Using Human History As a Guide Could Our Present Civilization Fall into a New Dark Ages or Even a Collapse ?

[GAROVORKIN]

30 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Personally (in the most literal sense of the word), a guaranteed source of the apocalypse 900 years away wouldn't concern me much.

 For all we know Betelgeuse could have already gone nova.  

[Lord Lannister]

The rapid population expansion of the planet is what concerns me most. In my lifetime alone it's grown by three billion. World War 3 will likely be fought over diminishing resources. Things will get so bad for one of the nuclear powers, that they'll decide a roll of the military dice is better than guaranteed slow destruction.

[GAROVORKIN]

15 minutes ago, Lord Lannister said:

The rapid population expansion of the planet is what concerns me most. In my lifetime alone it's grown by three billion. World War 3 will likely be fought over diminishing resources. Things will get so bad for one of the nuclear powers, that they'll decide a roll of the military dice is better than guaranteed slow destruction.

Finite resources and an ever expanding pollution is recipe for Disaster .  Perhaps we're heading for a future like in the movie Soylant Green.

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

2 hours ago, Lord Lannister said:

The rapid population expansion of the planet is what concerns me most. In my lifetime alone it's grown by three billion. World War 3 will likely be fought over diminishing resources. Things will get so bad for one of the nuclear powers, that they'll decide a roll of the military dice is better than guaranteed slow destruction.

As long as we don't totally fuck the environment (may be beyond that point already) we'll be fine.  The population should level out between 11 and 12 billion, which is sustainable if we just stop making stupid choices.  But on it's own population growth isn't the issue, it's what those 12 billion people are doing to the fish bowl they're living in.   

[GAROVORKIN]

3 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

As long as we don't totally fuck the environment (may be beyond that point already) we'll be fine.  The population should level out between 11 and 12 billion, which is sustainable if we just stop making stupid choices.  But on it's own population growth isn't the issue, it's what those 12 billion people are doing to the fish bowl they're living in.   

Given the limited resources of the planet and how much those resource  that number would likely consume , and how much waste would generated . I don't see how that can be a sustainable number.  

[Larry of the Lawn]

3 minutes ago, GAROVORKIN said:

Given the limited resources of the planet and how much those resource  that number would likely consume , and how much waste would generated . I don't see how that can be a sustainable number.  

Well that's kind of the point, we have to switch away from fossil fuels and stop polluting in the name of shareholders profits and stop throwing out so much food and it's actually not that tough. 

[Mindwalker]

On 23.1.2018 at 8:01 PM, IheartIheartTesla said:

Our brains as we enter the world are also more advanced than those in the actual "Dark Ages", so in my opinion it will take only a few generations (in other words, rather quick) for us to be up and running.

Do you have a link to support this claim?

AFAIK, our brains are basically the same as those of the medieval people, or the people during the Bronze age collapse, or even those living in the stone age. Of course our knowledge, even of less educated people, has grown immensely.

[S John]

6 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

Do you have a link to support this claim?

AFAIK, our brains are basically the same as those of the medieval people, or the people during the Bronze age collapse, or even those living in the stone age. Of course our knowledge, even of less educated people, has grown immensely.

That is my understanding as well.  That you could raise a baby from the Bronze age today, or send one of us back in time as an infant to be raised in the Bronze Age and in either case that person would not really be distinguishable from their peers.  Basically the babies will be shaped by their environment, but the human being is the same creature then as now.  

[Lord Lannister]

7 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

Do you have a link to support this claim?

AFAIK, our brains are basically the same as those of the medieval people, or the people during the Bronze age collapse, or even those living in the stone age. Of course our knowledge, even of less educated people, has grown immensely.

The progress of society is pretty much directly proportional to the ability to store and distribute information.

 

17 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

As long as we don't totally fuck the environment (may be beyond that point already) we'll be fine.  The population should level out between 11 and 12 billion, which is sustainable if we just stop making stupid choices.  But on it's own population growth isn't the issue, it's what those 12 billion people are doing to the fish bowl they're living in.   

Why twelve billion? I don't see there being a magical threshold where people stop having children, especially when there are more people to have more children.

[Larry of the Lawn]

5 hours ago, Lord Lannister said:

The progress of society is pretty much directly proportional to the ability to store and distribute information.

 

Why twelve billion? I don't see there being a magical threshold where people stop having children, especially when there are more people to have more children.

That's not the way it works.  When people reproduce at less than replacement rate  or close to it the population will level off.  

You can still have a child born for every adult and not increase the population.

Eta:. I guess the more accurate way to say it would be that a fertility rate of 2 or higher is needed to stabilize a population.  Less than that and it will decline.  

The massive growth rates we've seen in recent history are largely due to the developing world.  That should eventually level off.

