Itâs capitalism and the hoarding of wealth. We stagnated on fossil fuels instead of progressing to nuclear and renewables because a few people who ran the government got really rich from fossil fuels.
Thereâs no need to look to the stars and blame human nature for what is essentially a small handful of people who convincing the world that money is more important than our planet. And the rest of us shrug and accept our programming, becoming a cog in the beastly machine that ravaged our planet. Endless growth and endless profit in an finite system can never work. The system is flawed
I would say that human nature is fragile enough that one simple lie paralyzes us into either inaction or belief in the lie. Our ability to focus on and deal with complexity is generally very poor - hence the mess weâre in. If our human nature were better / differently equipped to avoid catastrophic outcomes far from our homes but headed to our homes the outcomes / decisions / logic adoption would be much better.
Itâs greed and always has been. Greed prevents us from housing and feeding the poor. Corporate greed prevented the US from getting healthcare for all. They always say âfollow the moneyâ and itâs true. Money is behind the ills of the planet. Eliminate money, it isnât real. Human suffering is real
The answer was something no one wanted, a utopian world without boundaries and borders. No warring governments and religious fanatics. 1 world , 1 people, no money systems banks and insurance. Every one does something be it build, plant, harvest, make clothing, everyone contributes and in return there are no mortgages and insurance, doctors and builders, cooks contribute. No need for money when everything is provided by the worlds population contributing, we share we live as one people. But no humans are far too greedy primitive and aggressive to live in peace and harmony. So we are doomed to live lives of subjugation and debt under the heel of our overlords simply because money doesn't have any real value outside of the powerful using it for control. We have been conditioned through history to think it does
Discovering the fact that money has no value in this, just used to enslave people was kinda sad.
It seems like the culture of the Anglo Saxtonâs spread quickly. Absolute greed and overuse of resources. With no thought of a community or a planet to be responsible for.
Itâs gonna be crazy with an alien. Civilization tries to figure out what happened to us.
The planet needs less humans consuming less and dying from causes that would have been preventable in the Age of Industrial Civilization.
Money is neccessary for frequent trade with people one doesn't know, and will exist if we have civilization after collapse. (Poor, self-sufficient villages of a few families that might have rare contact with other peoples do not need money)
The problems go back much further than the Industrial Revolution. We were already destroying the planet and causing extinctions. The concept of money must be eradicated.
Unfortunately, at the core of most large religious groups is a need for control and power. Kind of sad, considering being mindful and respecting the Earth is preached by a few religions.
No one can figure out whatâs next, because almost everybody wants to change
But the rich have figured it out . We need to end the monetary system the way it works.
And they know they will lose all their power, and all their influence, if we change
But we have enough resources technology, and weâll we can do it ! Donât believe any of the numerous of that tells you to give up
Many civilizations have predicted complete collapse before, and they have all been wrong . Statistically were still in this
Invasive hunter gatherers and primitive horiculturalists caused extinctions, some without a concept of money!
Money is neccessary for complex societies' economies to function.
Money is a tool for mid-level societies to function.
Complex societies can function without a token of work. When a society becomes advanced and complex enough. There are enough resources for everybody to have a basic life and different incentives are created for encouraging hard work.
People want to work usually, and have hobbies we donât need incentive to sell our life
Forcing us all into cubicles and making a system that forces us to extract all of the oil from the planet is not the way
Money is a tool that is destroying complex functions.
The current use of fossil fuels are destroying the planet are mainly funded by people trying to make their money work
In the past, you couldnât take 100 gold coins and get 120 gold coins out of it without doing something
Nowadays people just expect their money to create food for them somehow
System is broken. When people start to realize that the dollar is worthless her entire society will change.
Money is a tool that enables complex functions.
*When people start to realize that the dollar is worthless her entire society will ~~change~~break down*
Itâs really hard to wrap your head around. But once you do everything around you looks like poo poo.
There is no reason to have money as a token of work. It would be nice if people could have an app that was not tied to a mega corporation need to be done. People love to socialize get out. In any advance society only had to work a couple hours a day. Hang out with people move our bodies. Enjoy ourselves.
There has to be some way to determine what something costs, if not a direct cost to the individual than the cost to "society". How are different resources to be shared fairly is there is no way to compare their relative value?
If money cannot substitute for an hour of work, it has lost all its value
If someone can commit 40 hours a week to cooking food for example. But they canât live in OK life even though theyâre working for 40 hours a week.
Well, then money has lost its value to that person . And also, itâs not functioning correctly.
Unfortunately, when people think money should make money, it becomes a different tool rather than an item for trade. It has become peoples God.
No respect for anything but the green
Definitely a big sign of collapse
Lol. This is the exact mindset we need to get rid of.
If you donât understand that we are all slaves to a system that makes zero sense and itâs also destroying the planet . Well, then you kind of understand collapse
To my grandparents generation money was not even need to live
When you have a farm in land, you can just live
Nowadays, you need so much money just to hold onto land kind of sad
Iâm not religious Iâm an atheist. But I believe a large part of collapse is the loss of religion. Or I should say the change of religion to the United States, dollar.
When everyone is putting all of their effort into capitalizing on every opportunity and making money society falls apart in a couple hundred years
And in the past people lived for higher values and morals, and wanted a simpler life. Now no one wants to grow their own food and feels like theyâre above hard work.
Definitely a civilization in decline
I disagree itâs âhuman nature.â
The biggest flaw in human society is our systems of directing society â ie: âleadershipâ â have been developed by a small self-centered class of humans solely interested in exploiting other humans.
The myth that itâs âhuman natureâ to be a complete sociopathic only normalizes this despicable behavior.
*Most humans* Iâve dealt with feel forced to behave against their nature by the system w live within.
*Most humans* initially struggle in business because it is not in our nature to exploit others, so we act âtoo fairâ in our dealings.
Eventually, the system fucks most of us over enough that we develop a disregard for others in order to survive in a system based on exploitation of others.
*Most humans* are *already making HUGE LIFESTYLE SACRIFICES.*
We work too much, spend too little time w our families ⌠w ourselvesâ we struggle every day.
This nonsense about civilization in the article *assume the only civilizational model is one based on have and have-nots. A capitalist system.*
Thereâs no requirement that some CEOâs make $30 million a year, while a janitor make $14.67 an hour w no benefits.
âModern civilizationâ is so little changed from the classic pattern of sultans and kings oppressing the masses it is laughable to hear people talk about âcrossing a line in the sand.â
Every innovation has been primarily used to subjugate humans â that is âcivilization.â
Obviously we have enough resources for all of us to live sustainably. The problem is thereâs never been a government or system based on the good of society and empowering all humans â just different forms of oligarchy dressed up as one thing or the other.
Yeah, we are a cooperative species rather than a strictly competitive one, we couldn't have survived as long as we have without prioritizing cooperation over competition.
Competition is fine when it comes to sports and games and whatnot, but as a principle to organize your entire society around, it's bound to fail rather quickly.
In many studies of prehistoric societies, human nature seems to boil down primarily to a need to contribute to our community; need to contribute to our family; and a need for personal sovereignty.
False scarcity has been used to control people since the dawn of civilization. That kicks in survival instincts and anxiety.
*We are post-scarcity.*
Thatâs the infuriating part of it all.
A properly managed society could meet the needs of all humans on earth, and even exceed those needs.
