Will we still be alive in 50 years?

General Discussion
141

Humanity didn’t create everything that can or is going to go wrong. Furthermore, nature won’t fix some of the mistakes we have made. But we can.

A.) Embrace permaculture, life expectancy on average drops about 30-40 years, more people fight and die over petty shit because the Earth is not infinite + many regions on Earth are not inhabitable by humans, die out entirely when nature creates a super virus / super volcano erupts / megatsunami hits / key species in food chain goes extinct / whatever the fuck you can think of really.

B.) Ask yourself how nobody but you and a select few have realized the solution to all of our problems is to disregard the near exponential growth of technology in the past 200 years, which may as well amount to magic instead of numerous miracles, instead of hopefully reaching the limits of our imagination. Plant trees and shit in your yard while praying to mother nature that locusts don’t ruin your life and that a drought doesn’t occur. Oh and kill about 6 billion people over the next few years because there isn’t enough room for them.

C.) Continue to advance technology while attempting to repair mistakes done to Earth, try to work towards the elimination and strict regulation of WMDs/biological warfare, step up the space programs in various nations, and eventually expand into terraforming other planets and (hopefully) discovering ways to create renewable energy, cloning technologies, and all that other cool stuff.

Choose wisely. We’re fucked in all scenarios eventually, but I heard team C recently put some fancy robot on Mars.

*A and B also require you to master magic because nature randomly destroys forests, gardens, and what not in some environments while being generally difficult to sustain in others during certain periods.

Doesn’t even need his hands on the controller

I like the license idea as well. In fact, I would say it’s okay for you to have as many kids as you want…as long as you prove you can afford and care for them.

142

[SIZE=4]"Will we still be alive in 50 years?"[/SIZE]

I’m a Highlander. So I know I’ll be here.

143

I don’t really worry about whether or not we’ll die soon. I’m more worried about what comes next.

144

The way I look at it is we all know we’ve got finite resources. We all know there’s a shit ton of people that are too easy to piss off and that will kill one another for stupid reasons. We’re at the point where, after hundreds (and now thousands) of years of man running around, using up all of the resources and killing each other in numbers that rival the birth rates, that we all know we’re all going to be wiped sooner or later. Hell, we’ve all observed many other species of animals get wiped and we’ve seen whole planets get wiped. That means we know we’re 100% guaranteed to be wiped sooner or later we just don’t know when. So, it’s easy to fear-monger and accept that with each day/year that we live through, we’re one day/year closer to the end.

Even though we all know the mayan calendar theory is bull-shit, we’re all aware that it could in some small chance, be correct and the end could be within a few months. Even if the end is really just a stupid WW3/martial-law-big-brother thing we all know that mankind has matured enough where we’re going to kill ourselves sooner or later. Just like everything else.

Hell, we’re afraid of birthing too many people and we all just consume the resources and die of starvation. To rephrase for emphasis: we’re afraid to reproduce because that might kill us. We’re wary of everything we do because it will potentially kill us. I think the source of the issue is we’re afraid of dying because we all know that shit’s inevitable.

145

Sometimes I wish I had an indication on whether people read my posts at all.

The post itself is pretty spot-on, but the video a bit problematic. Rifkin starts out brilliantly and indentifies nearly all of the core problems correctly (though he misses a key one in the destructive nature of agriculture itself). His solutions are where he starts to falter. The observations on industrial revolutions and communications coinciding with and each other are interesting, but the solution he derives from that is at best very optimistic.

Firstly, he ignores the concentrated nature of the Internet’s infrastructure - it’s not just zipping IMs here and there, there’s backbone cables and servers to worry about, the humongous datacenters companies like Amazon and Google are operating that consume atrocious amounts of electricity and the like. The end result is, to us, a feeling of distribution but the reality is anything but. The second issue with his proposed solution are the energy collection devices all over the place everywhere.

For solar panels, this is problematic because photovoltaic panels require rare earths that as of now come from that single mine in China and are operated, unsurprisingly, on oil. Solar thermal solutions can work admittedly, but they don’t really work that well during winter from what I’ve understood, and in northern climes require specialized transfer fluids because water would freeze and ruin the apparatus.
And building updrafts? Is he kidding? The point I am trying to get at here is that there just really isn’t going to be enough stuff for that to work. And that is before we even get to high-tech hydrogen fuel cells and the whole of Europe being equipped with a smart grid, if that is even enough. And the smart grid again requires massive manufacturing, which doesn’t sound especially distributed to me.

The communication could I think be done via long distance wireless and satellites, but the amount of communication required would necessitate a shitton of new infrastructure. Not very likely to happen.

