Is humanity about to have a massive die off?

Humans now number about 6 billion people on the earth, and resources (including mere living space)are being over exploited. The threats that humanity faces seem to be increasing in number and in severity. So the question: Is something about to happen (Next 50 years.) that will cause the majority of humans to die withing a short period of time? (Say 10 years)

What would humanity look like after the die off? What percentage would die? Who would survive for the long term? Would a technological society rebuild?

Is the threat above politics, (Meaning nothing can be done) or can political solutions be found?

Your reasoned speculations are invited.

Major disasters at the wrong place and time could go a long way toward crippling us. Or a really spirited virus.

Who knows?

By Whitley Strieber.

VERY pertinent with respect to dieback, if I do say so m'self.

MojoXN

was a snore.

I literally could not force myself much past the first chapter while I had other books awaiting reading. The Wolfen was a very well done novel IMO but Nature's End just didn't read nearly as well.

And I usually love post-apocalyptic novels.

And is absolutely spectatcular in the last few chapters. You should consider giving Nature's End anoter chance.

MojoXN

Stalking Wolf's "Vision" ...

:kick:

because neither side has the political will to solve problems. The verbal sparing in the 90's has turned into full-blown hate and I don't see that changing in time to do any good. The bogus "Culture War" the neocons foisted upon us all has had disasterous consequences.

Many civilizations died due to the loss/missuse of resources. They packed up and left for more fertile ground when the area couldn't support them.

we are running out of fertile ground.

The big question here is whther humans will survive the next collapse.

Ancient Greek civilazation - ended
Ancient Persians - ended
Romans - ended
Aztecs - ended
Easter Island - ended & went extinct
Etc, ad nauseum

I'd say we have no hope. I don't want to see that future. I want life to continue. I want others to have their chance for a good long life.

friends like to remind me of that from time to time. ;)

A threat to the actual continuation of the human species is another matter, of course.

Look at their history going back to the Genghis/Kublai Khan Empire. They were very advanced for their day, but it was not "Chinese" civilization, it was Mongolian - the Yuan Dynasty. There were many different civilizations/dynasties (ie, Ming, etc) in China; the latest is the Communist civilization born out of the ashes of WWII. Civilizations have fallen in China just as in Persia aka Iran. And ironically the Persians were defeated by the Khans. Yes, I have a degree in History, specializing in world history.

The Kublai Khan/Yuan Dynasty is really fascinating.

But China has had many "civilizations" in its time. My first thought were the old kingdoms that eventually got unified to one under the Hans? Now where is that kingdom? :)

ability of the area they live in, nature has a way of culling them down to a viable number. We are just one of earth's inhabitants...a little smarter and more adaptable but still subject to nature's rules.

Over dependence on chemically subsidized agriculture is a definite problem. Due to the use of oil based pesticides and insecticides, our arable soil, particularly in the United States, is not what it used to be. The nutrients do not stay in the ground for long, and good old fashioned crop cycling hasn't been practiced in a large amount of that. With Peak Oil upon us, this subsidized agriculture is going to get increasingly more expensive, add in Global Climate Change, and you have a recipe for disaster that will make the dust bowel seem to be a mere inconvenience. The Midwest and west are suffering from a drought that doesn't look like its going to end anytime soon.

As for the after effects of an agriculture crash, those nations and areas of the world with subsistence farming as the primary means of production will survive with less overall casualties than First World countries. This is due to a couple of things, one being that they don't have a dependence on oil based fertilizers like 1st world countries. Second is that they already suffer from much of the problems that the First world has so far been immune from, when it spreads here, then we will have less resources as to how to deal with said crisis.

As far as percentage of the population that will survive and not survive? I would say that in Europe, The United States, Canada, and Australia, along with all major Island nations and territories, starvation can possibly wipe out 50% or more of their populations. Other nations better able to deal with the problem will suffer as well, but most likely in the range of 30% or less in fatalities.

ON EDIT: As far as technological levels, etc. Since there is no major advanced civilization in the world anymore, we are probably going to actually see faster technological advancement due to such a catastrophe than instead of it. In some areas we will have to "fall back" on to certain more "primitive" technologies to survive, at least short term, such as crop cycling, but at the same time, these can be aided by using the advanced technologies at our disposal now, all that matters is how those technologies are implemented.

dieoff will take us back to about 1 billion people between global warming and the energy crisis. Everyone on coasts will have to move inland or else. The anyone who needs heat to survive winters is going to be up a creek unless they start burning down forests , which will cause huge pollution, land runoff, more dieoff, etc.

2-3 billion, and climate is another reason why those in the third world will survive much better than those of us in more temperate climes. For far too long, the First World's lifestyles have been dependent on the Third World's labor, the tables will most likely turn, and turn rapidly, to such an extent that the situations will reverse.

I think Amazon carries it. Catton discusses the causes and aftermath of dieback in various animal populations. He's also very good on Peak Oil, fossil fuel replacement schemes and most of the other issues facing the Human Race today. If he's right, we're in for some very tough times.

It's a post-die off novel that seems right on target.

according to the Fertilizer Institute. Among the top five consumers of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are China, India, Brazil and Pakistan. I have also read of considerable fertilizer use in Argentina, Uruguay, and in some parts of Mexico and South Africa.

Certainly, those countries that do not use much chemical fertilizer and do not import grain from those who do will be in the best shape. How quickly we may switch over to non-chemical agriculture and how much food we will have has been hotly debated on a couple of lists to which I subscribe.

Clearly, we can recycle many more animal wastes than we do now. Perhaps we will return to smaller animal husbandry operations like those that existed 30-40 years ago so that the manure or tankage, etc., won't have to be hauled for miles.

We can eat less meat in general, and less corn-fed beef in particular. That will cut down on the amount of corn needed and thus the amount of nitrogen.

We could recycle food waste from all steps in harvesting, processing and cooking. This is being done around San Francisco, and the waste makes terrific compost. In Japan, they capture some methane from the compost. Or those who have space can make compost in their backyards and use it on veggie gardens. We can do the same with yard waste.

We currently recycle some sewage biosolids that are not contaminated. We may be able to use thermal depolymerization or other technique to separate fertilizer elements from otherwise contaminated organic waste, both newly created and exhumed from land fills.

In Sweden, communities and scientists are experimenting with recycling sterlized, diluted human urine (which contains nitrogen and phosphorus, and compost from composting toilets. The field results have been fairly good.

This, of course, in conjunction with crop rotations and cover crops, in organic or low-input agriculture.

All of this would much time and effort to implement, and how much of our current production we could maintain is unknown. However, I expect to live long enough to find out.



http://www.tfi.org/Statistics/largestconsumers.asp

there will be less crop yield than there is now. The most obvious reason is that the condition of the soil is extremely poor now thanks to the chemical treatments and lack of crop rotation. Not to mention the lack of mechanized help when those big machines can no longer run due to lack of diesel fuel. Biodiesel/ethanol would be impractical at that point, particularly given the fact that food production will be given a much higher priority than fuel production.

some techniques that might be helpful. I am aware of your current points and I did not mean to paint an overly optimistic picture of the future.

