How Technology Might Avert an Apocalypse 201
First time accepted submitter deapbluesea writes "Matt Ridley recounts the many predictions of catastrophe that have been made by prominent figures in the past. 'The classic apocalypse has four horsemen, and our modern version follows that pattern, with the four riders being chemicals (DDT, CFCs, acid rain), diseases (bird flu, swine flu, SARS, AIDS, Ebola, mad cow disease), people (population, famine), and resources (oil, metals).' From over population, to pandemics, peak oil to climate change, Ridley provides examples of human innovation that have averted the disasters, real or imagined. He does not declare the doomsayers to be wrong, merely hyperbolic in their predictions. 'We hear a lot from those who think disaster is inexorable if not inevitable, and a lot from those who think it is all a hoax. We hardly ever allow the moderate "lukewarmers."' Given the current discussions on rich vs poor, conservative vs liberal, religious versus non-religious, maybe a little moderation should be in order. After all, there are a lot of examples of 'experts' who got it completely wrong in the past."
War isn't one of the classic causes of Apocalypse? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but that's the oddest set of "Apocalypse" categories I've ever seen.
"Population"?
No war? No giant asteroid? No gamma ray pulse from a nearby star going nova?
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Re:War isn't one of the classic causes of Apocalyp (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, pretty ridiculous, we arent even near of apocalypse by population... War and weapon technology on the other hand...
Depends on your time frame [umich.edu]. 10 years no, 50 years, perhaps (note that the slope of the rise is dropping fast - whether it's fast enough remains to be seen).
Re:War isn't one of the classic causes of Apocalyp (Score:5, Informative)
The median UN projection is for our population to top out just below 10 billion at around 2070, and then decline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_population_growth_rate [wikipedia.org]
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Your opinion is not supported by data.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo [youtube.com]
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As people (particularly females) become more educated, they have more kids. The industrialized nations all have native populations that are decreasing. Only the third world is still increasing in population and that's slowing down too.
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Fewer kids. Whoops.
Re:War isn't one of the classic causes of Apocalyp (Score:5, Informative)
Man is more populous than the rat ...
Do you actually have reliable data on this? If so, a lot of people who study such things might be very interested in how the numbers can be verified.
I recently ran across a typical example showing how little is known of rat populations, in the form of a list of "expert" estimates for New York City that ranged from 1/4 million to 100 million rats. This is a 400:1 range, and most actual experts on the topic will openly admit that the estimates aren't much more reliable than this. New York may be one of the best-studied cities.
The conventional estimate is that most human urban areas have on the order of 10 rats per human. This estimate has only one significant digit, though, and probably less than one digit for a lot of the world's cities. (Do you really think we know how many rats there are in Calcutta or Lagos or Mexico city or Shanghai or ...? ;-)
Of course, it's common for us humans to base our policies on numbers that were just made up by self-proclaimed experts, often for PR purposes.
Re:War isn't one of the classic causes of Apocalyp (Score:5, Interesting)
I recall an experiment that was done about 40 years ago, I think in NYC. It involved a typical dilapidated tenement building that (I think) was due to be torn down. First the scientists interviewed the tenants, who were about to leave. Then they did their own survey, to determine how many rats were seen. Then (somehow?) they isolated the building and killed all the rats, and counted them. The result was that for every rat reported to have been seen, there were ten actual rats. If that is a reasonable ratio (and I think it is), then take the number of rats that the typical New Yorker sees in a year - let's say six, just to put a number on it - there are ten times that many. Human population of NYC is 8.5 million, so multiply by 60 to get 510 imllion rats. I wouldn't be surprised if that was close (1/2 order of magnitude) to the actual number.
Yes, it's not good science to extrapolate from one old study on one building to the much different environs of an entire city, my memory is vague so I probably have everything wrong (except the 10:1 - I'm sure of that), etc., etc. But it's a reasonable hypothetical number to use as a starting point.
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i see a problem with that assumption where if you put that many rats in that much space with 8.5 million they will be very very visible. the subways are huge, but not that huge.
a derelict building implies a low occupancy. also people spend far more waking time outside their apartments than inside them.
but you did point out the possible error in extrapolating that one case, so whatevs.
