Apocalypse Soon?

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Beer w/Straw said:
You are still no match for Robittybob1!

Ha ha, this is you: :fright: All frightened like n'stuff. More ha ha at you: :fart:

~Beer w/Straw :cool:
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What do you think of the David Price paper, little kitty?

---Futilitist:cool:
 
I started reading, but google was more interesting!

Teaching Economics in Kindergarten

By Krista Calvin


I am a kindergarten teacher at Clear Creek Elementary School in Silverdale Washington. My job is to teach reading, writing, math, art, science and social studies to a group of children who have had little or no experience in a classroom setting. It is also part of my job to teach these little people the skills necessary to be successful learners. Through modeling and instruction, I teach my students how to sit quietly, listen, follow directions and work with others.

When I began teaching kindergarten three years ago, I did not think it was possible to teach young students about economics and entrepreneurship. Working in an enterprising school that focuses heavily on economic education has taught me that kindergartners are able to learn basic economic concepts, decision making skills, good work ethics and financial responsibility. In adding economic education to my kindergarten curriculum, I believe that I am not only teaching children how to be successful students, but I am also providing them with an economic background that will allow them to one day be productive citizens in our society.

When it comes to economics, I am not an expert. It is a field in which I have only just begun formal training. Before working at Clear Creek, I never once thought about how to teach economic concepts and entrepreneurship to young children. I attribute most of my success as a teacher of economics to the fact that I started my job at Clear Creek with an open mind.

During my first year of teaching, I listened to many teachers share their ideas for economic education. I observed other teachers teaching economics and I had the opportunity to work with and learn from two mentors who knew a great deal about economics and economic teaching strategies. These experiences allowed me to grow as an educator. I incorporated many of their ideas into my own teaching and I have now developed many of my own lessons.

In writing this paper, I can share many things I have learned during my two years teaching economics at Clear Creek. I hope that other open minded teachers will be able to see the value in teaching economics to young people and use some of the lessons with their own students. The ideas and activities presented in this paper were originally designed for the kindergartners in my class. However, I believe they can be adapted and taught across many grades.

In the next three sections I will attempt to describe the activities that take place in my class during the school year. First I will discuss how I prepare my kindergartners for economic education. In the second section, I will describe the economic concepts that I focus on during the year. Finally, I will explain how I put everything together in order to put together a comprehensive economics program that has all students working and learning in my classroom. At the end of this paper, I have included lesson plans for the six economic concepts that I teach during the year. I hope teachers will find these lessons helpful when planning their own economic curriculum.

Part 1: Setting the Stage for Economic Education

On the first day of school, many kindergartners come to Clear Creek who have never stepped foot in a classroom before. Because of this, I feel it is necessary to teach my new students the rules, procedures and routines that make my class run smoothly. When my students learn how to sit quietly, raise their hands and complete their work on time, I feel it is appropriate to introduce basic economic concepts. I begin my economics program at the beginning of November. This allows my students two months to practice the skills necessary in order for them to be productive workers. Teachers who work with older students may find that they can begin teaching basic economic concepts much earlier in the school year.

Part II: Teaching Economic Concepts

At the beginning of the year, teachers at Clear Creek Elementary School are presented with a packet of materials prepared by Keith Lyum, my kindergarten teaching partner, and me. The teaching materials focus on the following six basic concepts to use when teaching econonomics: (Click on the links for complete lesson plans)

Wants
…things we would like to have

Goods/Services
…things we can use and buy/intangible activities we purchase and use


Resources
…provides the means for satisfying wants


Price/Money
…medium of exchange generally accepted because of its intrinsic value


Scarcity
…when wants are greater than the resources available to satisfy those wants


Opportunity Cost/Choice
…the value of the highest foregone alternative/we cannot have everything we want and must choose from alternatives.

During the year, I teach the economic concepts in the order presented above. However, these concepts can be taught in many different ways. They can be taught simultaneously, or in any particular order.

