How Can We Survive

[xman]

I'm wondering if this isn't the most important question which we should keep asking of everyone over and over again.

 

[borrofburi]

He forgot the threats of exponential human growth, best illustrated in the section between 3:35 and 8:00 of this video (the bits before are teaching what exponential growth really means): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb3JI8F9LQQ
More reading on that (why population limitation is a good idea, just from the global warming concept): http://www.optimumpopulation.org/releases/opt.release09Sep09.htm

 

[Shapeshifter]

I'm optimist enough to think that population growth will not be a notable problem. At least to that problem we know the solution, and it's not too hard to implement in the long term: education, rights of women and economic growth.

 

[Niocan]

Population growth is only a problem if people are dependent upon others. Self sustainability is the key.

 

[scalyblue]

Population growth is only a problem if people are dependent upon others. Self sustainability is the key.

The earth does not have enough surface area for everybody alive now to be self sustainable....growing your own garden and whatnot may make you feel squishy and warm inside, but it's completely moronic in a food/m,² sense.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

Self sustainability agriculture is one of the least efficient we have. A common ground is capable of suplying twice as much, if not more (that is the all point of modern societies if for some strange reason you missed that).
There is only as much that the sun inputs, energy is limited and if nothing else limits things this prety sure makes a treshold, ofcourse other factors will get us first way before we need to worrie about energy input (the crops need ground, and what we eat also needs to eat and reproduce in large quantities to ensure that you will still have food in the future and the food of our food and its entire ecosystem must be able to do that as well, and that prety much carves a freaking huge biomass requierment that can not be people, if you add the fact that you can not do that everywhere you are prety much f*'d), that treshold can still be big but if you let the situation grow freely big you will inevitably reach it. And if you do nothing about it will inevitably reach the day when someone will have to "pickup daisies" so you don't have to do it yourself.

 

[Niocan]

The earth does not have enough surface area for everybody alive now to be self sustainable....growing your own garden and whatnot may make you feel squishy and warm inside, but it's completely moronic in a food/m,² sense.

My my, well to start there's a plethora of room on this planet (The world population can fit into Australia as 1 Sq Km blocks).
Secondly it isn't for the warm squishy feeling, it's about maintaining your own fresh food source; You won't see the full implications of this point unless you discover for yourself just how bad most food is in terms of nutritional value and toxicity.
Third, this act alone would drive any market forces needed to help and to make gardens more efficient.

Completely moronic eh, well, only in the viewpoint of self-perpetuating corporations that would lose business

Self sustainability agriculture is one of the least efficient we have. A common ground is capable of suplying twice as much, if not more (that is the all point of modern societies if for some strange reason you missed that).

Self sustainability includes the ability to redesign and improve any technique you want to use, and the current dependence on societies today is what's causing the 'problem' of population growth because efficiency isn't profitable.

This whole argument has its roots in a battle against the self-perpetuating nature of belief systems brought to you by corporations like Monsanto and the like. Growing your own food is the best means of independent survival, but that cuts into the profit made by others

 

[Aught3]

My my, well to start there's a plethora of room on this planet (The world population can fit into Australia as 1 Sq Km blocks).

You do see the obvious flaw in this reasoning don't you?

 

[Niocan]

My my, well to start there's a plethora of room on this planet (The world population can fit into Australia as 1 Sq Km blocks).

You do see the obvious flaw in this reasoning don't you?

Yes, land sustainability / environmental factors that inhibit construction and etc. The point was to put into perspective just how little land we actually use currently.

 

[scalyblue]

What exactly is your posit? That we don't have to worry about population because everybody in the world can sustain themselves on .5 acres of land? Do you suggest that nobody lives anywhere in the 85-90% of the earth's land area that isn't arable? Do you suggest that people spend their entire days subsistence farming while leaving no time for things like education? What about people on ships, or oil platforms? Or all of the people in New York City, or Hong Kong, or London?

 

[Icefire9atla]

Well, places with huge populations like China and India are actually less densely populated than many European countries, who are more or less self sustainable.

The problem is that these countries lack the infrastructure to support the kind of agriculture that developed countries have. Wars and corruption are also big factors in this.

I agree though, that if the trend continues for too long, then serious problems can occur. In addition other factors like climate change can affect how productive our land is.

 

[5810Singer]

What exactly is your posit? That we don't have to worry about population because everybody in the world can sustain themselves on .5 acres of land? Do you suggest that nobody lives anywhere in the 85-90% of the earth's land area that isn't arable? Do you suggest that people spend their entire days subsistence farming while leaving no time for things like education? What about people on ships, or oil platforms? Or all of the people in New York City, or Hong Kong, or London?

Although I wouldn't entirely endorse Niocan's opinion on agriculture, I think there's another point worth raising here.

Most of us have watched "The Most Important Video You Will Ever See", and many of us would have been well aware of the problem of population growth, and resource usage before we saw it.

The conclusion of anyone who's considered the problem dispassionately is that whatever we do next, our current socio-economic paradigm must change.
It may well be that large population centres, IE: cities, will become a thing of the past, because they are very resource intensive, and often create massive concentrations of pollution.

Lower tech forms of agriculture may well become more widespread, because anything that we can do to lower our resource usage will help to preserve our limited resource supply.

Major changes to our civilisation are inevitable, and many of them are going to seem highly unpalatable from our current viewpoint.

 

[scalyblue]

I'm waiting for Arcologies ^.x

 

[Niocan]

Well, it should go without saying that any change is initiated by personal choice; A social change will drive the markets to whatever seems needed, and technology will always improve. Decentralization is a handy thing when it comes to stability, if done correctly. Compare early days of napster with current torrent protocols, or the quality of food you get from large scale farms to farmers markets

 

[Miranox]

It's unlikely for all humans to die within the next 100 years. Even if a nuclear war began, nukes would be fired mostly at cities so a good portion of the planet might be spared. Global warming is a smaller problem and is definitely survivable at least within the next hundred years. A large meteor impact is the only thing mentioned in the video which could kill everyone. It could happen anytime too. Exciting isn't it? :twisted:

 

[5810Singer]

Even if a nuclear war began, nukes would be fired mostly at cities so a good portion of the planet might be spared.