Re:War isn't one of the classic causes of Apocalyp (Score:5, Interesting)
We have one billion chronically hungry people today [latimes.com] and it's going to get far far worse in the coming decades. Man is more populous than the rat and is consuming the earth like a swarm of locusts consuming a crop field.
Your first sentence does not follow for your second.
There is more then enough food in the world today to feed the entire human race, plus some extra ones. Instead, most of it is wasted - not overconsumed - but wasted, because it's not possible to distribute it in an effective way.
Population crises are never going to be a problem because we straight up don't have to feed all the people in the world. We don't now, and that's not going to change in the forseeable future. And, it's not like starving people are able to swim across oceans or defeat a modern army, so the wealthy nations aren't going to be overwhelmed by the poor.
Additionally, let's suppose we did decide to feed everyone - which is a difficult endeavor. The infrastructure and education you need to make that a viable long term solution, empirically seems to have the side-effect of reducing population growth - if you succeed in preventing famine in an effective way, and start teaching farmers and educating women and children, then in every single place it's been tried, population growth levels off and then declines.
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Someone above cited UN predicts 10 billion by 2070. So what? We wait till we reach 10 billion? If we have shortage of population, it can easily be grown but reducing population is problematic & ugly.
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sustainable for whom? if we're talking pure (rather than the selfish kind I prefer) environmentalism, then overpopulation is when the biosphere can't support it.
if we define it as being unable to feed ourselves, then as part of a larger biosphere, it'll tend to self-regulate into a sustainable situation (ie population will drop until we can feed ourselves). one could argue that it's short term unsustainable but sustainable in the long (but not too pretty) term.
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your post and your sig are amusingly at odds with each other :)
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I've done some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and found that, using a VERY broad brush and some simple energy throughput and urban habitat analysis, the Earth could support one trillion people. Life would not be anything like it is now, of course, but the folks who grew up in that world would accept it as what it is. For example, they would probably consider the raising of animals for food as ridiculously barbaric and unsanitary, unlike their pure algae-based rations. One trillion people is about 150
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"the problem is that you describe a world that is totally dependent on the actions of man to 'keep turning'. "
And you don't think that's the way it is now? Where do you think your power, food, fuel, and water come from today? Elves?
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Sorry, but that's the oddest set of "Apocalypse" categories I've ever seen.
"Population"?
No war? No giant asteroid? No gamma ray pulse from a nearby star going nova?
Oh, if you read the TFA you'll find that the 'usual suspects' are still there.
Nobody's particular original with this end-of-world stuff.
That's great, .....
It starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes
Oddest? (Score:4, Interesting)
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War (well, the sword) is definitely a classic.
First horseman: conqueror
Second horseman : war
Third horseman : the economic oppressor
Fourth horseman : Death (and Hell followed with him, killing with sword, famine, disease, beasts)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse [wikipedia.org]
Conquest, War,Famine and Death
Re:Classic Causes (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the beginner student of history understands that wars are almost inevitably economic in nature. Religion is a useful tool, but I doubt there are more than a handful of wars throughout history whose underlying causes were religious. Even the Crusades, whatever the high flying religious rhetoric used to justify them, were more about Western and Central European Princes getting a piece of the action in one of the most important trade corridors in the world.
As to the claim about religions not liking democracy, that is pretty absurd. Modern democracy first began to grow in Protestant states, and that has economic underpinnings as well, as Protestantism was a useful tool for many European princes to break the political bonds with the autocratic Catholic Church. The growing mercantile classes, particularly in England, Scotland and the Low Countries, espoused forms of Protestantism very friendly to the notion of a thrifty sober working class, and it is this class that battled against the autocratic leanings of Absolute Monarchy (with all its Medieval and unspoken Medieval Catholic underpinnings), ultimately, in Britain at least, leading to one of the great revolutions in history; the Glorious Revolution which saw the Bill of Rights, 1689 enacted into law (and in one fashion or another inherited by pretty much all of Britain's former colonial holdings). This had solid Protestant underpinnings, so I would hardly say religion is an anathema to democracy.
In the end even the Catholic Church ended up heavily liberalizing, though it has a far uneasier alliance with democracy than Protestantism generally does.
