Arthur - you are obviously a lot (or just a bit!) older than me who is in my mid 30`s.
I see my nan in a hospice living the most fossil fuel supported part of her 95 years of existence. She has earned a comfortable golden years and is one of the generation who's life started hard and only got 'easier'.
I'm sure she will be gone soon and miss all the coming chaos.
I've already looked ahead and resigned myself to the fact that:
if I ever make it to her age no such places will exist.
the crap that's coming likely will prevent me making that age.
at my age she was a lot better equipped to deal with a harsh life than I am.
looking ahead won't change any of this so I may as well accept it.
I don't begrudge her any of the benefits of endless growth that she has enjoyed. Her frugal mindset has always ensured she is not wasteful or greedy. She's taught me an appreciation of nature and the environment. In a way I'm glad she's where she is, and I just appreciate how lucky I am to have access to some of the simple modern comforts I do. Not being rich there are plenty I can't afford, and others I choose not to partake in.
I think there will be plenty we take for granted that will disappear along with endless growth.
Mulling over some of these things in advance will help ease transition.
…bu-u-ut fossil fuels will be available for a long time, and hydrocarbon fuel can be synthesised if really needed. The current space entrepreneurs are not talking hundreds of years in the future but decades.
Blob commented
“bu-u-ut fossil fuels will be available for a long time, and hydrocarbon fuel can be synthesised if really needed. The current space entrepreneurs are not talking hundreds of years in the future but decades.”
Depends what you call a long time. Conventional oil has already peaked. 2006 ie. we have already gotten through over half the easy to get oil. My estimates that peak fossil energy (in all its forms) will occur between 2030 and 2040. The world population will be 8.5 + billion in 2030. In one hundred years time we will be below 20% peak levels of fossil energy in my opinion. So there you go,
Synthesising hydrocarbon fuel is not going to make any impression on mankind’s predicament. Keep dreaming.
I know this thread is winding down, but I just saw this news about Germany's birth rate. I'm not suggesting we are no longer in trouble of running out of resources…just posting this to supplement things said up above. Germany's workforce will shrink by 6m over the next 15 years.
Also, in regard to colonizing space, don't forget that there is a band of people who believe there may be a secret space program with the possibility of free energy devices. This is just for those interested in pursuing their reasons for believing this is so; I'm not trying to violate the terms regarding conspiracies. I can't even say I agree with everything these folks say.
sure, we are going through a paradigm shift right now, but has nobody noticed how gold, far from going up in a straight line, continues to sink ever lower?
just fact. fact that denies what mr martenson has been telling us.
next such fact - "endless growth" IS NOT a problem, if new products and services are more abstract than the previous generation of product, which they always are. mr martenson's theories assume a given, they assume a direct connection between physical resources and economic growth.
this is clearly false. obviously it takes significant physical resources to build a house and to provide a year's worth of food. but it takes less resources to build a car and run it for a year.
it takes far less resources to build a computer, and run it for a year.
although it takes far less resources than that, to build a smartphone and run it for a year.
first you feed yourself, then you buy your house, and then you might buy a computer and then you might buy an iphone.
moving up the hierarchy of maslow's triangle (google it) takes fewer and fewer physical resources to deliver.
mr martenson is correct that we are going through a significant paradigm shift at the moment, but the underlying assumption that economic growth is directly proportional to resource consumption is FALSE, just as the "intrinsic" value of gold is false. since you can't eat gold, or live in it, or browse the internet on it, i can assure you - it has no value whatsoever beyond psychological. the psychological value is deep, but it's not bottomless and i think it's being turned over right now.
i made a load out of gold when it was going up, but my money has been in the stock market for the last year. investments going up strongly, while gold has gone down in price!
my advice here is to use google to search for ideas that might contradict what you believe. don't create a mental echo chamber where you're only reading news that confirms your pre-existing beliefs.
Phil,
I don't normally engage drive by shooters who register and dump a pile of assertions unless I think it can provide either a teachable moment or some levity.
Facts are what they are. Assertions are merely statements that may or may not be grounded in data, but quite often are not upon even the mildest of examination.
So let's parse one of your assertions.
next such fact - "endless growth" IS NOT a problem, if new products and services are more abstract than the previous generation of product, which they always are. mr martenson's theories assume a given, they assume a direct connection between physical resources and economic growth.
this is clearly false. obviously it takes significant physical resources to build a house and to provide a year's worth of food. but it takes less resources to build a car and run it for a year.
If this is clearly false, then this should be quite easy for you to prove with data. Run a GDP series against anything you wish; cement, iron ore, oil, lumber, or even computers and smart phones. Show that you can have economic growth without the use of more resources.
I've done this, of course, and guess what? Economic growth always comes with additional use of resources.
Next, be careful what you call 'economic growth.' Another set of uncomfortable 'facts' is that what we are calling economic 'growth' is actually not growth at all, but merely a rise in claims against real things. Money and debt are both simply claims, but we count JPM's activities and earnings bonanzas as part of our GDP growth even though the vast majority of what financialized companies do produces nothing and merely counts up larger piles of freshly printed and 40x leveraged money as though it were the same as the installation of railroad track serving the Bakken.
