I genuinely believe that world civilization will imminently collapse and never recover due to insufficient resources (minerals, arable land, fossil fuels, etc) followed by human extinction due to earth no longer being habitable for the human species due runaway climate change and mass extinction of other lifeforms. Does anyone else think this?
Pepe the frog
If there is a collapse, it won't kill all of us. The resource wars will start among poorer nations that can't afford or lack the technology and infrastructure to get what they need. Rich nations will thrive after the human population dips back down.
It's like a prey and predator simulation, the humans being the prey with no predators higher than us in the food chain to control our population. With no predators the population explodes uncontrollably until the ecosystem no longer can support the population, so a high percentage of the prey (usually the weaker ones) will die. However, the species will lives. No extinction.
All assuming the worst happens.
Truth. In the 5th century when this happened it was the cosmopolitan Eastern parts of the Roman empire that survived intact, while the poorer, more agrarian Western part fell into bankruptcy and got gang-raped by steppe savages whose homeland had decayed into a wasteland incapable of supporting them.
In our modern scenario, it’s the West that is more like the ERE and the second world that is more like the WRE, while the 3rd world takes the role of barbarian hordes. Many will try to flee to the richest part but there will be limits to their generosity, forcing the bulk of migrants to go where the government is too weak to stop them.
And like the 5th century it was hardly the end of the human race, the West had its most productive years when the population was a small fraction of what it is today, and there’s no reason why they won’t be able to make due without an endlessly growing population
Imagine believing this, the very advanced civillization not only depends for those very resources and resource extraction from those poorer areas, but also history has shown that highly advanced and technicaly depedant civillizations are meta-stable.
When the Roman Empire fell it was the more advanced and developed areas that survived intact while the more rural and poorer sections suffered the most upheaval. You forget that the wealthier areas are the ones sitting on the best military equipment and have the money and brainpower to develop workarounds for shortages
You are describing Malthusianism, which has consistently been disproven. pic semi related.
We have enough resources to last us until we can colonize space and mine some asteroids. Then earth's resources won't be needed.
Nonsense. Stop watching star trek
not him but while human fleshbags are useless in space, robots certain deliver an economic return
And where are we with autonomous robot tech? Serious question
Not him but it will probably never make sense to send humans that deep into space. If we find a habitable planet it would probably make more sense to send robots that grow the humans upon arrival
The last thing we sent to Mars was a fully automated science lab on wheels. We just sent the mother of all telescopes to L2 that didn’t even need the human maintenance work that Hubble did. We’ve landed on comets and redirected a planetary probe to explore Kuiper Belt Objects. The biggest technical hurdle to resource extraction is lifting heavy machinery into space, and also the fact that it would crash commodity markets by making things like nickel and iron so cheap as to be worthless
Ok Einstein, how do we get the resources back to earth?
That’s the easy part. Put them in a giant magnetic slingshot and fling the raw materials into orbit where they can be collected and parachuted to Earth. The hard part is getting that machinery up there in the first place
And for non-ferromagnetic resources? Or we just somehow build magnetically succeptible capsules somewhere in the asteroid belt? I reiterate: stop watching Star Trek. Maybe focus on earth based solutions. What’s that? You have none? Ok then.
Do you not know how catapults and slingshots work?
Ok, fine, interplanetary kinetic slingshots. Any day now I’m sure. Doesn’t at all address the impracticality of literal pie in the sky solutions to our earthly issues, but you win an autism point. Happy?
It’s all plausible with currently existing technology and know-how. I’ve already given you the main hurdle which is not technologic but economic: why go through all the trouble of harvesting all that nickel just to crash the nickel market which is doing perfectly fine? Our need simply isn’t great enough to necessitate it it, and that is further proof that human society will continue along until it is necessary
I’m not sure how your argument constitutes proof of anything. The OP’s point seems to be that he’s concerned that we’ll deplete the resources necessary for advanced civilization before we find alternatives. Speculative notions about how we might address this with tech that is theoretically possible but not practically developed or implemented is just that: speculation.
My counter point is that all resource depletion models discount the ultimate resource: people’s ability to adapt and find novel solutions for problems and shortfalls. Malthus never took into account the fact that land use efficiency rises over time, so there was never a point where quadratic population growth outstripped linear food production even as the population was spiking to never before seen levels.
The concept of harvesting space resources is still speculation, but we could be doing it with current technology if there was a great enough need to justify it. However at this point we’d get more bang for our buck recycling materials back into the economy, so there’s no impetus for it as of yet
Fair enough, but it seems like your argument is that “we’ll find resources as we need them.” The counter-argument is that at some point we may well reach a Malthusian tipping point where we’ve exhausted so many of our resources that we lack sufficient resources to exploit the much less accessible materials (like those in space). I’ll leave you with a quote from Zhou Enlai: The impact of the French Revolution? “Too early to say.”
We’ve managed to (literally) burn through hundreds of millions of years of concentrated sunlight in less than a hundred years of modern civ, which is something Malthus couldn’t possibly have anticipated. That’s clearly not sustainable.
Not necessarily, we’ll reuse what we can and find work-arounds for what we can’t. The Bronze Age didn’t end because they ran out of bronze, it ended because a combination of war and natural disasters cracked the brittle and crude despotisms and lead to supply chain breakdowns that lead to a need for metal tools that lead to metallurgical techniques being developed to smelt and work iron, previously considered worthless, into tools that were “good enough” but with a more abundant material that eventually lead to a vast proliferation of metal tools and civilization bounced back in ways that made them far mightier than what they had before.
You seem overly focused on base metals. We’re running out of cheap energy and seem unwilling collectively to adopt nuclear power.
Well it has happened before due to both human events and natural disasters. I think the runaway use of plastics may fuck us harder than anything else anons. Also the population explosion among thirdies isn't gonna be good for anyone.
>population explosion among thirdies isn't gonna be good for anyone
That already happened. There being 10x more naggers and chinks than Whites doesn't change the RATE at which they breed, which is going down across the board.
The difference is Westerners will have a small but proportionally equal pool of men and women in the future. Many of those countries are going to have less people AND a dystopian gap in gender ratio.
>I genuinely believe that world civilization will imminently collapse
Don't subscribe to 2 more weekisms. Although if it DID collapse I agree that we will never get back to this stage in technological development. There's too much knowledge and tech to go back to the stone age, but I can't see the world resettled into anything more advanced than 19th century technology.
>human extinction due to earth no longer being habitable for the human species
Improbable and unrealistic. There are too many people on this Earth to believe non would survive. They would be crazy malnourished fucks with doomsday religion, but they'd survive.
>due runaway climate change and mass extinction of other lifeforms
The only way I can imagine it being 100% over is if everything that could sustain even a small village is used up or poisoned.
>I genuinely believe that world civilization will imminently collapse and never recover
And I don't genuinely believe but am becoming slowly but surely increasingly convinced that it won't be the first time that's happened.