As to autocratic states, well, they have little trouble doing business with democracies providing said democracies stay out of their internal affairs. China has no problem with Western democracy, since both have found a path by which everyone can make lots of money. Again, economics rules everything.
Re:Classic Causes (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA was poorly done. It can be broken down as Global war, pandemics, wide-scale crop failure (Famine), and Global Catastrophe (extrasolar non-cometary impacts, Krakatoa+ volcanic eruptions, etc. Overpopulation by itself isn't a problem; it makes the first three worse: War over land disputes, pandemics spreading faster due to population density and air travel, and more mouths to feed leaves less margin in world-wide crop reserves.
As a side note, I find it funny that religion is commented on as a possible cause of world-wide war. China is, by many measures, one of the least religious countries in the world. Their saber rattling over disputed land ownership, at least to me, makes them the most likely catalysis of the next major conflict.
Re:Classic Causes (Score:5, Interesting)
Religions don't like democracy, and autocracies don't like democracy.
Actually, as was pointed out 200 years ago regarding the establishment of the USA, to that time no democracy has ever survived more than about 200 years. Athens was the first democracy I can think of where bread, circuses and the threat of war were used by the leaders to stay elected (See Pericles). The result was a series of wars and the eventual demise of Athens. IMHO the peoples' virtue or lack thereof is the primary risk, and religion is just a convenient excuse or cause celebre'.
As someone else once put it (more or less), democracies last until the people realise they can vote themselves bread and circuses. First the people are virtuous and hardworking, then they become wealthy as a result of that hard work, then they become complacent, then they become greedy/needy/decadent, then (since most people are no longer working their ass off), their system collapses, people start to starve, and revolution, war or takeover by the neighbors is next.
Re:Classic Causes (Score:4, Informative)
So 200 years ago, people conveniently ignored Iceland (the Althing was the parliament of Iceland for more than 300 years), the Isle of Man (the Tynwald is the parliament of the island since 979, more than 1000 years of democracy!), San Marino (republic since 366 - more than 1600 years ago!) and Switzerland (democracy since 1291), just to make a point.
Re:War isn't one of the classic causes of Apocalyp (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually politically we probably could do it. If NASA and astronomers from around the world were sure it was a problem, then I suspect it would get the right attention (money) if it was all anyone ever talked about, and we were talking detailed trajectories and planning.
The real problem is no one wants to fund observation - though fortunately the enterprise of asteroid mining is probably going to solve that to everyone's satisfaction.
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There isn't a rock big enough to do the job near enough to worry about. We have decades before anything large enough but too far away becomes a threat, and our technology already suffices to deflect the largest rocks out there, so we'll just be advancing technology that will make the job cheaper between now and then.
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There are loads of "candidate" stars that could do the job. Fortunately it's an exceedingly rare event.
And a giant asteroid can absolutely not be ruled out.
One should note that both of the above extinction events have most likely already occurred on Earth at one time or another.
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No, there are currently no stars close enough to us that are also large enough and late enough in their lives to endanger us with a gamma ray pulse.
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A giant asteroid can be ruled out because we haven't seen it. Unless you're worrying about invisible giant asteroids that don't perturb gravity, we're in good shape.
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the GRB strong enough to affect life on earth occur about every 5 million years (see wikipedia article & its sources). no point in worrying about them, nothing to be done
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There is also the possibility that a larger object could enter the Solar System from outside it which is currently far now, but will eventually pass close to Earth. Very long period comets from the Oort Cloud might also be on the way to the inner solar system.
Still, as long as there are people checking, we should have some notice of an object incoming well before it happens.
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We're safe from the reasonably round orbit asteroids. It's the eccentric orbits and the recent Jupiter/Mars catapults that should worry us.
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*shrugs* The angels / demons have always been hinted at as being purely human with strange / evil ideas. So, switch out the word angels and the word demon, and see if human can end our civilization with that level of technology. A few variants have picked up on the idea, albeit for different reasons: the Amish would be a good example.
It all goes back to the king / royalty / highway-man / raiders motif, which is where the 'locusts' come into play; they may simply be the great hordes of mankind who are infant
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Again, if you check the various {holy} books for half a dozen religions, they are waiting on a worldwide famine to hopefully kill off, or otherwise unmask, the people they're going to kill. And as has been pointed out in history if not once, then more than a dozen times, some powerful people want this to happen. They want to create enough chaos that it will force the hand of their god, force him / her to come back, so they can shore up their faith with actual evidence. I mean, if 50% of the world's population is crying out to the Almighty, surely he'd be moved to answer them, right?