PS. I think I’m becoming allergic to Keynesianism. Hearing Rifkin mention “jumpstarting the economy” almost gave me a rash. “The economy” relies on growth to exist. That growth can only be gotten from one place for any sane length of time: Space. And last I checked I didn’t hear Rifkin incorporate space in his plans. He’s also inaccurate with his Linux vs. Windows and filesharing/blogs vs. media biz comparisons, but that’s neither here nor there.

146

Examples please, or actual arguments to the contrary instead of just more “lolnope”? Where exactly is he wrong?

I’ve never claimed permaculture is some magical miracle cure that is the best thing since sliced bread: It is simply a way to survive with a level of technological progress we can surely achieve, and can be implemented individually. That is it. A way to survive what I see as inevitable disaster while living a reasonably humane life. The life expectancy will inevitably drop, which is one thing that would likely happen anyway - our current level of health is one of those credit cards that can’t really be paid back and is bound to regress (perhaps not as radically though) anyway due to gross over- and misuse of all manner of medication.

Have you read/watched what I posted earlier at all? Yes, technology has progressed at a great rate thus far, but signs point to that progress slowing down more and more and being ever more dependant on high level complex infrastructure to be feasible. High level complex infrastructure requires lots of energy to maintain, and net energy is the one thing we don’t realistically have a lot of in the future.

Though really, it feels from reading your posts that you haven’t read mine, and decided something along the lines of “hippie treehugger, arguments therefore invalid and not worth bothering with”, a perception strengthened by one-liner responses to long, good posts by me and by Bob Sagat. which makes responding feel like a bit of a drag.

147

MacLeod was an Immortal who happened to be a Highlander.

Both of them.

REAL Highlanders these days won’t be here in 10 years, let alone 50 years.

Because deep fried every-fucking-thing.

Sent from my thumbs, using SRK technology.

148

Funny how many of the worlds problems can be easily remedied, yet the biggest issue isn’t resources or money, its us. How sad.

149

Us not having food in the near future called. They told that we were damn huge geniuses thinking “Hm, let’s put this insect-affecting neurotoxin on our food when it’s growing. In doses that won’t outright kill the pollinators, mind you. That’s perfectly okay isn’t it? I mean poison never harms unless it kills, right?”

150

I am challenging the most of your argument.

First of all, we are no different from beasts. I agree there no matter what. We prey on each other and yet we feel the need to help each other, it’s, complicated.

First sentence:
First, poverty rate increasing, cancer rate increasing, stagnation of culture, what are your sources for this? I’ll address why we’re less poor in the response to the second sentence. Cancer rate increasing, I’ve never heard of any stats other than we’re getting better at diagnosing it; but I do know when compared with 500 years ago, people are living longer. Stagnation of culture is subjective and best left to social scientists. I’d say in America we’re still changing and growing, painfully, IMO.
The two I can agree on, overpopulation is a natural result of how humans work, we expand just beyond our resources so we search out and find more resources; I also agree we are overexposed to products and services, but I’m not so sure that is necessarily capitalistic.

Second sentence:
All of these are in the context of, 'a faint notion of what we were.'
We were ignorant, hunter gathers, barely capable of agriculture only 10,000 years ago. On a scale of one day, we’ve barely done anything in the last second of the last minute of the last hour. Presently, we have world wide communication and are the dominate force on Earth. We may have the capability of stopping an asteroid that threatens our planent. I think we’ve grown so far, we would barely be able to relate to a human from ten thousand years ago, except maybe at meal time and sex time.

We are over-medicated, when compared to before, but more people are living longer than before. Many times medication is a band aid for an underlying problem. As discussed previously in this thread, solving the genetic problem before/at birth may be the way to go, but it’s VERY complicated and ‘solving’ something may reduce our capabilities unintentionally.

Under-nourished is the truth, perhaps in many different ways. Many people are relying on things such as McDonalds or have populations which have grown beyond their local bounds and are extremely reliant on foreign food sources. Compared to how we existed before, we have more stability in food sources, but we’re worse off in sustainability and are relying too much on easy access.

Under-educated. I cannot agree more. I always want more education. Better education can help promote birth control, sustainability, and many more things than I can list. Ignorance is sad, especially when a quick google search can start one on the path to truth. Compared to how we once were, the general populace is far more educated.

Over stimulated, certainly. People rely too much on being owed things, such as entertainment, money, etc. I agree. Not enough hard work compared to how we once were.

Sorry, I could stay up for another hour replying to this, but I should go to bed.

151

yea you know me!

152

Kind of feel sorry for the guys who refuse to have children due to their intelligent insight on the lack of productivity their genes will have on the world. It exposes the dearth of intelectual realisation regarding the importance understanding the unity between nurture and nature

The worlds problems stem from so called intellectuals you are too busy focusing on their hunger manifestations instead of using energy on the study of the many realms of reality

153

sorry, bro. that will never happen without conflict.

with me.

and my Tig3rb0ts.

don’t do it.

instead, find a way to blow up orphanages without getting caught

so you can blow up more orphanages.