Part 111: The Kindergarten Marketplace

In order for students to get the most out of an economics program, I believe they need to have the opportunity to experience situations that resemble a democratic entrepreneurial society on a daily basis. In my class, after all of the economic concepts are taught, I feel it is time to begin incorporating economics in the daily lives of my students.

I begin by establishing a banking system in my class with my students. I act as the banker and I explain to my students that their job in the classroom is to be model students who follow rules and complete work. In the beginning, students are paid one dollar, or one Orca buck, on a daily basis. Money earned is added to their private bank accounts. Using a banking system is a very valuable teaching tool. The bank helps me to meet many of my school district’s Essential Learnings. My students have to keep track of their money and continually add their money to their accounts on a daily basis. This process helps students in math as they practice sorting, counting, adding and problem solving.

After students earn about twenty-five Orca bucks, I introduce the concept of paying bills. Every student has to rent a house and a car and pay bills weekly. There were three houses to choose from ranging in price from nine dollars to thirteen dollars. Before students choose their houses, we talk about money and how much money they need in order to pay rent. Each child selects the type of house and car he or she wants.

Students are given small pictures of houses and place them on a map outside our classroom. Putting their houses on the map gives students ownership of their homes. This is very motivating for my students, because they can go to the map and find their house. Students also get to choose between three cars ranging in price from three dollars to seven dollars. Again, my students and I talk about the weekly cost of the different cars and how much money students need to afford the car they want. Every week each student has to pay rent on a house and a car.

After students begin paying bills on a weekly basis, it is apparent that one dollar a day is not enough for my students to be able to pay for their homes and cars. Because of this, it is time for students to start manufacturing products and selling goods at the marketplace.

In my class, students hold a market about once every two weeks. For many days prior to the market, my students begin manufacturing goods to sell at the market. During this time, my students and I talk about many of the economic concepts we had already learned such as, goods, resources, money and scarcity. On the day before the market, students take money out of their bank accounts so they have money to shop at the market. Before kids take any money out, I remind them of their bills, however, I allow kids to take out whatever amount they choose. If students take out too much money, they will not be able to pay their bills during the next billing period. When this happens I put a red mark on their paper and explain that they owe money. Many youngsters learn rather quickly that they should keep money in their account to pay for bills.

On the day of the market, students who want to be entrepreneurs bring goods to sell from home, such as baked goods and crafts. Students who do not bring goods from home act as workers in the market. Some help sell goods the whole class manufactured, some greet people at the door, some work at a raffle booth and others work at the fishing pond game. After the entrepreneurs and workers sell out, or complete their job, they get to shop at the market with the money they took out of the bank. I do not let them use the money they earned during marketplace.

Directly following a market, my students and I sit down together and discuss the things they saw at the market. We talk about things that were good and things that were not so good. We also discuss many economic concepts that students experienced at the market. Students often use the language of economics when discussing the market, for example, goods, services, opportunity cost, scarcity and money. Students also get to write about the marketplace. Students go to their seats with a piece of paper and draw a picture of the market and write down what they did and saw. One of the best pieces of writing I have seen is a child who drew a picture of himself selling cupcakes, he wrote money at the top of his picture and spelled it "mune." The follow-up discussion meets many of my district’s Essential Learnings in speaking and listening, because students take turns speaking and listening, make meaning clear and recall details after listening to a speaker. During the writing activity, students draw pictures and they use letters or letter-like forms to depict meaning.

In the days following a market, students count their money and figure out their profits. When counting money, students sort the bills by ones, fives, tens and twenties. With my help they count how much money they make and graph the results on a chart. This process helps students to count by ones and to skip count by fives and tens. After all of the profit results are gathered and plotted on the chart, students take turns making comments about the graph. They explain how much money they made compared to others. We use this information to determine which items were good sellers at the market and which items were not.

