Anxiety over mankind

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Nope, it's INTJ

what's your point?

BTW, I'm not forecasting an "end of the world" scenario. Just a major economic upheaval. The timing of which is uncertain. but the signs are all there that the current financial system is unsustainable.

Indeed. It's not good news at all, but I can accept it as reality.

Don't get me wrong though. There may be some potential upsets possible for the 21st century, I'm willing to bet this century will make the 20th century look like a walk in the park. But I think the overall outlook for mankind is positive. The overall trend over history is one towards freedom, and a true golden age down the road (not likely in our lifetimes though). If anything we humans are survivors, we are kinda like the cockroach in a positive sense. And when the Sh*t hits the fan, we help each other out more than we take advantage of the calamity. Hey, we survived the Kava supervolcano (bigger than yellowstone) 75-80K years ago, I think we can survive anything.

Life is unpredictable, things happen. But no need to get buried with fear over the infinite possibilities.
And things always turn out better than fear paints them to be.

Still, have some silver handy in case the dollar goes bye bye.

They're still saying it will run out.
I never considered it might actually be BS. I don't care anyway. It's not like it will run out in my lifetime.

I think I'm too self-absorbed to be concerned about the future of mankind. I think the world is boring so that's why I like science fiction. In science fiction our world may really be in peril and I find that exciting.

There will always be at least a trickle of oil and a lump of coal, for a price. Mining the tar sands and shale is like tearing off your wallpaper to eat the paste, but it can be done. The bigger problem is that if we burn even half of the reserves we know about, we will be losing over half of every crop to bad weather, and having to move whole cities away from the coastlines. If we declare it off-limits, money as we know it falls apart. Bucky Fuller said that oil should be used to build the sustainable future, but we are awfully late at doing it. Still, I'll be putting my pension into reducing my energy consumption.

Having a life, being a being that has language and words going on 24/7 in your mind ... words for every little thing, is the rarest thing that EVER happens in all of space and time. YOU are one of us. Do your best. Be early. Forgive yourself and others... it is all a muddle. Keep your agreements. Don't get hooked on hard drugs. Smile at other people first.

And on the oil/coal/fossil fuel subject. Just apply a little knowledge of physics and one will realize that there is no shortage of energy, there never will be. Energy is everywhere. Deriving energy from the burning of that black stuff is unnecessary.
Yes, a lot of R&D will have to be done to find alternatives, but the alternatives are there. Progress had been made 100 years ago by Nikola Tesla, but JP Morgan and cohorts who we're funding his research didn't like the idea of giving away energy for free and shut him down. But that research Tesla did is still in existence, and people are trying to make something of it. It's just an uphill battle for them. The people profiting greatly off of the energy industry are doing everything in their power to suppress any major breakthroughs in this field. yes, it's a "conspiracy" (oooo bad word) but it's a very real conspiracy, no theory here. Most of the time suppression is easy since most folks do their research in relative secret because they too have a profit motive. So, big energy company comes in with a check with a lot of zeros on it, buys the patent, then shelves it. If that doesn't work, feds come on and forcibly shut down that breakthrough energy research, citing national security reasons. On the rare occasion that doesn't work, a hit is put out. Hey, nasty things can happen when big money is involved.

So, whoever develops new breakthroughs in energy is going to have to do it fully out in the open for the public to see and give it away for the good of mankind.

I hope some day this will happen. I just can't believe that in a universe pretty much consisting of pure energy everywhere, that there is any kind of a "shortage". We just need to change the method in which we are converting that boundless energy.

And the 1860s were a lot worse then the 1960's in America.

There have certainly been some dirty tricks. GM and Firestone were fined for conspiring to wreck public transit options, and GM sat on a battery patent instead of upgrading the electric cars it had out on lease. There are thousands of similar stories. However, the big news is still that there are far bigger subsidies for oil than for wind. Cloudy, northern Germany has made huge strides in going Solar just by fixing the taxes to encourage it.
There are a few persistent mysteries, such as the disappearance of Rudolf Diesel, but I don't believe most of the suppressed breakthrough stories. The field is packed with con men and fools, often trying to bask in Tesla's glow but getting nowhere, except into people's pockets. NTs are awfully easy to fool. I just read the basic claims for the air car, and told an editor he was promoting a fraud. He didn't believe me for two years, until one of his colleagues did a test. I had a job evaluating alternative energy proposals for a while, and about ten percent of them were perpetual motion machines, with sincere but totally incompetent designers. British Columbia actually gave one of the scams four million bucks in the early eighties, as if nobody had ever taken high school physics.

The so called 'Coming Crisis' is almost entirely fiction based on hype. It lives mostly in the minds of media and money makers who feed off the anxiety of humankind.

Could something happen ? Yes, but realistically it is very unlikely. And even worst case, if you look at countries all over the world that have gone thru even extreme crisis' in modern times, they are all still there.

I think it foolish to allow remote possibilities control your actions and to live in needless fear.

I think that the OP should get a prescription for antianxiety or antipsychotic meds, first. I used to obsess over stuff until I felt that suicide was the only way out. Today I'm much calmer with the meds helping, but I still want to prepare. I plan on saving some of my disability check until I can buy an acre of land in rural Oregon. Then I plan to make a cargo container into a cabin and live there. I will use solar power for energy. I plan to grow and raise my own food. I think there's something to be said for ditching the typical American lifestyle of stuff and more stuff and a diet of junk food and GMO plants and chicken who are fed arsenic to build their muscles (meaning meat, and yes it's true) in favor of a simpler life. Search for a MSNBC article I posted in PPR, "Meet the intentional poor". There are people living on $5k a year right now. Not all of them believe in imminent doom, but they all think that the American way of life leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, the American Empire will collapse at some point, it's inevitable. Nobody can say just WHEN.

I was a teenager in the 60's and 70's. End-of-the-world talk was popular then. In 1973 the company I worked for had a survivalist president. For Christmas, instead of a turkey he gave all the employees as 5lb hoop of cheese so that we could save it in our underground shelters for when the world system collapsed. Though the 70's gas crisis was an interesting time, the collapse did not happen.

My parents lived through the 1920's Great Depression and survived. They and I also made it through the 2008-ish depression. In 1999 I was working for a major corporation, and we were all required to be in the office at midnight 12/31/1999, ready to intervene in case the telecomm and/or computer systems failed, causing airplanes to fall from the sky. They did not.

I am quite sure that in the future there will be some major hiccups in the way the world works, as there have always been from time to time. But unless there is some major natural catastrophe that wipes out everything (like the caldera at Yellowstone exploding, or a really big meteorite impact), I have a reasonable degree of confidence that things will be relatively ok.

Technological singularity is a notion that Ray Kurzweil has come up with that technology is advancing so quickly that in the near future... the next 40 years or so, that most people will live for hundreds of years, and that it will eventually make us immortal. Very Googleable. http://www.singularity.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Yes, but I did not want to google it, and still don't as a matter of fact. I guess you did want to, so it works out for the both of us.

Yes, but I did not want to google it, and still don't as a matter of fact. I guess you did want to, so it works out for the both of us.