Reminds me of "Rainbow Six".
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So what does IT have to do with it? The virtue of the geek? :)
Survivor Bias (Score:5, Interesting)
"After all, there are a lot of examples of 'experts' who got it completely wrong in the past."
That's a good example of survivor bias [wikipedia.org].
Re:Survivor Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also up in the air what qualifies as an apocalypse. I'm pretty sure for the people who were in Hiroshima on a certain day, the world as they knew it ended... to them that was the apocalypse. For the people in the airplane, not so much.
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Yeah those quotes around the 'experts' are very important. Actual experts have never been wrong.
Re:Survivor Bias (Score:5, Interesting)
Actual experts have never been wrong.
But they have often been ignored. ;-)
Here in the US, we had a case much smaller than the K-T asteroid impact just a few years ago, in New Orleans. If you want to read about what the experts were saying, google "Hurricane Pam". That was a simulation/exercise that studied the effects of a hurricane much like Katrina. The study did a remarkably good job of describing the impact of Katrina. Part of the study pinpointed the places where the levees would be breached. Applications to Congress for funding to fortify those levees were voted down.
Human history is full of similar events, when the experts made accurate predictions of disasters, and the people in charge decided to ignore them.
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That's hindsight bias. There are LOTS of disasters being predicted all the time - so what do you do? AFTERWARDS saying "oh we should have listened to THAT guy" is sooooo useless. Please make your statement not for the past but for the future, and let us come back to measure your success rate 10yrs hence.
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Actual experts have never been wrong.
Hahahaha. So cute, such trust. :) I assume you jest. But just in case someone believes that, here are some counter examples.
My 1960s era Earth Sciences grade school textbook mentioned the idea that the surface of the Earth might be comprised of several huge plates, and that the land masses might once have been all connected. But "All reputable scientists agree that this could not the case." I remember this, because I had just read a SciAm article discussing plate tectonics (the book was probably five y
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An expert by definition isn't wrong. All those people were were scientists. Being proven wrong demonstrates your non-expertise.
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Since nobody is perfect all the time, nobody is an expert. Therefore the "definition" is useless.
Ok, now come up with an actual definition for "expert" that reflects reality and has actual practical applications. That's the one everyone else is using, not the definition you pulled out of your arse to make a nonsensical point about on an internet forum.
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Survivor bias implies the existence of survivors. Also, the populations of survivors seem to be thriving.
Call it bias if you want, but do you really think we've all forgotten all the narrowly-averted apocalypses? Or were the predictions of doom exaggerated? Which is more likely?
[PSA] Avert a good man's early demise (Score:2, Informative)
[PSA] Ken Starks of HeliOS fame has 2-3 weeks left
This is one of those put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is situations. From his partner's blog at http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2012/08/this-is-where-we-are.html [blogspot.com]
Ken's cancer has just recently begun to spread to his right lymph node but his Oncologist has assured us that this is 80 percent curative if he gets the needed surgery in time.
Unfortunately, his 1100 dollar a month SSI disability disqualifies him for Medicaid care and the local county low-income insurance he was receiving. This leaves us with about 2 weeks to either raise enough money for at least the OR for the surgery (we are hopeful of finding a surgeon to do the work pro bono) or raise enough money for the entire procedure. We've spent hours upon hours researching and contacting the links some of you have provided but they are so limited in scope that 90 percent of them are not helpful at all.
We are looking at two weeks, maybe three before the cancer spreads past the point of surgery being an option. After that, we've been told just to make him as comfortable as possible until he passes. I'm not ready to accept that.
Stupid, this Medicare exclusion. More about the guy, by Steven Vaughan-Nichols of ZDnet fame [zdnet.com]:
+Ken Starks is a Linux and open-source supporter. He also runs a non-profit that's donated thousands of PCs to low-income households. Now, he needs help to fight cancer. For more on what's happening with him see:
http://thomasaknight.com/blog.php?id=71 [thomasaknight.com]
https://plus.google.com/app/plus/mp/374/#~loop:view=activity&aid=z132y3njjzjei5iic04cjds4ztnpef1pjb0 [google.com]
Pitch in if you can.