Economics is a valuable teaching vehicle for me. Working with my kindergarten teaching partner allows me to put together and teach a comprehensive program that incorporates many Essential Learnings into my curriculum. Economics is also a program that I enjoy teaching. Children come into my room on a daily basis and point to the calendar and tell me that Thursday is their favorite day, because they get to sell goods. If you ask me why I like teaching economics, I would say because it allows my students to learn many academic skills, and they get to work at their individual level. Most of all, I would say economics affords children the opportunity to experience real world problems from day to day. If you asked my students why they like learning economics, they would say because it is fun.
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http://clearcreek.cksd.wednet.edu/Economics/kinder.htm

PROFOUND!
 
Did you read the article?

I was hoping it would produce some good discussion.



~Beer w/Straw:cool:
 
Futilitist said:
That's very funny, little kitty. If you are done, please get off this thread. Thank you.

---Futilitist:cool:
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OK, I was hoping it would spark some introspection.

I am sorry that this is too tough for your conscious thought patterns.


~Beer w/Straw:cool:
 
Why is Futilist ignoring Krista Calvin's paper on teaching economics to Kindergarten kids?

What is he so afraid of?
 
Another attempt...

This is a thread to talk rationally about the upcoming apocalypse. Here is what I would like to talk about:

http://dieoff.org/page137.htm

THE POPULATION EXPLOSION

The cost of energy limited the growth of technology until fossil fuels came into use, a little less than three hundred years ago. Fossil fuels contain so much energy that they provide a remarkable return on investment even when used inefficiently. When coal is burned to drive dynamos, for example, only 35% of its energy ultimately becomes electricity (Ross & Steinmeyer, 1990, p. 89). Nevertheless, an amount of electricity equal to the energy used by a person who works all day, burning up 1,000 calories worth of food, can be bought for less than ten cents (Loftness, 1984, p. 2). 3

The abundant, cheap energy provided by fossil fuels has made it possible for humans to exploit a staggering variety of resources, effectively expanding their resource base. In particular, the development of mechanized agriculture has allowed relatively few farmers to work vast tracts of land, producing an abundance of food and making possible a wild growth of population.

All species expand as much as resources allow and predators, parasites, and physical conditions permit. When a species is introduced into a new habitat with abundant resources that accumulated before its arrival, the population expands rapidly until all the resources are used up. In wine making, for example, a population of yeast cells in freshly-pressed grape juice grows exponentially until nutrients are exhausted-or waste products become toxic (Figure 1).

David%20Price1.gif


Figure 1. Growth of yeast in a 10% sugar solution (After Dieter, 1962:45). The fall of the curve is slowed by cytolysis, which recycles nutrients from dead cells.

An example featuring mammals is provided by the reindeer of St. Matthew Island, in the Bering Sea (Klein, 1968). This island had a mat of lichens more than four inches deep, but no reindeer until 1944, when a herd of 29 was introduced. By 1957 the population had increased to 1,350; and by 1963 it was 6,000. But the lichens were gone, and the next winter the herd died off. Come spring, only 41 females and one apparently dysfunctional male were left alive (Figure 2). 4

David%20Price2.gif


Figure 2. Growth of reindeer herd introduced to St. Matthew Island, Alaska (After Klein, 1968:352).

The use of extrasomatic energy, and especially energy from fossil fuels, has made it possible for humans to exploit a wealth of resources that accumulated before they evolved. This has resulted in population growth typical of introduced species (Figure 3).

David%20Price3.gif


Figure 3. Growth of worldwide human population (Adapted from Corson, 1990:25).

Around 8,000 BC, world population was something like five million. By the time of Christ, it was 200 to 300 million. By 1650, it was 500 million, and by 1800 it was one billion. The population of the world reached two billion by 1930. By the beginning of the '60s it was three billion; in 1975 it was four billion; and after only eleven more years it was five billion (McEvedy & Jones, 1978; Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 1990, pp. 52-55). This cannot go on forever; collapse is inevitable. The only question is when.
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This seems pretty convincing, and there is more information if you would follow the link and read the essay. My question for the brave ones is:

How can we possibly avoid collapse?

