OH NOES!

I just love the fact that due to the protection of individuality, people have stooped to basic insults and mud-slinging.

Please. This is a VERY interesting comparison to a very short lived phenomenon in the early years of the Industrial Revolution (Luddism), and ideally, I'd love to see debate happen from people who A) Have an understanding of what they're talking about, and B) do so in an intellectual manner that gets their point across.

As a historian in training, insulting someone (particularly in an anonymous forum) kind of hurts.

'interesting' is a subjective concept.

Speak for yourself, anonymous guy. My user name is my actual name.

And I'm not sure if you've paying attention to the forums, this isn't the first time Sicarius has come in here with barely-baked ideas, and been slapped around.

There isn't much to debate. Read very carefully..... he has a lot of words, but he doesn't actually have much to say. Its sort of like listening to Fox News.

@Sic

This is what I truly don't understand:

You are using the Internet to spread your message. You are using technology to fight technology. So, why can't we, instead, use technology to fix these problems you've describe (that a lot of us agree are problems)? I don't understand the disconnect you've formed.

@sic There you go again with declarations you have not been proven as if they are laws of the universe along with inaccurate statements of facts. Modern humans two hundred thousand years max. No one has shown that modern society can not be sustained for a long periods of time.

For a far more realistic (though not really all that much less alarmist) take on the so-called population crisis, please read these links. Especially the second.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/11/the_grayest_generation?page=full
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/11/think_again_global_aging?page=full

It shows how the world is getting older far faster than ever before, and that in about 150 years the global population will be a great deal less than it is right now. This will all happen BECAUSE of the benefits of modern society. I'm sure I won't be able to summarize it well enough, so really do read the whole thing. There are pictures.

you can never have too many cans of baked beans.

It's just another Malthusian cycle. Eventually, something will occur where the Earth's population will fall drastically: food shortages, over crowding, disease, etc; and then it will rise again, due to the space and need for work/a younger population. However, if a technological breakthrough (e.g. in agriculture) is reached in the next few decades, this could be avoided.

Ok well I made my points. I'm sortof tired of being called an idiot and whatever just because I want to talk about. something. If my argument is really so childish and immature, then why does everyone call me names, instead of really show me up by proving me wrong?

@ Jack Klein - Olympic makes a good point. If Sicarius annoys you by periodically popping up with a concept you find unrealistic and unsupportable, why not either (a) ignore him, or (b) point out the serious flaws (as someone did with CRT's and LCD's), without the need to denigrate him as a person? I agree with 99.9 of your points - now how about applying that intellect to making arguments in a civil manner?

@ Sicarius - there are a lot of smart (smarter than me, certainly) people on the site, and there are some with lousy social skills. I think you're going to have to look past that and respond to the points they are making. I understand that you didn't know that CRT's use MORE power than LCD's - hence, today's monitors are actually MORE sustainable. I didn't know that either. Now that they have responded to your general example (whether accurate or not) with a general response (new technology is typically MORE efficient), you are free to respond and disagree. You don't have to drop a topic just because there are those who can't argue without shouting and calling names. But your ideas DO have to survive intellectual dissection.

Speaking of which, why does there HAVE to be a "die-off" or genocide? Didn't someone at one point in time predict the earth could sustain, at maximum, 3B people, or something like that?

"You are using the Internet to spread your message. You are using technology to fight technology. So, why can't we, instead, use technology to fix these problems you've describe (that a lot of us agree are problems)? I don't understand the disconnect you've formed."

Because technology is the cause of those problems.
fred "Oh no!, burning coal and other things is filling our air with toxins!"
ned "Oh gee, then I guess if we dont want poisonous air, we should probably stop, right?"
fred "oh heavens no, only an idiot would want to go back to those dark depressing horrible caveman evil short brutish nasty days a generation or two ago, its unthinkable! The only solution is to burn MORE! and with that electricity we can invent new technology that will make the coal cleaner, we could even invent little scrubbers to put at the top oF smokestacks! One day we can invent something even better so forty or fifty years down the line we wont have to burn any coal!"
ned "you want to burn more coal to burn less coal? it sounds like you may be a little cracked fred"
Fred" we cant just stop burning coal ned, what about all the people watching tru tv? what about all the people playing halo, they cant loose their score! oh wait, what about the hospital? what about the POOR POOR CHILDREN in the hospital?
ned "Well the longer we wait, the more dependent we become, and the worse it will be coal runs out. or petrol. or silicon. or uranium. or bauxite. why dont we live in a way thats already tried and tested?"
fred "what do you mean? we cant go "back"!!! its unthinkable! in fact, I cant even think about it! lalalala windmills lalalala geothermal lalalala biodiesel lalalala I dont have to give up any of my creature comforts lalalala

