WatchYou're going to be seeing headlines on this in about two weeks. That's when I'm guessing the arctic ice melt will reach an all time record and most of the arctic ocean will be free of ice and navigable.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
The blue starts in 1979. The more red the line, the more recent the year. (dark red is 2011) Each horizontal line is 1 million sq. kilometers. When the graph reaches the bottom, the north pole is completely melted. x-axis is day of the year.
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Delurking says
I'm aware of self-selection bias and that's why I said it could be coincidence.
However if now is simply a moment in time leading up to another 10,000 years of civilization, and the population will either keep increasing or stabilize at 8 billion or so, what would the chances be of drawing a single data point in 2000 instead of 2100-12,000?
Very tiny. You and I either won the lottery and beat extraordinary odds, or there isn't another trillion people coming after us.
Don't confuse certainty with probability. If I'm right, it's extremely improbable that I just happened to be born at a time when earth's population is the highest until now AND there's thousands of years more history to go. What's much more probable is that I'm here now because there isn't any tomorrow.
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Delurking says
I find the assertion about unknown unknowns, in this case some theoretical communication system that we don't even have a theory on how to construct, to be extremely unlikely.
Occam's razor applies here. Star trek technology that is little more than a fantasy, or all advanced societies eventually release their stored hydrocarbons and wipe themselves out.
The simplest explanation is B.
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The problem with your argument is that it's never wrong.
People in 1000BC could have been using the exact same logic.
Therefore, the logic is fallacious.
I think this planet has a carrying capacity in the hundreds of billions of people.
It's more a question of access to energy than anything else, and there are 3^25 kwhr under our feet in heat energy alone. Every square meter is bombarded with up to 1kw of insolation, too, of course.
Now 500 billion people on this planet would look more like the Matrix pods than mid-20th century suburban USA. But it would be easily livable, in its own way.
More livable than any extraterrestrial colony, LOL.
or all advanced societies eventually release their stored hydrocarbons and wipe themselves out.
question-begging really. Not saying we wouldn't "get our hair mussed" should eg. temps go up 5 degrees C and Greenland and Antarctica melt off.
But humanity would survive as a going concern. There have been gating incidents in our pre-history that we got through too.
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Belief that what we know now isn't the end-all of technological advancement isn't Star Trek thinking, btw. It's common sense, or should be.
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Delurking says
I don't know whether this is possible or not, but I don't know why we would change the environment planet that much.
We know that population in many developed countries is leveling off even now, and we know that oceans appear to be threatened even if we stay at 7 to 10 billion. MEanwhile we are probably dramatically changing the planet's natural ecosystems, also if we stay at 7 to 10 billion.
I don't see any way that we populate that much more. Why would be want to ?
Also, I don't see any indication from the past that we would choose to put our collective interests ahead of individual interests enough to develop systems that could support much higher population, and besides, if we were capable of putting priorities on humanity's collective needs (which include what benefits the planet long term), we would simply choose to stop growing the population.
This probably happens naturally in any case without an actualy decision or govt control.
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Delurking says
It's certainly possible that I'm wrong. There's always a small chance that you picked the red marble out of a basket of 99 marbles.
However I'd find it much more compelling if I was alive in year 3012 and we'd used up all our fossil fuel and the earth had a population of 8 billion humans for a thousand years. Or year 4012 or year 5012..........
However that's not the case. We're all alive at what appears to be a tipping point and the north polar ice cap is rapidly disappearing. It doesn't prove anything, but it's ominous anyway.
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iwog says
way to avoid the fact that you're utterly wrong in your reasoning here, since everyone dating back to the stone age could make the same argument, and be proved wrong in time.
Throwing your own stupid, fact-free reasoning back at you, if they were all proved wrong using this faulty logic, what are the chances that you will be, too?
Again, selection bias.
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iwog says
fossil fuel, LOL. This planet is alive with energy. Part of the problem is that inertia (path-dependence) and the market power of fossil fuel interests have kept us from developing alternatives.