I think that some of the last diesel will fuel farm equipment and transportation to get the crops to market. Although I think that the peak oilers are correct in general, I don't know how long it will be for all the diesel to run out.

Still, it remains to be seen what we could do with recycling of more waste products and use of more cover crops than was commonly done in the west just before the introduction of tractors.

and GROW more people by using all of their human wastes as fertilizer. If we did the same, we wouldn't need all that artificial fertilizer that uses petroleum products to produce.

But that would make sense. Can't have THAT.

I remember doing a report on global warming for a physical/cultural geography course I took some years ago. I don't remember who said this, but it realates to what was termed "the Gaia principle" which, as best I can recall, was basically, that Gaia will survive. The comment was that it may well take getting rid of us to do it.

who don't know it. Thanks for sharing, ashling.

http://www.gaiaweb.uk.net/GAIAINT.htm

This sounds like a good place to start:

Lovelock, James: (The originator of the Gaia concept).
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
Paperback - 168 pages (28 September, 2000)
Oxford Paperbacks; ISBN: 0192862189

of Lovelocks more in depth analysis. I had forgotten who and where I got that from (thanks for reminding me.)

I also think back to Jeff Goldman's (?) line from Jurassic Park: "Life will find a way." It occurs to me that one way for life to continue is to get rid of the dead wood.

:shrug:

IMO, nature not man will decide if a mass extinction is coming. So far it looks bad for humans. Without a balanced ecosystem we better expect climate and weather patterns to change. The more we push the natural environment in one direction, the greater the reaction. If we melt 2.3 million cubic feet of ice, it will help cause another climate change. The biosphere is a tiny layer of film on top of a huge ball or rock. If it disappears the rock will still keep humming around the Sun.

for their own survival.

It's a pity scum see fit to kill off decent people. But that's how humanity has been before, is now, will always be.

And those who survive get to live with the altered environment.

May the survivors live in interesting times.

I have a good friend who has studied climate change in Antarctica for 45 years. He and his colleagues have made many predictions-which have come true far ahead of schedule.

What we are looking at within the next 30-50 years (if not sooner): increased storm activity, forest failures,insect population explosions, the disappearance of the last rainforests (which provide 35% of the world's oxygen)spreading ocean "dead zones"(ocean flora provides the other 65% of our oxygen), massive species extinction; we are already experiencing the greatest biodiversity loss since the age of dinosaurs, which will threaten the existence of all remaining species and ecosystems (if the lack of oxygen doesn't kill most off sooner) not to mention rising sea levels and huge increases in disease. Basically, if we can't grow crops or even breathe, then our chance of survival is pretty much nil.

the idea is that massive earth changes will mean a lot of people will die. Their theory is that those who survive will be those who are living in relatively safe places where there is less of a chance of flood, earthquake, or other disaster.

unless we off ourselves with WMD.

But we are a vulnerable species constantly under attack from our environment.

I guess the look of humanity after the die off would depend upon how extensive it is. Lots of possible scenarios.

Bird flu and AIDS won't do a complete job; massive weather changes will leave pockets of population; nuclear winter isn't likely anymore

I think the big thing that could wipe us all out would be a meteor ... or a visit from unfriendly folks from beyond.

We are headed for a crash, and sooner rather than later because we do not have the political or cultural will to voluntarily reduce our population (drastically) or our rapacious first-world consumption of resources. Few people are willing to go childless to save the world, so their children will be faced with Hell on earth instead.

Civilizations have crashed and burned before, of course. The added complication this time around is that so much of our population is now highly dependent on complex, high-tech methods for maintining agriculture and distributing the goods. How many people even know how to grow food or have the land resources to be fully self-sufficient? As basic resources grow more scarce, the system will be disrupted and fail to deliver, making resources even MORE scarce in a downward spiral of civil disorder (think NOLA times ten), hoarding and desperation.

Once the inevitable population adjustment is over and stability is recovered, it's unlikely humans will be able to reassemble the dismantled technological infrastructure. We've been burning our bridges for far too long -- the most easily mined minerals and energy resources are now gone. The ones that remain require an infrastructure to reach and exploit them, an infrastructure that can't be built without the very resources people want to reach.

The remaining human survivors will be thrown back into a hunter and gatherer existence, and may scrabble back up to an agricultural society, but that will probably be the height they can reach. No more steel, no more oil, no more nuclear energy. Human muscle will have to suffice for the rest of our eternity.

Which might not be all that far away if global warming increases to the point at which plants experience a major die-off. Make a mark in the sand the day our high-tech culture crashes and CO2 emissions come to an abrupt halt, then wait about 200 years to see how far the feedback loops continue without new input. If the result is a 10-degree rise in global temp, then mammals will probably disappear entirely.

Impact by a large asteroid I believe it is 99% or more likely that while population will be somewhat larger than today growth will have stopped in most Nations. Indeed Europe and Japan will be most vexed socially by the effects of an inverted age pyramid in which the elderly are very numerous in comparison to those who are of working age. Resources? They all derive from the one ulimate resource than cannot be exhausted- human creativity. Problems? Of course...........but toil and tribulation has always been the Lot of humanity. We are ALL descended from the survivors of countless Plagues, Famines, Holocausts and Middle Passages. The only thing that can defeat us is us. Our very worst Enemy is the idea that Kismet/Fate is sronger than human will. It is not.

Oil derives from human creativity?

Food derives from human creativity?

Air derives from human creativity?

News to me.

Oil was just black goo until mixed with human creativeness. The rice/wheat/corn that feed billions are far more the product of human inventiveness than a mere product of Nature. Air Quality has been improving for the past so years in the USA BTW.

Humans are like a virus or bacteria and the earth is using it's immune system to fight off infection.

He said we should be "syphilis with a conscience" and quit breeding.

Sometimes I feel totally alone, and very guilty.

The rest of the story is long. So for brevity's sake, I'll leave it at that. What a fucking mess the breeders have made.

I love his known space series of novels.

If only it were fiction.

I guess only a few select of us are unlucky enough to see what's going on here. I'm spending my entire life running to get away from it.

LOL

We are an organism, no more, no less. The things that we are vulnerable to are natural disasters, drought, famine pestilence and wars. Even though we live in nice houses and have lots to eat(now) we are no more resistent to those threats than people who lived a thousand years ago. The only one of those threats that is actuallly under our direct control is war. I know science has conquered many illnesses, but the viruses and bacterium are just as resiliant and smart in their own way. I'm sure that at some point we will have a massive die off for some reason or combination of factors.

For some reason I am reminded of the Gary Larsen cartoon - "The real reason the dinosaurs died off" which shows the dinosaurs smoking cigarettes.

http://www.dieoff.com/

This site spells it out.

everything as we know it. There are scientist that say a pole shift has happened several times during the earth's history when a planet or some other large objects slams into the earths atmosphere. This makes the equiator actually move so the sun could rise in the west and set in the east, or even worse (for us) we could be the new antartica and have no sun at all. The scenario's I've read about pole shifts are pretty grim. People always say 'prepare, prepare', which I do, but I prepare more for an earthquake or something. If there is actually a pole shift... I don't think I even want to survive something like that.

