We're pretty much fucked

[Eulogy]

From what I gather from recent news threads and the like, we members of SD.Net and their friends and family don't stand much chance of making it through the next few decades alive, let alone living comfortably.

But that doesn't mean we give up. There has to be SOMETHING we can do. After all, nobody wants to be shot or starve because of stupid choices made by politicians or religious people- especially when the victim knows much better.

[Coyote]

Are you talking about crime? War? Global Warming? Drug-resistance microbes? Peak Oil? All of the above? Or just a random doom & gloom rant?

[Vampiress_Miyu]

I agree with Coyote. . .
O.o You should really be more specific on these things. After all, there are a great many things that currently threaten to royally fuck us.

[Beowulf]

From what I gather from recent news threads and the like, we members of SD.Net and their friends and family don't stand much chance of making it through the next few decades alive, let alone living comfortably.

But that doesn't mean we give up. There has to be SOMETHING we can do. After all, nobody wants to be shot or starve because of stupid choices made by politicians or religious people- especially when the victim knows much better.

Nah, there's nothing to be done. Might as well kill yourself now, and spare the misery. Remember, down the street, not across the block.

[Eulogy]

Sorry if I was vague.

I'm mostly talking about the Carbon Twins of Peak Oil and Global Warming, and how they'll affect a person on the local level. I pretty much expect Joe Sheep to be fucked, but as we are aware of the problem, we need to do a great many things about it.

So when the world feels the great big resource crunch, how can we live through it all?

[Bounty]

So when the world feels the great big resource crunch, how can we live through it all?

Same way people lived through World Wars One, Two and any other conflict that caused a resource crunch: they adapt.

[Darth Wong]

So when the world feels the great big resource crunch, how can we live through it all?

Same way people lived through World Wars One, Two and any other conflict that caused a resource crunch: they adapt.

Of course, it's always possible that your adaptation to resource shortfalls will look more like 1930s Ukraine or present-day Africa. Sometimes the "adaptation" is a dramatic reduction in population.

[Shinova]

When the great global warming smash happens most of us will probably be in our elderly years. It'll be our children who get all the headaches and the glory of leading civilization out of the mess, and then they'll be called the greatest generation or something. We'll just be the ones to get ourselves into the mess in the first place.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

When the great global warming smash happens most of us will probably be in our elderly years. It'll be our children who get all the headaches and the glory of leading civilization out of the mess, and then they'll be called the greatest generation or something. We'll just be the ones to get ourselves into the mess in the first place. :lol:

Don't worry, Peak Oil will effectively collapse all western economies while we're still hale and hearty.

[Darth Wong]

Just bask in the temporary adulation of democracy and capitalism. In 50 years, people will be looking back and blaming both democracy and capitalism for what happened.

[Enforcer Talen]

I fully intend to survive this.

Key thing is make yourself useful.

[Stravo]

Does anyone get the uncomfortable sense that Children of Men looks more and more like a documentary of our future than a movie?? I felt a little uncomfortable watching it for that very reason, it felt a little too real to me and I don't want to live in a world remotely like that.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Does anyone get the uncomfortable sense that Children of Men looks more and more like a documentary of our future than a movie?? I felt a little uncomfortable watching it for that very reason, it felt a little too real to me and I don't want to live in a world remotely like that.

No, it's not at all what it will be like, fortunately.

If you want a vision of what it will be like, try that scene from Dr. Zhivago where he gets arrested for stealing wood from a fence to keep a fire going in his house through the winter. That is what the average suburbanite is going to do if they're unable to relocate--be reduced to stealing the boards from the neighbour's fence and dismantling their garage for fuel to burn in winter. Just hope we don't end up with a civil war on top of everything else like the poor bastard Russians did back then.

Civilization is going to go on, but if a hundred people are dying of starvation a day in New York City, we'll consider that to be enormously lucky.

[Vampiress_Miyu]

-has yet to see Children of Men, but might rent it sometime over the summer-
I dunno, though... The knowledge that it's a movie based on a novel kind of kills me thinking of it in a realistic way. I'm just like that with movies...

And yeah, I agree with Talen. Not quite sure how I'm going to go about attempting to survive this insanity, but I'm sure as hell going to try.

[Enforcer Talen]

The movie I liked was Soylent Green. It did the global warming well, I think, but forgot the Peak Oil. . . unless the trucks for the soylent green was the only trucks existing.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

-has yet to see Children of Men, but might rent it sometime over the summer-
I dunno, though... The knowledge that it's a movie based on a novel kind of kills me thinking of it in a realistic way. I'm just like that with movies...

