

"Collapse will not be televised... you will only know that it has happened to you." - asciilifeform
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2007/Collapse-Discontents-Orlov1feb07.htm

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nostrademons
> An additional complication is that we cannot make such a huge reduction
> because the current human population of the Earth far exceeds its carrying
> capacity: a lot of people would have to die.

This is a persistent myth that really needs to die. _Right now_ , per capita
world food production is roughly 3000 calories/day/person. This means that
with _present_ food production, even assuming we never get another ounce of
efficiency, we could feed a world population up to 9-10 billion. At present
growth trends, demographers expect world population to top out at about 10-12
billion and then start declining just because of lower birthrates in
industrialized countries. We only need a slight increase to support that, and
we're home free.

So why are there starving children in Africa? It's almost always because of
distribution problems throughout war-torn regions with poor infrastructure. In
the south of a country, they'll be famine and war, while in the north food
rots in the fields.

The impediments to good nutrition for all are all social, not scientific. If
we weren't such assholes, nobody would be dying of hunger.

~~~
ced
The decreased birth rate we're experiencing is quite an amazing biological
anomaly. People who have many children (say 5) will reproduce much faster than
people who don't (1 child). 5^n faster, where n is is the number of
generations that has passed. This is a huge evolutionary pressure. If "having
many children" has any genetic basis at all, the phenomenom of small families
is likely to die out in the short term... at the evolutionary time scale,
anyway. Centuries, maybe.

The cause of reduced birth rates is the availability of contraception, of
course. It used to be that even if a man didn't like to have children, he
couldn't help it as long as he wanted to have sex. Now that this is no longer
true, it's quite likely that the average man will be increasingly fond of
children, or increasingly averse to contraception. Evolution, much like
progress, won't be stopped.

~~~
palish
Why? There is nothing to suggest people will become increasingly adverse to
contraception; they already are. And you can't evolve out (or legislate away)
abortion. I don't understand your points.

~~~
jibiki
I think he's talking about the ~100 generation time-scale; i.e., Darwinian
evolution rather than Lamarckian evolution. If anybody has a "desire to have a
large family gene", then that gene will come to dominate the human gene pool
in a few hundred generations, because people with it will produce, on average,
many times as many children as people without it. The two biggest assumptions
here are:

1\. This gene exists (and is the main factor in determining how many children
people have.)

2\. Other genes won't become more important.

I would bet on both of these assumptions being false, but it's certainly
possible that they hold.

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varjag
OK, I used to refrain from commenting on that guy on few occasions, but allow
me to chime in now.

He is not a "USSR survivor", he moved to the States in the age of 12 in 1980s,
before shit really hit the fan. Wikipedia says he's been "on extended trips to
Russia" in early 1990's. I reckon this sort of safari in late teen age is all
of his acutal post-USSR experience and is the basis for all of his reasoning.

To many of his audience, his prose and predictions come off as something cool,
sort of like Fallout, Escape from New York or a Gibson novel come live. Well,
as someone who actually lived there at the time, I can assure you it wasn't
nearly as cool or exciting. You couldn't "hire a couple of soldiers with AKs
to follow you around", there were no barrels burning as improptu street
lights, and one couldn't get a slice of Pu239 at a grocery market. There was,
on the other hand, massive amount of financial and humanitarian aid coming
from the USA and Western Europe, and a huge improvement in standards of living
(it was _that_ low to begin with).

I would say his factual parts are not entirely factual, he wasn't enough of
insider to convey how it was for insider there, his vision is skewed and he
has a fair anti-US bias. When I read him I visualize that excited, giggly
expat teenager on a trip to former homeland, that's who he still is.

~~~
viggity
Really? Damn, I was looking forward to meeting Snake Plissken

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palish
Since when is it good form to use a quote as the title? The article is
entitled "Collapse and its Discontents".

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dhimes
meh From the title I was hoping this was a doomsday prediction about the LHC
finding a new untra-stable form of matter or perhaps causing the universe to
decay to a lower energy state :)

Of course, I doubt we would even have time to know it was happening to us in
that case.

