[DesuMaiden]

Read this article. It is very interesting because it talks about the history of mankind and his likely fate.

http://www.sivatherium.narod.ru/library ... _01_en.htm

The article is in the following quote. Please pay attention to the bolded and underlined parts, which are especially important.

HISTORY OF LIFE
THE AGE OF MAN

The first men were plant gatherers and animal hunters and differed little in life style from other herbivorous and the carnivorous animals around them. They had sufficient intellect to devise tools and weapons and a social organization that made hunting and food gathering more efficient. Neither of these things, however, made any serious impact on the environment.

The first great change in their life style came when, instead of hunting and gathering animals and plants they brought them together and looked after them in a single location. This eliminated the element of danger present in hunting and reduced the probability of starvation, as there was no longer the possibility of returning empty-handed from a foraging expedition. It was the beginning of agriculture.

The evolution of man can be traced from an ape-like ancestor through hominids such as Australopithecus and early members of his own genus such as Homo erectus. Cro-magnon man, an early form of the species Homo sapiens itself, appeared in Europe towards the end of the Pleistocene ice ages. Man's skull developed from a massive structure containing a small brain into one of lighter bones encasing a large cerebral cavity. Man's large brain gave him the power of conscious thought and separated him from the rest of the animal kingdom.

At first the areas under cultivation were small and relatively insignificant. However, the improvements to early man's way of life were so dramatic that his populations increased markedly and more and more land had to be cleared of its natural vegetation to make room for crops and grazing animals.

As man's ingenuity and tool-making ability grew, he invented industrial processes that could produce tools with greater speed and less trouble than before. This inevitably involved heat, and forests were cut down to supply wood and mountainsides were dug away to reach coal to provide fuel. Within a few thousand years the landscape of the earth was changed out of all recognition.

Man's knowledge grew, most significantly in the field of medical science. Accidents and diseases that help to keep natural populations in check were overcome or reduced in their effects by man's endeavours. Genetic defects that, in the wild, would have proved fatal and would have been eliminated by natural selection were perpetuated because their possessors were allowed to live and reproduce. World population increased exponentially and hardly a region of the earth's surface remained untouched by man.

The ultimate effect was that, whereas other animals change and adapt through the slow process of evolution to fit into their environment, man was able to change his environment to suit his current needs, reaping a short-term advantage in the process. Living outside evolution each stage in his rapid cultural development was passed on to the next generation, not through his genes but by learning. Although he avoided the unpleasant effects of natural selection, he also did without its long-term benefits and in short called a halt to evolution as it applied to himself. The result was a world overburdened by a population of beings unable to survive without their own conscious intervention, a world given over to the essential needs of man, a world poisoned by his waste.

Ultimately the earth could no longer supply the raw materials needed for man's agriculture, industry or medicine, and as shortage of supply caused the collapse of one structure after another, his whole complex and interlocking social and technological edifice crumbled. Man, no longer able to adapt, rushed uncontrollably to his inevitable extinction.

With the dominant life form gone the animal world entered a period of evolutionary chaos that lasted tens of thousands of years. However, man's extinction provided the impetus for the formation of many new species of animals and his disappearance was of fundamental importance in shaping the world that has emerged 50 million years later.

Basically the human race started off as hunter and gathers, which had minimum impact on the environment. Then we invented agriculture, which caused our impact on the environment to increase. We started to damage the environment in profound ways when we invented agriculture. And then we invented industrialism.

With the use of fossil fuels,we were able to increase the productivity of products. And we were able to increase our consumption of other natural resources with fossil fuels. World population also increases as a result of fossil fuels and advances in medical technology. The world population becomes so large that it overburdens the Earth. There is simply too many human beings on this planet. Eventually the population grows to such a large number that it collapses under its own weight, as the resources man depends on for his industry, agriculture and medicine are gone from overdepletion. And then the human race faces an extinction level event, wiping off the entire human race.

After mankind becomes extinct, life on Earth goes on without us. Human beings aren't that important. We are just a speck in the history of the Earth. The anthropocene, the area of man, was just a tiny fraction of the history of the Earth.

This is a likely future if we keep on doing business as usual. If we keep on increasing population, this will be the likely outcome of the human race. The human race will become an evolutionary dead-end if we keep on increasing population to the point where the human race eventually becomes extinct because we used up all of the resources on this planet.

No amount of technology and ingenuity can overturn the laws of nature. When we use up all of the resources on this Earth from population overshoot, the consequences is a die off. It is that simple. And this die-off may wipe-off the entire human race.

That's all I have to say. The brief excerpt I showed you is what lies ahead for the human race.