Like I said, there's terawatts literally under my feet, free for the taking.
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marcus says
Why not? Wouldn't people have said the same thing when the population was 300 million in AD 1000? Isn't our standard of living on the whole much better now than then, even with 23X the people?
Granted, the more densely populated an area is, the shittier it is -- Bangladesh, India, China come to mind, while the sparse countries of Scandinavia, Canada, and Australia are still paradises.
Living in high density though is much more efficient when capital investment is applied intelligently. And there's so much we do that is make-work, a post-scarcity economy is not really science fiction.
Just our $800B/yr defense bill is $7/capita/day -- easily enough to feed each of us.
A world population of 500 billion would have a much different economy than now. We would not be strip-mining the seas for protein, we would have vats for that.
So much of our life would be virtualized. It could be like Logan's Run, the utopian parts at least, most everyone living in what amounted to shopping malls.
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iwog says
You know...this problem is beyond anyone's control at this point but especially yours. Go be nice to your wife or have a nice dinner outside or something.
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Delurking says
I like what you got to say here. ; D.. You talkin TESLA
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The Solution to all this:
"Get your ass to Mars"
Seriously. Any chance of figuring out how to get a big life with a small amount of resources is going to come through trying to solve the practical aspects of living on Mars.
And no there and back bullshit. The colonists at Westfjord and Plymouth had one-way tickets.
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If we ever outgrow the carrying capacity of the Earth we'd blow through Mars even quicker.
We don't have a small amount of resources here, for that matter.
We just think we do, but we in actuality haven't scratched the surface of this place yet.
It's all just an energy problem, really.
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thunderlips11 says
Victorville is a lot closer, and looks about the same.
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freak: I plan on buying RE in Maine.
Want to join me, iwog?
I'm there now. On an island. Good defensive position for the coming cannibal anarchy. Maybe not good so a position with the rising sea levels (need to check my elevation). They seem to have rain here, unlike the rest of the US.
And to continue the "cheap goods/labor from south of the border" meme, Canadian lobstermen have been blockading shipments of inexpensive Maine lobster to Canadian processing plants.
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Delurking says
That's correct. And everyone back to the stone age would be wrong.
However I'm not using the argument back to the stone age because human populations were tiny. I'm using the argument forward when nearly a trillion people should exist IF we don't all perish from global warming or nuclear holocaust.
I've already said it's possible that I'm just lucky. That human civilization does continue for 10,000 years and I just happened to live at the dawn of the oil age. Unfortunately those are very slim odds. I've got one single data point. That one single data point didn't happen in the year 3000 or 5000 or 9000. For some reason it occurred in 1966 at the exact inflection point of global warming, population explosion, nuclear technology, and a dozen other graphs.
It's not a strong argument and of course it wouldn't hold up a a scientific proof, but it's perfectly valid to catch a single trout in a lake containing 100 trout and a single catfish and assume the lake is full of trout.
Yes it's possible to catch the one catfish and your assumption that the lake is full of catfish would be wrong. Unlikely but possible.
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Delurking says
That is totally besides the point. Regardless of how many terawatts are available, people will keep burning oil an coal and natural gas until it's all gone.
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Fail.
It's not 'valid' to assume a lake is 'full' of any one species based on a single catch. Too many other factors exist which determine which species would thrive in any given lake.
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xrpb11a says
You simply don't understand. If you were forced to bet your life on which was the most common fish, and you were allowed to catch ONE fish, what would you guess?
Furthermore if there are 99 trout and 1 catfish, what do you think your one catch is going to be?
You've got one single life. One data point. If the human race is going to continue another 10,000 years, then the odds of drawing the first 100 years of the oil age is 1 in 100.
Yes you might catch the catfish, but we both know you wouldn't. You'd catch a trout. So why wouldn't you ponder why you caught the catfish? You might suppose all the trout were dead.
All the trout are dead. You're alive now because the trillion lives that are supposed to come next never happened.