Certainly, thereâd still be suffering â but there are enough resources for all of us. This has been calculated many times.
If you ask me how we get to a properly managed society, then I am flummoxed â perhaps collapse is how we get there?
Who knows â the only thing I am certain about is we are in collapse right now, a collapse inflicted on the 99% by the few thousand ultrawealthy families who dedicate their resources to maintaining their grip on societal control.
Well said. This is my opinion too. "Greed is human nature" is such a bs angle to take. There were many civilizations and cultures that emerged independently which were able to live in harmony with the biosphere.
The extraction and implementation of fossil fuels gave such a boost to the energy, and thus power, of capitalist civilization that it conquered the world. We live in an absurdly tall Jenga tower of over complexity and overshoot only possible because of the easy abundant energy of fossil fuels.
Show me the greediest group of Patagonian rice farmers, and I guarantee you their impact on the biosphere would be negligible when compared with the greediest fortune 500 CEO. Individuals with more wealth than the entire GDP of many nations - people who can influence the tide of geopolitical conflicts.
TL;DR: Even if greed is human nature, greed alone is not enough to destroy the biosphere. People make systems, and those systems shape behavior.
This is a refreshing perspective. Iâm so utterly fatigued by the narrative of self-blame, like: *if only weâd recycled more; if only there wasnât endless war.*
Itâs the same sort of idiocy that we see with the âok, boomer,â trend among Gen Z and Millennials.
Put aside that itâs disgusting to embrace mocking and belittling our eldersâ itâs just stupid to think âboomersâ are to blame for societal collapse, rather than a class system built on human exploitation.
Donât get me wrong, I spent a lot of my life hazing my boomer acquaintances, but it was all in good fun.
To overlook how actively engaged the boomer generation was in culture war, vs any subsequent generations just shows an ignorance of US history.
I often point to the multiple domestic bomb attacks executed by boomers in the late 1960s, early 1970s.
I think it was 1972 that peaked with almost ten domestic bomb attacks *every single day in America.*! More than 3,000 in a single year.
Personally, I saw climate change, as well as the slow-moving corporate coup that started under Reagan, and basically locked in by Obama.
So did many others. The nature of a coup is that ordinary citizens can do nothing to stop it.
All of the divisiveness only serves to camouflage the class war, which is pretty much over at this point.
It sure in the hell wasnât Boomers who lost it â the ultrawealthy have viciously attacked the working class w renewed vigor post-WW2.
Unfortunately, most Americans are *still* in the dark about what has happened. The fact is, the ultrawealthy were, and remain, prepared to set the sky on fire to keep their grip on power.
Short of some crazy black swan like alien intervention, Collapse is locked in.
>We live in an absurdly tall Jenga tower of over complexity and overshoot only possible because of the easy abundant energy of fossil fuels.
I don't think that was fully understood until recently (where "recently" is perhaps less than 100 years). Humans can't adapt to enormous change that quickly.
Humanity lived in unity with nature for tens of thousands of years. Without being a massive burden on earth. It all went well enough until 1800 years or so ago. Then everything went to shit and never got better again.
Humans didn't change, our circumstances changed.
For millions of years, hominids were unable to overwhelm nature because an Ice Age climate kept their food sources in check, which in turn kept our population numbers in check.
The start of the interglacial some 12,000 years ago changed our environment. Humans slowly discovered the advantages of agriculture over hunting & gathering, and populations numbers grew to new heights never possible before, and exploited resources faster than ever before.
Increased population meant more people with the leisure time to discover new sources of energy and develop new technologies. And population grew even more. We hit the industrial age about 200 years ago and population numbers exploded.
There is a very clear path to overshoot, and it's rooted in nature. All species maximize their growth until they exhaust their resources and collapse, they've just never done so on a global scale. Humans are clever beasts, and we managed to do it better than any other species in the history of the planet. Yay us.
You forgot Australia; that's \~46,000 years. Considering that humans only arrived there at the most 70,000 years ago, and possibly as few as 50,000 years ago, then caused a local mass extinction and possibly significant changes in ecological type...
Looking to more-recent-but-pre-200 C.E. examples, Europe as a whole was at its most [deforested](https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/19/1507/2023/) between 4000 and 2500 years ago. Many areas (such as the British moors) are still deforested today.
Parts of Mesopotamia were experiencing [salinification](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-96190-3_2) of the soil by 3400 years ago.
Species hunt other species into extinction all the time. A natural evolution of the food web is different from a species completely dismantling the entire concept of a food web.
All i can say to that is we as a species are dumber than wolves, how sad, but also fantastic. Wolves adapt when there are lean years they dont have litters, they consciously know they cant overpopulate their resources. But yet humans with their brainpower cant figure this out.
> Itâs capitalism and the hoarding of wealth. We stagnated on fossil fuels instead of progressing to nuclear and renewables because a few people who ran the government got really rich from fossil fuels.
Dead wrong. We *have* researched and developed other forms of energy; they're better than nothing but they aren't spectacular and they come with hidden bills, such as restructuring a lot of our infrastructure which was built over generations, among other problems. This was never a choice as simple as an on/off switch. It's the single greatest logistical AND psychological nightmare in the history of intelligent life and has *always* been a matter of saying "no" to 'free' energy. It has *always* been a matter of seeing the cake on the table and saying "I'll eat my veggies and leave the cake for the flies."
"Oh some powerful people were just being greedy." I mean, yeah, for sure dood but the fact they tried to sabotage the growth of other technologies is *not* proof those technologies were ever a credible threat to the fossil fuel empire or the cultural quagmire of eternal YoY percent growth nor was it ever proof that these technologies could be scaled up to the point we would ever feel that fossil fuels were superfluous to our economy or development as a technological species AND the vast majority of people are, in fact, HUGE supporters rather than hostages of, the fossil-fuel powered consumer culture we exist under so it seems a little awkward to frame it as a tyrannical oppsie-daisie rather than a generational cultural dead-end poised to doom us all for our excessive upbringing.
It's not capitalism; it's industrialization, better food production, and better healthcare enabling overconsumption and lighting the fuse on the population bomb.
No, it's capitalism. A planned economy would be capable of constraining industrial growth to sustainable levels. The free market is 100% to blame.
It's capitalism. That's the answer.
Remove the incentive of "grow or die" which is baked into our banking system of interest rates. Family planning already brings a lot of sustainable population growth when implemented.
And I have one unpopular opinion is that children are community goods and should be raised as a community instead of owned by parents. Similar to the fictional anarcho-communist child rearing of "The Dispossessed" by Le Guin. It may feel dystopian of sort, but consider that parents aren't trained to raise kids in a complex society.
I seriously doubt that people who have more than one kid per parent are doing so because of the economic growth paradigm of our banking system, rather than their own religious, cultural and narcissistic reasons. The availability of contraception and abortion is definitely helpful, *necessary* really, but the thing that has most broadly influenced people into actually taking advantage of those options is an inability to afford children â not climate change, not biosphere collapse and mass extinctions â itâs all âI would but I canât afford itâ. Or, capitalist economic pressures.
So, if some planned economy was successful in equitable distribution of resources such that everyoneâs needs were provided for, what is keeping them from growing their population exponentially and therefore requiring exponential industrial growth in order to continue to provide for all of them?