[h2]

These are the wrong forums here to post this stuff, I'm surprised the mods aren't modding more.

While I'm personally fascinated (not) by your ongoing voyage of either discovery or forum seeding, you really should try to read a bit more serious work before making sweeping conclusions about where man is or is not going.

Neanderthal man, who was around about 250k years, was smart, used language, made tools, was a hunter gatherer, probably had most cultural elements we would recognize, but didn't feel the need at any point to engage in ag, at least as far as we know.

modern humans, likewise, until maybe the latest 50 years, didn't globally engage in ag either, and if you push it back 150 years, many areas were still going along as usual. 300 yeas, and even more. LIkewise, the assumption that man's voyage was from hunter gatherer to ag to modern industry is likewise, bs, it's been an ebb and flow, just as cultures and empires have ebbed and flowed. The pawnee, for example, in the midwest, were initially doing some ag, or mostly ag, then went back to doing primarily hunter gathering, with very light ag to boost the food supply, but buffalo was the primary food source for them after they left primary ag behind. I suggest that before you make these ongoing silly proclamations about x or y, you stop and realize you have done no real work in this area, you have only the skimpiest of backgrounds in anything involving history or anthropology or anything else, and really you should give up on this since it's just a waste of time in many cases. Not referring to asking questions to figure out things like solar stuff, more about thinking you have any basis to make sweeping statements about things that involve actual learning and research. I suggest, STRONGLY, reading the arch druid, he'll cure you of a lot of the mistakes you are making, if you actually read it and pay attention. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ . His mission, if he has one, is to help bring the confused back to some form of understanding, he actually studies history etc, and has an actual context to put current events into. Very weak of course on some areas, like anthropology, but that's fine, they won't be that relevant to our future anyway.

So all these assumptions about what man 'is' or 'is not', are based on really junk research and sloppy reasoning.

likewise, when you fall into the typical american mental trap of creating artificial polar extremes then saying, ah, since overpopulation is not possible over time, which it isn't, that doesn't then lead to the other pole, extinction, it leads to a population drop through standard biological methods like disease and famine, famine itself weakens the individual human organism to the point where disease can wipe it out easily.

just because you can't see past this particular bump in human history doesn't mean that the bump will act the way you think it will, unsustainable population numbers will not be sustained, and numbers that the remaining ecosystems can sustain will be sustained. Likewise, just because we happen to now live in a very very short term globalized system, doesn't mean that we will keep living in this system, it means that as it can't be maintained, we'll return to increasing levels of regional living, which means, each biological niche will support what it can support, each will recover, or not recover, as it can, there won't be a global event beyond things like global heating, which will impact each primary region in its own different way, ie, the term climate change will lead to climate changes in each area depending on the heat levels reached.

Then, after about 1 to 10k years, the co2 levels will start to drop again, and a probably newly evolved form of homo something will go on, in a form we can't guess at, so there's no point wasting mental effort on that. Just as there is almost no point in trying to 'prep' for a future that we have no idea how will look. Again, reading history can give you some ideas, for example, in the late 1800s, san francisco saw a brief time of lawlessness, and then the city citizens got sick of it, and hanged publically a few people, and took back control. That took very little action on their part, and it's probably how we will handle things as well in our future as decline happens.

I would expect a sharp population drop sometime in the next few hundred years, when, doesn't matter, because when it happens, your kids and their kids will not be able to do anything about that, so it's pointless worrying about it.

You're starting to look like someone who is trying to populate a forum with new threads designed to generate discussion to me, or you just need to step back a bit, i recommend going into real nature and getting a grip of what non human ecologies look like, watch nature as it fills in niches, that's what will happen in our future too, all those empty niches and destroyed species will form empty spaces that nature will quickly fill up.

As long as we don't kill the oceans themselves we'll be fine, though hopefully we will evolve into something like existed in much of the world before 1500 or so, which was huge parts of the planet living sustainably. Though, lol, the entire notion of living sustainably is absurd in its face, since you can't live unsustainably since sustainable means can be sustained, it's not a lifestyle choice or whatever other bs the green marketers try to sell liberal yuppie consumers. There's a lot of ways to live sustainably, china has farmed for thousands of years, due to a weirdness with some past geological events, hunter gatherers did so for hundreds of thousands of years, so it's not like this is all going to vanish overnight as options globally, all at once.

You really need to step away from the keyboard, get some serious books on history, I recommend mark kurlansky books, they are great, history in context, his books Salt, Cod, The Big Oyster, will show you how cultures and systems evolve, he's quite good.