If you look at history you start to get the "evil" idea that Thanos was right. Every time the population is halved, or at least a significant part of it is eliminated, the standard of living of the survivors increases.
The Black Death (which was not bubonic plague, it was a hemorrhagic disease, which plague is not*) turned Europe from a continent where lords owned the people as slaves to one where workers had the power to demand improved standards of living and allowed for the creation, for the first time ever, of a middle class. Social mobility was created. Had millions of people not died and the social order of the world not been overturned those opportunities would never have arisen.
After 100 million people died in the Second World War America, as the only industrial nation that was not destroyed, saw the greatest boom economy in human history. For the first time ever a man with no education, no training, and no connections could demand, and get, a job that could support a wife, three kids, two cars, a house, a month of vacation, and retire in 30 years and live off a full pension. It was the first time ever that young adults could venture off on their own and not have to live in multi-generational families just to make ends meet (something still tragically seen as normal in our crippled economy). Had millions of people not died and nations not bombed to oblivion that opportunity would have never arisen.
Even in the Soviet Union, with that man-made catastrophe rent by Stalin that saw the murder of 20 million people, actually dramatically improved the lives of the survivors. An entire nation of peasant slaves was turned into an industrial super power with a standard of living half that of the United States in only 70 years. The survivors did have their lives improved. That would never have happened under the Tsar where everyone lived as chattel in an agrarian shithole.
History seems to attest to the fact that there really is a finite amount of resources, and if you eliminate half the people everyone not only gets double the share, but those double shares are worth even more.
"But why not just double the resources?"
Because things that are not earned have no value. Low IQ people take resources given to them by guilty Westerners and use those resources to quadruple their populations. Doubling the resources just exacerbates the problem by incentivizing bad behavior.
Everyone wanted silver, which was rare and highly valued. Wars were waged over silver. But when Spain discovered Potosi, the largest silver deposits in the world, and the supply of silver increased dramatically, all of a sudden silver became worthless because everyone had it and the Spanish economy collapsed.
Everyone wants to be a trillionaire, but when Zimbabwe made everyone a trillionaire the money became worthless. If everyone has a trillion dollars then no one will work, no one will pave roads, or build houses, or bake bread, or raise chickens. Why work when you're rich? But then, since no one is working, all those ordinary goods become extremely valuable and money becomes worthless.
Increasing the supply of a given resource devalues it. Increasing the supply of food, for example, would cause the excess food to rot and be wasted, or would incentivize people to have more kids who would demand more food, which would require resources to be doubled again to meet the new demand.
Any perceived increase in standard of living brought on by increasing resources is an illusion predicated on credit. Extraction of ground water and phosphate have allowed for an increase of food production which has allowed 6 billion extra people to be born in excess of the carrying capacity of the planet. The problem is ground water and phosphate take thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years to become replenished. Meanwhile they are exhausted in generations. Saudi Arabia totally depleted its ground water supply in a couple decades. There are places in America where the ground has subsided 70 feet or more because of the extraction of aquifers that took millennia to fill up. Whole "guano islands" were mined below the waves to extract phosphate for fertilizer and for making explosives and have been depleted in the past century.
It's a simple calculus: extraction of these resources allows for the increase of the population because most people have no concept of a future beyond their own death (or maybe the deaths of their children), an increase in population leads to an escalating pace of resource extraction beyond the point where those resources are being replenished, which leads to a population crash.
Now, it's true that places like Japan and Europe, especially Eastern Europe, have seen declining populations, but Africa's population is exploding. Within the next 50 years 1 in 3 people on the planet will be African if this trend continues. Sustainable agriculture can only support 2 billion people, and there will be at least 4 billion Africans who will not work, who will not invent new particle physics, who will not build rockets to colonize Mars. 4 billion more mouths to be fed by an increasingly smaller pool of Western workers who are being replaced in their home countries.
The long-term survival of the human species requires colonization of other planets. That cannot happen if dumb Westerners keep giving aid to countries in Africa and across the third world where people breed like crazy. There is a finite supply of resources, and those resources must be apportioned toward advancing the survival of the human species over the long-term, not increasing the population dramatically in the here and now.
The long-term survival of the human species requires the immediate end of foreign aid across the board.
“But wouldn't the population just grow back if half of it is eliminated?”
No, not if you eliminate the half that breeds beyond the replacement level.
You're committing the fallacy of assuming humans are fungible, like bacteria. If you eliminate half of a colony of bacteria the colony will just continue to grow until all the resources are consumed. If you double the resources for the colony to grow on the colony will continue to grow until all the resources are consumed.
If you double the resources on Earth some humans will continue to breed until all the resources are consumed. If you remove the half that is breeding beyond replacement level then those resources can be recycled, as they always have been.
