"Collapse will not be televised... you will only know that it has happened to you."

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2007/Collapse-Discontents-Orlov1feb07.htm

by asciilifeform • 17 years ago

15 20 17 years ago

> An additional complication is that we cannot make such a huge reduction because the current human population of the Earth far exceeds its carrying capacity: a lot of people would have to die.

This is a persistent myth that really needs to die. Right now, per capita world food production is roughly 3000 calories/day/person. This means that with present food production, even assuming we never get another ounce of efficiency, we could feed a world population up to 9-10 billion. At present growth trends, demographers expect world population to top out at about 10-12 billion and then start declining just because of lower birthrates in industrialized countries. We only need a slight increase to support that, and we're home free.

So why are there starving children in Africa? It's almost always because of distribution problems throughout war-torn regions with poor infrastructure. In the south of a country, they'll be famine and war, while in the north food rots in the fields.

The impediments to good nutrition for all are all social, not scientific. If we weren't such assholes, nobody would be dying of hunger.

jibiki2• 17 years ago

The doomer theory is that modern agriculture is merely an inefficient means of turning oil into food. I don't know how much credence to give this; I'm not an expert.

raintrees• 17 years ago

An interesting read on some of this would be The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I have yet to finish it, but I learned a tremendous amount about corn and petroleum just from the first seven chapters.

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

That part's real: modern agriculture requires fairly large fossil-fuel inputs in the form of fertilizer to yield anything. "Inefficient" is relative, of course: photosynthesis itself is only 3% efficient, so any biological process is already wasting massive amounts of energy.

However, the amount of oil used for fertilizer is a drop in the bucket compared to that used for transportation. So if we reach (or have reached) peak oil and the price of oil starts jumping, we'd feel it in our gas bill a lot sooner than we'd feel it in our food bill. And that'd spur people to get fuel efficient cars: if everyone switched from an SUV to a Prius or Fit, the amount of oil saved is several times the amount used in agriculture.

It's still nowhere near as wasteful as turning half of U.S. cropland into corn plantations to grow ethanol. You want an inefficient means of turning food into oil, try ethanol subsidies.

s_baar• 17 years ago

As food gets more expensive, people will have less children. Birth rates are below replacement rates in a lot of countries that keep their population growing mostly by immigration. Or am I missing something?

anamax2• 17 years ago

> As food gets more expensive, people will have less children.

Food has to get really expensive before birth rates decline. Survival rates get hit first by lack of food.

> Birth rates are below replacement rates in a lot of countries that keep their population growing mostly by immigration.

The countries that have low birth rates are rich, not poor. To be crude, TV is one of the most effective better birth control devices. (The poor countries with low/shrinking population have man-made disasters.)

ced• 17 years ago

The decreased birth rate we're experiencing is quite an amazing biological anomaly. People who have many children (say 5) will reproduce much faster than people who don't (1 child). 5^n faster, where n is is the number of generations that has passed. This is a huge evolutionary pressure. If "having many children" has any genetic basis at all, the phenomenom of small families is likely to die out in the short term... at the evolutionary time scale, anyway. Centuries, maybe.

The cause of reduced birth rates is the availability of contraception, of course. It used to be that even if a man didn't like to have children, he couldn't help it as long as he wanted to have sex. Now that this is no longer true, it's quite likely that the average man will be increasingly fond of children, or increasingly averse to contraception. Evolution, much like progress, won't be stopped.

palish3• 17 years ago

Why? There is nothing to suggest people will become increasingly adverse to contraception; they already are. And you can't evolve out (or legislate away) abortion. I don't understand your points.

asciilifeform3• 17 years ago

Human evolution is over. I predict that in less than a century, having genetically unedited children will be viewed as an act near in its savageness to cannibalism or at the very least public defecation. At any rate, the necessary technology will appear long before the glacially slow natural evolution has a chance to substantially change us. Assuming the familiar nuclear/bioengineered plaugue apocalypse doesn't get us first.

aoeu• 17 years ago

As others have stated the status quo requires us to maintain current oil production not only to power farm machinery but also for fertiliser production, packaging etc and food transportation. We here in England are now net importers of oil, gas, coal, food and we have an ever increasing trade deficit. Hardly reassuring. Oh and oil production is set to continue declining..

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5177

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5241

palish3• 17 years ago

Ouch. I believe you misunderstood him (and took a quote out of context). He's saying if we all reduce our resource consumption, then everything would be fine, but such a reduction is not possible because then* we wouldn't be able to support everyone, which is true. He's not saying we can't support everyone now. He's talking about a hypothetical situation.

As for the article, I find it distasteful. Generalized, sweeping statements without hard evidence to back most of them. And here we are two years later (which is mighty close to a "few years" later, which he referred to in the article) and none of the predictions are even close to becoming huge problems. (The current economic problems are not related to his predictions.)

asciilifeform3• 17 years ago

>The current economic problems are not related to his predictions.

Why are you so sure of that?

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-p...

gaius• 17 years ago

So why are there starving children in Africa? It's almost always because of distribution problems throughout war-torn regions with poor infrastructure.

Not even problems, those could easily be fixed. We in the West know a lot about logistics. The underlying cause is that people like Mugabe find it politically useful that their opponents starve. The "fix" for that is regime change, something we used to be able to do (Germany, Japan) but those skills are long since lost.

asciilifeform3• 17 years ago

>Right now, per capita world food production is roughly 3000 calories/day/person.

This is because petrochemical fertilizers, tractors powered by internal combustion, etc. are still going strong.

palish3• 17 years ago

Since when is it good form to use a quote as the title? The article is entitled "Collapse and its Discontents".

varjag• 17 years ago

OK, I used to refrain from commenting on that guy on few occasions, but allow me to chime in now.

He is not a "USSR survivor", he moved to the States in the age of 12 in 1980s, before shit really hit the fan. Wikipedia says he's been "on extended trips to Russia" in early 1990's. I reckon this sort of safari in late teen age is all of his acutal post-USSR experience and is the basis for all of his reasoning.

To many of his audience, his prose and predictions come off as something cool, sort of like Fallout, Escape from New York or a Gibson novel come live. Well, as someone who actually lived there at the time, I can assure you it wasn't nearly as cool or exciting. You couldn't "hire a couple of soldiers with AKs to follow you around", there were no barrels burning as improptu street lights, and one couldn't get a slice of Pu239 at a grocery market. There was, on the other hand, massive amount of financial and humanitarian aid coming from the USA and Western Europe, and a huge improvement in standards of living (it was that low to begin with).

I would say his factual parts are not entirely factual, he wasn't enough of insider to convey how it was for insider there, his vision is skewed and he has a fair anti-US bias. When I read him I visualize that excited, giggly expat teenager on a trip to former homeland, that's who he still is.

viggity• 17 years ago

Really? Damn, I was looking forward to meeting Snake Plissken

dhimes• 17 years ago

meh From the title I was hoping this was a doomsday prediction about the LHC finding a new untra-stable form of matter or perhaps causing the universe to decay to a lower energy state :)

Of course, I doubt we would even have time to know it was happening to us in that case.

"Collapse will not be televised... you will only know that it has happened to you."

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