---Futilitist:cool:

EDIT---

Here is more of the David Price paper for people to look at:

THE ENERGY SUPPLY

Today, the extrasomatic energy used by people around the world is equal to the work of some 280 billion men. It is as if every man, woman, and child in the world had 50 slaves. In a technological society such as the United States, every person has more than 200 such "ghost slaves." 5

David%20Price4.gif


Figure 4. Worldwide energy consumption. Estimates of the world's annual consumption of energy, at twenty-year intervals beginning in 1860, appear in Dorf, 1981:194. World population for these years is calculated from a graph in Corson, 1990:25. Per-capita energy use for more recent years is given in the Energy Statistics Yearbook, which is published yearly by the United Nations. Figures differ somewhat from volume to volume; I have chosen to use more recent ones, which are presumably based on more accurate information.

Most of this energy comes from fossil fuels, which supply nearly 75% of the world's energy (see note 5). But fossil fuels are being depleted a hundred thousand times faster than they are being formed (Davis, 1990, P. 56). At current rates of consumption, known reserves of Petroleum will be gone in about thirty-five years; natural gas in fifty-two years; and coal in some two hundred years PRIMED, 1990, p. 145). 6

It should not be supposed that additional reserves, yet to be discovered, will significantly alter these figures. Recent advances in the geological sciences have taken much of the guesswork out of locating fossil hydrocarbons and the surface of the earth has been mapped in great detail with the aid of orbiting satellites. Moreover, these figures are optimistic because the demand for energy will not remain at current rates; it can be expected to grow at an ever-quickening pace. The more concentrated a resource, the less energy it takes to make use of it; and the less concentrated a resource, the more energy it takes. Consequently, the richest deposits of any resource are used first, and then lower-grade deposits are exploited, at an ever-increasing cost. As high-grade mineral ores are worked out, more and more energy is needed to mine and refine lower-grade ores. As oldgrowth timber vanishes, more and more energy is necessary to make lumber and paper out of smaller trees. As the world's fisheries are worked out, it takes more and more energy to find and catch the remaining fish. And as the world's topsoil is lost -- at a rate of 75 billion tons a year (Myers, 1993, p. 37) -- more and more energy must be used to compensate for the diminished fertility of remaining agricultural land.

The system that sustains world population is already under stress. The growth in per-capita energy use, which had been increasing continually since the advent of fossil fuels, began to slow down some twenty years ago -- and the accelerating pace at which it has been slowing down suggests that there will be no growth at all by the year 2000 (Figure 4). Agriculture is in trouble; it takes more and more fertilizer to compensate for lost topsoil (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 1990, p. 92), and nearly one-fifth of the world's population is malnourished (Corson, 1990, p. 68). In fact, the growth rate of the earth's human population has already begun to fall (Figure 5).

David%20Price5.gif


Figure 5. Growth rate of world population. Based on an average of estimates by Willcox (1940) and Carr-Saunders (1936) as adjusted and presented in United Nations, 1953:12; United Nations, 1993:6-7; and CIA, 1993:422.

People who believe that a stable population can live in balance with the productive capacity of the environment may see a slowdown in the growth of population and energy consumption as evidence of approaching equilibrium. But when one understands the process that has been responsible for population growth, it becomes clear that an end to growth is the beginning of collapse. Human population has grown exponentially by exhausting limited resources, like yeast in a vat or reindeer on St. Matthew Island, and is destined for a similar fate.

FALSE HOPES

To take over for fossil fuels as they run out, an alternative energy source would have to be cheap and abundant, and the technology to exploit it would have to be mature and capable of being operationalized all over the world in what may turn out to be a rather short time. No known energy source meets these requirements.