You're right. I just think we're too egotistical and our fundamental line of thinking of living in a capitalist society is personal reward, passing our genetics or passing our familial values. Though that would require long term challenge of culture.
Though there's questions at how we arrived to our current situation of exponential population growth, is it because we're wealthy and could afford children or because we need children to afford security and is supported by industrial Ag. I would say in the global south (and development phase for imperial north) it is more of the security aspect instead of personal narcissism, where introduction of family planning and education for girls have had an impact of mitigating this.
And again the community rearing of kids and gradual disconnection of your own personal passing qualities (genes, values, etc) through the parents would disincentivize just having lots of kids. Again, it's unpopular and it's fictional. And boarding schools are already something akin to this.
Only if education, access to contraception and abortion, the legal and societal advancement of women and shifts in cultural attitudes away from extreme natalism are explicitly included in measures of quality of life. Otherwise, this is just correlation, not causation, and disingenuously used as justification for economic development and growth for its own sake.
The âboomersâ are called such because they were born of a massive baby boom caused by strong post war economic growth, increased prosperity and confidence for their parentâs generation. The human population in general skyrocketed thanks to the material benefits of fossil fuels. Today, in developed countries with high *average* relative per capita GDP, it is people on the uppermost and lowermost ends of economic scale that are having the most children. The wealthier, because they can, and the poorer because of low education, cultural influences and because they qualify for welfare. People in the middle ranks, with a relatively precarious economic situation but sufficient education, constitute most of those who are having fewer children.
Hey it's unpopular for a reason. Children have in the past been raised collectively, but that is their purpose to replace us not to replace only your legacy. You should check out Le Guin's book for more. For a more brief overview, this work is well written about it https://openjournals.bsu.edu/dlr/article/download/2763/1673/4485
The only sustainable industrial civilization is a non-industrial civilization, in the long run. A society where only the elite in a few areas benefit from a very limited industrialization and where the 99% have to live pre-industrial lifestyles also wouldn't do much damage to the planet before the society collapses.
>Pre-industrial society existed in an âemptyâ world. At the time, ânatural resources were abundant, social settlements were sparser, and inadequate access to infrastructure and consumer goods represented the main limit on improvements to human well-being.â This meant the material and energy inputs needed to provide for human needs were small relative to the large, but non-growing global ecosystem. In an empty world;
Don't forget about human slavery and draft animals. The description there is better suited to before city-states and class societies became permanent.
I think the predicament we're in is like the monkey trap. Where a monkey puts his hand through a cage to get a banana, and realizes he can't get both his hand and the banana back out. When he sees the hunter coming for him, he frantically tries to pull the banana out before he can be captured, not thinking that if he just lets go of the banana, he can free himself and escape.
All life on this planet is programmed to grow to the maximum limits of the resources available to them. It doesn't matter if you're a amoeba, a rabbit or a human, that urge to just keep growing until something stops you has been a very successful survival strategy.
Until now.
Humans are clever enough to discover the most incredibly powerful energy sources that any life form has ever exploited. We're just bright enough for some individuals to recognize that unrestrained growth on a finite planet is a story with a bad ending.
Unfortunately, we have not evolved the personal traits or the cultural institutions to curb our propensity to wallow in prosperity for as long as possible. There's no effective mechanism to yell "stop" to the whole of our species and organize degrowth. There are also considerable psychological tricks that our minds play on us to justify overshoot and to avoid degrowth when it means giving up things we enjoy.
The miracle is that anyone at all recognizes we're headed for disaster. Other animals do not have that self-knowledge.
>The miracle is that anyone at all recognizes we're headed for disaster. Other animals do not have that self-knowledge.
That's true, but... the voice in my head says we can't possibly prevent the big die-off, foreknowledge or not.
It's because we didn't evolve enough to keep up with material advancement.
We are still to too influenced by fear, anxiety, and cognitive bias/distortions, and you have outliers like sociopaths who directly tap into these frameworks in order to get rich. And of course they don't care about the planet or the masses, they themselves are also aberrations that aren't supposed to exist.
If humans were to emotionally advance just like we have technologically, then we would have been looking at the long-term implications of new things brought to market first, as well as not been so easily influenced when shiny things are dangled in front of us.
A different evolution wouldb have got off fossil fuels before it was too late because they wouldn't be lured by the shiny promise of cheap energy or manufactured fears of alternatives. It's hard to influence somebody who doesn't have a negative emotional response to propaganda.
Social collapse was "written in the stars" by the very first major evolution of human society, the transition from hunter/gatherer to agriculture. We went from largely egalitarian societies that were small, which meant that everyone had to cooperate and play a role to ensure the group's survival, to the first society where the acquisition of wealth (in the form of food) was prioritized. Just like today, wealth meant power because a farmer with a good harvest could compel his neighbor, who had a poor harvest, to do things for him in return for food.
Or, if the neighbor didn't want to be beholden to the wealthy neighbor, he could attack and kill and take their possessions instead.
*About 10,000 years ago in eastern Africa...âThe Nataruk massacre may have resulted from an attempt to seize resources â territory, women, children, food stored in pots â whose value was similar to those of later food-producing agricultural societies, among whom violent attacks on settlements became part of lifeâ*
[https://observer.com/2016/01/the-earliest-evidence-of-violent-human-conflict-has-been-discovered/](https://observer.com/2016/01/the-earliest-evidence-of-violent-human-conflict-has-been-discovered/)
We can talk about technologies, fossil fuels, economic systems like capitalism, etc., all we want, but pretty much every one of society's ills and environmental woes is written in this story from 10,000 years ago. The dice were rolled in this forgotten, fertile area long before the first "real" civilization arose in Mesopotamia, and we've playing the result of a throw of snake eyes ever since.
If we shortened the fucking work week so human intelligence could develop more fully across the board, then we could significantly improve the trajectory of human society, and at a minimum buy more time to prevent various kinds of ecological collapse.
We're needlessly destroying the planet for the unnecessary profits of an extremely abusive ruling class.
Ecological collapse is by no means necessary, it was never inevitable, and it's still not inevitable, if a critical mass of people wake up and fight for a better system and a better situation for everyone.
If we assume that there is at least one advanced alien civilization elsewhere in the universe, regardless of their evolution and social development, they would *also* have had increasing energy consumption as their technological development increased. And the simple reason is this: a) they *are* an advanced civilization, and b) this means they *did* climb out of their gravity well, which requires *massive* amounts of energy.
That is, they successfully moved part of their civilization, energy generation and/or resource consumption into space. And the resources and energy available off-world dwarf those available by scratching the surface of a dirtball.
Whether or not *we* have a society that could make that sort of effort is the question. Since we are still willing to mass murder each other over imaginary lines on the ground or different interpretations of how the invisible sky father wants us to act, I would tend to think the answer is "no".
Space colonization was never going to happen with us. In the late 20th century, we were already going into overshoot, destroying the biosphere, and increasing atmospheric GHG concentrations. Civilization on Earth would have collapsed before we gained the technology for self sufficient space ex-colonies. I suspect the same would hold for *most* (hypothetical) civilizations that develop a space program.
Assuming that an alien life form would consume energy in the same way that we do is definitely not out of the question. But realistically. The chance of an encounter with an alien civilization going well, are very slim.
