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Wombaticus Rex wrote:We non-extinctable.
JackRiddler wrote:Maddy wrote:Considering the possibility that human beings have been around for 200,000 years or more, I'm not overly concerned that the earth is going to just die off. Civilizations have come and gone - perhaps this is simply the end of another era. Perhaps its simply the end of an era that should have ended before it became so toxic. I am relatively certain the earth is going to heal herself when we're gone. And its not going to take the earth to "shake us off", we're doing a grand job of destroying this civilization without her help.
Let’s define it, though. Barring a very large collision, Earth the planet is almost certainly not going to cease to exist for billions of years. Earth even has a chance to survive the expansion of Sol prior to its depletion in four or five billion years. In that case it will remain in orbit around the brown dwarf for many more billions of years, again barring any other significant astronomical events in the vicinity.
The biosphere - let’s call it Gaia - has seen at least six major species die-offs since the Cambrian explosion (arrival of first multicellular organisms) 600 million years ago, and after each it has returned again to a higher level of biodiversity. Humans are very unlikely to kill it, even if (to take a purely theoretical extreme) we pledge ourselves to Sauron and consciously deploy all our weapons and resources for the express purpose of wiping everything out. All kinds of stuff will live, including bacteria, fungi, protista and very likely many kinds of plants, insects and possibly even vertebrates. They will adapt to new circumstances and within a mere 100 million years evolution is likely to be producing big dumb lumbering animals again, like ourselves.
Obviously we won’t all agree to act as one in actively trying to exterminate ourselves down to the very last person killed. So humans as a species are pretty much a lock to survive the worst ecological disasters for many thousands of years yet. That would probably include even a nuclear war, hydrocarbon depletion, mega-plagues, a new ice age or a rise in average temperatures by 20 degrees, black clouds blocking out the sun, the collapse of the present civilization and a substantial rollback of technology. Even then, millions of people very likely will still find ways to survive in select habitats. Shakespeare, Homer, and Mickey Mouse will also survive. People will weather a series of catastrophic centuries, adapt, set themselves up under domes, engineer themselves to eat and breathe crap, and hate all of their ancestors with an abiding passion.
Not that it's altogether guaranteed. During the 200,000 years you speak of, according to present knowledge of population history, the total population of humans in the first 100,000 years grew to higher than 10,000 people, but then declined to just about that around 100,000 years ago. At that time, the right plague or a minor astronomical event could have put an end to us.
It took another 90,000 years to get to six million people, 10,000 years ago.
Going by rule of thumb measures, that’s 95 percent or more of all human history to get to one one-thousandth of the present human population, and at that point gathering and hunting was already getting difficult by the means and in the habitats available at the time. Over the next few millennia, independently of each other, people on several continents started settling and figuring out agriculture. That was the first big explosion, and it took almost all of the remaining 10,000 years to reach a population of about half a billion, 500 years ago.
After more growth, interrupted briefly by the black plague, we reached a billion people 200 years ago, at the dawn of the industrial and hydrocarbon age. In 1950, we were still at just over two billion people! (Imagine it: We're talking already after World War II!)
Population has tripled in sixty years, whereas 800 years ago the growth rate was such that it would still take 300 years to double. (10,000 years ago the implied doubling time was about 5,500 years. I’m getting these figures from David Christian, Maps of Time, Table 6.2, p. 143.)
We constantly and collectively mislead ourselves and deny reality by calling the present dilemma of the human species an environmental or ecological crisis. It’s not. The environment is indifferent to us. An environment will continue to exist no matter what happens.
The crisis is only that of our collective (by the decisions and actions of some more than others) destruction of the biospheric basis for sustaining our civilization in its present form and our species at the present numbers - and also of Gaia’s ability to support most other higher life forms (the latter probably only for the short term of mere millions of years).
Nevertheless Earth and Gaia will survive, and you may think that (as I also do in some of my more philosophical moods) it’s no big deal, in the big picture, that billions of us will prematurely die as our population crashes, and also no big deal that most species in the vertebrate and arboreal classes will be wiped out, if our civilization continues consuming everything in the way we do, until it collapses. This still won’t mean our extinction… so okayfine?
1.4 million views for an old codger giving a lecture about arithmetic? What's going on? You'll just have to watch to see what's so damn amazing about what he (Albert Bartlett) has to say.
I introduce this video to my students as "Perhaps the most boring video you'll ever see, and definitely the most important." But then again, after watching it most said that if you followed along with what the presenter (a professor emeritus of Physics at Univ of Colorado-Boulder) is saying, it's quite easy to pay attention, because it is so damn compelling.
U.S. Resources
The United States has enormous coal "resources" and "recoverable reserves." { Map Terms Defined } The most reliable information about coal is published by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The most recent figures available from the EIA, show that America's estimated recoverable reserves of coal --
Stand at 275 billion tons, an amount that is greater than any other nation in the world.
Are capable of meeting domestic demand for more than 250 years at current rates of consumption.
U.S. Demand
America's coal is used primarily for the production of electricity. According to the EIA, in 2001 --
There were 315,000 Megawatts (net) of coal-based electrical generating capacity in the United States.
This represented approximately 37% of the total installed capacity.
However, coal plants accounted for 52% of the electricity generated since these facilities and nuclear plants are normally operated as "baseload" generators (the generating equipment normally operates on an around-the-clock basis).
Some 965 million tons of coal were consumed for the generation of electricity. This amounted to 86% of total U.S. coal production.
The EIA also makes energy production and consumption estimates for future years. Under these projections, domestic coal consumption is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 1.1% - 1.5% through 2025.
the more peaceful alternative will only be realised if the international community can accept that nation states are no longer strong enough to deal with the world's problems and construct an effective system of global governance instead.
Cosmic Cowbell wrote:...
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