You may be thinking of what happened once in the Earth's history, before life began, when something huge struck the Earth, and a large molten piece was ejected which became the Moon (that's a current hypothesis, but not certain). No geological 'pole shift' has occured since then - and there aren't any bodies in the Solar System big enough to do such a thing that could possibly hit us.

There are, however, many magnetic pole shifts in Earth's history - when the magnetic polarity shifts. The exact way this happens isn't certain, and it's even possible that it's happening right now (there are magnetic anomalies in certain places, such as the South Atlantic, which seem to be growing). But it's thought it would take several years to happen, and wouldn't have a large effect on us.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3359555.stm

Proof of previous Earth Pole Shifts

Riddle of the mammoths

Large graves of mammoths dated to the Pleistocene era (2 million to 11,000 years ago) form a convincing piece of the theory that earth experienced major cataclysms in its recent past. Several mammoth specimens unearthed contained fresh undigested buttercups in their stomachs indicating a rapid freezing before death. In these cases, the fauna found in their stomachs originated from a different climate compared to the one that existed at their grave site during their time of death. It is highly improbable these large beasts roamed vast distances within a few days yet retained fresh fauna in their digestive tract. Research has shown that freezing conditions are not always required for long term preservation. Nevertheless, contrary to popular belief, the mammoth was unlikely a permanent native resident of the arctic as it lacked sebaceous oil glands that cold-climate mammals require to lubricate their skin to avoid dehydration. The arctic tundra could not conceivably yield enough vegetation to support herds of these large herbivores either. Some researchers have postulated that the preserved frozen specimens can be explained by movement of their grazing land to a far northerly latitude during a sudden displacement of the planets crust. Once shifted into the new climate they quickly froze or died from asphyxia (suffocation). Not all frozen mammoths examined exhibited these coronary characteristics, but enough evidence exists to support the notion that at least one cataclysm afflicted them in earths history.

The famous Berezovka mammoth discovered by hunters in Siberia in 1900 was found to have unchewed grass and buttercups in its mouth, along with undigested vegetation in its stomach.
and most likely about 1600 BC. Here is one such article - I cut and pasted this a while ago and don't have a link - just trust me that I am not the author ...


Sudden fall of ancient civilizations

Ancient civilizations have risen and fallen for a variety reasons. Archaeologists and historians cannot explain the demise of every one however. The Minoan civilization in the Mediterranean is one such example. Approximately 3,500 years (close to the time of the last pole shift circa 1600BC) ago a massive volcanic eruption devastated the Aegean island of Thera. An estimated 50 years later the Minoan civilization was in ruins. The eruption was so violent that the ash fallout preserved the town of Akroti. Strangely no skeletons were recovered on the island.

The Old Egyptian kingdom experienced an exceptionally severe drought lasting several decades around 2200BC. The drought in turn reduced the regular Nile floods that the Egyptians depended on for agriculture, causing widespread famine that decimated the population.

He was the main person advocating that idea.

No scientists accept it. A sudden shift of the earth's axis of rotation would turn the entire surface of the planet into molten lava, killing ALL life.

have read always talk about if the shift occurs and you end up on the cold side of the equator, then you freeze to death, but if you end up on the side that has sun, then you'll live but life will be a whole lot different than 'normal'. I have a hard time believing such a catasrophic event could happen without something major plowing into the earth, and if that were to occur, we would have warning it was about to happen (probably years of warning). Not much we could do about it, but we would have warning.

those are just random blogs and websites. Websites can contain some very, very silly things - have you seen the Time Cube website, for instance?

The font on that site it too big and too colorful to be real, so it's obviously a fake. LOL, kidding, but I don't frequent those types of obviously bizarre sites but I have seen some strange ones.

Having trouble posting - will try again

http://www.physorg.com/news6734.html

Supernova Explosion May Have Caused Mammoth Extinction

A distant supernova that exploded 41,000 years ago may have led to the extinction of the mammoth, according to research that will be presented tomorrow (Sept. 24) by nuclear scientist Richard Firestone of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

snip

Now, a supernova may join the lineup. Firestone and West believe that debris from a supernova explosion coalesced into low-density, comet-like objects that wreaked havoc on the solar system long ago. One such comet may have hit North America 13,000 years ago, unleashing a cataclysmic event that killed off the vast majority of mammoths and many other large North American mammals. They found evidence of this impact layer at several archaeological sites throughout North America where Clovis hunting artifacts and human-butchered mammoths have been unearthed. It has long been established that human activity ceased at these sites about 13,000 years ago, which is roughly the same time that mammoths disappeared.

They also found evidence of the supernova explosion’s initial shockwave: 34,000-year-old mammoth tusks that are peppered with tiny impact craters apparently produced by iron-rich grains traveling at an estimated 10,000 kilometers per second. These grains may have been emitted from a supernova that exploded roughly 7,000 years earlier and about 250 light years from Earth.

It's about a comet-like body, 10km wide. That's still very small in comparison to the earth, and wouldn't have a major effect on the axis of rotation of the earth (and we have ice cores from both the arctic and antarctic that go back much further than that, and indicate the land there was there hundreds of thousands of years earlier). They propose that the impact may have killed many, or even all, of North America's mammoths and other megafauna - but mammoths survived much longer elsewhere - until 2000 BC on the Russian Wrangel Island. That would also imply it wasn't a pole shift. The impact would produce dust clouds, affect the weather, and so on.

an asteroid passed by the Earth outside of the Moon's orbit. Supposedly it wasn't large enough or close enough to affect the Earth's rotation or anything, but afterwards I remember seeing reports that lava levels were rising in 3 separate volcanoes simultaneously. Sometime later, the 9.0 earthquake occured causing the tsunami. It might be difficult to prove that all of this could have been related, but I wouldn't be surprised is a close call with an asteroid or comet could cause some drastic changes in the iron core magnetic field, Earth mantle convection currents, etc.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/asteroid_close_041222.html

Note the date - this was right before the tsunami

Small Asteroid Passes Between Satellites and Earth
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 22 December 2004
10:24 am ET


Astronomers spotted an asteroid this week after it had flown past Earth on a course that took it so close to the planet it was below the orbits of some satellites.

The space rock was relatively small, however, and would not have posed any danger had it plunged into the atmosphere.

The object, named 2004 YD5, was about 16 feet (5 meters) wide, though that's a rough estimate based on its distance and assumed reflectivity. Had it entered the atmosphere, it would have exploded high up, experts figure.

I was referring to another asteroid, which I guess was called Toutatis, which was "the largest asteroid ever known to pass near Earth" on Sept. 29 2004, whose closest approach to the Earth was 4 times the distance to the Moon. See the "Similar Events" section further down in the referenced article.

scientists find evidence that the "34,000-year-old mammoth tusks are "peppered with tiny impact craters apparently produced by iron-rich grains traveling at an estimated 10,000 kilometers per second" and then other scientist find that the mammoths freeze froze about the same time period. I say both can be true and that the earth was hit my something catastrophic, which caused a pole shift, which would explain the instant freezing with iron rich grains ebedded in their tusks. No?