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I would not make a guess. I would rather die, than to make an illogical assumption based on the ramblings of a dabbling duck who is incapable of catching more than one fish in a pond stuffed to the gills with aquatic life.
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xrpb11a says
We'll call that a total abandonment of the conversation.
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Based on the parameters you have given, Yes, I agree.
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&feature=related
speaker has some points about global warming.
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Uh... somebody's lying. And methinks it is the AGWer (ClimateGate redux, anyone?) This year There has been record or near record snow and ice in Alaska, the Arctic, Antarctic, a brutally cold winter in Europe and even parts of the Southern Hemisphere had a year without a Summer." The same with the heat wave of July 2012, re. which Al Gore failed to report this: “Heavier than expected ice in Arctic waters off Alaska will likely delay until August Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s (RDSa.L) long-anticipated exploration drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, a company spokesman said on Friday. Shell, which wants to search for oil in what are considered remote but promising frontiers, had planned to start the wells this month, said Curtis Smith, a company spokesman in Anchorage. Sea ice is “the number one reason we won’t be drilling in July,” Smith told Reuters. “At this point, we’re looking at the first week of August… ice off Alaska is thicker than in recent years.”
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Iwog's argument is actually very strong from a mathematical perspective (and it is a well known idea in science fiction too).
The idea is that we build out a galaxy and reach our "light speed sphere" then collapse due to overpopulation/resource usage of an entire galaxy simply because we can not break the speed of light barrier (hence the sphere radiating out from the starting point, very slowly at first, then it speeds up) then it all collapses at once. (Also see: the lily pond is only half covered on day 29, then on day thirty it is chock full and unsustainable, but the growth started very slowly, etc.)
If this happens (humanity survives) you are possibly even talking quadrillions of people, not trillions. Then the odds of you being in the first 100 billion are just silly small. Very hard math to disprove.
Or maybe you believe that faster-than-light travel is possible? In that case we can escape the fate of resource depletion as we grow, without any hard limits (like the lousy old speed of light!) In that case we may very well live "forever" or until the great heat death (or possibly the next big crunch, take your pick, gear up for the next cycle, etc.)
All very interesting stuff. See Fermi's paradox as well, that goes nicely with these discussions. Add it all up (as Iwog has) and it does not look good for us 10K years in the future, 40K years in the future, etc.
Fascinating stuff. Worth thinking about imo.
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JR says
Yeah except no.
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/argentina-heat-stresses-summer/60028
JR says
OMG you have got to be fucking kidding. Here's a satellite picture of Alaska on August 1st Please show us the ice blocking the harbor. (click to zoom)
THIS ENTIRE THREAD is about smashing all previous records of summer arctic ice melt.
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I think the human race will eventually destroy itself.
But clearly Iwog's argument is absurd. Anyone existing at *any* point in history could make the *exact same argument.* As Delurking already pointed out.
"I exist, therefore I live at the peak of human population" is a non-sequitur. The statement assumes an imminent reduction in population "a priori."
It's a form of circular reasoning.
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iwog says
Never let facts get in the way of someone's ideology!
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freak80 says
As I said, it's by no means a proof that there isn't a future for mankind.
However you don't think it's a bit unlikely that you'd be born at exactly the point of highest human population in history AND right at the moment that we start using up all our fossil fuels if the human race continues another 10,000 years?
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freak80
Why do you keep saying this over and over after youve been proven wrong? You remind me of an idiot I saw once in a high school bar fight who kept saying "I'll give you one free punch, go on hit me." who would then get punched in the face and knocked down, who would then stand up and say it again, and get punched in the face again and knocked down. This happened about five times before he didn't get up. But you...
Any way, here's an article from the daily mail in the uk about the arctic ice:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2187346/Arctic-sea-ice-disappear-10-years-global-warming-increases-speed-melting.html
"Arctic sea ice could disappear within 10 years as global warming increases speed of melting, Arctic sea ice is melting at a faster rate than previously believed, a group of scientists have claimed.