You are using the Internet to spread your message. You are using technology to fight technology. So, why can't we, instead, use technology to fix these problems you've describe (that a lot of us agree are problems)? I don't understand the disconnect you've formed.

well if what you claim is true than we are 3-5 billion people over the carrying capacity.
There "HAS" to be a die-off because nature always corrects itself. look at the populations of any species, including humans, when they go over the carrying capacity. for humans a good example is what happened at easter island.
Now imagine easter island but planet-wide.

my point, Sic, was that i believe people have projected "over the carrying capacity" many times before. And due to technology, it has failed to be true. If that is so, could it be true now?

Here's a genuine fact: look up the life expectancy from 200 years ago. Look at the % of children dying with a year, from 200 years ago. All this during the time when we didn't burn coal to the extent we do today. Yes, the lower technology level from burning coal and putting it in the atmosphere wasn't good for us....so scrubbing technology was invented, and today, coal burning is fairly clean. AND...you get the advantages of electricity.

What do you think life expectancy was in the 1700s versus today? Has technology helped or not?

Sicarius:

You're making a rather strong claim, that we must turn the clock back to survive.

However, with that strong claim, you offer basically no reasons the average person would go along with this. You yourself engage in petty name calling (that whole dialogue).

The onus is on YOU to convince US that our viewpoints are wrong. I might add, that history is replete with people screaming that the sky was falling due to progress. The Earth is still here, the human race survives, and the Cubs still suck.

Life goes on.


Energy production is the key, by the by. We are in no danger of "running out" of any particular resource. The only issue we might have is the price people are willing to pay for X resource isn't enough to justify the extraction of that resource. That is the reason oil prices are going up... there are a LOT of untapped resources, but they're located in places that are economically impractical to exploit.

The Earth is not Easter Island. If you are proposing us living in the Iron Age again, then we aren't even talking about a couple billion people having to no longer be alive to make it work.... we're talking about in excess of five billion people having to no longer be alive.

I'll take my chances with technology.... at least it has the hope of making this work, instead of throwing our hands up and resigning ourselves to massive deaths. (if it works, we're fine. If it doesn't, we get what we were "going" to get already).

Calling Chicken Little.... its your cue.

Sicarius has already made up his mind that we need to unmake the Industrial Revolution. He doesn't want discussion, he wants to proselytize.

Our grandchildren wont care if we wrote good books, did good things, were good people. They wont care about our explanations or excuses.
They will care about whether or not they will have clean water to drink. whether or not the soil can support crops. whether or not their air is choked with toxic fumes.

Technology is ambiguous, its a tool, neither good or bad. I'm not against "technology". I'm against its highly irresponsible use. I'm against wastefullness and pollution and rampant consumerism. If we can use it without toxifying our environment and sacrificing our futures then great. But no one knows how to do that. They just put their faith in technology like the pious put their faith in invisible gods.
"I'll take my chances with technology.... at least it has the hope of making this work" but how? tell me how! You're just blindly putting your faith in the same thing that has caused us these problems.

"The Earth is still here, the human race survives"
reminds me of the man who jumps off the cliff with his flying machine. The poor fool thinks he's flying until its too late.

I'm also not saying we're running out of resources. Sure we're running out of some, oil for example, but humans will always find something to light on fire for energy. the problem is the cost of using those resources. Sure theres plenty of coal left in the appalachians (sp) but at what cost? blowing up entire mountains? theres oil under the seafloor sure, but at the cost of how many 'deepwater horizons'? shit there was like 5 oil spills in the same month. the BP spill, one in kalamazoo MI, one in china somewhere, one in africa, one in russia, and I think there was a fire or something on aother rig like 30 miles from deepwater.

Maybe technology can save us. Maybe we'll all live in some techno-utopia where all energy is clean, harvested form the sun or wind or happy thoughts and hope. robots will do all our work and it'll be this great venus project shiny white future. But are we really willing to chance massive ecological disasters just so we wont have to give up our mercedes, incandescent bulbs, and iphones? really? so what you're saying is electricity is more important than life on this planet? dams are more important than salmon, uranium is more important than native americans, sierra-pacifics profit margin is more important than the existence of redwoods?


@indy
comparing 200 years ago to today is not framing the question fairly. 200 years ago people were plagued by many of the same problems as today. affluent malnutrition, overcrowding, pollution, generally just poor living conditions. Only recently has industrial civilization reached the life expectancy of humans who lived thousands of yearsa go. The average modal age of adult death for hunter-gatherers is 72 with a range of 68-78 years.