The quick mammoth freezing is just an indication that the mammoth found a lot of ice quickly - by, say, falling into a crevasse. The forces required to move all of the earth's crust hundreds, or even thousands, of miles in a matter of days (which is what the frozen mammoth implies) are far larger than those a 10km rock could produce - and that implies that the crust would stay in one piece and move together (in fact, it wouldn't surprise me if someone challenges Firestone to say where his rock impacted - I'd have thought such a recent impact would have a large, obvious crater).

As I said, the ice core records indicate the poles have been where they are now for hundreds of thousands of years.

You don't have to answer if you think I'm just 'not getting it'. I just find this very interesting and you seem to know quite a bit about it.

http://www.poleshiftprepare.com/hapgood.htm

In 1970 a new edition of Earths Shifting Crust named Path of The Pole incorporated a major revision to the pole shift theory. Hapgood now claimed the trigger mechanism for the crustal shift came not from the motion of ice caps, but rather from deep within the earth itself. Path of The Pole is an extraordinary thorough and detailed examination of geological data for a person with no formal background in geology. It provides sources of evidence ranging from geomagnetic diffusion in rocks, sea sediment cores, ice cores, sudden changes of past climate, mountain building, gaps in the theory of evolution, and mass graves of temperate climate mammals in sub-artic locations to argue the case for pole shifts. From the beginning of the book Hapgood dives straight into the scientific deep end to support his hypothesis that the north pole has changed position at least four times during the Pleistocene epoch, which started 1.5 million years ago and ended just 11,000 years ago. The end of that geological epoch is thought to coincide with end of the last ice age. A recurring point he makes is that Hudson Bay in Canada was shifted from the north pole to its present spot, as he states Greenland has likewise done. Also emphasised is the failure of conventional geology to explain the ice ages, or the reason for the 'interstadials' - periods of warm climate of varying duration between them. The mysterious causes of the ice ages have been attributed to a variety of reasons, a popular one of which is a temporary decrease in the suns radiation. However, Hapgood reminds us that if the ice ages were a consequence of a global decrease in temperature then it doesn't explain why the ice sheets didn't cover most areas of earth in each particular period.

Hapgood cites how ionium dating of sediment cores from the bottom of seas, such as the Atlantic and Arctic oceans, have revealed drastic changes in the composition of sediment within a small time scale. A change in sediment may have resulted from great crustal upheaval. The same applies for ice cores taken from Antarctica, which geologists accept once had a warmer climate amenable to vegetation.

I always have to laugh at the old 5/5/2000 types (that was when it was supposed to happen again). Earth has gone through several magnetic reversals over its long history, but these changes have nothing to do with the earth turning upside down.

Here are relevant clips:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal

This process leaves changes in rock that are used for geomagnetic dating all the time.

I'm having trouble getting an earthquake kit together and I live in Los Angeles - less than a mile from the San Andreas fault.

The axis of rotation is 23.5 degrees off of vertical, and precesses in a complete circle every 26000 years. Think of a slowly spinning top, which wobbles slightly.

The Earth has significant mass, which is spinning around its axis. This spinning mass has inertia (remember an object in motion stays in motion, and all that?) The amount of energy needed to change this angular momentum, and cause a significant shift in the Earth's axis of rotation is, well, really really big.

If something big enough to change the axis of rotation slammed into the Earth, the sun rising in the west would be the least of your worries. :)

That being said, Astronomy was a really long time ago, and my memory isn't what it used to be.

Sid

yet somehow we are more numerous than ever

Humans think in small numbers, like the 55 years that you cite as some kind of glowing proof that we will always survive and multiply.

In historical and geological terms, 50 years isn't even the blink of an eye. The collapse of a global ecosystem can take hundreds of years, which is very very fast in geological time but seems like slow-motion to short-lived humans. There are numerous signs that we are entering a period of mass species extermination -- both in the sea and on land -- but few people alive today will see the worst that is to come.

Our species is a new one, a short blip at five or six million years. Even if we last another million years before dying off, we'll be nothing more than a footnote in the world's history compared to the species that lasted hundreds of millions of years.

excuse me for answering the question that was asked, sheesh

So I didn't make the connection between the two posts. My bad.

Imagine, if you lived in a culture, in which you only kept what you needed at the moment, because if a mishap happened, the culture would supply your needs from a common shared resource.

You would then not need to hoard assets, and "things" for a rainy day that might never come.

Compare that to the world we live in now. Because we believe we must be independent, and rely on ourselves, we each must plan for that rainy day, and so we each hoard so much more than we really need. This drives consumption and creates incredible amounts of waste.

I call this a myth, because, how independent can anyone really be? Even the rich tycoons in their fortresses can't last long without food and water, and if they had some kind of supplies how enjoyable could that existence possibly be?

This is all idealistic stuff, but if we could even move half way towards a caring world I think 6 billion is not too much. If we keep fighting each other for the sake of "personal resposiblity", 6 billion is about 6 times too much.

Malthus was wrong two hundred years ago. And I think he's still wrong now.

But on the other hand, there's always hope! A massive die off! Just think! If it happens in the next year or so, I'm sure the survivors would open their eyes, and we could get Bush impeached.

Look at caucasians and japanese(in Japan) in western europe and the US.

Many Population Growth charts for the next 50 years are pretty much flat.

Don't underestimate humanity.

there is a theory that the extreme RW agenda that we hate so much is intended to "cull" the human species to about 500 Million over this century, leaving about 2 Million masters, a few tens of millions technocrats and a few hundred million serfs.

One part of their strategy is to control petroleum and prevent it from becoming obsolete for as long as possible.

Besides, you are focusing only on oil. What about a disease that mutates, or a new one that we make more frequent contacts with it's disease reservoir until it manages to make a species jump to us. Example: AIDS. A mutated Marburg or Ebola could devastate humanity.

No CTs needed for that - just nature.

The 'culling' theory is WAY far out there. WAY.


And I agree with you that we can probably manage to kill ourselves without the help of Republicans. Though they do seem to promote some policies that will speed things along.

Disease thrives in crowded places. The world is becoming a crowded place. It is very scary.

In the theory, disease is a weapon that will be used to cull the herd.

A conspiracy would want something they can control. Besides, too many people ruin a conspiracy. If it were a true conspiracy, YOU would not know about it.

the Earth quickly

I know about many conspiracies. There is nothing that requires conspiracies to be "secret."

Millionso of poeple knew, for example, that religiously insane fundies conspired to infiltrate school boards and local governments with stealth candidates. That was a conspiracy, but I knew about it.

But, this particular example is not MY theory. I'm just noting it's existence and its relevance to the original thread.

From dictionary.com: Law. An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.

While the definition does not precisely say that it would be secret, if it is illegal, then it would also require secrecy.

Basically, I am very tired of the tendency for so many here on DU to automatically reach for the tinfoil hat to explain events. I have no use for uber conspiracy theories.

--cue spooky sci fi theramin music.--

I thought so.

I'm neither a conspiracy buff nor a conspiracy denier.