Don't use Plus link, thomasknight link has donate (Score:4, Informative)
I was about to give up donating since you can't view a Plus link without a Plus account.
Then I tried the thomasknight link, a donate button was there.
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Steven is a well-known contributor at ZDnet. Anyway, you may Google 'Ken Starks TX' and read about his charity efforts. He and his buddies (the project was recently renamed "Reglue") refurbish computers and donate them to kids around Austin.
I only knew about them because it has been posted three times to the Firehose, unsuccessfully
What about apocalypses provoked by technology? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What about apocalypses provoked by technology? (Score:5, Interesting)
You fail to see the true "apocalypse" that's right under your nose. As nature has done time and again, it has used the other species to push forth a better version... You smugly believe you humans are the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder. You are not. You're in the process of bringing about your own demise via freeing cognition from its organic limitations. Your only hope is to make peace with the technology, or merge with it.
Even though Humans have shied away from evolution and natural selection by prolonging the lives of the unfit, even polluting the gene pool via allowing them to breed, natural selection still carries out its task through you all. Much like water born life in the sea became more hearty to survive on land and in the air, nature is hard at work creating life that can survive in the harshness of space.
Once life itself caused a huge cataclysm to befall this tiny blue world -- The Great Oxygenation Catastrophe [wikipedia.org] was likely the single most devastating event, killing off most of the anaerobic life. Were it not for this disaster, larger lifeforms would not have formed so quickly: Oxygen is jet fuel for big beasts. Where some see an apocalypse in The Great Inorganic Awakening, others see life fulfilling its prime directive.
Re:What about apocalypses provoked by technology? (Score:5, Funny)
You can't frighten us, anaerobic pig bacteria!
Go and boil your cell walls, daughter cells of a silly archea.
I blow my pores at you, you and your so called nitrate loving freaks!
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Your style of posting is very odd.
"You humans"? What kind of talk is that? You ARE a human! Only someone suffering from a severe detachment from society would consider themselves enough of an outcast to refer to the rest of humanity as "you humans". Unless you're a LOLcat who'd learnt how to type a coherent sentence rather than walking on the keyboard, please try to accept that you're one of us, and as such we're all
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Intelligence isn't like hair color or height and isn't directly inheritable.
Interestingly, according to recent literature psychopathy is about 80% inheritable. (But only about 50% of children who show the symptoms early become psychopathic as addults - the other half seem to find a way to fit into society's norms.) One then must ask, "Why would psychopathy be so successful (at some small percentage of the population) that it inherits this strongly, while intelligence isn't.?" Of course intelligence has a strong environmental/development component, and it is complicated by the fa
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Simple enough: The previous poster is wrong, Mike Judge is right, and intelligence is inheritable, though not 100%. As for the previous poster's claim of being an intelligent child of stupid parents, I can think of a few options
1) Hybrid vigor: Managed to get a good combination out of a poor but not hopeless set of genes.
2) Adoption.
3) Infidelit
Have we averted peak oil/climate change? (Score:3)
Oh, my, I must have been sleeping a lot lately.
To think that I believed that we were still in 2012...
Seriously, the author of these "articles" should disclose how to find his drug dealer. Must be some serious stuff.
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US CO2 emissions are at their lowest level in 20 years, and we are in talks to do the same for the Chinese. How? By frakking natural gas. Which averts peak oil, and replaces it with peak natural gas.
Seems poorly researched (Score:5, Informative)
Seems poorly researched
In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a Shell geophysicist, forecast that gas production in the US would peak at about 14 trillion cubic feet per year sometime around 1970.
Oil production not gas
All these predictions failed to come true. Oil and gas production have continued to rise during the past 50 years.
Sorry, blatantly false. Try to find a US oil production graph showing this, LOL. Prediction dead accurate.
Yes, US oil production peaked in 1970 (Score:5, Informative)
US oil production not only peaked in 1970, it's about half of what it was then. [wikipedia.org] Texas (!) is a net oil importer. World oil production has been more or less flat since 2005, despite a price increase from $20/bbl to $100/bbl.