Once we strip out the easy come, easy go false prosperity the numbers become even more obviously in support of the idea that if you want real goods and services and you want them to grow, you need more resources.
This is just patently obvious to anybody who has looked into this even briefly. You might begin by noting world primary energy use over the past 3 decades. Or steel use. Or cement. Or food. Or fish.
Notice this is new materials and minerals per person per year.
Finally, I have a challenge for you Phil. Please find where I have said that gold will go up in a straight line forever. Or made any claims about where it will be in terms of dollars vs. time.
I do say that owning it is a very good idea but that's for a whole host of subtle reasons that have more to do with systems fragility, human behavior, and a good sense of monetary history than how many dollars per gram it is.
Anything that is unsustainable will stop…and nothing is more unsustainable than exponentially increasing your claims against the goods and resources of a finite world. It's only a question of when that gives way, not if.
Well, I wouldn't argue with oil peaking and all that, I accept it, and I wasn't thinking of synthesised fuel replacing fossil (maybe it could, maybe not), but the asteroid mining is already in the works. Branson is set to launch asteroid exploration satellites, and he's been producing peak oil reports so he obviously thinks it's not a problem for him. Hence my doubts about the economy being limited by a finite planet. Limited for other reasons maybe, but not because of that.
If, say, I am an IT professional, and I power my computer with a solar array, earning money and adding to GDP in part via extra-terrestrial energy, doesn't that mean I have now transcended the Earth (alone) as a resource base ?
Controlled reproduction will likely start within the prison system, as the incarcerated have already been stripped of freedom and liberty.
The average citizen will have no problem with physical castration of inmates as it will be performed on dangerous sex offenders, first.
Slowly but surely, within the general prison population, those with serious felony offences will have their reproductive rights taken away, through vasectomy. And in women's prisons, tubal ligation.
Jay walkers and litterbugs will be safe, but drunk drivers? Not so much. Any major threat, perceived or otherwise, will not be tolerated. Law abiding citizens, under increasing economic burden will be much less tolerant. A triage mentality will dominate in a resource depleted world where the law abiding will be under tremendous stress, in all ways.
The genetic role of personality disorders and structural changes in the brains of psychopaths are currying great interest among neuro-scientists. These studies could help lay the groundwork for an attempt to expel this potential from the gene pool.
As this program progresses and the working population becomes more stressed, there could be a growing intolerance for those on welfare, particularly multi-generational welfare families. Parents will be offered the choice of govt help in exchange for tubal ligations, etc..
The government will be heavily involved with curtailing population, eventually. I don't know where it will end up, but I think this is how it will begin.
I am not advocating for it. I see it as tragic, potentially very dangerous.
Minorities, who have born a disproportionate weight of unemployment and incarceration, largely due to automation and offshoring of jobs, will be impacted in a huge way, if I'm correct. The criminal 'justice' system in the U.S. has had features of racial genocide for decades.
Where's the outrage? Unless the family or friends of the complacent are directly impacted, where have THEY been? Looking the other way is where. The social petrie dish has been cultivating nothing but willfull ignorance about the rights of minorities for a long long time. That could easily be replaced by out and out hositility to those less fortunate...and a further desire to cut down on their numbers.
So many people who get bent out of shape over the subject of govt's role in curtailing reproduction, (because it just might affect them somewhere down the road) have been just fine with the wholesale warehousing of minorities in the prison industrial complex.
agitatingprop: I believe the scenario you laid out is very possible.The general population would not care about government limiting the rights of others to reproduce until it is too late and the government acquires the power to control us all. It would run much like the quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "
"First the came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out."
In a certain respect the loss of social connections, liberty and economic serfdom is already happening to prisoners and certain minorities in this country.
Having descended from people who suffered genocide and realizing that people existed, and still exist, who would be happier if I and mine were not here, makes me very touchy about this subject. We may not be able to stop it from happening but I will not agree to any government having this power.
Am so sorry that your immediate and extended family have been impacted by schizophrenia. My sibling has suffered the tortures of the damned. It is depressing beyond measure to watch someone you love consumed by paranoia.
I agree with you that pre-culling along lines of personality and or 'dis'ease is dangerous for any number of reasons. It's fraught with unintended consequences and moral ambiguity.
Remove genes coding for psychosis and you remove creative intelligence.
Remove genes coding for psychopathy and inadvertantly you have taken some necessary traits of fearlessness along with it.
The surgeon with the steady hands is that way, because he is somewhat insensitive and uncaring. But strangely, this works in the operating room, where nerves of steel are required. Neurotypicals, overwhelmed with the potential for damaging somebody, wouldn't likely perform as well.
Remove autism and you remove Aspergers. Remove Aspergers and society no longer has the benefit of cool rationale, divorced from emotion and narrowly angled specialization and way outside the box thinking.
I chose not to have children because genetics put my risk of having a schizophrenic child, at the very least, 10% chance. As I share many brain traits with my sibling; minus the psychosis, (luckily) I assumed that we are genetically pretty close. It would be too risky and I would not have been able to cope.