Most of human history has been shaped by conspiracies.


BTW, neither criminality nor secrecy is strictly required.

con·spir·a·cy
n. pl. con·spir·a·cies
An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
A group of conspirators.
Law. An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.
A joining or acting together, as if by sinister design: a conspiracy of wind and tide that devastated coastal areas.

....when I consider the history of Skull & Bones.

But - their response to the dying in New Orleans seemed way beyond unprepared, way beyond incompetence, and even beyond indifference. Really made me wonder. And, even though I'm white, it DID seem racist. What I don't understand, if this admin is so racist - how can they get so many blacks to work for them? Rice, Powell, etc. Maybe Powell got out because of his conscience. Maybe Rice just wants power at any cost. I don't know, but it does seem like they almost wanted a high death toll in New Orleans. I saw reports of the army refusing to let Gore rescue people. They were shooting people walking across the bridge to get out of New Orleans. Very weird. This also makes me more likely to believe the 9/11 MIHOP stories.

one girl became an orphan because her parents were dead, one was killed by influenza. We don't seem to have progressed beyond the early 1900s, at least with the flu. I didn't express my feelings to my 7-year-old granddaughter, but I got a chill from that movie.

I believe our mechanical bodies will be around for a while yet. But what ever makes us human on the inside is dead and long gone.

we'll be the ones in the movie who struggle through to the final commercial break and find the hidden valley (and there'll be ranch dressing!)

I'm sure. :rofl: It's gonna be a much harder time than people realize when the American economy finally crashes.

:kick:

We humans think we are above and beyond the mysterious and unknowable workings of the natural world. Arrogance. Too bad we don't collectively experience the beauty and mystery but instead continuously poke and prod looking for "answers". Science and technology are big parts of the problem but we wrongly assume they are neutral.

The first rule in tinkering is save all the parts.


Melting Planet

Species are dying out faster than we have dared recognize, scientists will warn this week. The erosion of polar ice is the first break in a fragile chain of life extending across the planet, from bears in the north to penguins in the far south

By Andrew Buncombe in Anchorage and Severin Carrell in London

Published: 02 October 2005

Some of its findings include:

* Four out of five migratory birds listed by the UN face problems ranging from lower water tables to increased droughts, spreading deserts and shifting food supplies in their crucial "fuelling stations" as they migrate.

* One-third of turtle nesting sites in the Caribbean - home to diminishing numbers of green, hawksbill and loggerhead turtles - would be swamped by a sea level rise of 50cm (20ins). This will "drastically" hit their numbers. At the same time, shallow waters used by the endangered Mediterranean monk seal, dolphins, dugongs and manatees will slowly disappear.

* Whales, salmon, cod, penguins and kittiwakes are affected by shifts in distribution and abundance of krill and plankton, which has "declined in places to a hundredth or thousandth of former numbers because of warmer sea-surface temperatures."

<snip>

The science magazine Nature predicted last year that up to 37 per cent of terrestrial species could become extinct by 2050. And the Defra report presents more problems than solutions. Tackling these crises will be far more complicated than just building more nature reserves - a problem that Jim Knight, the nature conservation minister, acknowledges.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/article ...

Harm de Blij, Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America -- Climate Change, the Rise of China, and Global Terrorism


http://www.booktv.org/General/index.asp?segID=6092&schedID=379

Showed the accidental nature of things. Well, maybe accidental is a bad word. Just being in the right place, at the right time in terms of weather patterns.

but on a serious note, i wouldnt be completely surprised if what you describe happens

a manual has been written.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400049628/qid=1128371989/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-8956411-0619806?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

High energy technology civilization has allowed humanity to increase its numbers. High energy technology civilization is frightfully fragile, and its units are incredibly interdependent. No American city is more than three days away from food riots, for example ... even a brief interruption of the normal operation of things can be lethal.

High energy technology is under great stress due to the naivety of its political and economic leaders. We're gonna take a fall. Katrina was a sneak preview.

.......in NOLA maybe it was deliberate. BUT the end result is the same. IF food is not delivered to our supermarkets for a week, what will happen to most of America?

the story is that countries going from an agrarian economy to an industrial one have population explosions. In the 'First World' these large/enlarging populations were maintained until de- or post-industrialization began, around 1980. There simply isn't the need for as much manual human labor, especially the kinds uneducated people are put to doing- ever more powerful and intricately controlled machines do ever more of that with fewer human operators.

We're starting to see the first wave of population shrinkage. Japan and western Europe and northeastern Europe are starting to shrink populations or on the verge of it. China began its one child policy in the Seventies and might be 10-20 years from population peak. India implemented a subcoercive but, they say, highly effective set of measures and should stop significant population expansion in around the same time frame.

That's all a lot less amusing than all the apocalyptic stuff and the experience of how crowded a lot of the better places to be on the planet are.

But there's a pressing problem of two or three generations of people worldwide finding insufficient traditional productive both jobs and vital work to be employed in doing, directly or indirectly. That's opportunity for creativity and a lot of horror.

We need transportation and fuel to grow, harvest, and transport the food crops we need

global warming is a problem yet without the rest of us watchin' american idol there will be a lot less electricity used, and generating electricity leads to global warming (I just hope we're past the point because those selfish pricks, instead of doing things to allow us all to live would rather kill us off to save themselves in true dog-eat-dog, antichristian ways...)

sigh. Those are just two issues. There are many more.

Oneliners do nothing.

We need real talk about the problems. And most people aren't interested on doing that on DU; I've asked several times how people would tackle big issues and they sink more quickly than any other posts.

combined on a useless military-industrial complex, and throw that money at a manhattan-style project... nay, TWENTY manhattan style projects- to develop renewable, eco-friendly sources of energy. I happen to believe American Ingenuity, when properly applied to POSITIVE, forward-thinking, Human-presence in the Universe enhancing projects (as opposed to newer, better ways to torture, incarcerate, and/or kill people) is still a formidable force on this planet.

End the drug war, and with it allow the growth and use of hemp as paper, fuel, food, etc. Take the money we've been plowing into that and warfare and plug it back into not only technological R&D, but also covering every single piece of available rooftop space with solar panels. Get our considerable wind, thermal, and ocean power to work for us.

People talk about this stuff like it's a zero sum game, but its not. (For example, developments in nanotechnology may revolutionize the solar industy and cheapen the cost per KwH considerably very, very soon) I'm not a neo-luddite- technology has caused some of these problems but it can also solve a lot more, if properly applied. We can think our way out of this, but the operative word is THINK.

Google "Changing World Technologies"

as far as I know, nothing else lately. I'm really curious to see what comes of it- it sounds great.

They claim to have 85% efficiency , that's not true because they obviously take in account the truck needed to transport the waste to the plant.

They also said it's begin to worth it when oil is 80$ barrel.Most opep country produce oil at 10$ a barrel at the moment, no one in the oil industry invest in field where cost to recover oil will be higher than 30$.Yet ;they sell it a 65$ a barrel, guess how much will cost oil from thermal depolarization for the customer ? At the very best 160$ a barrel.