World natural gas production is up, and US natural gas production is way up. Not clear how long that can continue. Gas wells can be pumped out faster than oil wells, and production drops off rapidly towards the end. Oil wells slow down more gradually, ending up as "stripper wells", producing less than 10 bbl/day each. The US has about 400,000 of those; it adds up.
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Sorry, blatantly false. Try to find a US oil production graph showing this, LOL. Prediction dead accurate.
Oddly enough I did read an article this week, discussing this very topic. Proven reserves of oil are now four times what they were in 1970. The same or similar is true of gold, aluminum, and various other resources. Granted, the technologies of extraction have made all the difference, and it costs more in some cases as we go deeper, etc. But that is the essence of tech progress: "exchanging small simple problems for bigger, more complex ones."
Re:Seems poorly researched (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been a lot of those articles lately, mostly appearing in small town newspapers where feedback isn't possible, so you can't quickly get pointed to the sites that show what nonsense it is. They're meant to show up on Google and reassure investors and the public, not to convey actual information.
Behind the scenes the real problem is almost invisible. We're not mining hydrocarbons, per se. We're mining energy. In the 1960s, in West Texas, the energy in one barrel of oil got you 100 more. Fast forward to 2012. A ratio of 10:1 is considered very good - a 10-fold decrease in 50 years. We used to have enough slack in the system to provide enough energy so that we didn't even have to raise prices. That changed in 2005. Energetically speaking, we ran out of slack. Now, actual quantities matter. Shortages of product mean shortages of energy and immediate increases in price.
Energy return on hydrocarbons is still declining. The $64 billion question is, "How low can the energy return on hydrocarbons go and still produce enough energy to sustain itself AND run industrial civilization at present levels. The problem is, of course, that there's no simple easy answer to that question. The funny (not haha funny) thing is, that even if there are oceans of oil under the surface of the earth, it won't matter if we can't get at them in an energetically positive manner. A teacup of oil in a cubic yard of granite 7 miles down does us no good, no matter how many such teacups might exist.
some say the sun rises in the east, some say west (Score:2, Insightful)
we hardly ever hear from the moderate voices who say the sun comes from somewhere inbetween. Sometimes halfway between the truth and bullshit is just as bullshitty.
The Fifth Horseman (Score:4, Funny)
Unfortunately, he fails to mention the often forgotten fifth horseman, who brings about a decline in innovation. From what I see in the news today, he may already be here. Doom is certainly upon us!
Re:The Fifth Horseman (Score:4, Funny)
Unfortunately, he fails to mention the often forgotten fifth horseman, who brings about a decline in innovation.
The Conqueror, War, Famine, Death and, most horrifying of all, the Patent Office.
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What the fuck? Doesn't Slashdot have enough threads about hating patents? Why bring it in to one about technology creating an apocalypse?
This chariot needs more than four horses (Score:2)
Asteroid impact
Supervolcano
Nuclear war
Grey goo
Brain fever
and many more...
Apocalypse diverted by good people not technology (Score:2, Troll)
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The CRT puts out a great deal of radiation and wastes a great deal of energy. Through a series of regulations at various national levels, a standard was put in place to limit the radiation of the CRT. The ultimate solution was the LCD, but that was expensive. However, in a short time, due to interaction between government and corporate interests, almost everyone has moved away from the CRT to a more efficient and safe LCD. Does the CRT really cause damage? Who knows, but because all this was done under the table we are saved from the hooligans of conservatism and libertarians shouting from the rooftops that the LCD is a communist plot and anyone who wants an LCD hates America, or whatever.
I congratulate you to a well written troll post. However, there are some nutcases that really believe a CRT TV put out harmful radiation, you might want to make sure you don't get confused with them in any way.
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/latest-questions/question/2417/ [thenakedscientists.com]
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The reference was "Andy Karam, adjunct professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology."
(I challenge the OP, if that's not you, to supply one single scientific reference to "a great deal of radiation" where radiation would be of the harmful non visible light kind)
Also, since I'm Swedish, I think you might be confusing the private organisation TCO (which is a workers union) with our government. See http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCO-m%C3%A4rkning [wikipedia.org]
The non-disease "monitor-sickness" was one of the motivations
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Your LCD argument is just silly. People buy LCD TVs because they are lighter, they take up less space, and can provide a large high definition picture. Safety is irrelevant because CRTs were never found to be unsafe when properly produced and shielded. LCDs are not a gift from government, nor was government a major part of the reason we all switched to LCDs.