Resources are recycled. There are water cycles, phosphate cycles, nitrogen cycles, carbon cycles. Humans use resources, die, and the dead bodies decompose and return the elements to the Earth to be reused. If population is kept stable, at the carrying capacity, then resources can be recycled endlessly. The world will not become overrun with Japanese people, ever. Japanese people are not exhausting resources to fuel their bottomless thirst for expansion, like in China or Saudi Arabia, or Chad. If the wasteful half is eliminated, or simply not allowed to expand, then the stable, sustainable half can reuse the world's resources endlessly until the Sun dies.
*The disease that killed most of the people in the Americas when the Spanish arrived is called "Cocoliztli". It has the same symptoms as the Black Death: high fever, profuse bleeding, large dark spots - especially around the neck and genitals, bloody diarrhea, bloody vomiting, severe body pains, delusions, discoloration and necrosis of the skin. Death was usually in 3-5 days after onset of symptoms, an extremely short amount of time. We don't know the incubation/latency period is, there are very few diseases that kill that quickly. People with Ebola usually linger for 21 days or so. Cholera can kill quicker, but that's from fluid loss.
Coupled with the fact that the disease is spread primarily from person to person, and was devastating in areas that were virtually rodent free while sparing other areas that were teaming with rats, indicates that some unknown viral hemorrhagic fever was the worst killer of humans of all time. It wiped out 75% of Eurasia and 90% of North and South America. We are all the survivors of some extremely virulent disease that nearly brought humanity to extinction within a span of 300 years.
Showing posts with label World Water Crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World Water Crisis. Show all posts
Saturday, September 7, 2019
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
The Failure of Economics
The problem with all economic systems is money. There's not enough of it. Alternately you could say there are too many people, but I'm not going to go down the path of suggesting genocide, so let's say the problem is not enough money. I read somewhere that even if all the money in the world was divided equally among everyone that would mean everyone only gets about $5,000. And no new money would be made because everyone would be too poor to do anything. There's just not enough money in the world for 8 billion people.
You look at all the times when there was a spectacular economic situation for some people and you see the reason is always because the world has become hell on earth for others. The US prospered like no country before or since during the 50s-70s because WW2 destroyed all possible competition and lead to the deaths of 50-100 million people. Even the paupers in America lived as kings because there were jobs galore and they paid unbelievable wages. Once the rest of the world rebuilt then the wealth of America vanished, it spread around elsewhere.
What else do you see? Places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the native population does not work, at all. They can pull unlimited money out of the ground and they import basically slaves ("sponsored workers") to do all the labour for the native population who all live like kings off welfare. But that's ending too. They realise that oil is not infinite so they are desperately trying to diversify their economies so as to avoid what would inevitably be the devolution of their crapulent societies into Somalia.
I've read the literature, methane, created by bacteria in the deep ocean vents, is transformed into butane and propane under heat, and has been shown to turn into crude oil in laboratory conditions mimicking the upper mantle. Oil is not a fossil fuel, but it's not inexhaustible, just like ground water. We're extracting it faster than it's being replenished. I don't care if the Earth is "9,000 miles deep" as one Youtube commentator has expressed, you can see that technology is not advancing anywhere near fast enough to make up for the decreasing supply of available resources, be they ground water, oil, gold, or anything else. The thickness of the Earth is the problem, not the solution. It's just not possible to drill that deep, and gold or oil or whatever just isn't worth nearly enough to justify developing drilling technologies further. There's not enough money.
The only way to fix the global economic disaster that is looming fast, without starting another world war, is to discover some previously unknown magic resource to take the place of oil. There needs to be something super abundant that is extremely valuable and extremely useful as a resource and it needs to be extremely easy to attain and we need to find it soon or all hell will break loose.
Communism, socialism, capitalism, corporatism, "social democracy", they don't work because of human nature and because of the nature of the world itself.
Communism bullshit.
First of all, Marx was a hypocrite who understood nothing about human nature. "When a people's basic needs are met then people will work for free. Work will be its own reward." Bullshit. Bullshit. People will not work for free, even if all their basic needs are met. People will only work for money or for a cause to which they are totally devoted (like family or religion). People will not work for nothing if they don't have to, and they will not work if there is no correlation between work and reward.
Second, planned economies don't work because it's impossible to predict the future to that degree of specificity. That's why planned economies always have shortages. A grocery store in a communist country might have one salami hanging up and you're not allowed to have it, but the party bosses can have mansions and limousines and caviar.
"But that's not real communism."
Bullshit, but let's indulge your fantasy.
"Communism works perfectly on paper but the problem is that real communism has never been implemented."
No. If by "real communism" you mean a stateless, classless society then you have to admit that "real communism" is a utopian fantasy that can never ever be realised ever in this or any world. The second you get two people together you have a hierarchy, because people have different degrees of competence so someone will always be better than someone else, and a hierarchy on the scale of a society is a class structure. You also develop a state structure, even in hunter-gatherer societies (so called "primitive communism"). This is "our" land, as opposed to "their" land. And tribes went to war with each other constantly because humans are territorial animals, just like chimpanzees. So if you're definition of "real communism" is a utopian fantasy than you might as well admit to being wrong from the start.