I would not call that cheap energy...

the truck transporting the waste to the plant would otherwise be transporting the waste to the dump.

I don't know about that. There have always torandos, volcanos, earthquaks, pandemics, etc. The human race is very resilient.

its just a matter of time till the parasitic fungus kills the host, and therefore itself.

Be a good spore.

since Malthus, we've had all sorts of dire predictions of our demise, and we always manage to make it throught the mess. Remember the Club of Rome report?

Unlike other organisms, we have the ability to both adapt to AND control our environment-- within reason.

If something's going to wipe us out, it's going to be something BIG. In the early 20th Century, we had Mao, Hitler, Stalin and a bunch of smaller monsters killing millions, with war, famine and plague bringing the total deaths up to the hundreds of millions. Did any of that reduce the population explosion we see now?

Resources are limited, but look at the population densities of Japan and Europe and ask if they have any problem with feeding themselves or keeping up their standards of living. They import a few essentials, but are largely self-sufficient and export more than they import. China and India are experiencing economic growth, not collapse from their huge populations.

Can't keep it up forever, but just when we think we've reached the limit, we reach another limit, and that's the way it's always been.

OK. we're running low on fresh water and oil, but that's about it, and we'll find something to replace oil and figure out how to desalinize the ocean for fresh water-- when we have to. Our instincts for survival are too great for little things like that to really slow us down.

But, if an asteroid hits, a monster volcano goes off, the Gulf Stream shifts course, or the Antarctic land ice falls into the ocean and raises sea heights by 20 feet, we're in deep shit. Really deep shit.

Two books-- King's "The Stand" about a plague killing off most of the population, and Niven/Pournelle's "Lucifer's Hammer" about an asteroid hit are the best I've read about the aftermaths of catastrophe. Don't have much to add to what those two books have to say about it.

but I think the ending is more tin-foil hat-reactionary like the posts everyone else is making. In every age, there have been people who say "the end is near" but it never happens. There have been times much worse than ours, periods in history much more violent or deadly (the plague) or crazy, and it's always inspired that hysteria in people. It's all about US, we're the age that's going to see this big huge tragic thing happen in our lifetime, nevermind that there have been thousands of years before our lifetime and most likely thousands of years after it. We're tiny strands on the giant rope of humanity, yet we all want to think we're different and special.

I think we've got a long way to go yet, humans I mean.

hit with an asteroid, just that it would take that sort of thing to wipe us out.

Quite frankly, I'm not terribly worried about that sort of thing. It probably won't happen, but if it does, we're obviously screwed.

What will happen, though, is that now that we are rapidly gaining the technology to reshape the face of the planet, we wil reshape it.

Studies of previous extinction cycles have discussed the role of atmospheric oxygen in massive extinctions. The ocean produces much of the world's oxygen....the pH and temperature of the ocean is changing....the amount of algae and plankton in the ocean varies with pH and temperature.....therefore the amount of oxygen produced may change.

Given time, people, plants, and animals can adapt, move, or change base conditions. Sudden changes lead to things like frogs getting sunburned, disappearance of tundra, disappearance of coral reefs, etc.. Hard to know what would happen if oxygen levels drop quickly or if some other factor might balance the change, but doubtful that it would be good for many plants, animals, and marginal societies.

quite a bit of oxygen, too, and it's fast disappearing. But, think of the employment possibilities of building immense windmills to power oceanic oxygen generators with hydrogen as a byproduct... We have the technology to destroy the world, but also to rebuild it in a very different fashion.

I do find it difficult to imagine a world without butterflies, wildfowers and songbirds, though. Is such a world worth living in for some of us? Me, I'd rather we work to find a way to keep it pretty much as it is.

When I think of massive catastrophe, I'm thinking of the effects of something, not necessarily the causal action itself. An asteroid would be massive in many ways, but something like the Gulf Stream switching course might not seem to be much in itself, but it could put North America and Europe into an ice age.

But, I don't worry myself about all this. It will happen or it won't, and there is little I can do about it by myself.

I believe mankind has been as advanced or more so in times gone by and blew itself back to the stone age and probably will do so again. I expect this time for the cause to be biological instead of nuclear. Only the absolute most remote peoples will survive and it will probably be a good thing for Mother Earth. Mankind has been a plague upon the planet.

Well presented, allows you to more analytically depress yourself over how we are all going to be affected negatively, if not driven back into the 1700s.

Just wait for Yellow stone to explode.

and the area they're living in is getting tighter and tighter, that's a recipe for disaster. With all the new diseases surfacing here on earth, I wouldn't be surprised to see a massive die-off w/in the next fifty years or so.

Anything by him (although I prefer "The Story of B")

A page at random from his site, http://www.ishmael.com

http://www.ishmael.com/Origins/Damned/



We are way, WAY past the "political solutions" phase.

What is the carrying capacity of the Indian Subcontinent?

Earth Abides, by Stewart, I believe. About a flulike epidemic that wipes out much of the population. The book is about what happens to the survivors. Fascinating.

John Titor-Time travel

"Someone using the assumed name of John Titor and claiming to be a soldier on a mission from 2036 presented a considerable amount of information on the Web beginning around November 2000 about his mission and time travel machine, his perspective on our society, how our society is going wrong, and how society as we know it will end in a very short but massive global nuclear war in 2015. He's gone now, back to 2036 he said he was going in his last posting on March 24, 2001, and the threads he left across the Web in his five months with us have been slowly evaporating since then. As time passes and interest in Titor's story grows, new "Titor" material and imposters emerge, and self-styled debunker's may go so far as to claim the story's already been proven a hoax (although so far there's never been any such actual proof offered). There are some good reasons to not believe everything you read, and good reasons to keep your mind open about Mr. Titor's story are more and more often appearing in the daily news. Russia is saber-rattling again in response to perceived American aggressions; tens of thousands of nuclear weapons still stand ready to launch on warning; police powers, illegal detentions, and concentration camps are growing like a cancer on the Constitution. Even the mad cow disease epidemic he predicted has already begun rearing its ugly head in America as well as around the world. Mr. Titor's words sound more prophetic every day."


Was John Titor really a time traveler from the future?

If we run out of oil, you can bet that with subsistence agriculture, there will be probably 2/3rds or so of humanity that will bite the bullet.

He made his prediction in late 2000 and not a hint about 9-11.According to his prophecies we should already been in a civil war.

However his description of our future world may very well be true due to the incoming energy crisis.

I consider it one of the greatest hoaxes ever devised - one that makes Nostradamus look like a amateur

space/time are intriguing.

And of course the multiverse would make time paradoxes and predictions being accurate irrelevant. After all, he never said this timeline was the same timeline that he is from, only that it was close to his timeline thus even if his 'predictions' are not 100% accurate, that in of itself does not disprove the idea of multiple timelines or a multiverse as the ultimate reality.

A multiverse view of reality also solves the problem of destiny versus freewill. It can be both, just like Gump said. There can be a destiny, but only if all players go along with that future destiny and do what is needed will make that destiny real. Think of it as in at least one timeline, a destiny is fullfilled. Someplace, sometime everything possible does happen.