No offense, but I think your knowledge on this subject might be a little deficient.

The cumulative effect of multiple nuclear explosions can create massive firestorms, and seismic activity, the dust and rock kicked up by them could cause a global darkening similar to a largescale meteor strike, or super-volcano, and high yield nuclear blasts in the upper atmosphere might even destabilise the Van-Allen radiation belt that protects us from much UV radiation.

And then there's good old radioactive contamination to consider which could poison the atmosphere, both natural and human controlled water supplies, and all the food.

If a large scale nuclear war broke out nowhere would be safe, and our survival as a species would be uncertain.....of that we can be certain.

 

[xman]

Global warming is a smaller problem and is definitely survivable at least within the next hundred years.

You are very optimistic. We could destroy most life on this planet in the next hundred years from global climate change alone.

But even if some of us did survive our stupidity, that would just reboot the problem and we'd end up given the chance to wipe out everything all over again in a few millenia or centuries perhaps.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

Self sustainability agriculture is one of the least efficient we have. A common ground is capable of suplying twice as much, if not more (that is the all point of modern societies if for some strange reason you missed that).

Self sustainability includes the ability to redesign and improve any technique you want to use, and the current dependence on societies today is what's causing the 'problem' of population growth because efficiency isn't profitable.

This whole argument has its roots in a battle against the self-perpetuating nature of belief systems brought to you by corporations like Monsanto and the like. Growing your own food is the best means of independent survival, but that cuts into the profit made by others

I know this is probably a lost case, but I fell that I have to keap beating this pile of jibelits that once was a horse.

What you mean is that self sustainability agriculture doesn't prevent improvements, but there is a huge difference between what doesn't prevent and what actually happens, research and development is a ressource consuming endeavour, if everyone has to make their own food there will be nobody left fro research and development is there? If there wasn't some one else making the food of an engineer I wonder how long would it take for us to invent the wheel much less go to the moon.
The sofistication of societies has allways been hand in hand with food surplus created by comunal crops and the ability to release the people from working on crops to do other things more interesting like potery, iron and ass scratching. If you were today to decrete that everyone would have to make their own food you wouldn't last 2 days, and you would have sucessfully draged the entier human race literaly back to the stone age, Congratulations I personaly couldn't have come with a better plan to destroy the entire human civilization, MUUHAHAHAAAAAAAA!.... Oh waith the point was to do the oposite.

But lets conceed that there are magical people that don't need food. For no matter how sofisticated you are self sustainability crops would still suck compared to the mass production serialed production, because there is as only as much that you can do with certain methods. The problem isn't exactly linear, and it has several minimal tresholds requiered to aply certain solutions. What do you think produces more, your pathetic garden or the maximized industrialized mass production gigantic ass fields?
Plus where the hell do you see sofistications like heavy machinary or multi resistant genetically modified weet? What kind of sofistications do you actually see at all on self sustainability agriculture?

And the argument that you could people all the people in the world in Australia is a gigantic strawman, one thing is being able to stand people on the ground, another completly different thing is to keep the majority of them alive for more then a week. You need animals and vegetables to eat, your will need more vegetables for your animals to eat, you need a pile more of animals and vegetables to ensure that you are able to keep eating for a longer time, you need an ass load of other animals and plants requier to sustain the eco system, everything will need tones of water, you will need tool to do stuff, you need mines to get materials to build those tools, and sense we can't eat anything without cooking you will need an assload of trees plus their entire ecosystem just to make fire and be able to keep making fire. People die and need to be barried, people make garbage or at leasst need to shit. And this shit goes on and on.
Your opinion about the world is identical to a 5 year old which doesn't have a clue where the hell things come from and that food spontaneously spawn in packets on the super market.

 

[Niocan]

I'm sorry, but No. I'm talking about gradually moving into a decentralized model of society to prevent the problems that occur from over-dependence. You don't need *any* new R+D for setting up a garden, and it seems you're over-complicating my case; Not all the people need to spend all their time gardening, and only those who want to begin this trend will do so. More farmers markets will (re)appear so the levels match what the US and Canada at least used to have thirty years ago, and from there more personal gardens if the trend continues.

I suggest you look into the history of farmers and their continued decline with more and more apathy like yours and the profit incentive that Monsanto has with getting GMO foods and mass produced (horrible quality) goods into your common meal instead of a few veggies from your local market / garden.

I'm well aware of the apparent problems of fitting everyone into one area like that, and I've said before it's just to show how little space we currently use up on this world.

The absolute irony of it all, though, must be that I'm the apparently childish one when I suggest we all do a little more work on the personal level to help relieve the burden of dependence... I'm sure you won't believe this as well, but with this transition to better and more local foods the HEALTH of those who do so will increase substantially; But obviously nothing we eat ever effects us negatively and you should trust the big corporations like monsanto

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

I really don't give 2 shits about coorporativism, the bais of my argument only stays on the fact that mass production technics are better to produce in large quatities (quatities that many people are dependent on).
Your are operating on the assumption that because we are not using naturaly occuring solution (or whatever that supoused to mean) that it is automaticaly bad for your health and only natural methods are good (despite the evidence of otherwise). it is wrong to try and convince people to adopt less efficient methods, to produce in less quatity with less quality and less reliability (and ask almost half of the people in the world that can aford food to starve) just beacuse you feel unease whit your vegetables even tough there is nothing wrong with them.