The European Space Agency say that new satellites they are using have revealed that 900 cubic kilometres of ice have disappeared over the last year.
This is 50 per cent higher than the current estimates from environmentalists, they claim."
But you know, never let facts get in the way of your ideology...
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The problem with this line of thinking is that at any point in time, mankind has never been fully aware of the potential fuels at his disposal. ie.
* wood and sticks by Homo Erectus around 2 million years ago
* Charcoal (wood derivative) use started around 6000 BC
* Coal, 1000 BC
* Fossil fuels during the industrial revolution
* Currently, Nuclear and renewable fuels are the trend.
* Future: To be determined....
To assume that "fossil fuel" is at the top of the fuel ladder, based on what we know today, is simply foolish and ignores the lessons of history.
iwog says
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iwog says
Here is a paper that discusses the "great silence" in depth:
http://brin-l.stock-consulting.com/downloads/silence.pdf
Technological life may not be burning "itself" out...
One of my favorite theories from the above link (p. 14-15) is the the "deadly probes" scenario. In short it works like this: One of the early intelligent species to develop is a xenophobic paranoid species that sees all other intelligent life as a threat. They then go about building self-replicating probes and seed them through the galaxy over the course of 5 million years or so. These probes listen for unknown sources modulated electromagnetic radiation (radio waves). Then when they detect any they toot on over to the source planet and proceed to hurl bombs or asteroids at the planet until it is silent.
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Kentm,
I was *agreeing* with Iwog that ice is declining due to AGW.
That's why I said "someone's ideology" and not "your (iwog's) ideology."
It was probably confusing since I disagreed with Iwog's argument about his existence being evidence for future population crash.
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xrpb11a says
I see what you are saying, and it is a possibility that some new super-fuel comes along, but there are big differences between now and every other moment of fuel evolution in human history.
1. Current renewable fuels are much less efficient than fossil fuels and nuclear is also a finite fuel.
2. Each other time when there was a transition to a new fuel -- a more efficient fuel -- the previous fuel was not exhausted.
We are currently running out our most efficient fuel source and have nothing of equal or greater efficiency to replace it.
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xrpb11a says
1. Wood has no net long term increase in CO2. Trees pull carbon out of the air, burning puts it back in.
2. Ditto for charcoal.
3. Fossil fuel use on a large enough scale to affect climate only started about 100 years ago. All the coal and oil use prior is miniscule.
4. Nuclear and renewable fuels don't change the bottom line.
The bottom line: Humans will burn all the fossil fuels on earth, thereby releasing 2 billion years of stored carbon into the atmosphere in several hundred years tops.
Although nuclear and renewables will help, they will not stop humans from using the cheapest fuel available.
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iwog says
There's also the matter of cow farts. This is a serious deal what doesn't get mentioned much.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/08/america-drought-political-will-climate-change
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JodyChunder says
I thought it was cow burps, not cow farts.
I guess it's academic at this point.
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iwog says
It seems to me that it's the ego that would make someone think that the big issues in their lifetime happen to be the biggest issues of all time for that species. That actually seems entirely unlikely to me.
iwog says
I don't understand this at all. The logical thing seems almost the opposite to me. We are alive now. Talking about the likelihood that we exist now rather than other times seems silly to me. The truth is that existing at any time is extremely unlikely.
Still, I am interested in understanding your point, but so far can't make anything out of it.
I could say that there are 7 billion people on the planet now, and not too long ago there were only 10s of millions of people on the planet, and that's why it's more likely you exist now. But I still don't see the logic of the probabilistic discussion about something that already is.
I tend to agree with BB above that we may not have advanced forms of communication yet. Far more likely that communication quickly evolves to other forms than that life forms can not plan and just waste their resources in a harmful and quick way and destroy themselves. Thats too pessimistic even for me.
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THen again if you're talking really long time frames, maybe it not that easy for any life forms to survive for truly long period of time.
But you aren't even talking about that.