Couldn’t agree more. “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Your last two articles have been some of my favorites!

@Seth –
http://www.amazon.com/dp/037571328X/?tag=oildepletio03-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/052138673X/?tag=oildepletio03-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0894202995/?tag=oildepletio03-20

I am much more optimistic than you, Jacob. I do believe in the singularity and even in those times where “civilization” fell, technology still progressed right up into the 19th centuries, and whole new lands were discovered (or invaded, depending on your perspective).

Still, I think there’s something to be learned from your philosophy, and one certainly shouldn’t make too much of expectations. It’s true that much unhappiness results from that.

@IiW – http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-lost-technologies.php … things are discovered, lost, rediscovered … One of the reason for the delay in running water until just a few hundred years ago was that people simply didn’t know how to build aqueducts anymore.

@r&j – It seems that recoverable estimates in the Bakken formation are on the order of 3-4 billion barrels (USGS). That’s about 1 year of US use. A significant dollar amount which will change the fortunes of some companies. In the overall scheme, it’s not going to make much of a difference. There are very few people in any demographic—mostly middle-aged/retired engineering/geologist types.

@Guy – Yes. Also see Toynbee’s work.

Good post, and hilarious intro! 🙂

The Earth is old, and so are we, but our horizons and memories are short. Life on Earth has been wiped out at least 5-6 times, down to .1% or so, and at other times, there has been far more life than now. In 100M years, there will hardly be any traces left of us, and all traces will have been churned and ground away by 1B years, though several billions of years remain. The foot steps on the moon will be wiped out by meteorites; porcelain will be crushed into powder; and radioactivite waste will long have decayed or mixed into the Earth’s own radioactive products. Given these statistics, I can easily imagine previous civilisations, even large-scale ones, though this is of course far too anthrocentric a way of seeing things: there might well be other civilisations living on Earth, although my imagination is just as limited and anthrocentric as most people’s. Do ant colonies count? Kilometres of coral reefs/underground fungus/rain forest/etc. etc.? We are not special, and each new discovery of our non-special status (eg., Copernicus, Darwin) is a step towards an adult understanding of our species. In this light, it’s not at all hard to accept my own death or the death of us all. We treasure ourselves and our “accomplishments” but they are not special to the rest of the world and won’t be missed.

Great post Jacob. I often wonder what it is we should strive to optimize. Hans Rosling says reducing infant mortality rates is the best thing for society, but that only accelerates us toward the overshoot. Do we want lots and lots of miserable people or a small number of happy people?

Can’t resist commenting, at least briefly. As a Christian I do believe that life on this earth is a pilgrimage to settle our relationship with Jesus Christ and the Bible is the instruction manual. Each person must decide individually. The world as we know it will come to an end and the new creation is the ultimate destination. Whether it is in 5 years or 5,000 really doesn’t matter so much as we each have to choose before we hit the ground.

@tmgbooks: Dirty bombs are possible risks but are pretty hard and expensive to procure, so they would not be weapons of choice for terrorists. On the other hand, MI6 has just publically assessed that terrorists are a small risk compared to national aggressions, particularly when atomics are involved (eg. Iran, Israel, or Pakistan).

@Carol@inthetrenches: I’m athiest but like theology (in that context, it doesn’t matter whether God is a real entity or an externalisation of our psyche). I see God as a sort of parent who is trying to help us grow up and be civilised. In the Old Testament, we were pretty barbaric, so God’s message had to be kept pretty simple: follow all these very specific civic and personal laws, and I (or: the good behaviour) will reward you. Through these Laws, people got more civilised, but the Laws sometimes got to be more important than actually being a good person (eg., for the Pharisees). At this point, people were just about ready for the next lesson: Jesus. His message was that the Laws are ok but that we should internalise them and follow the spirit of the Laws, rather than the specific Laws. Each of us should try to do good and take care of each other, and that’s pretty much it. Unfortunately, this message might have been a bit premature, or maybe we will never be able to be that civilised, though I do see the social democracies of Scandinavia as a close realisation of this ideal behaviour. In any case, this civil message got degraded through Church dogma (externalising laws again) and by Mohammed, who reverted things back to Laws again. God (real or psyche) just wants us to grow up and be civilised – for our own good – and neither the Bible nor our relationship with God is as important as this growing up. In this interpretation, Armeggedon/Jesus’ return is the next civic lesson… but we first have to learn our present lesson properly first. Things like the UN and international cooperation, or Gandhi, or the Scandinavian countries, for instance, indicate that we have become a bit civilised – but it’s pretty obvious that we have a long way to go, so the next lesson is won’t be happening for quite a while.

