Was Unabomber right? Will civilization collapse?

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Exactly

Yeah population is surely the root cause of all the problems we face now. And it seems to be a dirty word. Nobody wants to comment or address this issue. I think its because our ruling elite just want a bigger market. I think they see us as a market and not a society.

Enough food is grown in the world to feed everyone (so-far) notwithstanding some glitches in distribution. Overpopulation is not an absolute term. Overpopulation occurs when the population and its demands for food exceed the capacity of the planet to provide it. That state has not yet been reached. You will notice there hasn't been a rip roaring world wide famine for over fifty years. Can you spell "Green Revolution"? Sure you can.

ruveyn

Of course we produce enough food for all to eat. The question is how long can we keep doing that? Also current farming contributes a very large percentage to global warming. We need to find an optimal capacity for the planet. How many humans can we sustain and keep things in balance. We will absolutely need to address this issue. We cannot go on increasing our population and then increasing the amount of cattle to feed us.

In the extreme case population will be limited by War, Pestilence, Fame and Death.

ruveyn

ANY measurement

That seems to be somewhat of a generalization unless you list all of the measurements for us

Do some research on exponential growth.

Capitalism requires continued exponential growth, which is unsustainable.
Inflation is exponential.
Money supply is exponential.
Population is exponential.
Resource depletion is exponential.

I could go on, but if you're interested in researching this line, here is a very good piece.. it's LONG though, like 3 hours 23 minutes.

http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse

You can also dl via torrent.
This video covers more than just exponential growth too, but I'll point that out as being the cornerstone of the impending collapse. Some of the other points he goes over is the math-games that are played with the national statistics such as inflation and GDP (something called Hedonics). How in fact if not for those games the end would be upon us now. The artificial confidence that propaganda has created is the only thing keeping us going today.

"sometime this century" is a bit optimistic if you ask me, but of course I could be underestimating the establishment's capacity to string it out, which is really all they are able to do right now.
My prediction is that it is less than 1 doubling time of the US debt. (the real debt, not the 13.3 billion or so that they claim)

I believe he mentions this site in the video too, but it might be of interest too.

http://www.shadowstats.com/

It re-reports government stats. Taking the BS games out of them.
By BS games I mean things like ... if you own your home, the government adds something like 1,600 dollars a month for the rent you're paying yourself.
Inflation is reduced by a made up percentage if an item stays the same price but adds new features.
Volatile pricing is removed from the inflation indexes.
If something starts going up in price more than "it should" it's weighting in the inflation index is reduced, because it's assumed that people will buy other things instead.

Here is a short story by him.
http://www.sacredfools.org/crimescene/casefiles/s2/shipoffoolsstory.htm

1- EVERY SINGLE CIVILIZATION (CULTURE OF CITIES) COLLAPSED, because it's an unsustainable system. Civilization grow and create complexity who consume ressorces and energy. At each step of complexity the benefit of that complexity reduce (reducing return on investment). Firts investment on complexity in agriculture gived high return for relatively small energy invested in complexity (ex. irigation chanel) but the "green revolution" require the whole industrial system to produce, distribute and maintain the fertilizer, tractors, trucks, dryers, pump. It require so much energy that we invest around 5 joules for each of food we eat. Without the massive use of oil this is undoable. Remove oil to some extend (peak oil) and the civilization while expérience mass starvation and collapse until she reach a lower level of complexity that can be sustained until anotheressential resorce to sustain that complexity reach her peak.

2- NT with power tend to seek for more and more power, control and wealth.

So I think that both are unavoidable to some extend. Civilization collapse under it's complexity. And dystopia can grow to the extend of complexity that the civilization can affort before the collapse begin. Roman empire (among others) started is collapse long before barbarians invade it. Infrastructure have started to fall appart from lack of maintenace, corruption was rampant, morality was a thing of past, fatherlessness was exploding, peoples was destroying public properties, crime was on raise. History is a good way to know where we are going...