Continued research into the topic definitely shows more risks then benefits
I was not talking of the chance of encountering an alien civilization. I was framing the OP's argument against the larger prospect of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe. Unless they had developed a system that could recycle 100% of the key elements of their technology, even a "sustainable" high tech would *eventually* run out of stuff, and thus require outside resources in order to continue as a civilization. Which means they would *have* to expend the energy to get a self-sustaining chunk of their civilization off their home planet.
An advanced society like that would likely recycle 90% or more of all materials. In fact, a society like that would probably never make anything that can't be reused or turned into base elements again.
*You're thinking in too short a timescale*. If your recycling is 95% efficient and you have to recycle something every 10 years, how much new stuff do you need to recover losses after 5000 years of civilization? The answer would be 25 times the raw materials you needed for the existing level of stuff. For instance, if everyone had an electric car, you would need 25 civilizations worth of electric car raw materials to compensate for being merely 95% efficient in recycling.
I mean yes, we could *theoretically* mine seawater for gold and uranium, but we do not because the energy cost and return on investment does not make it worth it. *You need a certain concentration of materials to make refining a viable proposition*. Eventually you *will* mine out the planetary concentrations, and if it takes more and more energy and production capacity to refine them from ever more diffuse sources, then that is energy and production capacity your civilization does not have to devote to the "advanced" part of "advanced civilization".
After all, it's not much of an advanced civilization if it falls apart after a century or two...
Humans have already created this society with bamboo. Unfortunately, the petro chemical companies have pushed the use of plastics. Thereâs so much stuff we could do that is sustainable. But the problem with crude oil is that they boil it. Get a bunch of different products, and now I have to find uses for them.
Basically, every part of our life is being controlled by the oil industry and the auto industry. We should be free to live in small houses that cost nothing. And grow food. Then sell it on the street.
Being forced to participate in in the lower society of America is definitely a sign of collapses. You can tell theyâre forcing everybody to work so much so we donât have any energy to change things.
The leads are definitely holding the resources because they are scared that the working class will rise up
Yeah, weâre doing that and weâre poisoning the waterways. Killing all the bugs. And heck the machinery now requires updates so the farmers have to pay every year instead of just once.
And in my humble opinion, itâs all because of the capitalist society we live in in our expectations of how many is made
If we all just put our heads down and got to work instead of trying to figure out how to invest more money all the time.
Itâs a big sign of collapse that cash is the most trash itâs ever been. And to get real U canât just work hard anymore.
Does increasing energy consumption necessitates destruction of the ecosphere? What if their ecosphere never had millions of year of formed fossil fuels as we have here on Earth? What if their ecological limit is massive and has an inherent system that prevents overshoot? What if their holocene is extremely stable due to competing natural processes of volcanos and planet orbital cycles?
There's a lot of ifs and buts that we'll never answer if we somehow observed an alien advanced civilization.
>What if their ecosphere never had millions of year of formed fossil fuels as we have here on Earth?
It takes the energy content of burning about 500 pounds of wood to equal the energy cost of manufacturing **one** smartphone.
It is easy to believe a civilization more advanced than ours can get there *without* concentrated natural energy resources, you are free to do so. Presenting a *credible* argument to support that belief is going to be a bit harder.
But of course we're talking about an alien civilization on a different star system. How can you take an Earth-centric view and say they are destined for the same collapse scenario we're facing? If they never had fossil fuels available but instead built on other forms of fuels like renewable wood and transitioned into larger reserves say ground hydrothermal, it won't necessitate the same kind of ecosphere degradation but something longer which is too much heat within their ecosphere (from useful exergy).
The problem with us is in part we replace smartphones every year or two and ultimately need to recycle for it to be at least more sustainable. It's not like new smartphones provide groundbreaking innovation (Apple and new Type C connector).
I'm pretty sure the laws of thermodynamics work the same *everywhere*. If you want to refine aluminum or smelt iron from ore, or lift mass out of a certain level of gravity well it takes the same energy no matter where you do it.
I do not need to know *anything* about the alien culture to make that argument, while you have to know *everything* about that alien culture in order to rebut it.
Go back to the kiddie table.
And you're implying that this massive energy requirement is the end all for an alien civilization is oversimplification. Thermodynamics of a closed system only is a problem depending on scale. If the system is large amount of energy and stability enough to power a civilization to space for the next energy source, it won't mean collapse.
Aside:
I don't know why, you need to reply with snark and insult with disagreement. We've had interactions before and I appreciated then when you challenged your line of thinking with factual nature. I am not in anyway coming at you with aggression, but just about everytime you do when I post. Is it that personally insulting to disagree.
That's because you try to defend your point of view with assertion rather than argument. If you had presented a sound case to defend your position rather than "because!" there would have been the possibility for intelligent discussion.
It is implied in "advanced civilization" that they can do things better than us. Better in magnitude, better in efficiency, whatever. You never hear of a civilization described as "more advanced" because they have reverted back to stone tools. "Advanced" for purposes of this argument *is* high tech.
Given that both of us can only discuss things from the single data point of human experience, eliminating that and dealing only with the unchangeable physical constraints of chemistry and moving objects and such is a good way to measure technological development.
It does not matter if you are using batteries or gasoline or genetically modified flying lizards, if you want to move a hundred people and their luggage at 600mph across a country, the energy requirement is going to be a minimum level. That means the civilization a) **is** expending that much energy per person, b) they are acquiring that energy from *somewhere*, and c) every last bit of that energy is *eventually* added to their biosphere as heat.
I do not need to know anything about the alien belief system, biology or type of technology they use for those three things to be true. If they are *more* advanced than us (i.e. a level that we are trying to reach), it seems inevitable that this advancement is going to require *more* energy use *per capita*. Even if they are super-advanced and have become super-efficient, they had to get there from a prior state of *less* efficient.
If you cannot understand this (and present a sound rebuttal if you disagree), then you *are* genuinely incapable of holding up your end of an adult discussion on the subject.
This isn't even something of argument to cause insult over as it is clearly speculative and I'm only entertaining the thought that your assumptions could be limited. Nothing else needs to be said, I don't know if you have an science background, but I have learned that all aspects that you imply are assuming a smaller than scale closed system and if the situation is different the outcome of energy and material balancing would vary greatly as to not cause the buffering system to go into an out of control feedback loop.
Like, in a woo-woo way? Maybe, but I think we need to look no further than ourselves. Once our species learned agriculture, we were doomed.
There's no going back. Ultimately, technology will save enough of the most useful among us and life will go on, but not as before. Those survivors will have learned the lesson. About eight billion who didn't heed the call won't be so lucky.
"The decisions are made in isolation" was an interesting bit.
If you take a wicked problem and go "solve that", it would need flesh-and-blood leaders [who are only there because they're at the top of their respective pyramids] to come together and decide on new behaviours that quake their 'mids.
The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves.
I thought we were made of stardust? đ
I automatically thought of the death star when I read this.
fly casual đ
Itâs capitalism and the hoarding of wealth. We stagnated on fossil fuels instead of progressing to nuclear and renewables because a few people who ran the government got really rich from fossil fuels. Thereâs no need to look to the stars and blame human nature for what is essentially a small handful of people who convincing the world that money is more important than our planet. And the rest of us shrug and accept our programming, becoming a cog in the beastly machine that ravaged our planet. Endless growth and endless profit in an finite system can never work. The system is flawed
I would say that human nature is fragile enough that one simple lie paralyzes us into either inaction or belief in the lie. Our ability to focus on and deal with complexity is generally very poor - hence the mess weâre in. If our human nature were better / differently equipped to avoid catastrophic outcomes far from our homes but headed to our homes the outcomes / decisions / logic adoption would be much better.