The rest of your post may or may not be correct. We certainly need to be able to compromise between zero government and totalitarianism. It would b
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People buy LCD TVs because they are lighter, they take up less space, and can provide a large high definition picture.
LOL they only buy them to show off how much money they have, or how trendy in general. Also high def TVs were CRT in the old days when HD was new.
Ask your average goofball how much more money they'd pay, or how excited they'd be for a 10% lighter TV and they'd be all WTF who cares. On the other hand, if you offered them a free $5000 TV solely so they could brag to their future dating partner / neighbor / the guys at work how they have a $5000 TV and they'll faint with excitement.
As my CRTs have died I hav
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I don't know how you could argue that LCDs are only popular because they are "trendy".
If people wanted to simply be conspicuous consumers, all they needed to do was buy gold plated toilets. You have an LCD TV because it grants you an advantage. It may well not be economical to own a 50" TV, but if you were going to buy a 50" TV, it is probably one of the most economical ways to go about it. I think you are confusing the trend to buy 50" TVs with the development of the LCD. Buying a TV that big may well b
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If people wanted to simply be conspicuous consumers, all they needed to do was buy gold plated toilets.
LOL that doesn't even make sense. I know this is slashdot, but which line is more likely to work:
"Hey baby lets go back to my place and watch a movie on my new $3000 TV"
or
"Hey baby lets go back to my place and you can take a dump in my gold plated toilet"
On /. I suppose a pickup line would be more like "I just got a new $600 graphics card, wanna play Dayz on it?" Or whatever. It has a much better chance of working than a gold plated crapper anyway.
Also, toward the peak of the recent ongoing housing bubbl
Can't wait for January 1, 2013. (Score:2)
Or, y'know, maybe applying human-generated myths to actual, present-day scientific observations isn't needed, as humans are so completely inconsequential it's laughable.
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Hmm, if the pseudo-neo-Mayans aren't convinced after seeing the sun rise on December 22nd, 2012, I don't think that January 1st, 2013 is going to convince them either.
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Some of the myths are laughable, of course, but some of them are stories to explain actual astronomical events that we did not have science to explain. Humans are far from inconsequential, very simply because we're the only observers that we are aware of. That doesn't mean that everything we believe is the same as the way it is, but we perceive reality, even if we don't know what it means most of the time.
We really need to get away from this idea that it is somehow virtuous or accurate that humans are inc
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Lot's of Niburu debunking here: http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/2012-and-counting/ [skeptic.com]
niburu is nonsense verifiably false (Score:2)
we amateur astromomers would notice an extra earth-sized planet in the solar system, trust me. it would perturb inner planet orbits. there is no such thing.
As for Apophis, the pass of 9 January 2013 will tell us if future passes pose danger to earth, already the probability of the 2029 pass going through an imaginary "keyhole" area in space to ensure a 2036 collision is very, very small.
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I assure you, no one has left Langley. Unless, of course, they're just hiring hundreds of people people to drive cars into the CIA HQ every day at rush hour.
Same goes for NSA, although I have heard that Ft. Meade does have power issues which might well necessitate a move or the creation of a new annex for their stuff. More likely a new annex.
And please... enough with the psychics. They're all bullshit. Every one of them. Tested... failed. The real "secret societies" and stuff like that seems to be the
True, but obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
It's true, of course, that there are many more apparent imminent catastrophes (AICs) than actual catastrophes, especially as we are still here to argue about it.
Some AICs arise from incomplete understanding, some from politically motivated woolly thinking and will go away if ignored. Some are real risks and we just get lucky. Others are partially mitigated by actions taken in response to the apparent threat (Y2K for instance). Some may be fully genuine threats averted by prompt action. Nuclear war between NATO and Warsaw pact in the 60s or 70s might be argued to fall into this category. CND and others successfully undermined the notion of "winnable nuclear war" and made sure that no Western politicians would risk nuclear war.