I don't agree with the theory that those severely afflicted with schizophrenia are misunderstood mystics. I think that milder variants of the illness, may present more as a benign syndrome,but certainly not severe cases, where symptoms have been present from birth.
Hunh. It never occurs to me to simply state things without ever backing anything up, but we have a few of them here today. I'm guessing that the obvious limitations of a finite planet idea bumps into a couple of belief systems.
Just for yucks though, here's a simple list of what makes up "GDP."
I've taken the liberty of highlighting the areas that, for sure, require physical, tangible inputs and that most definitely have 'physical properties.'
I think a lot of people are confusing their smart phones with GDP. But for those who don't, "goods" means solid things like furniture, cars, food, and computers.
Fixed investment means structures and equipment. You know, very tangible stuff.
All Federal spending is pure consumption by nature. It goes to salaries and transfer payments, both of which enable people to buy things like food and pay rent, while defense spending is, obviously, very much composed of hard things made out of physical stuff.
This idea that we are all about to inhabit a virtual economy with virtual goods and virtual services is just marketing copy for the dominant belief systems of our times. It's not real and even if it were, and we all earned gobs of money tending virtual farms and selling aps to each other, what would we spend that money on does one propose?
That's right. Stuff. Things like houses and cars and plane rides and food and services like uber lifts.
So, yes, the idea that the US will, all by itself, have $80 trillion of an economy (in current dollars!) absolutely means that the US would be flowing pretty close to an entire world's worth of 'stuff' through its economy alone.
Happy to be convinced otherwise, but it will take real data and not a thin gruel of beliefs presented as if they were some sort of popular wisdom for "those in the know.".
Carbon Blob, you need to watch the Crash Course - click through from the home page. After that come back with specific questions and I'm sure someone will answer. It's more complex than just the fossil fuel situation
Re Krishnamurti - this was a human being that experienced extraordinary states of consciousness. In your excellent quote he is experiencing non dual awareness, sometimes called unity consciousness. In this state the subject and the object have collapsed into direct experience. He is not experiencing himself as separate from anything in the gross physical realm (or the subtle or causal). Technology is of course part of physical manifestation. But there is nothing special about technology - it is simply here as physical expression of our current civilization. And it can disappear very quickly if the conditions that support it no longer exist.
David yeah I have seen the crash course, it was ok, some good stuff. I've been poking my nose into peak oil for quite a while.
Anyway the Krishnamurti thing, that's right it's one of the non-dual states. You can swing it as nothing special about technology, but don't you think it means there is nothing special about nature either ?
just fact. fact that denies what mr martenson has been telling us.
next such fact - "endless growth" IS NOT a problem, if new products and services are more abstract than the previous generation of product, which they always are. mr martenson's theories assume a given, they assume a direct connection between physical resources and economic growth.
this is clearly false. obviously it takes significant physical resources to build a house and to provide a year's worth of food. but it takes less resources to build a car and run it for a year.
it takes far less resources to build a computer, and run it for a year.
although it takes far less resources than that, to build a smartphone and run it for a year.
As a guy whose job is to mind the "stuff" that goes into building computer chips, including the ever growing collection of antenna switches found in most multi-network capable smart phones.. I can tell you that we are not using less stuff to build them. While an outside observer might assume that miniaturization implies less stuff... the processes needed to create the chips grow increasingly complex, and we keep building more and more of them so that everything can eventually talk to everything else (so called Internet of Things, or IOT).
Building chips for smartphones and computers is stressing the world's capacity for;
Tantalum - we use more than half the world's supply of this rare metal building these building chips, which are imagined by our trollish poster to be nearly stuff free;
A more granular look at tantalum consumption in electronics reveals that capacitors and semiconductors are the most important market drivers; but additional minor markets, such as surface acoustical wave filters and thin film resistors also consume tantalum raw materials. It is also important to note that demand from the electronics industry has averaged from 50% to 70% of total tantalum demand over the past 20 years.
tl;dr: Yes we are running out. Everyone uses products of the many industries that require helium, and there is no way to cheaply make more.Many people do not realize that helium is a non-renewable resource. It is made on earth via nuclear decay of uranium, and it is recovered from mines. Once it is released into the atmosphere it becomes uneconomical to recapture it, and eventually atmospheric helium will escape earth altogether because it is so light.
On the question of whether we are running out, the existing answers are absolutely correct (YES !!), but I want to add another voice. This is an issue that many people outside the industries that use helium are unaware of, but one that will eventually affect them nonetheless.
And also for Neon and other rare gases -
The neon market is also proving to be very interesting. The demand for neon has increased each year for the last few years and is continuing
to grow.
The drivers are mostly demand from electronic chip manufacturers that use processes which require neon-based laser gas for etching on silicon wafers. On the supply side, we have a decline in the production of neon,70 percent of which comes out of Eastern Europe.
Everyone in China, and elsewhere, won't have a cell phone without much more stuff (and energy) being used up in process. So much for the stuff free GDP ramp.