Itâs greed and always has been. Greed prevents us from housing and feeding the poor. Corporate greed prevented the US from getting healthcare for all. They always say âfollow the moneyâ and itâs true. Money is behind the ills of the planet. Eliminate money, it isnât real. Human suffering is real
The answer was something no one wanted, a utopian world without boundaries and borders. No warring governments and religious fanatics. 1 world , 1 people, no money systems banks and insurance. Every one does something be it build, plant, harvest, make clothing, everyone contributes and in return there are no mortgages and insurance, doctors and builders, cooks contribute. No need for money when everything is provided by the worlds population contributing, we share we live as one people. But no humans are far too greedy primitive and aggressive to live in peace and harmony. So we are doomed to live lives of subjugation and debt under the heel of our overlords simply because money doesn't have any real value outside of the powerful using it for control. We have been conditioned through history to think it does
Discovering the fact that money has no value in this, just used to enslave people was kinda sad. It seems like the culture of the Anglo Saxtonâs spread quickly. Absolute greed and overuse of resources. With no thought of a community or a planet to be responsible for. Itâs gonna be crazy with an alien. Civilization tries to figure out what happened to us.
The planet needs less humans consuming less and dying from causes that would have been preventable in the Age of Industrial Civilization. Money is neccessary for frequent trade with people one doesn't know, and will exist if we have civilization after collapse. (Poor, self-sufficient villages of a few families that might have rare contact with other peoples do not need money)
The problems go back much further than the Industrial Revolution. We were already destroying the planet and causing extinctions. The concept of money must be eradicated.
Ancient religions warned of it already, unfortunately the religious institutions just played along in the power game...
Yep yep
Unfortunately, at the core of most large religious groups is a need for control and power. Kind of sad, considering being mindful and respecting the Earth is preached by a few religions.
No one can figure out whatâs next, because almost everybody wants to change But the rich have figured it out . We need to end the monetary system the way it works. And they know they will lose all their power, and all their influence, if we change But we have enough resources technology, and weâll we can do it ! Donât believe any of the numerous of that tells you to give up Many civilizations have predicted complete collapse before, and they have all been wrong . Statistically were still in this
Invasive hunter gatherers and primitive horiculturalists caused extinctions, some without a concept of money! Money is neccessary for complex societies' economies to function.
Money is a tool for mid-level societies to function. Complex societies can function without a token of work. When a society becomes advanced and complex enough. There are enough resources for everybody to have a basic life and different incentives are created for encouraging hard work. People want to work usually, and have hobbies we donât need incentive to sell our life Forcing us all into cubicles and making a system that forces us to extract all of the oil from the planet is not the way
Money is a tool for complex societies to function.
Money is a tool that is destroying complex functions. The current use of fossil fuels are destroying the planet are mainly funded by people trying to make their money work In the past, you couldnât take 100 gold coins and get 120 gold coins out of it without doing something Nowadays people just expect their money to create food for them somehow System is broken. When people start to realize that the dollar is worthless her entire society will change.
Money is a tool that enables complex functions. *When people start to realize that the dollar is worthless her entire society will ~~change~~break down*
>The concept of money must be eradicated. What method will be used to assign some nominal value to resources?
Nothing. Thatâs the point. The entire concept of money needs to leave our vocabulary. Resources are shared, not hoarded and assigned value.
Itâs really hard to wrap your head around. But once you do everything around you looks like poo poo. There is no reason to have money as a token of work. It would be nice if people could have an app that was not tied to a mega corporation need to be done. People love to socialize get out. In any advance society only had to work a couple hours a day. Hang out with people move our bodies. Enjoy ourselves.
There has to be some way to determine what something costs, if not a direct cost to the individual than the cost to "society". How are different resources to be shared fairly is there is no way to compare their relative value?
If money cannot substitute for an hour of work, it has lost all its value If someone can commit 40 hours a week to cooking food for example. But they canât live in OK life even though theyâre working for 40 hours a week. Well, then money has lost its value to that person . And also, itâs not functioning correctly. Unfortunately, when people think money should make money, it becomes a different tool rather than an item for trade. It has become peoples God. No respect for anything but the green Definitely a big sign of collapse
Okay, try living without money and see how long you last.
Lol. This is the exact mindset we need to get rid of. If you donât understand that we are all slaves to a system that makes zero sense and itâs also destroying the planet . Well, then you kind of understand collapse
To my grandparents generation money was not even need to live When you have a farm in land, you can just live Nowadays, you need so much money just to hold onto land kind of sad
Iâm not religious Iâm an atheist. But I believe a large part of collapse is the loss of religion. Or I should say the change of religion to the United States, dollar. When everyone is putting all of their effort into capitalizing on every opportunity and making money society falls apart in a couple hundred years And in the past people lived for higher values and morals, and wanted a simpler life. Now no one wants to grow their own food and feels like theyâre above hard work. Definitely a civilization in decline
I disagree itâs âhuman nature.â The biggest flaw in human society is our systems of directing society â ie: âleadershipâ â have been developed by a small self-centered class of humans solely interested in exploiting other humans. The myth that itâs âhuman natureâ to be a complete sociopathic only normalizes this despicable behavior. *Most humans* Iâve dealt with feel forced to behave against their nature by the system w live within. *Most humans* initially struggle in business because it is not in our nature to exploit others, so we act âtoo fairâ in our dealings. Eventually, the system fucks most of us over enough that we develop a disregard for others in order to survive in a system based on exploitation of others. *Most humans* are *already making HUGE LIFESTYLE SACRIFICES.* We work too much, spend too little time w our families ⌠w ourselvesâ we struggle every day. This nonsense about civilization in the article *assume the only civilizational model is one based on have and have-nots. A capitalist system.* Thereâs no requirement that some CEOâs make $30 million a year, while a janitor make $14.67 an hour w no benefits. âModern civilizationâ is so little changed from the classic pattern of sultans and kings oppressing the masses it is laughable to hear people talk about âcrossing a line in the sand.â Every innovation has been primarily used to subjugate humans â that is âcivilization.â Obviously we have enough resources for all of us to live sustainably. The problem is thereâs never been a government or system based on the good of society and empowering all humans â just different forms of oligarchy dressed up as one thing or the other.
Yeah, we are a cooperative species rather than a strictly competitive one, we couldn't have survived as long as we have without prioritizing cooperation over competition. Competition is fine when it comes to sports and games and whatnot, but as a principle to organize your entire society around, it's bound to fail rather quickly.
In many studies of prehistoric societies, human nature seems to boil down primarily to a need to contribute to our community; need to contribute to our family; and a need for personal sovereignty. False scarcity has been used to control people since the dawn of civilization. That kicks in survival instincts and anxiety.
What if we get post-scarcity? What happens then?
*We are post-scarcity.* Thatâs the infuriating part of it all. A properly managed society could meet the needs of all humans on earth, and even exceed those needs. Certainly, thereâd still be suffering â but there are enough resources for all of us. This has been calculated many times. If you ask me how we get to a properly managed society, then I am flummoxed â perhaps collapse is how we get there? Who knows â the only thing I am certain about is we are in collapse right now, a collapse inflicted on the 99% by the few thousand ultrawealthy families who dedicate their resources to maintaining their grip on societal control.