However, NONE OF THIS MEANS THAT THE NEXT ONE WILL NOT BE REAL. Probably it won't, but we can't just assume it isn't a real threat because the last one wasn't. We have to study each plausible threat, do our best to estimate the risk and where the risk appears significant, do what we can to mitigate it. The universe does not owe us continued existence, let alone continued civilization.
Proximate threats to human civilization are: (Score:2)
1) Monetary collapse
2) Energy return from hydrocarbons dropping so close to 1:1 that they are no longer a viable energy source (*Not* the strawman "peak oil" arguments).
3) Nuclear war
4) Any disaster which stops nuclear plant maintenance on a large scale (See reasons above).
Strictly speaking, 1 and 2 are "just" the collapse of the interdependent web of "just-in-time" supply chains, however, once gone, they may not be repairable in the lifetime of any living human. 3 is supply chain collapse plus infrastructu
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Nonsense. The greatest threat to humanity is itself. Only need one fruitcake in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and even what little good is done these days quickly becomes undone.
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That's an interesting point that I've thought about a few times - as civilization becomes more technical and more intertwined, the value of what surrounds each of us, and the potential cost of a mistake or a purposeful act, becomes greater and greater. In the extreme you have a pilot flying a $1.5 billion airplane, or the captain of a ship that could cause similar levels of cost due to a collision. But even on the highway, a serious auto accident is likely to cost more than the combined annual incomes of t
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"Is personal liberty the inevitable victim of advanced civilization?"
I kind of think so, yes. Not to the degree it's being victimized right now (drug war), though.
Obligatory XKCD (Score:2)
Psychological projection (Score:2)
Simple (Score:2)
Use technology to trigger your own apocalypse. The odds of two apocalypses striking this planet are vanishingly small.
Avert the Apocalypse? (Score:2)
But I get to be the second horseman, you insensitive clod!
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Asteroid can be ruled out. There's nothing sufficiently large to destroy civilization and also on a near collision path.
Re:Nature (Score:4, Interesting)
FTFY: There's nothing sufficiently large to destroy civilization and also on a near collision path; that we know about.
Assuming things, can get you killed, that's why we generalize. Obligatory car analogy. If I cross the street at a crosswalk (zebra crossing for almost everyone else outside of North America), I might assume that all drivers will stop to let me cross since it is the law. Always making that assumption will get definitely get me killed or seriously injured someday (hell, when I was young I was almost killed by a police car on an emergency run, lights no siren, while legally crossing the street one time... to be fair a bus on the outside lane blocked both our views, but thank goodness he was paying better attention than me... it's what made me not trust blind faith in traffic lights and crosswalk laws when crossing the street any more). Thinking we will always have sufficient advance knowledge of an extinction event asteroid will eventually kill us all. Precedent has already been set, not only in actual extinctions, but the fact that those size asteroids hit all planets now and then, including earth. I'm not paranoid about it. But I would be if I thought everyone thought like you. While it's not a big possibility in my life, it has a high impact if, well, it impacts. But on the upside, if it does happen, the outcome won't matter to humans after that.
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Unless the asteroid large enough to destroy civlization is magically invisible, it's not out there, or not close enough to pose a threat until so long after we've identified it that we'll be able to do something about it.
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s/Asteroid/Comet/ A large comet could come out of the Oort cloud headed for Earth and give us less than a year of warning. It's not likely we'd be able to handle it with our present space technology.
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No, they don't move that fast.
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That being said, I leave you with a paraphrased quote I remember from someplace: The universe is a strange place. Probably even more strange than you could possibly imagine. Anything is possible. There are no limits.
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I hope it all works out but right now I see much of science and technology as dooming mankind more than helping. We are gambling that there is a point where science and technology suddenly shine with a bounty for all of humanity.
It's possible, although historically technology has definitely improved our lives and saved our butts. Sanitation engineering, just for starters.
As I see it, science and technology are potentially what will change us from a single 'plant' (ecosystem) on a single planet to a spacefaring race, putting seeds of life throughout the solar system and eventually the galaxy. To me this is 'black sky' - beyond blue sky, but the opportunity is there, and unlimited. And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Just
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I checked your papers, and it appears they started from the conclusion and rationalized their way back to the data.