And yeah, I agree with Talen. Not quite sure how I'm going to go about attempting to survive this insanity, but I'm sure as hell going to try.

If you have no useful skills currently, go get a railroad job. They'll take people with job experience in other fields who are young with only a couple years' job experience, they'll train you, and they'll pay you well. The railroads will not stop running and they'll mean guaranteed indefinite job security. If you can fork over several thousand dollars for training on your own for a Conductor's certification, the starting salary can be as high as 60k a year. If you're intelligent and you live on about a third of that, you can put the rest of the money into buying land in an area where you can set up renewable power resources and rent space to tenant farmers in the future.

[Surlethe]

What will academia look like in thirty years? Is preparing chiefly for a job teaching at a university a futile investment in the future, or will research universities still exist, if in an altered form?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

What will academia look like in thirty years? Is preparing chiefly for a job teaching at a university a futile investment in the future, or will research universities still exist, if in an altered form?

Research will certainly exist, probably on a larger scale than it does today, if in very focused areas, with heavy engineering focus rather than interest on theoretical matters. Autocracies are much more willing to invest in long-term projects; instead of worrying about the election cycle, the leadership has a secured position and can think about the sort of legacy they're leaving behind for when their children take over running the country.

The main focus of censorship and repression will invariably be in the liberal arts, but they've made themselves useless anyway. A nice side effect will be that creationism will be effectively eliminated, as there will no longer be any people-power on the part of Christians to force these changes. The government is more apt to manipulate religion as a tool rather than force it on people, as its main and only interest will be stability. Stability, stability, stability. The largest repression will be against those who threaten the state's ideology: Free-marketeers, libertarians, communists, socialists, populists, democracy advocates, protestors, radical anarchists, etc. The economic system will of a necessity be basically corporatist, by which I refer to the early 20th century definition.

Essentially we're looking at a social system like that which Alexandre Solzhenitsyn argued was necessary in his famed critique of the west at his infamous Harvard Commencement Address, where he tore apart the customs of the prevailing western civilization. Its aggressive obsession with growth is going to demand a harsh contraction. The future of society could be described as medievalist, but that's not quite correct, as the leadership will have a considerable interest in increasing the efficiency of the means of production to make up for the massively limited energy resources. With wealth made up of maximization of existing resources rather than expansion, we're looking at what is essentially a resumption of the recycling economy previously required for pre-industrial civilizations to exist.

The only and ultimate way to resume sustained prosperity will be to gain the ability to extract resources in space, to collect energy in space, and to grow food there, which, in terms of the scale of tonnage required, necessarily means space elevators or nuclear pulse-rockets, or some esoteric design beyond that. Stabilization from peak oil and global warming mitigation (by which I mean the elimination of ALL burning of hydrocarbons, period, the only sure way to put an end to the warming process--no coal, no oil, and no bio-fuels, none of it being used) will not be completed until the 2070s; after that we're looking at, hopefully, using the resources of the dead areas of the planet (Africa, etc) where most of the population has perished, to fuel colonization of space, in the same way that those resources once fueled industrialization in the western world.

This means that we need to have a solid, long-term government in place which can make efficient and rational decisions which will be carried out over decades, and the only form of government in human history capable of such is an authoritarian one. Fortunately the main source of an authoritarian government in the modern world will be the military, and the military's officer corps is largely made up of people who, if they took power, would be interested in stability at any cost rather than pursuing certain ideological aims.

What I'm basically saying is that there is absolutely no chance for us to resume the level of prosperity we enjoyed in the 19th and 20th centuries until the beginning of the 2200s, and it requires several preconditions.

[Stravo]

I'm curious Dutchess, if man was able to have relatively stable democracies in both Greece and Rome in Iron and Bronze Age no medicine, no electricity era what has changed that man cannot continue to have that form of government should this crisis happen. I'm not saying nothing will change but a more autocratic/paternalistic type of democracy or socialism mix is certainly something I can see happeneing as opposed to simple destruction of democracy.

[Surlethe]

I'm curious Dutchess, if man was able to have relatively stable democracies in both Greece and Rome in Iron and Bronze Age no medicine, no electricity era what has changed that man cannot continue to have that form of government should this crisis happen. I'm not saying nothing will change but a more autocratic/paternalistic type of democracy or socialism mix is certainly something I can see happeneing as opposed to simple destruction of democracy.

