Caius
Posts: 175
Joined: 2/2/2005
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Wow, quite a lot of ignorance of the basic facts of the subject you've chosen to speak to there Vaughner. If I had any significant degree of common sense I'd just second Dubbelganger's blanket 'horseshit' response, but here goes anyway...
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ORIGINAL: Vaughner
The overwhelming majority of methods to produce electricity come down to one very simple concept....boil large quantities of water to create steam that spins a turbine. Coal, Oil, even Nuclear all function on this premise. So long as we have a means to generate heat, we can generate electricity.
Ok, generally correct so far, though oil (or more specifically, it's more refined end-products) is not typically used in this fashion. Petroleum is a major contributor to the energy infrastructure of the industrial world, but more for the central role it plays as fuel, be it in the form of gasoline, jet fuel, bunker fuel, ethane, ect. Also, of course, it is an essential component of many manufacturign industries and agro-tech.
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ORIGINAL: Vaughner
I get so goddamn tired of hearing all these theories about how the planet is over-populated, and how it can't sustain any more people. Farmers right here in the US, the world's leading producer of food, are regularly paid NOT to produce food. Meanwhile enormous tracts of land in the US, Russia, India, Africa, Australia, are completely uninhabited due primarily to lack of drive to make them habitable. Even the great deserts can be made habitable, man has been doing it for thousands of years.
First off, it's not a theory that there are implications of increased populations and that any system predicated on finite resources must operate in certain constraints. Rather in this context it's called crunching the numbers -- or more frequently 'duh' since even those who are uneducated in the relevant fields can see the potential for problems -- and with regard to the viability of human population sizes and densities is hardly based on the ability to produce sufficient food alone. What makes this non-sequitor of yours all the more confusing is that the very subject of this thread is another such factor and one you were referencing yourself in the previous paragraph. How does the viable amount of farming space and production capability correlate in your mind so directly with a clearly finite resource like petroleum?
So yes, while current food production is sufficient to meet the demands of the world's population -- the sad truth of the matter is that the near 1/6 of our starving global population lives with privation not because there is not enough food but rather as a result of the economic models upon which that surplus is formed -- this is hardly relevant to the current discussion. Except actually to say that once peak oil has passed our ability to generate food so efficiently will drastically plummet and thus becomes one of any number of factors as to why food production is not a guarantee moving into the future either. Though somehow I doubt that is what you were getting at, since it runs contrary to your argument, such as it is.
I don't even know where to start with your assertion that only a lack of will keeps certain regions from being more populously inhabited. It almost seems as if you picked the countries you references because they were amongst the biggest you could think of. Compared to much of the modern world India actually does not have that much unused land, relative to its enormous population. Significant portions of Russia's unused land are tundra, permafrost, or otherwise untenable arctic landscapes. The interior of Australia is largely a forbidding badlands environment, arid beyond description and possessing other geological and practical properties that make it one of the worst potential areas for habitation in the world. And contrary to what you claim, mankind has not been reclaiming deserts left and right throughout it's histories. The ability to establish populations of any significance in a desert is dependent upon the ability to divert sufficient water there, a practical impossibility in the context of most of the world's deserts. Consider that the Sahara is is roughly the same size as the continental U.S. and then consider what happens when populations of a region the size of the Gaza strip come into conflict over water. In fact, far from our finding was to sufficiently render deserts into lush gardens, our history as a species has shown a tendencies to effect exactly the opposite change -- and not just with the new intense demands for resources of the modern world consider how even technologically primitive peoples like the Anasazi (amongst many other examples) were also able to generate desert out of forested regions like those that once covered parts of the Four Corners region. Even your citation of Africa (By which I assume you meant especially Sub-Saharan Africa) is ridiculous, since it's a region already rife with overpopulation and it hardly has potential as a breadbasket; ideal agricultural zones posses what are called Mediterranean climates, but that's a whole post of its own.
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ORIGINAL: Vaughner
In many countries where the population outstrips the means, it is not for lack of resources, but for the presence of those who horde them from the masses. When a population truly outstrips its local capacity, the end result is inevitably immigration and/or war.