[lokisnow]

5 hours ago, Lord Lannister said:

The progress of society is pretty much directly proportional to the ability to store and distribute information.

 

Why twelve billion? I don't see there being a magical threshold where people stop having children, especially when there are more people to have more children.

Because population has boomed in correspondence with accessing the changes from rapid modernization: the central South America population boom is long over, the Asia&islands population boom is petering out as education levels for girls increase, and the only place left in the world to expand is the currently beginning Africa population explosion. 

But for every sector of the globe that has undergone these modernization driven population booms they are followed up with stable populations or population decline.

so if we factor in the generational growth curves for the current two booms, and project out to the future, we can presume that the population will stabilize at about that level, with almost all the growth coming from Asia/islands and Africa. 

This is also why projections for US immigration expects Asian/islander populations to grow at fantastic rates as they’re simply going to have so many people they’ll fill up all their allotted supply. And eventually be replaced by immigration from continental Africa. But before that happens, it is likely that we will hit the point where there are more Asian Americans than African Americans.

[Zorral]

On 1/23/2018 at 6:53 AM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Plus, you have the various “fake science” anti-vax, flat-Earth, lizard people, and other bulshyte spewers pushing back against genuine science with social media and people actually getting behind the bulshyte spewers.  

I can’t wait for the anti-vax crowd to re-embrace “humors” and therapeutic bleeding to balance them.

And poo poo as further fake news germ theory and stop boiling waterm washing hands and medical instruments. What's really different is the poisoned oceans and water supply and so much of the arable land.  Not to mention whole cities dealing with flooding.  I could not buy Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 at all -- in which, additionally, he conveniently skipped over how we got from the catastrophic sea rise to Manhattan as the New Venice (which presumably had finally drowned for good under the Adriatic).  Such catastrophes don't happen incrementally anymore than do tsunamis.

[Jo498]

On 24.1.2018 at 3:02 PM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Correct me if I'm wrong but don't we literally lack the ability to grow enough food to feed the planet without using fossil fuels (which are an actual ingredient in the process for artificially fixing nitrogen not just the energy source (natural gas is the primary hydrogen source for the process)) to fix nitrogen to facilitate plant growth?  Therefore if we run out of fossil fuels a large portion of the human population will starve to death?

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

This would be another reason not to waste fossil fuels on stuff like flying to holiday destinations. I don't know enough about that stuff but "alternative" (and not only them) people have been looking into and testing all kinds of more sustainable cyclic agriculture for decades. There are lots of things one can do to get far more calories out of a given piece of land than use modern industrialized farming on it. E.g. with smaller scale gardening one can use "levels" to grow vegetables on the ground, berries on hedges and apples on trees etc. thus making far better use of the ground. It takes far more manual work and sophisticated organization but it is possible. And of course it is necessary to stop population growth. But as others have pointed out, except for Africa and a few Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan etc.) at least growth rates are declining.

And as brutal as it sounds, if half a billion starves in Africa or two billion over the whole world in the second half of the 21st century this is not going to lead to an overall collapse and might affect the rest of the world comparatively little.

[Mindwalker]

17 hours ago, Lord Lannister said:

The progress of society is pretty much directly proportional to the ability to store and distribute information.

 

That may be true; but we store information in computers, clouds, and libraries. And access to this information would make much of a difference. To think how much knowledge got lost during both the Dark Ages that we know of... medical, scientific, engineering...

But this has nothing to do with the memory capacity of our brains. In fact, it could be argued that has decreased with our seemingly unlimited access to information (why store it in my brain when I can google it anytime?). Which, of course, does not mean we are born with lesser brains than our ancestors, just that we use them in different ways.

A stone age person used their memory and their problem-solving capacity very effectively for, say, finding resources, sewing fur clothes against the cold (INVENTING the needle, btw), raising your child so it would survive, making tools, hunting techniques, making art with primitive tools, etc.

ETA: Of course we memorize aLOT of things in our brains from early childhood, too -- just like our ancestors, just different stuff.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, Jo498 said:

This would be another reason not to waste fossil fuels on stuff like flying to holiday destinations. I don't know enough about that stuff but "alternative" (and not only them) people have been looking into and testing all kinds of more sustainable cyclic agriculture for decades. There are lots of things one can do to get far more calories out of a given piece of land than use modern industrialized farming on it. E.g. with smaller scale gardening one can use "levels" to grow vegetables on the ground, berries on hedges and apples on trees etc. thus making far better use of the ground. It takes far more manual work and sophisticated organization but it is possible. And of course it is necessary to stop population growth. But as others have pointed out, except for Africa and a few Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan etc.) at least growth rates are declining.