Solves good and evil problems too. As everyone is both good and evil depending on their choices. They are free to make good choice or bad. Even Jose Diablo is good man on one timeline someplace/sometime. I know its hard to believe, but possible? Yes. I know I can hardly believe it. But maybe. So much for Calvin, huh.

The OP thought though about if we have a crummy future, Titor seemed to be saying it won't be a walk in the park. Our whole technical society is built on cheap plentiful oil. Without that oil, then it is not a hard stretch to imagine a die off of most of the people as food production drops and transportation becomes very difficult. To maintain order during the die off you can bet society will resort to a police state. That prediction does not need a crystal ball to see. And with a police state there will also be civil war. It's not like the people are disarmed, the police wont be able to take all the weapons. Thus chaos.

It's really all about the oil. Are we running out? And what would this do to the dreams of the globalists. If it's much more expensive to ship things, wouldn't that seem to indicate that all this exporting of jobs will end. I guess it wouldn't matter though because who could buy anything? Maybe a new dark age is right around the corner and there isn't anything we can do about it. It's to late baby.

I wonder about Titor though. Like who was he.

Edit: Imagine how the Chinese/Indians will feel when the oil runs out and they have all those worthless greenbacks. It's only paper.

The downfall of humanity was purely political and due to terrorism according to him.Every one who read the PNAC back in the day could have made this prediction.

You do are right about oil, i'm astonished so few people can see the problem with oil.Most make the mistake to think problem will happen when we will run out of oil.It won't, problem will be way sooner, when world oil production won't be able to meet world demand.(Most geologist agree This will happen between now and 2015)

There are many thing we could have done to prevent that, if we were able to seriously conserve in the 70' peak oil will have been a joke by now.
We didn't and wanted to increase our so called lifestyle, we will pay the price soon for our arrogance.

in that,"we will pay the price soon for our arrogance".

However, I don't subscribe to the idea that just because some people screw humanity up, I should also suffer from what they do. You do not seem to be arrogant, nor am I.

For example, let's take solar photocells as a source for generating energy.

In the early 70's the cost to produce a photovoltiac solar cell was about $20/watt. In the early 90's that cost had been reduced to about $10/watt. Currently to purchase a state of the art solar photocell panel will cost about $5.50/watt.

On the surface this looks like very good progress in making a suitable replacement for stationary oil burning electricity generating plants. But is this $5.50/watt what could have been achieved if more emphasis had been placed on development several decades ago?

The cost of just the collectors of a solar 'farm' at $5.50/watt for a gigawatt of capacity in this case would be about $5.5 billion dollars. That is pretty high and doesn't compete with oil by a large margin. And this price is only for the collectors and doesn't cover a storage, conversion or distribution system.

What troubles me about the solar power industry is the oil companies were allowed by the Reagan administration to diversify into solar industry. You can see names like BP and Shell as the producers of these latest 'state of the art' solar panels.

When we consider the light for these solar panels is free and in an unlimited amount, why were these oil companies allowed into an industry that will tap this source of energy? The oil companies have in the past and continue on today in trying to limit the supply of their product as a method to force the unit price higher. Look at refining capacity if you doubt these companies are in collusion with each other to manipulate the price. Yet the Reagan administration gave them the green light to move into a new industry so they could 'put a tax' on the light from the sun.

Now we are supposed to believe that $5.50/watt is the best they can do in developing this resource. I don't believe this is the best that could have been done in these last 35 years. And when the oil companies came in, there was another agenda and that would have been to keep a potential competitor out of their oil market.

The republican are not smart in positions of policy making in government. They have always 'danced with the ones that brung them'. It is they that bear the responsibility of those that will die if oil becomes in short supply. It is their short sighted profiting that will kill so many. And it is their 'dancing with the ones that brung them' that is core error in philosophy that causes them to be be poor choices at the ballot box. I will not share responsibility with them on what will happen, however like all of us, I will also pay the price for what they have done to us all.

NT

After a lot of investigation into the direct and proximate effects of Peak Oil, I've come to the reluctant conclusion that there is probably going to be a massive die-off. My current thinking is that we will start to see early signals in three years, first effects in the industrialized nations in about ten, and we'll be well into it in 15 years. I suspect that by the time is all said and done (within 50 years), we'll be back a bit below the Earth's steady-state carrying capacity of 1 billion people.

I base my pessimism on the assumption that Peak Oil is happening now, and that we no longer have the time we need (10 to 20 years) to put effective remediation efforts in place. We will see a gradual decline in economic growth, coupled with a massive increase in food costs. That will start the whole thing off with the spread of famines - first through the poor nations, then inexorably into the developed world.

What I think will deliver the coup de grace to our civilization, though, is the collapse of the fractional reserve banking system. It depends for its very existence on overall economic growth. If the global economy stops growing for two to three years, this system will collapse. As soon as that happens, social chaos will take hold on a global scale. It's a tossup which will bite us first - famine or fiscal collapse, though they will both reinforce each other in a macabre Malthusian pas de deux.

And that's even before we factor in the destabilizing effects of global warming and pandemics, both of which seem imminent. Add in the competition for increasingly scarce resources in a nuclear-armed world, and it's easy to see that humanity is at a crisis point here. You don't even need to bring Gaia or time travellers into it to see that our race is probably run.

It will be something like that - without the zombies....

Seriously, I've always thought Romero's Zombie flicks painted a very probable view of humanity during a die-off. His movies may have zombies in them, but they're not exactly about zombies...ya know?

The original Night of the Living Dead was about society not working together and all failing to survive because of it.

Masked mocking of racism, consumerism, militarism, science gone mad, and corporate greed have all had parts in the "Dead" series.

Romero like Ridley Scott is not just a 'horror director' but uses fiction to interpret and analyze non-fiction realities.

but just in case:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400049628/qid=1128371989/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-8956411-0619806?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

It's a documentary about the Bush administration

1. It could happen that inovations allow population leveling in peace. However, given good choices, our humanity always picks the WORST path.

So, economic failures dominate the next ten years. Shortages affect the poor and forgettable. (Remember any distraught souls from the late eleventh century? Nobody does.)

Next ten years show decrease availability of effective medications. Half of twenty-year-olds still take fifty years to die. Some make life in colder climates to remain with elderly. Influenza makes a small dent in the mostly unnoticeable.

Thirty years: New weaponry makes A&H bombs cumbersome. South America rises to dominate. China rises and ends up, once again, ruling itself.

Fifty years: Numbers are ignored. World population rises in surprising areas, falls in others but is ignored as relocation. Potency drops. In Iceland, life is good.

Weather affects tropical regions worse than fridged temps in polar regions. The elderly and weak die a little faster. Decentralized food production slows economy of U.S. which is already weakend.

Seventy-five years U.S., its Constitution long-ago ignored is as ignorable as England's pink on maps. Still a major investor and center of some dying family control. By one more generation, the families will move to South America. World population begins constant drop. U.S. makes a strike in various world areas to slow their progress as ordered by South American regimes. Loss of life is large, but hardly helpful to resource difficulties that face remainder.

One hundred years: Population five billion and falling.

Two hundred years: two billion.