Or pervasive famine, extensive environmental degradation, regional destabilization, economic woes for those who have interdependent trade with them. But isn't the existence of these consequences just more argument for why we should be concerned about overpopulation before the fact, rather than after? I understand that this all flows into your "balancing of the scales" philosophy but that line of thinking, aside from being callous to the issue of human suffering, is highly flawed in practical respects as well. It's an oversimplified concept that those who are uneducated in such issues like to try to apply to any complex process, be it natural or human in nature -- this idea that everything will balance itself out. The problem is, it's not predicated in any kind of empirical fact. Yes, of course eventually if enough people die the demands for resources will be lessened, but in the interregnum there may be consequences that A) degenerate the ability to reproduce those resources on a time-scale that goes well beyond the lives of any involved or B) causes impacts that can be felt well beyond the are where the initial scarcity took place. The basic properties of the physical universe are the only types of things we can count on balancing with any reliability and even then only over vast stretches of time. Anything else is an uncertainty and using this language as the cornerstone of some generalized philosophy on human affairs and to dismiss practical concerns so flippantly doesn't demonstrate one's ability to abstract themselves from the here and now to look at the 'big picture'; rather it simply demonstrates a basic misconceptions of both natural processes and human history.
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ORIGINAL: Vaughner
Not to mention no one has ever explained to me why if you pump an oil-well dry, cap it, and come back in 50 years there is oil in it again. (Never heard that one on the news did you?)
Probably no one has never explained this to you because it does not happen and is patently ridiculous.
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ORIGINAL: Vaughner
Though if oil does start to become hard to come by you'll see renewed interest in fission power, additional funding for fusion power, and many of these superfulous "nature preserves" containing low-sulpher coal and oil that were closed off to appease the environmentalists will transform...the elk and the caribou will just have to deal.
Nuclear fission is undoubtedly going to come back into consideration as a widespread alternative, though it has a host of problems all its own. Fusion as a source of reliable net energy production for controlled applications is in the theoretical stages, to say the least. And the coal and oil reserves you speak of are already factored into peak estimates for fossil fuels.
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ORIGINAL: Vaughner
Not to mention with countries like China that have a severe excess of males vs females, history shows us that it is a self-correcting problem. If a population begins to outgrow it's means it often corrects itself well before said means is exhausted.
First off, the (mostly apocryphal) stories you've clearly heard about disparity of male-to-female populations in China have obviously led you to greatly overestimate the degree of that difference. But aside from that, I don't even know what you're getting at here. Are you saying the Chinese cultural preoccupation with male children is the result of some decision in the collective unconscious of the humanity of the region to self-regulate itself? Becuase there is no less than several dozen obvious reasons this is a moronic notion, not the least of which is the fact that China is the most populous nation and the one that takes the very issue you are dismissing as unnecessary (concerted direct population control) most seriously.
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ORIGINAL: Vaughner
I do not wish to ramble
LOL...ok.
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ORIGINAL: Vaughner
Civilization will collapse if and when 2 things are perfected, The Holodeck, and the Replicator. When the latter replaces everyone's job, that which has predicated the development of all civilization will be gone. When someone invents the former, when men can have all the horny naked women, endless football games, and battles between ninjas and pirates they could want, meanwhile while women have all the chocolate, expectation-free footrubs, and doting they could want...there will be no motivation in life beyond keeping power to the holodeck.
Ok, now things are starting to make sense. All of your practical knowledge of science comes from reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation? Though I suspect you may have been inspired by having recently read this article? Let me give you a tip -- when the guys at Cracked write on such things, it's hilarious speculative humour. When you bring it into an argument about real phenomena...well, it's likely to inspire laughter as well, but for entirely different reasons.
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ORIGINAL: Vaughner
In short, until those two things happen, I don't think civilization is in any huge danger of anything more than self-correction.
Self-correction has to come form a conscious decision to face the realities of a situation and adjust you response accordingly. It does not arise, as your entire post implies, from some subconscious, automatic, collective, and error-less instinctual response on the part of our whole species. Understand that our instincts were forged, by and large, in the hundred and fifty thousand year period we spent as a hunter-gatherers. Those instincts tell us shit -- well, very little in any account -- about how to behave in these novel new contexts we've found ourselves in today. That's where some of the newest of our adaptations -- the capacity for abstract though, the assessment of empirical fact, the ability to plan -- have to take over. The funny thing is, I was first impelled to comment in this thread to caution against having to dismal an outlook on our ability to cope with change, but your stance is an infinitely more absurd argument in the opposite direction of alarmists, this idea that we need only sit back and let things sort themselves out. If we, as you suggest, simply sit around with out thumbs up our collective ass, the consequences will surely be staggering. And I don't know about you, but I'm not counting on the warp drive to fetch us some aliens to sort it all out for us.
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RE: So, when will industrial civilization collapse? - 
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