the end of the world - and how to avoid it

as this subject is (or was) getting extensive coverage in other threads such as TFoTTP, i thought it merited its own home.

i have thought about this quite a bit, ever since studying population curves in A level biology, and have some thoughts to share, but for my part no particular call to action; there will be more to follow from me, but anyway, here is a space for this discussion.

of course, as ever, please avoid ad hominen and other forms of sniping and nastiness.

Nice

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The World will end when the Sun blows up no?

Whether humans are around or not? #justsayin

as i was saying, when I was 16 and studying (i use the term loosely) A level biology, i became interested in the population phases exhibited by bacteria in a culture (usually in a petri dish or some other finite environment).

as i'm sure many people will know, the population of bacteria typically shows 4 phases:
lag (slow growth)
log (exponential growth)
stationary
death (exponential reduction)

so what? well two things are pretty much beyond debate: we are in the log phase of human population growth, and exponential growth of anything cannot continue to infinity (maybe the universe, who knows, i'm not a physicist but even if the universe can expand forever, i don't think that will help any beings living on a finite lump of matter such as the earth).

so that suggests that exponential growth must stop at some point, and after that something else must happen, which could either be an extended phase of stationary population, or a short phase of stationary population, or possibly we could miss out that phase altogether and go straight into decline.

for me, the essential concept is resource exploitation. populations which are effective at exploiting resources can grow. as resources are finite, at some point the effectiveness of the resource exploitation starts to decline. because we are clever, we adapt and find different ways to exploit resources, and different resources to exploit. however this, in my view, cannot carry on indefinitely. arguably, solar and wind are sufficiently abundant to be considered infinite, but i can't see a model where these resources alone are sufficient to allow continued population growth indefinitely.

and then there is the other cause of the death phase - the build up of waste resulting from resource exploitation, aka drowning in your own shit. not sure how renewable energy can help with that, on a global scale.

so we know that we need to change our ways, manage population growth and the rate of and effects of our exploitation of resources. but what is the motivation to change?

this is the part where i struggle. maybe there is a theoretical collectivist / ecological / socially just future, but i just can't see how we get there. it appears to me that the only things that will change behaviour on a societal or global scale are large shocks and / or the things we rely on becoming unavailable so that the option not to change is removed.

i wish that i had a more positive message, and i have complete respect for those who are trying to drive change, whether in small ways or large ones. fwiw one of my kids is a climate change activist. i was previously involved in left wing politics, and i still respect and admire some of the left wing thinkers i encountered at that time. for now, i'm just trying not to be too much of a d*ckhead and not make too many blatantly awful decisions.

yeah, i debated whether to use "world" in the thread title as i really meant "human civilisation" as the world is arguably just a a lump of rock.

i thought "world" sounded more catchy, though :)

I thought the projections were that world population was actually going to peak this century and so fears of continued expone tial growth are unfounded.

E.g. (but there are lots of others)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/27/world-population-bomb-may-never-go-off-as-feared-finds-study

potentially good news if that does happen - however:

the authors caution that falling birthrates alone will not solve the planet’s environmental problems, which are already serious at the 8 billion level and are primarily caused by the excess consumption of a wealthy minority

While population growth levels may slow by the end of the century, living standards are forecast to keep growing, so you might have less people but more people living at a current western living standard and higher, so resource consumption growth will continue to grow for far longer

This is a good report on the issues we face and obviously being a whole year out of date, we have managed to make the situation worse
https://www.postcarbon.org/publications/welcome-to-the-great-unraveling/

The great simplification with Nate Hagens is a great podcast trying to answer the topic of this thread

Relevant Kevin Anderson quote

https://youtu.be/Z0GFRcFm-aY?si=1t5nGPSC5hWx40Uj

Relevant Kevin Anderson quote

i agree that the future will be radically different, just as the pre industrial age was radically different from now.

what i can't see is how we can manage that change in a proactive way without some massive shocks. even if the motivation was there, it's hard to contemplate how in a world of over 8 bn people.

The World will end when the Sun blows up no?

Continuing my theory that most threads are resolved on their first page.

exponential growth of anything cannot continue to infinity (maybe the universe, who knows, i'm not a physicist

*takes a spaceship to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe*

personally I can't wait to never have to go to work again

I don't want to put words in @Kimmo 's mouth, but I'm pretty sure their point was wider than just climate change itself and covered at least some of (and possibly more than)

• Disaster capitalism
  
• What could replace it
  
• How to effect change as a concerned campaigner/activist
  
  

Disaster capitalism is now the driving force behind climate change, but there are other ways it could potentially break global society first, which might even have been Kimmo's point.

If there's energy and appetite for people to talk about these things, one thread will collapse under the weight. You'd need one of those subforum areas (or whatever microcosm calls them) where people could launch separate threads on those topics, or for specific campaigning ideas, or whatever, while being one place to go look and find all those things.

There's already a climate crisis thread. It awakes from hibernation every year or so, makes some noise for a few weeks or months, then goes back to sleep.

A global war would reduce the population and the number of young people capable of reproduction…..win, win?

Well I thought fallout series was a bit shit.

But that's just me.

I was aiming / intending to be non specific about the potential causes of the end of the world / human civilization.

Just found this on the Wiki Overpopulation page.

"Concerns about population size or density have a long history: Tertullian, a resident of the city of Carthage in the second century CE, criticized population at the time: "Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us... In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race."[98] Despite those concerns, scholars have not found historic societies that have collapsed because of overpopulation or overconsumption.[99]"

You’re all…

The problem is absolutely not overpopulation. It's excessive and constant use of machines--transportation machines, computers (wrongly considered to be a universal tool), industrial agriculture, and depleting the natural world through destructive practices like monocultures and deep-sea trawling. It's been shown that a lot of the damage caused by aviation, for instance, is caused by relatively few frequent fliers, etc. The lifestyles of the vast majority of the population—people who live in warm areas, who still share more things communally, are (materially) relatively poor, don't travel much, etc.—are not a problem. All this is of course undermined by all the seductive nonsense about modernism, as it has been for the past 200 years, by hyper-individualism, 'bucket list' desperation, bad and unjust government, wars and violent repression (with the exception of the World Wars, I don't think anything much has changed there compared to past times, though), and so on. But yeah, let's distract from the real problem and claim that it's poor(er) people who cause it, it might just get us off the hook.

What's always interesting is that you get no end of virtuous and well-informed articles like this one ...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/21/humanity-earth-natural-limits-biodiversity-warning-cop16-conference-scientists-academics

... that focus on things most people don't understand, e.g. abstract concepts like 'biodiversity'—next it'll be temperatures, average or extreme, etc. You can talk about that until you're blue in the face and issue all the warnings you want; that's been going on for at least a century and it's never had any effect beyond the sticking-plaster solutions like urban 'rain gardens' that we can cite to make us feel better about the total failure to do anything with enough impact.

Just leaving this here.

https://flightfree.co.uk/

the problem may not be population numbers per se, but the "use of machines" and related industrial "progress" is what has allowed the population to expand in the way that it has. i'm not sure that the two things can be decoupled.

yes, the privileged few consume the most and do the most damage by a massive margin, albeit that "few" is now circa 1bn people.