I'm guessing that it boils down to the size of society, efficiency, and resource availability. Athens and Rome were both city-states when they began their democracies; when they grew into empires, the democracies became bloated and inefficient. There's also the fact that we'll be facing a prolonged crisis: in both ancient cases, the city-states had provisions in place to incorporate authoritarian rule in case of crisis: for examples, see the Greek tradition of tyrants and the Roman tradition of dictators. Even in American history, presidents have assumed authoritarian powers to deal with periods of crisis: Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and FDR effectively nationalized the economy for the duration of WWII.

The final and most damning point, I think, is that natural selection will work to emphasize social efficiency at the cost of citizen participation. Democracies are, by their very nature, bloated and inefficient: see the Carthaginian behavior during the Second Punic War, or even the US now. Unless the breakdown of society is so total that city-states are once again a viable social unit, natural selection will favor those societies that most ruthlessly and efficiently use their resources to grow, expand, and acquire more resources. Over the past five thousand years, resources have been plentiful, so the selection forces have been weak (though still present). Now, the Malthusian scarcity of resources is becoming evident, and for nation-states with more than several thousand citizens, I would propose authoritarian governments are more efficient and far-sighted than democratic governments in the acquisition and use of resources.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I'm curious Dutchess, if man was able to have relatively stable democracies in both Greece and Rome in Iron and Bronze Age no medicine, no electricity era what has changed that man cannot continue to have that form of government should this crisis happen. I'm not saying nothing will change but a more autocratic/paternalistic type of democracy or socialism mix is certainly something I can see happeneing as opposed to simple destruction of democracy.

Roman democracy collapsed because of an influx of cheap slave labour from their conquered provinces. A sharp increase in available economic resources destroyed the Roman Republic because the average man on the street was dispossessed from their livelihood and turned to radical politics to get it back.

Think about what is going to happen when the average American Surburbanite loses Walmart, McDonalds, Starbucks, and their electrical power, their cars, their job, and has to rely on a weekly government truck rolling by and dumping a sack of wheat on their curb for them to survive if they can't find work in the cities or as manual labourers on a farm. They aren't going to care about why this is inevitable and necessary or how to fix it. They're just going to want their previous prosperity back, and they're going to do anything to get it back, no matter how irrational.

At that point, unless someone ends democracy, democracy will become a tool for the total self-destruction of society.

The problem isn't with the lack of modern conveniences, Stravo, it's with the abrupt change. The shock of the abrupt change is what's going to destroy democracy, not the new conditions themselves.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Survive? Yes, if prepared. Enjoy? Likely not. If the prospect really does harm your sensibilities, then end it all now. Or, you can ride it out and hope for the best.

I really am quite interested in how we shall go through the next couple of decades. As the Chinese curse goes, may you live in interesting times. Well, I'm going to take advantage of that, seeing as how the 21st century will very likely be the most testing time for humanity ever.

Of course, people who can't live without an SUV, McDonald's burger bars on every corner and 500 channel satellite TV will find it hard to adapt. I'll try and hold back the tears as best I can.

It's funny, just now on Question Time the panel was discussing Russia and a new Cold War. Now it's on that damn Olympic logo, as if it rates on the same level of pressing matters (yes, it's causing epileptic fits and cost half a mil, but come on).

Still no mainstream news coverage of super cyclone Gonu.

[Broomstick]

-has yet to see Children of Men, but might rent it sometime over the summer-
I dunno, though... The knowledge that it's a movie based on a novel kind of kills me thinking of it in a realistic way. I'm just like that with movies...

And yeah, I agree with Talen. Not quite sure how I'm going to go about attempting to survive this insanity, but I'm sure as hell going to try.

If you have no useful skills currently, go get a railroad job. They'll take people with job experience in other fields who are young with only a couple years' job experience, they'll train you, and they'll pay you well.

Unless, of course, you're colorblind, such as I am. Or not so young anymore. Or on some rather common medications. And a few other things.

How will I survive? Not sure... and I wouldn't want to lock myself too strongly into one particular plan, anyhow, since adaptibility will be an asset. I do know that I can be content with a much lower material standard of living than most of my contemporaries. I do enjoy my computers, video games, CD's, DVD's , car, truck, airplanes, etc. but I also have a deep understanding I don't need them the way I do food and water.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Granted, all of that is correct, but for the average individual it will be a dependable career. There are others out there. I'm just suggesting a fairly quick fix if you're genuinely worried in the short term. Mostly to counteract all this "holy fuck I'm going to die it's hopeless" shit that seem to be pulling as they realize the magnitude of the problem.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I hear being dead cuts energy and food bills dramatically and plenty of real-estate to boot. Shame the tax is too high, else I'd probably consider it.