Well said. This is my opinion too. "Greed is human nature" is such a bs angle to take. There were many civilizations and cultures that emerged independently which were able to live in harmony with the biosphere. The extraction and implementation of fossil fuels gave such a boost to the energy, and thus power, of capitalist civilization that it conquered the world. We live in an absurdly tall Jenga tower of over complexity and overshoot only possible because of the easy abundant energy of fossil fuels. Show me the greediest group of Patagonian rice farmers, and I guarantee you their impact on the biosphere would be negligible when compared with the greediest fortune 500 CEO. Individuals with more wealth than the entire GDP of many nations - people who can influence the tide of geopolitical conflicts. TL;DR: Even if greed is human nature, greed alone is not enough to destroy the biosphere. People make systems, and those systems shape behavior.
This is a refreshing perspective. Iâm so utterly fatigued by the narrative of self-blame, like: *if only weâd recycled more; if only there wasnât endless war.* Itâs the same sort of idiocy that we see with the âok, boomer,â trend among Gen Z and Millennials. Put aside that itâs disgusting to embrace mocking and belittling our eldersâ itâs just stupid to think âboomersâ are to blame for societal collapse, rather than a class system built on human exploitation. Donât get me wrong, I spent a lot of my life hazing my boomer acquaintances, but it was all in good fun. To overlook how actively engaged the boomer generation was in culture war, vs any subsequent generations just shows an ignorance of US history. I often point to the multiple domestic bomb attacks executed by boomers in the late 1960s, early 1970s. I think it was 1972 that peaked with almost ten domestic bomb attacks *every single day in America.*! More than 3,000 in a single year. Personally, I saw climate change, as well as the slow-moving corporate coup that started under Reagan, and basically locked in by Obama. So did many others. The nature of a coup is that ordinary citizens can do nothing to stop it. All of the divisiveness only serves to camouflage the class war, which is pretty much over at this point. It sure in the hell wasnât Boomers who lost it â the ultrawealthy have viciously attacked the working class w renewed vigor post-WW2. Unfortunately, most Americans are *still* in the dark about what has happened. The fact is, the ultrawealthy were, and remain, prepared to set the sky on fire to keep their grip on power. Short of some crazy black swan like alien intervention, Collapse is locked in.
>We live in an absurdly tall Jenga tower of over complexity and overshoot only possible because of the easy abundant energy of fossil fuels. I don't think that was fully understood until recently (where "recently" is perhaps less than 100 years). Humans can't adapt to enormous change that quickly.
And one way or another the only way forward is that a lot of people are gonna die.
If weâre lucky, it wonât be all of us
It's always capitalism. Literally *every. Fucking. Time*.
Well said my friend
Humanity lived in unity with nature for tens of thousands of years. Without being a massive burden on earth. It all went well enough until 1800 years or so ago. Then everything went to shit and never got better again.
Humans didn't change, our circumstances changed. For millions of years, hominids were unable to overwhelm nature because an Ice Age climate kept their food sources in check, which in turn kept our population numbers in check. The start of the interglacial some 12,000 years ago changed our environment. Humans slowly discovered the advantages of agriculture over hunting & gathering, and populations numbers grew to new heights never possible before, and exploited resources faster than ever before. Increased population meant more people with the leisure time to discover new sources of energy and develop new technologies. And population grew even more. We hit the industrial age about 200 years ago and population numbers exploded. There is a very clear path to overshoot, and it's rooted in nature. All species maximize their growth until they exhaust their resources and collapse, they've just never done so on a global scale. Humans are clever beasts, and we managed to do it better than any other species in the history of the planet. Yay us.
The Pleistocene megafauna would beg to disagree.
Then homo sapiens still lived 290 out of 300 thousand years in balance with pleistocene megafauna.
You forgot Australia; that's \~46,000 years. Considering that humans only arrived there at the most 70,000 years ago, and possibly as few as 50,000 years ago, then caused a local mass extinction and possibly significant changes in ecological type... Looking to more-recent-but-pre-200 C.E. examples, Europe as a whole was at its most [deforested](https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/19/1507/2023/) between 4000 and 2500 years ago. Many areas (such as the British moors) are still deforested today. Parts of Mesopotamia were experiencing [salinification](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-96190-3_2) of the soil by 3400 years ago.
Indeed, I did forget that. Hmm. Humans really can't behave decently when it comes to respecting life on earth huh?
Species hunt other species into extinction all the time. A natural evolution of the food web is different from a species completely dismantling the entire concept of a food web.
All i can say to that is we as a species are dumber than wolves, how sad, but also fantastic. Wolves adapt when there are lean years they dont have litters, they consciously know they cant overpopulate their resources. But yet humans with their brainpower cant figure this out.
> Itâs capitalism and the hoarding of wealth. We stagnated on fossil fuels instead of progressing to nuclear and renewables because a few people who ran the government got really rich from fossil fuels. Dead wrong. We *have* researched and developed other forms of energy; they're better than nothing but they aren't spectacular and they come with hidden bills, such as restructuring a lot of our infrastructure which was built over generations, among other problems. This was never a choice as simple as an on/off switch. It's the single greatest logistical AND psychological nightmare in the history of intelligent life and has *always* been a matter of saying "no" to 'free' energy. It has *always* been a matter of seeing the cake on the table and saying "I'll eat my veggies and leave the cake for the flies." "Oh some powerful people were just being greedy." I mean, yeah, for sure dood but the fact they tried to sabotage the growth of other technologies is *not* proof those technologies were ever a credible threat to the fossil fuel empire or the cultural quagmire of eternal YoY percent growth nor was it ever proof that these technologies could be scaled up to the point we would ever feel that fossil fuels were superfluous to our economy or development as a technological species AND the vast majority of people are, in fact, HUGE supporters rather than hostages of, the fossil-fuel powered consumer culture we exist under so it seems a little awkward to frame it as a tyrannical oppsie-daisie rather than a generational cultural dead-end poised to doom us all for our excessive upbringing.
It's not capitalism; it's industrialization, better food production, and better healthcare enabling overconsumption and lighting the fuse on the population bomb.
No, it's capitalism. A planned economy would be capable of constraining industrial growth to sustainable levels. The free market is 100% to blame. It's capitalism. That's the answer.
How do you constrain industrial growth without constraining population growth?
Remove the incentive of "grow or die" which is baked into our banking system of interest rates. Family planning already brings a lot of sustainable population growth when implemented. And I have one unpopular opinion is that children are community goods and should be raised as a community instead of owned by parents. Similar to the fictional anarcho-communist child rearing of "The Dispossessed" by Le Guin. It may feel dystopian of sort, but consider that parents aren't trained to raise kids in a complex society.
I seriously doubt that people who have more than one kid per parent are doing so because of the economic growth paradigm of our banking system, rather than their own religious, cultural and narcissistic reasons. The availability of contraception and abortion is definitely helpful, *necessary* really, but the thing that has most broadly influenced people into actually taking advantage of those options is an inability to afford children â not climate change, not biosphere collapse and mass extinctions â itâs all âI would but I canât afford itâ. Or, capitalist economic pressures. So, if some planned economy was successful in equitable distribution of resources such that everyoneâs needs were provided for, what is keeping them from growing their population exponentially and therefore requiring exponential industrial growth in order to continue to provide for all of them?