"Real communism" also doesn't work well "on paper" because humans won't work for free. Work is not its own reward, if it was people wouldn't need to be paid to work, and of the thousands of experiments that have been done to disprove this basic reality of human nature none has ever succeeded. No hippie commune or Marxist revolutionary vanguard has ever produced a system where people will work for free because "Well isn't that swell, I might as well help my neighbors out. And work is just so gosh darn fun too." If you worked all the time and got nothing out of it then you wouldn't keep working. That's not even a human trait, that's true of all animals. Unless you're getting more than you put in then the activity isn't worth the caloric output.
Socialism is bullshit too. Unless you have a very small, ethnically homogenous population that can pull wealth out of the ground there's no incentive to sacrifice for others in society. That's just human nature too. In-group preference. Four million Norwegians floating on an ocean of oil might pay 70% income tax to give all their fellow Norwegians "free" healthcare, but that will never work in a place like the United States where there are 350 million people of every ethnic group who don't trust each other and are unwilling to sacrifice for members of different tribes.
What happens when you have bureaucrats divvying up handouts supposedly to the people most in need? What happens every single time? They give handouts to the people who will vote them into office. Politicians buy votes by giving away "free" shit to people with low IQs who breed like rabbits because, surprise, selfishness is another part of human nature.
Maybe robots might be able to work out the system of handouts perfectly. Robots, who were deemed the overlords of humanity and had unchallengeable might, and who acted out of pure rationality and followed routines by rote without any outside factors influencing their judgment might be able to make a social welfare state work. Robots would be dispassionate enough not to be bought off by special interest groups, and if they were willing to let humans live (as pets, say), then, and only then, could socialism work. Or you might get a system where the machines decide we all must be plugged into the Matrix because humans are self-destructive by nature.
And capitalism bullshit.
The US economy is worth $18 trillion. There are 350 million people (50 million of whom are illegal). Divide the two up and you get $51,000 per person per year.
So why are there people with $100 billion and other people struggling to survive on less than $20,000?
You'll see corporations with big CEOs who make $100 million bonuses on top of the money they already make sitting on the boards of directors of six other corporations, yet they won't pay their workers a living wage. Pundits always say that the profit margins are razor thin. Well if the profit margins are so thin that the company can't pay a living wage yet the CEO can make $100 million, or with smaller businesses where the bosses can hire and promote their incompetent friends at outrageous salaries, then those businesses have very shitty business models and deserve to go out of business. If carpetbaggers can exploit their workers to make millions and not even give those workers enough to live then those people should be put in jail. It's like Citi Group or the AIG or the Goldman Sachs. Everyone in upper and middle management of those corporations should be in jail for life.
So what's left? Could post-economics work, or is it too doomed by the flaws in human nature?
You look at all the times when there was a spectacular economic situation for some people and you see the reason is always because the world has become hell on earth for others. The US prospered like no country before or since during the 50s-70s because WW2 destroyed all possible competition and lead to the deaths of 50-100 million people. Even the paupers in America lived as kings because there were jobs galore and they paid unbelievable wages. Once the rest of the world rebuilt then the wealth of America vanished, it spread around elsewhere.
What else do you see? Places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the native population does not work, at all. They can pull unlimited money out of the ground and they import basically slaves ("sponsored workers") to do all the labour for the native population who all live like kings off welfare. But that's ending too. They realise that oil is not infinite so they are desperately trying to diversify their economies so as to avoid what would inevitably be the devolution of their crapulent societies into Somalia.
I've read the literature, methane, created by bacteria in the deep ocean vents, is transformed into butane and propane under heat, and has been shown to turn into crude oil in laboratory conditions mimicking the upper mantle. Oil is not a fossil fuel, but it's not inexhaustible, just like ground water. We're extracting it faster than it's being replenished. I don't care if the Earth is "9,000 miles deep" as one Youtube commentator has expressed, you can see that technology is not advancing anywhere near fast enough to make up for the decreasing supply of available resources, be they ground water, oil, gold, or anything else. The thickness of the Earth is the problem, not the solution. It's just not possible to drill that deep, and gold or oil or whatever just isn't worth nearly enough to justify developing drilling technologies further. There's not enough money.
The only way to fix the global economic disaster that is looming fast, without starting another world war, is to discover some previously unknown magic resource to take the place of oil. There needs to be something super abundant that is extremely valuable and extremely useful as a resource and it needs to be extremely easy to attain and we need to find it soon or all hell will break loose.
Communism, socialism, capitalism, corporatism, "social democracy", they don't work because of human nature and because of the nature of the world itself.
Communism bullshit.
First of all, Marx was a hypocrite who understood nothing about human nature. "When a people's basic needs are met then people will work for free. Work will be its own reward." Bullshit. Bullshit. People will not work for free, even if all their basic needs are met. People will only work for money or for a cause to which they are totally devoted (like family or religion). People will not work for nothing if they don't have to, and they will not work if there is no correlation between work and reward.