I'd wager he's wrong, I say that because - where we're at right now - we're much more likely to be on the brink of having our world become exponentially better, just so long as we don't let democracy roll over, either to financial collapse or certain strains of religious fundamentalism.

For one thing gangs generally spring up from a vacuum. A class of the 'poor', in a struggling rather than relative sense, comes from a society trying to put the same stamp on all rather than having the span of humanity worked out. Sometimes they have the aptitude to rise out, often enough they're where they are because its the best they can do - and obviously enough people born into that may be sharp enough but many never find the difference. My impression is that human psychology will stop being like voodoo or witchcraft as it advances, that in the next 30 or 40 years our culture will likely become significantly more people-wise just off of all the professional studying, tracking, crossover with medicine, I think part of it will be that the illusion of free will will collapse - we'll 'get it' on a broader level, and also we'll start looking at the human condition more accurately.

As for moral decay - it happens in three generation cycles and renews every third or fourth. Industrial society is under upheaval, for we in the west at least, because its leaving us and, as technology solves factory and what used to be considered 'dirty' work, we'll be in a situation of trying to figure out how to evolve our social fabric to accommodate for the fact that not everyone is built to be an engineer or to repair advanced computer and robotics systems.

I think he's wrong on the environmental issue as well. You have companies out there developing leaner and greener ways of operating constantly, they now push for philanthropic work in what's considered the developing world. In a sense the developing world is getting a huge kickstart toward better efficiency, in the next thirty years places like China may have quite considerable drops in pollution as solar will become so much more efficient, as it is in the process of all over the world. It may well be within our lifetimes that fossil fuels will be an issue for the plastics industry and few others, only perhaps related to the automobile industry insofar as light covers and upholstery.

The biggest challenge has always seemed to be innovation. I live in Cleveland for example, it seems like its only gotten cleaner in the last twenty years. I try to think of what it would have been like in the twenties or thirties, or Pittsburgh for that matter, and can't help but shudder. To know real gross pollution we just need to go back in time a century or so.

I think the most salient concerns are population and, if it is directly anthropomorphic, the possibility of population fueling warming. At the rate innovation is moving I think innovation may have the drop on that and, if it is too late to do anything about it, direct measures may be able to be taken to correct the issue (and, rather than having glaciers swallow a good 50% of current arable land we'll likely find the measures worth it). The other part - I think as we get more real about our identity as a species the need to outdo each other, the feeling like the Smiths need to beat the Jones's - or commit seppuku for failing in that endeavor, will ease up some, likely never completely go away - we're still apes afterall - but with gene targeting drugs as well on the market by that time a lot of the things that force us to treat each other and ourselves like crap will be removed, thus paving the way for a world where being an a***hole is much more logistically voluntary.

+1

That and we're far too interwoven. The only real possibility of anything getting significantly worse would be natural cataclysm dropping our numbers down to several million, if that happened I suppose we'd have all kinds of room again for brutal Assyrian style empire building. As for right now though, no matter who's economy nudges past who's or who's country changes boarders, divides, or rolls in a new country, global accountability is pretty consistent (and even where its unequal its consistently unequal).

Sooner or later every civilization or society will collapse. History has shown us that societies and civilizations have a rather limited shelf life.

Where is Athens? Where is Sparta? What of Alexander's Kingdom? Whiter Rome? Great Britain has diminished from the glory days of The Empire. The U.S. may very well be on a terminal course.

ruveyn

I hope it collapses.

I would prefer a primitive society to a dystopian one as well. I can't see any other result of a collapse besides tyranny unfortunately. The powers that be will have been preparing for it for a very a long time.

Mmmm... try to imagine prison-style living *outside* of prison walls.

Civilization as a whole has lasted for some thousands of years already.

The current western civilization has its days counted, of course. Civilizations always die and are replaced by another kind of civilization and we have no reason to believe that there is anything about the current one that will make it immune to that reality. In fact, we have plenty of reasons to expect it to happen in a not so long term future.