And as brutal as it sounds, if half a billion starves in Africa or two billion over the whole world in the second half of the 21st century this is not going to lead to an overall collapse and might affect the rest of the world comparatively little.

No.  There is a fixed amount of nitrogen that we need in order to grow enough food to feed the human population.  It doesn’t matter how clever we are.  If we don’t have that fixed nitrogen the plants will not grow.

The normal nitrogen cycle does not produce enough fixed nitrogen.  We must have artificially fixed nitrogen to feed our existing human population.

[Larry of the Lawn]

 

 

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

No.  There is a fixed amount of nitrogen that we need in order to grow enough food to feed the human population.  It doesn’t matter how clever we are.  If we don’t have that fixed nitrogen the plants will not grow.

The normal nitrogen cycle does not produce enough fixed nitrogen.  We must have artificially fixed nitrogen to feed our existing human population.

We can also change diets.  If people eat less meat it takes way less nitrogen to feed one person, and allows land used for live stock (and the land used to feed them) for crops that can be consumed by people.  

Yes, in that article IHeartTesla linked the conventional farming methods produced more calories per acre than sustainable practices but at a cost - the excess nitrogen in the runoff is literally poisoning our waterways.  If we hadn't already fucked the oceans and fisheries people could make the dietary leap we could switch to a more pescatarian based diet which would free up a fuckton of land. 

All of a sudden you don't need as much fixed nitrogen to feed so many people. 

It won't eliminate the need for artificial fertilizers but there are other parts of the nitrogen cycle that can be tweaked beyond 'just keep dumping more of this shit on everything'.  There are other places to increase efficiency other than 'produce more'.  

And that's not even getting into the food waste issue (another place that nitrogen can be reclaimed - composting all food scraps instead of letting it break down in landfills).  

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

6 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

 

 

We can also change diets.  If people eat less meat it takes way less nitrogen to feed one person, and allows land used for live stock (and the land used to feed them) for crops that can be consumed by people.  

Yes, in that article IHeartTesla linked the conventional farming methods produced more calories per acre than sustainable practices but at a cost - the excess nitrogen in the runoff is literally poisoning our waterways.  If we hadn't already fucked the oceans and fisheries people could make the dietary leap we could switch to a more pescatarian based diet which would free up a fuckton of land. 

All of a sudden you don't need as much fixed nitrogen to feed so many people. 

It won't eliminate the need for artificial fertilizers but there are other parts of the nitrogen cycle that can be tweaked beyond 'just keep dumping more of this shit on everything'.  There are other places to increase efficiency other than 'produce more'.  

And that's not even getting into the food waste issue (another place that nitrogen can be reclaimed - composting all food scraps instead of letting it break down in landfills).  

 

What unanticipated impacts do you think might result from tweeking bacteria?

[Larry of the Lawn]

4 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

What unanticipated impacts do you think might result from tweeking bacteria?

We already know that certain bacteria can break down complex organics like methane and plastics.  Not crazy to think that we could reclaim nitrogen with the right genetically modified bacteria.

Eta: even rasing chickens that are fed mostly from food waste is a great way to add nitrogen back to the soil if you can collect their shit.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Sorry for dp but also, an important take away from that article with the Wizards vs Prophets (which was a great article, btw) is that a lot of our food issues come from bottom line profit end.  We've drastically reduced the human labor component of agriculture, which in turn has produced the dependence on fixed nitrogen and gotten us used to 'cheap' food.  A mass starvation event might change minds about paying more for food knowing that there will still be some in ten years.  The reason we're so dependent on fixed nitrogen is because it's cheap and easy - if it no longer becomes cheap and easy we'll adapt and find a way to get work around it.  But we haven't had to because fossil fuels were cheap and abundant during the industrialization of agriculture, and manual farming is tough work for very little pay.  Some of my best friends are farmers and they are all chronically broke and in debt.  But they don't use artificially fixed nitrogen fertilizers.

Eta:. Also, the entire calories per acre model isn't really a be all end all, you can feed someone 2000 calories of sugar a day and someone else 1200 calories of mixed sources and guess who's going to live long enough to be productive and and not have chronic health problems. Which gets us back to the 'are all calories equal' question that I believe @Triskele posed awhile back, which led to inquiries on the efficacy of drinking gasoline.  So I do seriously question the accuracy of the claim that we NEED to fix massive amounts of nitrogen to feed people and that there's nothing to be done about it.  Because a calorie isn't always a calorie, but the world can live off apple orchards alone (see the article on Wizards and Prophets).

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

LtI,

We need X amount of fixed nitrogen to grow Y amount of food.  The natural nitrogen cycle does not produce X.  As such we have to have artificial nitrogen fixing or we have massive starvation.

Are you disputing biologists?