewer hands, it's not a positive, it's a symptom of an economic system dieing.

They'll keep shuffling around the pieces pretending that growth based economics aka capitalism can keep growing without real growth, but that has a VERY finite future, though actual free market economics that actually adds value to the local system will of course never die, but that's not capitalism, that's just trade and manufacture, that's always been with us. Capitalism must have growth to function, it's a built in non optional component.

The example Easter Island is another popular doomer false belief system, that's being seriously challenged by the latest research, they had a decent sized population, with at least some trees, before the Euros and their diseases visited. When the first European came, the big statues were all standing, staring inland, when they next came, about 50 years later, they were all knocked down. The real devastation, and this is something flakey guys like Jared Diamond simply 'forgot' to mention was Euros taking full control over the island, filling it with about 70k sheep, and letting them graze it to death, a situation it has never recovered from. Sheep, you may or may not recall, graze to the root, cattle graze higher up. We have no way of knowing how many people lived there before Euros came, they were doing a lot of clever ag work, and were using ropes to pull their statues along, aka, walking them, not logs, by that time.

They had cut down/burned most of their forests for farming, that's not questioned. But before you get all excited about them doing what all other ag based human cultures do, keep in mind that before Euros came to the North East Americas, it was said that a squirrel could go from the east coast to the mississippee without once touching the ground, in continuous forests that is.

[americandream]

GHung is closest to the risk if we do not put a halt to capitalism, soon.

Two things. First, capitalism is not going away. And second, even if it did, there is no -ism that can prevent us from dealing with the mess that we've already baked into the cake with overshoot and environmental degradation. It's all just about how fast we hit the brick wall, but it's gonna be messy even if we all just stop short, join hands, and create some Permaculture commie utopia.

isms merely label the way we live. A linguistic convenience to convey a concept. Thus to suggest that these labels are meaningless is to fail to understand what is being conveyed. Lack of sufficient consciousness is our problem and ignorance will be our downfall.

But the fact remains, we have the tools to remedy our problem, whether we do so will require the concerted effort of the few with sufficient consciousness to instil awareness in the rest. You exemplify the difficulties ahead but we must perservere as we owe generational obligations to our children.

[ralfy]

Capitalist systems are not sustainable for reasons given here:

another-future-of-capitalism-argument-t70892.html