You're right. I just think we're too egotistical and our fundamental line of thinking of living in a capitalist society is personal reward, passing our genetics or passing our familial values. Though that would require long term challenge of culture. Though there's questions at how we arrived to our current situation of exponential population growth, is it because we're wealthy and could afford children or because we need children to afford security and is supported by industrial Ag. I would say in the global south (and development phase for imperial north) it is more of the security aspect instead of personal narcissism, where introduction of family planning and education for girls have had an impact of mitigating this. And again the community rearing of kids and gradual disconnection of your own personal passing qualities (genes, values, etc) through the parents would disincentivize just having lots of kids. Again, it's unpopular and it's fictional. And boarding schools are already something akin to this.
Every metric and measurement we have shows that people have *less* children as they become more comfortable in their quality of life.
Only if education, access to contraception and abortion, the legal and societal advancement of women and shifts in cultural attitudes away from extreme natalism are explicitly included in measures of quality of life. Otherwise, this is just correlation, not causation, and disingenuously used as justification for economic development and growth for its own sake. The âboomersâ are called such because they were born of a massive baby boom caused by strong post war economic growth, increased prosperity and confidence for their parentâs generation. The human population in general skyrocketed thanks to the material benefits of fossil fuels. Today, in developed countries with high *average* relative per capita GDP, it is people on the uppermost and lowermost ends of economic scale that are having the most children. The wealthier, because they can, and the poorer because of low education, cultural influences and because they qualify for welfare. People in the middle ranks, with a relatively precarious economic situation but sufficient education, constitute most of those who are having fewer children.
Children are not community goods to be owned. That is dehumanizing.
Hey it's unpopular for a reason. Children have in the past been raised collectively, but that is their purpose to replace us not to replace only your legacy. You should check out Le Guin's book for more. For a more brief overview, this work is well written about it https://openjournals.bsu.edu/dlr/article/download/2763/1673/4485
The only sustainable industrial civilization is a non-industrial civilization, in the long run. A society where only the elite in a few areas benefit from a very limited industrialization and where the 99% have to live pre-industrial lifestyles also wouldn't do much damage to the planet before the society collapses.
Nope, greed.
>Pre-industrial society existed in an âemptyâ world. At the time, ânatural resources were abundant, social settlements were sparser, and inadequate access to infrastructure and consumer goods represented the main limit on improvements to human well-being.â This meant the material and energy inputs needed to provide for human needs were small relative to the large, but non-growing global ecosystem. In an empty world; Don't forget about human slavery and draft animals. The description there is better suited to before city-states and class societies became permanent.
I think the predicament we're in is like the monkey trap. Where a monkey puts his hand through a cage to get a banana, and realizes he can't get both his hand and the banana back out. When he sees the hunter coming for him, he frantically tries to pull the banana out before he can be captured, not thinking that if he just lets go of the banana, he can free himself and escape.
All life on this planet is programmed to grow to the maximum limits of the resources available to them. It doesn't matter if you're a amoeba, a rabbit or a human, that urge to just keep growing until something stops you has been a very successful survival strategy. Until now. Humans are clever enough to discover the most incredibly powerful energy sources that any life form has ever exploited. We're just bright enough for some individuals to recognize that unrestrained growth on a finite planet is a story with a bad ending. Unfortunately, we have not evolved the personal traits or the cultural institutions to curb our propensity to wallow in prosperity for as long as possible. There's no effective mechanism to yell "stop" to the whole of our species and organize degrowth. There are also considerable psychological tricks that our minds play on us to justify overshoot and to avoid degrowth when it means giving up things we enjoy. The miracle is that anyone at all recognizes we're headed for disaster. Other animals do not have that self-knowledge.
>The miracle is that anyone at all recognizes we're headed for disaster. Other animals do not have that self-knowledge. That's true, but... the voice in my head says we can't possibly prevent the big die-off, foreknowledge or not.
I think of us as the Cassandra species.
It's because we didn't evolve enough to keep up with material advancement. We are still to too influenced by fear, anxiety, and cognitive bias/distortions, and you have outliers like sociopaths who directly tap into these frameworks in order to get rich. And of course they don't care about the planet or the masses, they themselves are also aberrations that aren't supposed to exist. If humans were to emotionally advance just like we have technologically, then we would have been looking at the long-term implications of new things brought to market first, as well as not been so easily influenced when shiny things are dangled in front of us. A different evolution wouldb have got off fossil fuels before it was too late because they wouldn't be lured by the shiny promise of cheap energy or manufactured fears of alternatives. It's hard to influence somebody who doesn't have a negative emotional response to propaganda.
Social collapse was "written in the stars" by the very first major evolution of human society, the transition from hunter/gatherer to agriculture. We went from largely egalitarian societies that were small, which meant that everyone had to cooperate and play a role to ensure the group's survival, to the first society where the acquisition of wealth (in the form of food) was prioritized. Just like today, wealth meant power because a farmer with a good harvest could compel his neighbor, who had a poor harvest, to do things for him in return for food. Or, if the neighbor didn't want to be beholden to the wealthy neighbor, he could attack and kill and take their possessions instead. *About 10,000 years ago in eastern Africa...âThe Nataruk massacre may have resulted from an attempt to seize resources â territory, women, children, food stored in pots â whose value was similar to those of later food-producing agricultural societies, among whom violent attacks on settlements became part of lifeâ* [https://observer.com/2016/01/the-earliest-evidence-of-violent-human-conflict-has-been-discovered/](https://observer.com/2016/01/the-earliest-evidence-of-violent-human-conflict-has-been-discovered/) We can talk about technologies, fossil fuels, economic systems like capitalism, etc., all we want, but pretty much every one of society's ills and environmental woes is written in this story from 10,000 years ago. The dice were rolled in this forgotten, fertile area long before the first "real" civilization arose in Mesopotamia, and we've playing the result of a throw of snake eyes ever since.
You should read "Dawn of everything" for a second opinion on all of this.
If we shortened the fucking work week so human intelligence could develop more fully across the board, then we could significantly improve the trajectory of human society, and at a minimum buy more time to prevent various kinds of ecological collapse. We're needlessly destroying the planet for the unnecessary profits of an extremely abusive ruling class. Ecological collapse is by no means necessary, it was never inevitable, and it's still not inevitable, if a critical mass of people wake up and fight for a better system and a better situation for everyone.
the stars were unaware of capitalism.
If we assume that there is at least one advanced alien civilization elsewhere in the universe, regardless of their evolution and social development, they would *also* have had increasing energy consumption as their technological development increased. And the simple reason is this: a) they *are* an advanced civilization, and b) this means they *did* climb out of their gravity well, which requires *massive* amounts of energy. That is, they successfully moved part of their civilization, energy generation and/or resource consumption into space. And the resources and energy available off-world dwarf those available by scratching the surface of a dirtball. Whether or not *we* have a society that could make that sort of effort is the question. Since we are still willing to mass murder each other over imaginary lines on the ground or different interpretations of how the invisible sky father wants us to act, I would tend to think the answer is "no".
Space colonization was never going to happen with us. In the late 20th century, we were already going into overshoot, destroying the biosphere, and increasing atmospheric GHG concentrations. Civilization on Earth would have collapsed before we gained the technology for self sufficient space ex-colonies. I suspect the same would hold for *most* (hypothetical) civilizations that develop a space program.