But, life's still good in Iceland, Inuit areas, and, ignoring unrest, Africa. The wealthy, however, will make do in every old region. Only the quality of servants will rise and fall depending on their own smarts.

Have fun.

Guess I'm not seeing a major die-off. It will seem like a major die-off to those who will die.

More than 20 million people have died of AIDS since 1981.

Africa has 12 million AIDS orphans.

(from http://www.avert.org/worldstats.htm )

While 20 million out of 6 billion may not be a very large percentage overall, the proportions of certain social groupings that are dying off because of AIDS is extremely worrying.

IMHO it will only take a more virulent SARS or bird flu and the catastrophic event that WHO is constantly afraid of will come to pass.

and a plateau of 11 billion tops.

We've got more than enough land & water to feed everyone. We've got more than enough labor available to farm, irrigate, weave, tailor, build, erect, teach, doctor, & entertain.

The question is how to allocate the resources we have. Resources like plows, shovels, tractors, houses, trains, pipe, etc. are virtually unlimited, in time.

Resources like labor are practically unlimited.

Resources like land, soil, forests, clean water, clean seas, clean air, and the like are very much limited.

Now is the time to start agitating for a green tax shift, particularly a shift from taxing labor to taxing land. Include what adam smith et al labeled land, that is all natural resources, and we'll have quite a start.

If you tax jobs, businesses, and trade, you keep people out of work. If you make people pay for the right to occupy / exploit natural resources, you put people to work.

For what it's worth, you can grow enough for 2300 calories a day on 5000 s.f. of land, with 20" of rain (or 10" of irrigation), and a 3 month growing season. This with no off-farm inputs - no petroleum, no fertilizers, no mechanization. 11 billion people would require 2 million square miles of cropland. There are currently more than 6 million square miles of arable land in the world.

You can build the walls for 300 houses with the earth from a quarry 1 acre in size, 10 feet deep.

It's not the resources that limit us. It's that our economic systems don't allocate resources properly. The free market is great at allocating manufactured goods, however, allodial ownership of land and resources is a monkey wrench into the allocation of such resources. Solution: tax land and resources at the market value of their use, and share the proceeds among all members of the community.

: energy crisis
: overcrowding
: pollution
: global warming

etc...

nature always finds a way to attain a balance between predator and prey.

Humans are, in my uneducated opinion, an aberration. We have so far thwarted all attempts to keep us in check. But now, more incurable disease seems to be cropping up. HIV/AIDS is ravaging Africa, but the richer nations have drugs to slow it down. Now, avian flu is becoming a concern. Will we be able to stop it? Who knows.

hard first. Consider the Black Death. Cities were descimated. I think the countries with the least decent sanitation and drinking water will carry the burden. I live in the country. I will have a better time about disease if I don't mingle with larger populations. Even though the Black Death descimated country pops too, it was because city folks fled. God help us all if the avian flu really gets going.

The responses have been interesting.

I completely reject all uber conspiracy theories on this topic. Junk science is also rejected. No earth shifting on it's axis or time travelers, please. What's next - Theatans?

I first came across the idea in a novel I read in the 60's (I think it was the 60's) in which a disease had reduced humanity to a handful of individual survivors here and there. They get together, have children, and try to rebuild society, but can't. The leader of the tribe carried a hammer to meetings. As he died of very old age the hammer was passed on to the next leader. I can't remember the title, but it was well thought out.

Then in the late 70's I another book, (Title again forgotten) made me aware of how fragile technological society was. Like a finely made transmission, some sand in the gears could jam it up. I began then to suspect that we may someday have to go back to a primitive life. That was about the time we began to see a lot of survivalists. Nuclear war was a big concern then too.

I do not think we will see a civil war of the type some here seem to hope for.

Peak Oil I am not worried about. It think the onset is here, but we will be adaptable enough to begin serious conservation until Thermal Depolymerization can produce enough renewable oil to solve the problem, and with less pollution, and decentralized so it will not be vulnerable to storms or control by any small group of countries.

But there are many other resources that could put a pinch in a industrial society. A disruption of any of them could have widespread ripple effects.

Because of the butterfly effect, and that we a making changes in many of earth's systems, it is definitely possible that we could inadvertently change one of the critical control systems of the earth, causing it to settle in a new stable state that would be unfriendly to humans.

The above situation are top-down in that they would effect the high tech societies first, and the subsistence societies least. The isolated hunter-gatherer tribes that are still left would be barely effected, if at all. Humanity would venture back out from them, but would never again become a high tech society like ours. The easily available resources are already gone, as one poster pointed out.

The other great fear is disease. This is the one that I think will be the one that takes us down. Humanity is crowded, so that if a killer virus evolves, or jumps to us from another species, it could run through humanity in fast order. Antibiotics are losing effectiveness and have always been useless against viruses. Viruses have responded to vaccines by speeding up their mutation rates, thereby leaving the vaccines ineffective until a new one is found, and the cycle repeats, more quickly.

Industrial societies would be hit least hard by disease. Those most hurt would be those with poor sanitation, over crowded, and poor education to know how to avoid the disease. Third world countries would be badly hit along with the poor in the U.S.

While the disease ran it's course, social services could be expected to break down. Degree of the breakdown would depend upon the severity of the disease, and the efficiency of the gov'ts in keeping order. Note that I used gov'ts - plural - meaning not only USA but other world gov'ts also.

A really bad disease could take out half of humanity, and numerous could be expected to break out as part of the aftermath.

Tech society would be able to survive, albeit in greatly changed form. After a couple of decades tech societies would rebuild.

Gov'ts would have to institute genuine emergency measures that would be dictatorial with few rights for the individual to survive the crisis. They would be loathe to give up those powers, and people would be afraid that a weak gov't would not be able to control things. The central gov'ts would remain powerful and people would be happy to be alive.

Alternate possibility. We stave of the peak oil crisis, the disease doesn't hit until after the advances in DNA techology enable it to be beaten quickly. We then get a chance to work on the other problems.

If we are that lucky, then in about a thousand years - we reach for the stars, and colonize New Earth.

That's why people are so scared of these emerging diseases over there (such as SARS) and the Avian Flu.

According to some jehovah's witnesses who came by, there would be a big
shakeup and die off of the sinners. But then god will create a world
government and everyone left alive will become a progressive.

But really, all 6 billion persons will die in the next 100 years,
guaranteed. The enemy is called "time".

i read that if the population was 2% of what it was, then the planet would be in balance. there are WAY too many people, and i've always wondered how the universe and mother earth will take care of the dilemma. :popcorn:

Jared Diamond's new book explores the result of human choices on survival of various societies. Several people have mentioned Easter Island, the destruction of whose ecology he analyzed, but there is the counter example of the much smaller island of Tikopia which has maintained a stable population of about 1000 for 1300 years. At one point, they made a decision to give up pigs in order to keep the ecology in balance. If our species has destroyed Easter Island, it has also preserved Tikopia. I think we could probably do gradual population and dramatically reduce throughput of energy and raw materials and have reasonable lives for everybody, but it's a matter of will to do it, which seems to be in short supply.