Second, planned economies don't work because it's impossible to predict the future to that degree of specificity. That's why planned economies always have shortages. A grocery store in a communist country might have one salami hanging up and you're not allowed to have it, but the party bosses can have mansions and limousines and caviar.
"But that's not real communism."
Bullshit, but let's indulge your fantasy.
"Communism works perfectly on paper but the problem is that real communism has never been implemented."
No. If by "real communism" you mean a stateless, classless society then you have to admit that "real communism" is a utopian fantasy that can never ever be realised ever in this or any world. The second you get two people together you have a hierarchy, because people have different degrees of competence so someone will always be better than someone else, and a hierarchy on the scale of a society is a class structure. You also develop a state structure, even in hunter-gatherer societies (so called "primitive communism"). This is "our" land, as opposed to "their" land. And tribes went to war with each other constantly because humans are territorial animals, just like chimpanzees. So if you're definition of "real communism" is a utopian fantasy than you might as well admit to being wrong from the start.
"Real communism" also doesn't work well "on paper" because humans won't work for free. Work is not its own reward, if it was people wouldn't need to be paid to work, and of the thousands of experiments that have been done to disprove this basic reality of human nature none has ever succeeded. No hippie commune or Marxist revolutionary vanguard has ever produced a system where people will work for free because "Well isn't that swell, I might as well help my neighbors out. And work is just so gosh darn fun too." If you worked all the time and got nothing out of it then you wouldn't keep working. That's not even a human trait, that's true of all animals. Unless you're getting more than you put in then the activity isn't worth the caloric output.
Socialism is bullshit too. Unless you have a very small, ethnically homogenous population that can pull wealth out of the ground there's no incentive to sacrifice for others in society. That's just human nature too. In-group preference. Four million Norwegians floating on an ocean of oil might pay 70% income tax to give all their fellow Norwegians "free" healthcare, but that will never work in a place like the United States where there are 350 million people of every ethnic group who don't trust each other and are unwilling to sacrifice for members of different tribes.
What happens when you have bureaucrats divvying up handouts supposedly to the people most in need? What happens every single time? They give handouts to the people who will vote them into office. Politicians buy votes by giving away "free" shit to people with low IQs who breed like rabbits because, surprise, selfishness is another part of human nature.
Maybe robots might be able to work out the system of handouts perfectly. Robots, who were deemed the overlords of humanity and had unchallengeable might, and who acted out of pure rationality and followed routines by rote without any outside factors influencing their judgment might be able to make a social welfare state work. Robots would be dispassionate enough not to be bought off by special interest groups, and if they were willing to let humans live (as pets, say), then, and only then, could socialism work. Or you might get a system where the machines decide we all must be plugged into the Matrix because humans are self-destructive by nature.
And capitalism bullshit.
The US economy is worth $18 trillion. There are 350 million people (50 million of whom are illegal). Divide the two up and you get $51,000 per person per year.
So why are there people with $100 billion and other people struggling to survive on less than $20,000?
You'll see corporations with big CEOs who make $100 million bonuses on top of the money they already make sitting on the boards of directors of six other corporations, yet they won't pay their workers a living wage. Pundits always say that the profit margins are razor thin. Well if the profit margins are so thin that the company can't pay a living wage yet the CEO can make $100 million, or with smaller businesses where the bosses can hire and promote their incompetent friends at outrageous salaries, then those businesses have very shitty business models and deserve to go out of business. If carpetbaggers can exploit their workers to make millions and not even give those workers enough to live then those people should be put in jail. It's like Citi Group or the AIG or the Goldman Sachs. Everyone in upper and middle management of those corporations should be in jail for life.
So what's left? Could post-economics work, or is it too doomed by the flaws in human nature?
Thursday, June 8, 2017
The Long, Slow Decline
How much computing power would be needed to simulate the Matrix? A whole lot more than every computer combined. Unless there's some quantum leap in computing it may even be impossible.
That's just like a realisation I had a few years back. I wrote a piece called "Dreams of Foreign Suns" (it was all the way back in 2013, was it?) and again in "A Future I Did Nazi Coming".
At least three factors seem to be working together against creating the science fiction future:
1. Declining rate of technological advancement.
We've already seen the decline in shrinking processors. Processor speed is able to increase because we're adding multiple cores to processors, but the miniaturisation of transistors will reach a hard limit very very soon due to the quantum effects on individual silicon atoms.
At the same time we're seeing decline in advancement in other technologies. It's been decades since new antibiotics have been developed, and with the disaster of antibiotic resistance, the age of wonder drugs will also reach a hard limit probably over the next generation. We'll once again return to the era where a papercut could be life threatening.