@tmgbooks – Terrorism is a mind-game. Europe has had it for a long time due to their colonial efforts and so their population is not terrorized to the same degree that American’s are; being somewhat new to the great colonial game.

I sincerely doubt that it would collapse the financial system. It would be rocked alright, not because of fundamentals, but rather because traders reflexively short on bad news. Within a month, I would bet heavily that the market would recover back to where it was.

We need to keep in mind that terrorists don’t terrorize people. They just attack civilians. People terrorize themselves. Hence terrorism only works if we let it. It’s psychological warfare. The first dirty bomb is scary. Ten dirty bombs and it’s just another hassle. People get used to almost anything.

@Kelly – I think it’s a consequence of boxed in thinking—“I know what I believe!”—and not really knowing.

I’ve noticed that optimists primarily (almost exclusively) come from camps that don’t deal directly with reality. The further away, the more optimistic: Economists and computer scientists tend to be most optimistic. The closer to reality, the worse it gets. Petroleum people are the biggest pessimists on the planet followed by scientists (in the nature fields, like biology, geology). Engineers are in the middle and fall either way—usually depending on whether they work upstream or downstream relative to nature.

@Carol – Financially Independent/Retired Early.

I see humanity as a spinning hard drive. At some point it’s going to fail and all will be lost.

What do we do about it? We need an array and off site backup.

Can we get people living off the Earth in time?… Doesn’t look like it, most people seem more concerned about feeding the obese and educating in our hopeless public education system.

I’m half really pessimistic and half really optimistic- though I guess it’s probably more accurate to say I haven’t made up my mind on the matter.

On one hand, it’s really hard to imagine that our current civilization won’t just keep developing and become more complex, that we won’t find some new energy source just in time and that life will go one just as before. Probably this is hard to imagine because everyone says that we will find a solution.

On the other hand, I think we’ve become arrogant and lazy, and it seems unlikely that we’re still flexible enough to adapt to whatever comes next.

I think we will find/develop other sources of energy, but it’s not going to be the same. I just wonder how we, as a culture, will adapt.

I don’t think your triad of climate change, resource depletion, and overpopulation is nearly as frightening as you claim.

Overpopulation becomes a non-issue as countries become fully industrialized and grant equal rights to women. According to the UN, EVERY developed country except Albania has a fertility rate below the replacement rate of 2.1 births/women, including countries like Brazil (TFR = 1.9) with a strong Catholic tradition. The development gap between the first-world countries and the rest of the world, especially the population centers of China and India, has been rapidly narrowing for the last half of the twentieth century. Once it’s fully closed the world’s population will begin declining, hopefully slowly enough to prevent social unrest.

(Ironically, consumerism/careerism seems to be one of the main reasons driving this voluntary population limiting. The two reasons for not having kids that pop up in every article about Italy or Japan are: 1. Neither of the parents wants to limit their career; and 2. Raising a child is too expensive, especially when you factor in college.)

Source 1: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2005/pop918.doc.htm
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate

Resource exhaustion is more complicated, since there are literally millions of different resources you could be referring to, but the two cases I frequently see brought up are oil and food. Cars like the Prius and the Volt demonstrate that we can maintain our transportation infrastructure as long as we have electricity, which we can have in unlimited quantities as long as we allow more nuclear power plants to be built. As for food, the first green revolution tripled the average yield of the world’s staple crops, and genetic engineering can repeat that gain or make more subtle improvements, like golden rice or crop strains that can grow in land that’s very dry or has an odd soil pH or some other issue. These specific examples demonstrate the basic idea that science is shockingly good at solving human problems even given constrained resources.

Source 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
Source 2: http://www.goldenrice.org/

Climate change is the most credible threat, and I’m certainly not going to argue with the extensive scientific evidence that it’s caused by humans and that it will lead to more frequent natural disasters and the loss of some food-producing areas. However, most scientists and economists agree that the ill effects will mostly be felt by the developing nations, and that the disruption won’t be severe enough to destabilize the first world economies. You can absolutely argue that it’s immoral for the first world countries to inflict this kind of suffering on the rest of the world, but it does demonstrate that climate change isn’t going to lead to the end of civilization as we know it.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/science/earth/01climate.html?pagewanted=all

@me: Yes, it is. Somehow I had skimmed over the last part.