154

I think in 50 years time, China will be in control big time, and that’s why I’m teaching myself Mandarin. Although, in 2060, I’d be far too old to work for rice in the silicon mines.

155

Interesting. An Indian friend of mine told me about this 16th century prophet in his home country who has foretold many things.
http://www.kalagnani.com/

http://panchamahakalagnanamulu.org/Sri%20Potuluri%20Veera%20Brahmendra%20Swami%20Kalagnanam.html

156

It’s going to be war, son.

America is just an obnoxious loudmouth that throws itself around with reckless abandon. China, Korea and Russia don’t like that shit. You’re going to piss them off big time one day and get your ass handed to you*, *then Britain and the rest of Europe will be forced to participate in this war and shit will hit the fan on a global scale. America will launch it’s missiles, Britain will use Trident and everyone will just press that big red button and the last man standing wins.

It’s always China. You can’t beat this country, son. They’ve been on top for centuries and who the fuck can move them? It would take a global effort to destabilise those fuckers never mind defeat them in a war. They have Kim Jong un and his little pile of Nukes at their back, too. Fuck man. china is that dude that hits on your girl in the bar leaving you to watch because you’re too scared to do anything.

TL;DR - America will end up killing us all.

157

I think OP has GAD. (Generalized Anxiety Disorder)

Yes of course we, the human race, will still be alive in 50 years. WTF. -_-

In 50 years I’ll be 85. That should be sweet. I wonder how many bionic limbs/organs I’ll have?

~K.

158

America or China. And it goes beyond annoyance. NEITHER OF THEM HAVE ANY WATER LEFT.

159

That people dismiss radically different ideas is old news, but a book I read recently sheds light on the why. It posits that all cultures are enacting a kind of story about their origins, purposen and destiny in the world. The story the book dubs as the "Takers’ " (from take it or leave it) one is curious in that it considers it’s way the only right way and tries to make others live according to it, and most interestingly considers everything else unacceptable. We are literally destroying the world, yet this is clearly the only correct way forward because any other is unacceptable.
(That is to say, not only is the change proposed pretty massive in and of itself, the general attitude of our culture makes things even harder)

The book also brings forth another interesting concept: That of ambient culture. It’s how people just construct their culture’s story from bits and pieces here and there, so you never really realize you’re being indoctrinated in a manner of speaking. So you subconsciously hold all these assumptions you didn’t even know you had. The book combats this by stopping every once in a while to deliberately think what “Mother Culture” would tell us, so we can separate the ambient opinions of our society from what we think. It’s a hard thing to break out of without being aware of it first.

Expanding a lot when you have a ton of food is a basic function of any colony of living organisms. We’ve stretched those limits by quite a lot with oil, but it’s basically credit card time. We’re living on borrowed energy, and will sooner or later have to drop back to our actual energy income - the solar budget. That will be nasty, probably.

Incidentally, ten thousand years ago we also started the systematic destruction of the planet by our culture starting to spread agriculture and expand expand expand. As Toby Hemenway put it in one of the lectures I linked to in Page 2, “agriculture turns ecosystems into people”. And then we need more food for more people, which means more land. Agriculture is fortunately very conquest-friendly, unlike hunting and gathering or horticulture/gardening. They typically sustain smaller, healthier populations that are more rooted to one area and have more free time.

As for medication, it’s again one of the credit cards - medication is misused so much it loses it’s effectiveness relatively quickly, and that lost ability to fight back against diseases can’t really be paid back unlike credit card debt. I’d distinguish between reachable life span and average life span, by the way - in the old days people tended to die younger on average, but it was very possible to live to be an old geezer.

Stability in food in a very short term, perhaps. But there’s 7 billion of us, more coming, and agriculture - especially our variant with petrochemicals, irrigation and heavy machinery - does one thing very well. It turns arable land into desert. See the once-fertile crescent. See Greece (which was lush and green two thousand years ago). See the American dustbowl. See India.
Moreover, the monocultures used in today’s industrial agriculture are quite prone to pest and plague, quite a bit more so than actul diverse ecosystems. Healthy land also helps to combat drought - it retains and absorbs moisture better than tractor-compacted land that is barely alive.

Whether education is good or bad depends a lot on what it teaches and how it is taught. To compare our current education system to a factory doesn’t miss the mark much. Some remnant of the industrial era. Nevermind the curriculum…

160

Where is the challenge? i see that you agree with most of my stuff bruv. and these are my opinions/feelings there are no facts, just observations.