There's also a decline in new energy technologies. I did a study in 2004 for a landscaper about the cost effectiveness of solar power. Scanning the literature last year I discovered, to my dismay, that the efficiency of photovoltaics has not increased at all in 12 years. Not to mention the fact that to manufacture solar cells requires an input of more energy than the cells will produce in their entire lifetime and creates tons of toxic waste, the whole technology is a bust. Add to that the reality that acquiring energy basically means pumping water into low pressure gas wells to re-vitalise them, and the endless political hurdles facing thorium power, our future energy prospects seem grim.
We're also running out of key resources like phosphate and potable water. There's likely another two centuries of "fossil" fuels remaining, even at the current rate of consumption, but ground water will definitely be gone in the next 50 years (and probably sooner) unless some drastic change is made. Once water and phosphate are depleted the Earth's population drops from 8 billion to 1 billion, because that's how much food traditional agriculture can produce.
2. I'm going to call this the "Energy Cliff".
The amount of energy it takes to become a spacefaring civilisation is absolutely astronomical. It's possible, as I've pointed out before, we've known how to travel to at least the nearest stars within a single human lifetime using technology that is reasonably within our capability, it's just not very practical. We could use nuclear pulse propulsion, such as Orion, and even though the fallout would likely only kill three or four people, the EMPs produced by the 800 nuclear explosions needed just to reach orbit would destroy the technology that's keeping billions of people alive. To say nothing of the tens of thousands of new nuclear warheads that would have to be produced to fuel the rockets.
It doesn't seem likely that we'll find the power to keep China's endless construction of ghost cities afloat, let alone colonising say just the Moon and Mars. If we're going to do this in human time scales (one month to Mars instead of 14, 50 years to Alpha Centauri instead of 40,000) there is going to have to be a quantum leap in the ability to produce energy to get the damn rockets into space. Kerosene and liquid oxygen just won't cut it, and neither will setting off a ton of nukes.
3. Humans are becoming more anti-social.
Call it "affluenza", or vermin paradise*, or whatever you like. The more people move to cities the more anti-social they become. Anti-social humans are the perfect useful idiots for gigantic, bloated bureaucratic governments that either don't want to or are unable to tackle problems 1 and 2. The European Union passed a law regulating the acceptable degree of bend in bananas, thousands and thousands of tons of fish are caught and thrown away, lakes of wine and mountains of butter are destroyed to meet arbitrary quotas set by bureaucrats. And the rapefugees. Millions of rapefugees are imported to keep the criminal debt-based banking system solvent.
The more people move to cities the more they become anti-social and the more likely they are to vote for these kinds of obstructionist governments that, ironically, call themselves "progressive" while stonewalling any real technological, economic, scientific, or cultural progress. The more "progressive" human society becomes the less actual progress humans will make toward developing new energy, medicine, and aerospace technologies.
And there doesn't seem to be a way out.
By the way, I'm not suggesting going back to the 1950s. I'm not suggesting that radical "off the grid" "rugged individualism" or just becoming more like redneck 'muricans is the solution either. It's not. That's the problem that I've been trying to point out for several years now. Neither the "right" or the "left" has the solution to these problems. They both seem to be in a state of arrested development.
Drilling into Mt. Rushmore to get more oil won't solve any of these problems. Neither will driving gas-guzzling tanks just to piss off environmentalists, nor will wind turbines and solar panels.
The "free market" or anarcho-capitalism won't solve these problems.
Communism, socialism, or "social democratism" won't solve these problems.
Feminism, MIGTOW, transhumanism, AI, the "singularity", or any other utopian visionary bullshit won't solve these problems.
None of these positions will be able to solve these problems because they can't even see the problems. The very existence of these -isms is the heart of the problem.
A dramatic quantum leap in human psychosocial and technological evolution is required. And I don't think that's possible. I think humans are just too damn stupid. You can graph the ability of an animal to socialise by brain size, and even though human intelligence affords 10,000 times less interpersonal conflict than is seen in chimpanzees, it's just not enough. The upper limit on any totally cohesive human society is 5,000 individuals. Unless the fundamental limitations of the human brain are either transcended or global society itself is radically altered to accomidate those limitations, there can be no solution.
And that's very depressing if you think about it.
*There was an experiment with rats or hamsters or something (vermin) where their every need was instantly met. The population exploded until a certain population density was reached, then the rats became anti-social, stopped breeding, and they all died out.
That's just like a realisation I had a few years back. I wrote a piece called "Dreams of Foreign Suns" (it was all the way back in 2013, was it?) and again in "A Future I Did Nazi Coming".
At least three factors seem to be working together against creating the science fiction future:
1. Declining rate of technological advancement.
We've already seen the decline in shrinking processors. Processor speed is able to increase because we're adding multiple cores to processors, but the miniaturisation of transistors will reach a hard limit very very soon due to the quantum effects on individual silicon atoms.
At the same time we're seeing decline in advancement in other technologies. It's been decades since new antibiotics have been developed, and with the disaster of antibiotic resistance, the age of wonder drugs will also reach a hard limit probably over the next generation. We'll once again return to the era where a papercut could be life threatening.