I’m hoping we find a way to keep the space program going, but I don’t think that we will. It is the only thing that could potentially save us from a comet or asteroid hitting the earth and killing us off. Of course, no matter what we do, we have a limited time here on this planet. The sun won’t shine forever.

@alcibiades424
The golden rice you talk about has indeed more nutrients than standard rice. From a nutrition point it is obsolete. Just add some spinach type weeds to your meal and you have the same nutritional benefits. It is more of a type of convenience food, because most people just eat white rice with no vegetables. Compared to that golden rice might help, but it is by no means necessary to get good nutrition, even cheaply.

“Fighting is good, but to remain happy it is best to realize that there’s little a single individual can do and set your expectations accordingly. Work from a baseline of zero: That you can’t do anything about the big problems. Then appreciate anything you get beyond that. Conversely, don’t fall into the trap that there’s nothing you can do personally about your situation. Concern yourself with things you can control. Learn to live with what you can’t.

Incidentally, that’s a pretty useful life philosophy overall. Much unhappiness derive from unmet expectations.”

The foregoing is an interesting way of restating the Serentity Prayer for the non-spiritual. In the original: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.”

*meant to say humans HAVEN’t really change. sorry for the typo

The decline and fall of our civilization is possible, but it is not inevitable.
Those who say it is inevitable are primarily relying on induction: every prior civilization has fallen (which is true), so ours will too. That sounds like a good argument but it’s an explanationless theory. Ironically, this is the same flawed mode of thinking of those who think the good times will never end / progress is inevitable. The only difference between the “doom is inevitable” and “doom is impossible” types is the historical time frame over which they are focused.
It’s like the turkey for whom the farmer brings a plate of food every morning of its entire life. The farmer has always brought food, so the turkey thinks he always will. One morning in September the farmer starts bringing even more food for the turkey. “Great! The farmer must like me even more!” thinks the turkey. Then one morning in late November the farmer brings an axe instead of a plate of food, and chops off the turkey’s head.
Point being, you can’t use induction to predict the future – either good or bad. You must have a working theory of why things will or won’t happen, that you’ve thought about well and has survived your best attempts at criticism.
The other thing thrown out by the “end is inevitable” types are arguments around sustainability. Definitely, our civilization is not sustainable in its current form. Of course, neither was the civilization of the 20th century, or the 19th, or the 18th, 17th, etc. The form of our civilization is constantly changing, from one unsustainable form to another.
Our civilization will not fall due to unsustainability alone.
If our civilization falls, it will be because we can no longer solve problems faster than we have created them. That could happen. Doom is possible. It’s also preventable. To prevent it, we must get better at solving problems faster and not creating new problems as fast.
David Deutsch has a good talk about this in relation to global climate change:
https://tedxproject.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/david-deutsch-our-place-in-the-cosmos/
The chapter on sustainability in David Deutsch’s latest book is also excellent.

I think population will steady and then decline as education becomes more wide spread. Typically, people who have advanced education beyond secondary school, have less children later in life. Likewise, I do not think in cyclical civilization. In the past yes, but we have more knowledge than ever before about our past, and therefore are in a better disposition to steer a different course. As people become more educated, I’m inclined to think this is more likely to happen. I wholly agree with the true battle for the environment being about consumers and investors. In fact, as education increases and hopefully consumerism decreases, I think governments will increasingly become facilitators of living and less so directors and eventually in the long term grand scheme, become moot.

this post is great, i am going thru this change now. i am a rotten, evil, christian conservative and saw the way the usa and the west in general is going(as in never to return to its golden days and maybe ever as leading the world) and tokk it real personal, then realized i was a tick on a dog about being able to do anything about it; which is real depressing and have also come to the conclusion that about all i can do is improve upon myself and do what i enjoy and the world will go merrily on pretty much whatever that is.

I also dream abt going to the stars, so I do hope that Singularity will become true, and then we will get an explosion of intelligence, something that we need in order for us to reach those stars. In the meantime, ERE will do and grow as human being by exploring as much as possible with your skills and intelligence. (and I do not need a Bible as instruction guide for that, funny, that still people believe this)