Today's second-most-important source of energy, after fossil fuels, is biomass conversion. But all the world's wood fires, all the grain alcohol added to gasoline, and all the agricultural wastes burned as fuel only provide 15% of the world's energy (WRI/IIED, 1988, p. 111). And biomass conversion has little growth potential, since it competes for fertile land with food crops and timber.

Hydropower furnishes about 5.5% of the energy currently consumed (see note 5). Its potential may be as much as five times greater (Weinberg & Williams, 1990, p. 147), but this is not sufficient to take over from fossil fuels, and huge dams would submerge rich agricultural soils.

The production of electricity from nuclear fission has been increasing, but nuclear sources still supply only about 5.2% of the world's total energy needs (see note 5). Fission reactors could produce a great deal more, especially if fast-breeder reactors were used. 7 But anyone with a fast-breeder reactor can make nuclear weapons, so there is considerable political pressure to prevent their proliferation. Public confidence in all types of reactors is low, and the cost of their construction is high. These social constraints make it unlikely that fission's contribution to the world's energy needs will grow fifteen-fold in the next few years.

Controlled thermonuclear fusion is an alluring solution to the world's energy problems because the "fuel" it would use is deuterium, which can be extracted from plain water. The energy from one percent of the deuterium in the world's oceans would be about five hundred thousand times as great as all the energy available from fossil fuels. But controlled fusion is still experimental, the technology for its commercialization has not yet been developed, and the first operational facility could not come on line much before 2040 (Browne, 1993, p. C12).

Visionaries support the potential of wind, waves, tides, ocean thermal energy conversion, and geothermal sources. All of these might be able to furnish a portion of the energy in certain localities, but none can supply 75% of the world's energy needs. Solar thermal collection devices are only feasible where it is hot and sunny, and photovoltaics are too inefficient to supplant the cheap energy available from fossil fuels.

While no single energy source is ready to take the place of fossil fuels, their diminishing availability may be offset by a regimen of conservation and a combination of alternative energy sources. This will not solve the problem, however. As long as population continues to grow, conservation is futile; at the present rate of growth (1.6% per year), even a 25% reduction in resource use would be obliterated in just over eighteen years. And the use of any combination of resources that permits continued population growth can only postpone the day of reckoning.
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Robittybob1 said:
Beer W/Straw is a pain. Your concerns are very genuine. Now to read the thread sometime.
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And yet he foretold your arrival.

Beer w/Straw said:
You are still no match for Robittybob1!
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What gives?

And I look forward to your comments when you've had the chance to familiarize yourself with the thread. Thank you.

---Futilitist:cool:

PS---As of 7:00 PM 1/15/2013 this thread has had 34,653 views. I only wish there was a way to get rid of the trolls.

EDIT---

Here is end of the David Price essay, Energy and Human Evolution:

http://dieoff.org/page137.htm

FALSE HOPES

To take over for fossil fuels as they run out, an alternative energy source would have to be cheap and abundant, and the technology to exploit it would have to be mature and capable of being operationalized all over the world in what may turn out to be a rather short time. No known energy source meets these requirements.

Today's second-most-important source of energy, after fossil fuels, is biomass conversion. But all the world's wood fires, all the grain alcohol added to gasoline, and all the agricultural wastes burned as fuel only provide 15% of the world's energy (WRI/IIED, 1988, p. 111). And biomass conversion has little growth potential, since it competes for fertile land with food crops and timber.

Hydropower furnishes about 5.5% of the energy currently consumed (see note 5). Its potential may be as much as five times greater (Weinberg & Williams, 1990, p. 147), but this is not sufficient to take over from fossil fuels, and huge dams would submerge rich agricultural soils.

The production of electricity from nuclear fission has been increasing, but nuclear sources still supply only about 5.2% of the world's total energy needs (see note 5). Fission reactors could produce a great deal more, especially if fast-breeder reactors were used. 7 But anyone with a fast-breeder reactor can make nuclear weapons, so there is considerable political pressure to prevent their proliferation. Public confidence in all types of reactors is low, and the cost of their construction is high. These social constraints make it unlikely that fission's contribution to the world's energy needs will grow fifteen-fold in the next few years.