There's also a decline in new energy technologies. I did a study in 2004 for a landscaper about the cost effectiveness of solar power. Scanning the literature last year I discovered, to my dismay, that the efficiency of photovoltaics has not increased at all in 12 years. Not to mention the fact that to manufacture solar cells requires an input of more energy than the cells will produce in their entire lifetime and creates tons of toxic waste, the whole technology is a bust. Add to that the reality that acquiring energy basically means pumping water into low pressure gas wells to re-vitalise them, and the endless political hurdles facing thorium power, our future energy prospects seem grim.
We're also running out of key resources like phosphate and potable water. There's likely another two centuries of "fossil" fuels remaining, even at the current rate of consumption, but ground water will definitely be gone in the next 50 years (and probably sooner) unless some drastic change is made. Once water and phosphate are depleted the Earth's population drops from 8 billion to 1 billion, because that's how much food traditional agriculture can produce.
2. I'm going to call this the "Energy Cliff".
The amount of energy it takes to become a spacefaring civilisation is absolutely astronomical. It's possible, as I've pointed out before, we've known how to travel to at least the nearest stars within a single human lifetime using technology that is reasonably within our capability, it's just not very practical. We could use nuclear pulse propulsion, such as Orion, and even though the fallout would likely only kill three or four people, the EMPs produced by the 800 nuclear explosions needed just to reach orbit would destroy the technology that's keeping billions of people alive. To say nothing of the tens of thousands of new nuclear warheads that would have to be produced to fuel the rockets.
It doesn't seem likely that we'll find the power to keep China's endless construction of ghost cities afloat, let alone colonising say just the Moon and Mars. If we're going to do this in human time scales (one month to Mars instead of 14, 50 years to Alpha Centauri instead of 40,000) there is going to have to be a quantum leap in the ability to produce energy to get the damn rockets into space. Kerosene and liquid oxygen just won't cut it, and neither will setting off a ton of nukes.
3. Humans are becoming more anti-social.
Call it "affluenza", or vermin paradise*, or whatever you like. The more people move to cities the more anti-social they become. Anti-social humans are the perfect useful idiots for gigantic, bloated bureaucratic governments that either don't want to or are unable to tackle problems 1 and 2. The European Union passed a law regulating the acceptable degree of bend in bananas, thousands and thousands of tons of fish are caught and thrown away, lakes of wine and mountains of butter are destroyed to meet arbitrary quotas set by bureaucrats. And the rapefugees. Millions of rapefugees are imported to keep the criminal debt-based banking system solvent.
The more people move to cities the more they become anti-social and the more likely they are to vote for these kinds of obstructionist governments that, ironically, call themselves "progressive" while stonewalling any real technological, economic, scientific, or cultural progress. The more "progressive" human society becomes the less actual progress humans will make toward developing new energy, medicine, and aerospace technologies.
And there doesn't seem to be a way out.
By the way, I'm not suggesting going back to the 1950s. I'm not suggesting that radical "off the grid" "rugged individualism" or just becoming more like redneck 'muricans is the solution either. It's not. That's the problem that I've been trying to point out for several years now. Neither the "right" or the "left" has the solution to these problems. They both seem to be in a state of arrested development.
Drilling into Mt. Rushmore to get more oil won't solve any of these problems. Neither will driving gas-guzzling tanks just to piss off environmentalists, nor will wind turbines and solar panels.
The "free market" or anarcho-capitalism won't solve these problems.
Communism, socialism, or "social democratism" won't solve these problems.
Feminism, MIGTOW, transhumanism, AI, the "singularity", or any other utopian visionary bullshit won't solve these problems.
None of these positions will be able to solve these problems because they can't even see the problems. The very existence of these -isms is the heart of the problem.
A dramatic quantum leap in human psychosocial and technological evolution is required. And I don't think that's possible. I think humans are just too damn stupid. You can graph the ability of an animal to socialise by brain size, and even though human intelligence affords 10,000 times less interpersonal conflict than is seen in chimpanzees, it's just not enough. The upper limit on any totally cohesive human society is 5,000 individuals. Unless the fundamental limitations of the human brain are either transcended or global society itself is radically altered to accomidate those limitations, there can be no solution.
And that's very depressing if you think about it.
*There was an experiment with rats or hamsters or something (vermin) where their every need was instantly met. The population exploded until a certain population density was reached, then the rats became anti-social, stopped breeding, and they all died out.
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Cults: Veganism
Lierre Keith is a writer, radical feminist, food activist, and environmentalist (three out of four isn't bad). She's written a book, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, that exposes the cult of veganism and how it is destroying the planet (literally).
