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Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

theguardian.com

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Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#31

Post by ForHackernews »

arcadeparade wrote: post #13
dasil003 wrote: post #3

There is some interesting insight to be gained from the elites vs masses psychology here. However I'm very skeptical of looking at history to try to predict the future of our civilization. Population and resource utilization as a percentage of total available on our planet have never been anywhere near what they are today. If civilization is to survive we somehow need to transition work environmental and total resour…

Is capitalism compatible with human survival? You can't have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. >Report for the UN into the activities of the world's 3,000 biggest companies estimates one-third of profits would be lost if firms were forced to pay for use, loss and damage of environment http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-to... It's true that massive regulation to account for all…

I don't really disagree with any of your prescriptions, but from a purely theoretical standpoint the most critical resource for life is energy.

The ultimate source of (almost) all energy on Earth is nuclear fusion in the Sun. From the perspective of humanity, solar resources might as well be infinite.

At least in principle, if we could learn to recycle critical rare-earth elements, and to derive our energy more directly from the Sun (rather from through fossil intermediaries), there's no reason that our economic system would be unsustainable.

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#32

Post by spikels »

runn1ng wrote: post #27

Is there an actual link to the study? I couldn't find it.

Couldn't find anything on the study's author, Safa Motesharri, other than a bunch of reposts of this Guardian article.

Edit: Study author's name was misspelled in the Guardian: Safa Motesharrei not Safa Motesharri. He's a math grad student at Univ. Of Maryland. Found a paper too...

http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/handy-paper-for-submi...

http://www.sesync.org/users/smotesharrei

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#33

Post by ForHackernews »

mitchty wrote: post #12
coin wrote: post #9

NASA is an acronym, yet most British publications stylize it as a word - Nasa.

They seem to do that when its pronounced versus spelled I've noticed. aka: NASA = Nasa BBC = b b c I could be wrong though so whatever.

That's what makes it an acronym. Technically, an "acronym" is an abbreviation that can be pronounced as a word (e.g. Radar, Nasa).

In contrast, things like BBC or FBI are "initialisms" but not acronyms.

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#34

Post by graeme »

narrator wrote: post #7

The problem with studies about the future is that they tend to too easily reconfirm the ideological beliefs of the writers. For example, the Romans didn't collapse because of environmental reasons. This makes them a tough jigsaw piece to squeeze into a deep environmentalist collapse puzzle. This is probably why Jared Diamond ignores them and instead focuses on small tribes in the arctic and easter island. The only co…

The Roman's did exhaust their environment though. Soil depleted, habours silted up, and forests disappeared. In North Africa this led to desertification that persists today.

Tainter specifically mentions Roman soil depletion in his book.

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

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#35

Post by fauigerzigerk »

I agree that inequality is a growing problem for our economic and democratic models, but I think we need to keep two things seperate: Inequality of resource usage and inequality of resource ownership.

The super rich may be thousands or hundereds of thousands of times as wealthy as the average person, but they do not eat thousands of times as much and they do not personally use thousands of times as much energy as the rest of us.

The 0.1% and not even the 1% can ever eat enough for the rest of us to go hungry. There isn't going to be famine due to resource scarcity in developed countries. At least not because the rich have used all the resources.

This hasn't always been the case. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong as I'm not a historian) that hundereds or thousands of years ago the elites could actually use not just own so much of the available resources that there wasn't enough left for the masses.

Inequality of asset ownership is to a large degree inequality of power. Mr. Brin can wake up tomorrow and say ha!, today I'm going to set up a lab staffed with top scientists that are going to figure out how to build a space elevator. Or he can buy himself a senator or two. I can't do that. He can. But we can both eat and the food won't be that different (I believe).

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#36

Post by _of »

narrator wrote: post #7

The problem with studies about the future is that they tend to too easily reconfirm the ideological beliefs of the writers. For example, the Romans didn't collapse because of environmental reasons. This makes them a tough jigsaw piece to squeeze into a deep environmentalist collapse puzzle. This is probably why Jared Diamond ignores them and instead focuses on small tribes in the arctic and easter island. The only co…

What are the ideological beliefs of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center?

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#37

Post by fargolime »

cinquemb wrote: post #28
fargolime wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're trying, but a cursory evaluation shows it's a lost cause. Much easier to achieve a sustainable civilization (zero growth), as hard as that is.

What has a higher probability (honestly): - getting an increasing majority of the population of people who for the most part of their entire lives are taught/live/believe by certain ideals (i.e. are not doing anything different now), to the benefit of the few, to convince themselves of another way. - convincing the few who benefit now who have the means to try something new (or old) (i.e. who are doing something now)…

I don't understand your choice descriptions. What are you getting at?

"Exploration" is the tying concept but other than that it's apples and oranges. Colonizing / terraforming another planet may be theoretically possible but also possibly require more expendable resources than our planet has to offer to the cause. Unlike Earth exploration.

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#38

Post by acqq »

heydenberk wrote: post #25
arcadeparade wrote: post #5

Guy McPherson has a disturbingly well sourced and pessimistic summary of how climate change will affect humanity in the next few decades. In his view it's too late to stop it and we're finished: http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-u...

An interesting thought experiment I like to entertain is the case in which climate change is mitigated by the same kind of factors that cause and exacerbate it. It's not outrageous to imagine 21st century materials technology making it profitable to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or low-power, ubiquitous computing/surveillance/logistics technology that can extract heat energy from the atmosphere and conv…

I hope you understand that converting CO2 to anything else requires energy. CO2 is the "lower energy" state. Either you win the energy by burning something or you have to spend the energy to produce organic matter out of the CO2. The nature did the later during the last hundreds of millions of years. The humanity burned half of the oil so produced in a mere 100 years -- an order of million times faster, and growing.

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#39

Post by acqq »

ForHackernews wrote: post #31
arcadeparade wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is capitalism compatible with human survival? You can't have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. >Report for the UN into the activities of the world's 3,000 biggest companies estimates one-third of profits would be lost if firms were forced to pay for use, loss and damage of environment http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-to... It's true that massive regulation to account for all…

I don't really disagree with any of your prescriptions, but from a purely theoretical standpoint the most critical resource for life is energy. The ultimate source of (almost) all energy on Earth is nuclear fusion in the Sun. From the perspective of humanity, solar resources might as well be infinite. At least in principle, if we could learn to recycle critical rare-earth elements, and to derive our energy more direc…

> From the perspective of humanity, solar resources might as well be infinite.

They aren't as soon as you continue to expect to have growth. Which the present systems still assume.

Re: Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

#40

Post by ForHackernews »

acqq wrote: post #39
ForHackernews wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really disagree with any of your prescriptions, but from a purely theoretical standpoint the most critical resource for life is energy. The ultimate source of (almost) all energy on Earth is nuclear fusion in the Sun. From the perspective of humanity, solar resources might as well be infinite. At least in principle, if we could learn to recycle critical rare-earth elements, and to derive our energy more direc…

> From the perspective of humanity, solar resources might as well be infinite. They aren't as soon as you continue to expect to have growth. Which the present systems still assume.

You can also have economic growth through more efficient use of the same resources. Again, there's probably some theoretical limit, but it certainly won't be a practical consideration any time soon (we're very inefficient).
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