What? Hunter-gatherers live to 72? Now THAT one needs a source. How can you live to 72 running from tigers and eating berries? That sounds like borderline New Age-Atlantis-Reptilian-Nibiru fake history. Did these hunter-gatherers use energy from crystals to live so long?

Your reactionary psychobabble on Neo-Luddism is one thing (and may have a grain of a good idea in it somewhere), but unless there's some legitimate study you can source for that claim you made about septuagenarian wildmen then you will have zero credibility left.

Humans by Era Average Lifespan at Birth
(years) Comment
Upper Paleolithic 33 At age 15: 39 (to age 54)[7][8]
Neolithic[9] 20
Bronze Age and Iron Age[10] 35+
Classical Greece[11] 28
Classical Rome[11] 28
Pre-Columbian North America[12] 25-30
Medieval Islamic Caliphate[13] 35+
Medieval Britain[14][15] 30
Early Modern Britain[10] 40+
Early 20th Century[16][17] 30-45
Current world average[18] 67.2 2010 est
How do you get 70+ years?

Per Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy_variation_over_time

Sic, unless you have a source - ANY SOURCE - for the 70 year lifespan of hunter/gatherers, you have just put the gold seal on the comments of your detractors.

Source?

Again with the false facts, wild claims, and declarations. As above shows your wild statements of fact are false. It's not to say a few people did not live to be 72 but they would be the rare exception. If you continue with such wild statements how do you expect anyone even with a basic education to agree with you?

And people wonder why I just skip the pointless discussions and go right to the slapping him like a retarded puppy.

To be quite explicit: This is why.

I understand but I try anyway.

"look at the populations of any species, including humans, when they go over the carrying capacity. for humans a good example is what happened at easter island.
Now imagine easter island but planet-wide."

Firstly, I want you to tell me what you think happened at Easter Island.

Secondly, what happens when any species exceeds its carrying capacity is that the death rate outpaces the birth rate and the population declines toward the carrying capacity, which represents a sort of equilibrium. While an increasing death rate is surely tragic, it is not often the catastrophic or dramatic "die off" that I think you are imagining. This is not an indicator of much, but I can't think of a single species that has indulged its way into extinction, though you're welcome to supply an example.

It's important that you analogized Earth to an island, because the most severe ecological imbalances occur due to external influences such as the introduction of an invasive species or pathogens. It's extremely difficult for an island population to significantly outgrow its islands carrying capacity on their own; it is only by trading with people on other islands that they can manage this. Does Earth have any interplanetary trade?

There will always be regional and temporal variation in carrying capacity that may lead to famine or what have you, but you seem to be arguing that on a global level, a collapse is imminent. It's funny that you claim to view technology as neutral when you then speak of the absurdity of solving the problems caused by technology *with* more technology... If technology is neutral, and what matters is how you use it, then well applied technology solving the problems of previously misapplied technology is hardly an idea to be derided.

Nobody is arguing that human society does not have significant ecological impact and that technology amplifies the effect. However, your solution of rolling back technology to primitivism hardly merits being called a solution at all.

Luddites were hardly protesting technology in general, even if that is the idea that has been adopted by neoLuddists. They were acting out of self preservation because it was their jobs that were on the line in this wave of technological change. I bet they had no qualms about enjoying the many boons to their standard of living offered by technologies in other industries, just as those in other industries enjoyed the boons offered by increased productivity in the textiles industry. Though, wiki offers the alternative that Luddites were in fact protesting the abolition of set prices as evidenced by the fact that workshops who obeyed the old economic practice were not vandalized.

Anyway, labour saving technology only leads to unemployment if you operate under the assumption that firms are keeping productivity constant, which is obviously not at all what they would do.

The massive uprise isn't a unique response to the advent of technology so much as it is what happens when you piss enough people off.

@ Sicarus: "I dont however see the need for citations."

This is why a lot of people find it hard to take you seriously.

Are you really saying that you STILL don't understand why citations are important, despite the fact that this has been demonstrated to you at some length in many previous threads? If that's the case, Sicarus, I give up, I really do. I give up on you.

The problem with the "carrying capacity" arguments is that we can draw on non-renewable reserves to increase our resources base in the (relatively) short term, in ways that won't work over the long term--it's like using savings when your income runs out. Some of our technology is helping with the annual budget, but a good chunk of it involves eating into savings. And that just can't go on forever.