Amazon's description:
Part memoir, nutritional primer, and political manifesto, this controversial examination exposes the destructive history of agriculture—causing the devastation of prairies and forests, driving countless species extinct, altering the climate, and destroying the topsoil—and asserts that, in order to save the planet, food must come from within living communities. In order for this to happen, the argument champions eating locally and sustainably and encourages those with the resources to grow their own food. Further examining the question of what to eat from the perspective of both human and environmental health, the account goes beyond health choices and discusses potential moral issues from eating—or not eating—animals. Through the deeply personal narrative of someone who practiced veganism for 20 years, this unique exploration also discusses alternatives to industrial farming, reveals the risks of a vegan diet, and explains why animals belong on ecologically sound farms.
Agriculture is tremendously destructive of the environment. The vegan lifestyle is actually the least environmentally friendly of all possible options. Forests and fields need to be cleared, habitat needs to be destroyed, aquifers need to be drained, and oil needs to be drilled to make fertiliser. The system of agribusiness we have in place right now is only possible due to massive government subsidies and petrochemical fertiliser. 5 billion people are alive today because of artificial phosphate fertilisers and ground water irrigation. Those phosphates won't last forever, and neither will the groundwater, just like the guano. Personally I suspect there's two or more centuries worth of oil that remain to be exploited, but phosphates and ground water are being depleted faster than they can be replenished, and I don't put much hope for future utopianisms. Old methods of agriculture can only supply food for about two billion people, not seven, and it takes millions of years for aquifers to fill with water and caves to fill with shit to be used to grow food for five billion real people who will die if they don't eat anything.
There was a great discovery in 1802 of something called guano. Guano is bird shit, and it is perfect for fertiliser (and for making explosives and gunpowder). The great powers of Europe waged wars and colonised the entire planet in search of guano. For thousandsof years seabirds had crapped on tiny rocks and islands, creating piles of guano hundreds of feet thick, and it only took about a century for all the guano to be mined. How long will it take for all the groundwater, phosphate, and oil to be mined? 50 years? 100? Some places like Saudi Arabia, which had tremendous aquifers, have already depleated their groundwater in a single lifetime. They engaged in massive agriculture, growing cash crops like alfalfa and soy that use a tremendous amount of water, and now that they've run out they are buying up water in the United States to grow soy on US soil, depleating our own water reserves.
Some people, most people I would assume, place hope in "future science". "Future science will solve all of our problems!" Has it? Most animals were not designed to eat corn (a human invention of the Andes peoples). But the government subsidises corn, and petrochemical fertilisers can grow a ton of it cheap, so tons of corn are grown and fed to animals to fatten them up quickly. Those animals, because they are eating junk and living in their own shit in cages too small to move, need to be pumped with antibiotics to keep from dropping dead. Massive reliance on antibiotics in factory farms have produced superbugs that are now resistant to all of our drugs of last resort. Just this year colistin, a drug so potent and toxic that it was used only to combat bacteria that would respond to no other treatment, has just met its match in drug resistant superbugs. How could this happen? Because although colostin was only very rarely used in humans, China pumped tons of the stuff into pigs and chickens to keep them from dropping dead in hideously polluted factory farms. Just this May the first colostin-resistant bacteria was discovered. We have no idea if that bacteria has escaped into the wild. Even if it has not we're not too far away from a time when all antibiotics are rendered useless (unless we develop new ones, and there haven't been any new antibiotics in decades). In a single lifetime we have seen the rise and fall of drugs to combat disease.
It's not just superbugs, it's our own bodies too. We're not designed to ingest massive quantities of grown hormone, antibiotics, estrogen from birth control that ends up in the water supply, and all the other toxic crap we're putting into food to grow lots of it really quick and make it last forever.
What if "future science" doesn't solve all of our problems? What is "future science" anyway? It's that stuff no one wants to invest in because it's not two hundred year old science. I love oil. I'm sitting on oil, typing on oil, looking at pictures projected on oil, in a house lit by oil, and I eat food that exists only because of oil, but maybe we should be investing in things beside oil because it's stupid to rely on only one kind of power source, just in case something bad happens to it?
Getting beyond that, the human body isn't designed to eat a plant diet. Most plants are toxic and need to be cooked to destroy those toxins before it is safe to eat them. Even then, most plants aren't too good for your body anyway, and cellulose is impossible to digest, so most of what you're eating just ends up filling the toilet. Some animals can digest plants, animals with very long, complicated guts. Pack hunters like humans, have shorter guts designed to digest meat from animals with longer guts. Herbivores do all the work, we get all the benefit. It's win-win really. Cows, sheep, and pigs are tremendously successful species, because they taste good. Domesticated animals have a very good chance of reproducing. That's why there are billions of them. These animals have thrived, while their wild counterparts have gone extinct, because they have adapted to life under human control. Eating meat keeps many species from going extinct, keeps wilderness land from being destroyed and turned into farms, and provides the human body what it needs to survive.
That said, there's a right and a wrong way to raise animals. The factory farms that pump animals full of antibiotics is the wrong way. What's the right way? Read the book.