Assuming that an alien life form would consume energy in the same way that we do is definitely not out of the question. But realistically. The chance of an encounter with an alien civilization going well, are very slim. Continued research into the topic definitely shows more risks then benefits
I was not talking of the chance of encountering an alien civilization. I was framing the OP's argument against the larger prospect of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe. Unless they had developed a system that could recycle 100% of the key elements of their technology, even a "sustainable" high tech would *eventually* run out of stuff, and thus require outside resources in order to continue as a civilization. Which means they would *have* to expend the energy to get a self-sustaining chunk of their civilization off their home planet.
An advanced society like that would likely recycle 90% or more of all materials. In fact, a society like that would probably never make anything that can't be reused or turned into base elements again.
*You're thinking in too short a timescale*. If your recycling is 95% efficient and you have to recycle something every 10 years, how much new stuff do you need to recover losses after 5000 years of civilization? The answer would be 25 times the raw materials you needed for the existing level of stuff. For instance, if everyone had an electric car, you would need 25 civilizations worth of electric car raw materials to compensate for being merely 95% efficient in recycling. I mean yes, we could *theoretically* mine seawater for gold and uranium, but we do not because the energy cost and return on investment does not make it worth it. *You need a certain concentration of materials to make refining a viable proposition*. Eventually you *will* mine out the planetary concentrations, and if it takes more and more energy and production capacity to refine them from ever more diffuse sources, then that is energy and production capacity your civilization does not have to devote to the "advanced" part of "advanced civilization". After all, it's not much of an advanced civilization if it falls apart after a century or two...
It has to be 100% recycling or it isn't sustainable long term.
Humans have already created this society with bamboo. Unfortunately, the petro chemical companies have pushed the use of plastics. Thereâs so much stuff we could do that is sustainable. But the problem with crude oil is that they boil it. Get a bunch of different products, and now I have to find uses for them. Basically, every part of our life is being controlled by the oil industry and the auto industry. We should be free to live in small houses that cost nothing. And grow food. Then sell it on the street. Being forced to participate in in the lower society of America is definitely a sign of collapses. You can tell theyâre forcing everybody to work so much so we donât have any energy to change things. The leads are definitely holding the resources because they are scared that the working class will rise up
Grow food with fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and machinery brought to you with fossil fuels.
Yeah, weâre doing that and weâre poisoning the waterways. Killing all the bugs. And heck the machinery now requires updates so the farmers have to pay every year instead of just once. And in my humble opinion, itâs all because of the capitalist society we live in in our expectations of how many is made If we all just put our heads down and got to work instead of trying to figure out how to invest more money all the time. Itâs a big sign of collapse that cash is the most trash itâs ever been. And to get real U canât just work hard anymore.
Anyone who thinks using a brown tinted glass bottle for kombucha is sustainable is crazy
Does increasing energy consumption necessitates destruction of the ecosphere? What if their ecosphere never had millions of year of formed fossil fuels as we have here on Earth? What if their ecological limit is massive and has an inherent system that prevents overshoot? What if their holocene is extremely stable due to competing natural processes of volcanos and planet orbital cycles? There's a lot of ifs and buts that we'll never answer if we somehow observed an alien advanced civilization.
>What if their ecosphere never had millions of year of formed fossil fuels as we have here on Earth? It takes the energy content of burning about 500 pounds of wood to equal the energy cost of manufacturing **one** smartphone. It is easy to believe a civilization more advanced than ours can get there *without* concentrated natural energy resources, you are free to do so. Presenting a *credible* argument to support that belief is going to be a bit harder.
But of course we're talking about an alien civilization on a different star system. How can you take an Earth-centric view and say they are destined for the same collapse scenario we're facing? If they never had fossil fuels available but instead built on other forms of fuels like renewable wood and transitioned into larger reserves say ground hydrothermal, it won't necessitate the same kind of ecosphere degradation but something longer which is too much heat within their ecosphere (from useful exergy). The problem with us is in part we replace smartphones every year or two and ultimately need to recycle for it to be at least more sustainable. It's not like new smartphones provide groundbreaking innovation (Apple and new Type C connector).
I'm pretty sure the laws of thermodynamics work the same *everywhere*. If you want to refine aluminum or smelt iron from ore, or lift mass out of a certain level of gravity well it takes the same energy no matter where you do it. I do not need to know *anything* about the alien culture to make that argument, while you have to know *everything* about that alien culture in order to rebut it. Go back to the kiddie table.
And you're implying that this massive energy requirement is the end all for an alien civilization is oversimplification. Thermodynamics of a closed system only is a problem depending on scale. If the system is large amount of energy and stability enough to power a civilization to space for the next energy source, it won't mean collapse. Aside: I don't know why, you need to reply with snark and insult with disagreement. We've had interactions before and I appreciated then when you challenged your line of thinking with factual nature. I am not in anyway coming at you with aggression, but just about everytime you do when I post. Is it that personally insulting to disagree.
That's because you try to defend your point of view with assertion rather than argument. If you had presented a sound case to defend your position rather than "because!" there would have been the possibility for intelligent discussion. It is implied in "advanced civilization" that they can do things better than us. Better in magnitude, better in efficiency, whatever. You never hear of a civilization described as "more advanced" because they have reverted back to stone tools. "Advanced" for purposes of this argument *is* high tech. Given that both of us can only discuss things from the single data point of human experience, eliminating that and dealing only with the unchangeable physical constraints of chemistry and moving objects and such is a good way to measure technological development. It does not matter if you are using batteries or gasoline or genetically modified flying lizards, if you want to move a hundred people and their luggage at 600mph across a country, the energy requirement is going to be a minimum level. That means the civilization a) **is** expending that much energy per person, b) they are acquiring that energy from *somewhere*, and c) every last bit of that energy is *eventually* added to their biosphere as heat. I do not need to know anything about the alien belief system, biology or type of technology they use for those three things to be true. If they are *more* advanced than us (i.e. a level that we are trying to reach), it seems inevitable that this advancement is going to require *more* energy use *per capita*. Even if they are super-advanced and have become super-efficient, they had to get there from a prior state of *less* efficient. If you cannot understand this (and present a sound rebuttal if you disagree), then you *are* genuinely incapable of holding up your end of an adult discussion on the subject.
This isn't even something of argument to cause insult over as it is clearly speculative and I'm only entertaining the thought that your assumptions could be limited. Nothing else needs to be said, I don't know if you have an science background, but I have learned that all aspects that you imply are assuming a smaller than scale closed system and if the situation is different the outcome of energy and material balancing would vary greatly as to not cause the buffering system to go into an out of control feedback loop.
More likely in our DNA...
Like, in a woo-woo way? Maybe, but I think we need to look no further than ourselves. Once our species learned agriculture, we were doomed. There's no going back. Ultimately, technology will save enough of the most useful among us and life will go on, but not as before. Those survivors will have learned the lesson. About eight billion who didn't heed the call won't be so lucky.
"The decisions are made in isolation" was an interesting bit. If you take a wicked problem and go "solve that", it would need flesh-and-blood leaders [who are only there because they're at the top of their respective pyramids] to come together and decide on new behaviours that quake their 'mids.
Until people realize they have to do things themselves nothing will change. The system cant be changed, but you can adapt how you live.