Amazon's description:
Part memoir, nutritional primer, and political manifesto, this controversial examination exposes the destructive history of agriculture—causing the devastation of prairies and forests, driving countless species extinct, altering the climate, and destroying the topsoil—and asserts that, in order to save the planet, food must come from within living communities. In order for this to happen, the argument champions eating locally and sustainably and encourages those with the resources to grow their own food. Further examining the question of what to eat from the perspective of both human and environmental health, the account goes beyond health choices and discusses potential moral issues from eating—or not eating—animals. Through the deeply personal narrative of someone who practiced veganism for 20 years, this unique exploration also discusses alternatives to industrial farming, reveals the risks of a vegan diet, and explains why animals belong on ecologically sound farms.
Agriculture is tremendously destructive of the environment. The vegan lifestyle is actually the least environmentally friendly of all possible options. Forests and fields need to be cleared, habitat needs to be destroyed, aquifers need to be drained, and oil needs to be drilled to make fertiliser. The system of agribusiness we have in place right now is only possible due to massive government subsidies and petrochemical fertiliser. 5 billion people are alive today because of artificial phosphate fertilisers and ground water irrigation. Those phosphates won't last forever, and neither will the groundwater, just like the guano. Personally I suspect there's two or more centuries worth of oil that remain to be exploited, but phosphates and ground water are being depleted faster than they can be replenished, and I don't put much hope for future utopianisms. Old methods of agriculture can only supply food for about two billion people, not seven, and it takes millions of years for aquifers to fill with water and caves to fill with shit to be used to grow food for five billion real people who will die if they don't eat anything.
There was a great discovery in 1802 of something called guano. Guano is bird shit, and it is perfect for fertiliser (and for making explosives and gunpowder). The great powers of Europe waged wars and colonised the entire planet in search of guano. For thousandsof years seabirds had crapped on tiny rocks and islands, creating piles of guano hundreds of feet thick, and it only took about a century for all the guano to be mined. How long will it take for all the groundwater, phosphate, and oil to be mined? 50 years? 100? Some places like Saudi Arabia, which had tremendous aquifers, have already depleated their groundwater in a single lifetime. They engaged in massive agriculture, growing cash crops like alfalfa and soy that use a tremendous amount of water, and now that they've run out they are buying up water in the United States to grow soy on US soil, depleating our own water reserves.
Some people, most people I would assume, place hope in "future science". "Future science will solve all of our problems!" Has it? Most animals were not designed to eat corn (a human invention of the Andes peoples). But the government subsidises corn, and petrochemical fertilisers can grow a ton of it cheap, so tons of corn are grown and fed to animals to fatten them up quickly. Those animals, because they are eating junk and living in their own shit in cages too small to move, need to be pumped with antibiotics to keep from dropping dead. Massive reliance on antibiotics in factory farms have produced superbugs that are now resistant to all of our drugs of last resort. Just this year colistin, a drug so potent and toxic that it was used only to combat bacteria that would respond to no other treatment, has just met its match in drug resistant superbugs. How could this happen? Because although colostin was only very rarely used in humans, China pumped tons of the stuff into pigs and chickens to keep them from dropping dead in hideously polluted factory farms. Just this May the first colostin-resistant bacteria was discovered. We have no idea if that bacteria has escaped into the wild. Even if it has not we're not too far away from a time when all antibiotics are rendered useless (unless we develop new ones, and there haven't been any new antibiotics in decades). In a single lifetime we have seen the rise and fall of drugs to combat disease.
It's not just superbugs, it's our own bodies too. We're not designed to ingest massive quantities of grown hormone, antibiotics, estrogen from birth control that ends up in the water supply, and all the other toxic crap we're putting into food to grow lots of it really quick and make it last forever.
What if "future science" doesn't solve all of our problems? What is "future science" anyway? It's that stuff no one wants to invest in because it's not two hundred year old science. I love oil. I'm sitting on oil, typing on oil, looking at pictures projected on oil, in a house lit by oil, and I eat food that exists only because of oil, but maybe we should be investing in things beside oil because it's stupid to rely on only one kind of power source, just in case something bad happens to it?
Getting beyond that, the human body isn't designed to eat a plant diet. Most plants are toxic and need to be cooked to destroy those toxins before it is safe to eat them. Even then, most plants aren't too good for your body anyway, and cellulose is impossible to digest, so most of what you're eating just ends up filling the toilet. Some animals can digest plants, animals with very long, complicated guts. Pack hunters like humans, have shorter guts designed to digest meat from animals with longer guts. Herbivores do all the work, we get all the benefit. It's win-win really. Cows, sheep, and pigs are tremendously successful species, because they taste good. Domesticated animals have a very good chance of reproducing. That's why there are billions of them. These animals have thrived, while their wild counterparts have gone extinct, because they have adapted to life under human control. Eating meat keeps many species from going extinct, keeps wilderness land from being destroyed and turned into farms, and provides the human body what it needs to survive.
That said, there's a right and a wrong way to raise animals. The factory farms that pump animals full of antibiotics is the wrong way. What's the right way? Read the book.
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