Controlled thermonuclear fusion is an alluring solution to the world's energy problems because the "fuel" it would use is deuterium, which can be extracted from plain water. The energy from one percent of the deuterium in the world's oceans would be about five hundred thousand times as great as all the energy available from fossil fuels. But controlled fusion is still experimental, the technology for its commercialization has not yet been developed, and the first operational facility could not come on line much before 2040 (Browne, 1993, p. C12).

Visionaries support the potential of wind, waves, tides, ocean thermal energy conversion, and geothermal sources. All of these might be able to furnish a portion of the energy in certain localities, but none can supply 75% of the world's energy needs. Solar thermal collection devices are only feasible where it is hot and sunny, and photovoltaics are too inefficient to supplant the cheap energy available from fossil fuels.

While no single energy source is ready to take the place of fossil fuels, their diminishing availability may be offset by a regimen of conservation and a combination of alternative energy sources. This will not solve the problem, however. As long as population continues to grow, conservation is futile; at the present rate of growth (1.6% per year), even a 25% reduction in resource use would be obliterated in just over eighteen years. And the use of any combination of resources that permits continued population growth can only postpone the day of reckoning.

THE MECHANISMS OF COLLAPSE

Operative mechanisms in the collapse of the human population will be starvation, social strife, and disease. These major disasters were recognized long before Malthus and have been represented in western culture as horsemen of the apocalypse. 8 They are all consequences of scarce resources and dense population.

Starvation will be a direct outcome of the depletion of energy resources. Today's dense population is dependent for its food supply on mechanized agriculture and efficient transportation. Energy is used to manufacture and operate farm equipment, and energy is used to take food to market. As less efficient energy resources come to be used, food will grow more expensive and the circle of privileged consumers to whom an adequate supply is available will continue to shrink.

Social strife is another consequence of the rising cost of commercial energy. Everything people want takes energy to produce, and as energy becomes more expensive, fewer people have access to goods they desire. When goods are plentiful, and particularly when per-capita access to goods is increasing, social tensions are muted: Ethnically diverse populations often find it expedient to live harmoniously, governments may be ineffective and slow to respond, and little force is needed to maintain domestic tranquillity. But when goods become scarce, and especially when per-capita access to goods is decreasing, ethnic tensions surface, governments become authoritarian, and goods are acquired, increasingly, by criminal means.

A shortage of resources also cripples public health systems, while a dense population encourages the spread of contagious diseases. Throughout human history, the development of large, dense populations has led to the appearance of contagious diseases that evolved to exploit them. Smallpox and measles were apparently unknown until the second and third centuries AD, when they devastated the population of the Mediterranean basin (McNeill, 1976, p. 105). In the fourteenth century, a yet larger and denser population in both Europe and China provided a hospitable niche for the Black Death. Today, with extremely dense population and all parts of the world linked by air travel, new diseases such as AIDS spread rapidly-and a virus as deadly as AIDS but more easily transmissible could appear at any time.

Starvation, social strife, and disease interact in complex ways. If famine were the sole mechanism of collapse, the species might become extinct quite suddenly. A population that grows in response to abundant but finite resources, like the reindeer of St. Matthew Island, tends to exhaust these resources completely. By the time individuals discover that remaining resources will not be adequate for the next generation, the next generation has already been born. And in its struggle to survive, the last generation uses up every scrap, so that nothing remains that would sustain even a small population. But famine seldom acts alone. It is exacerbated by social strife, which interferes with the production and delivery of food. And it weakens the natural defenses by which organisms fight off disease.

Paradoxically, disease can act to spare resources. If, for example, a new epidemic should reduce the human population to a small number of people who happen to be resistant to it before all the world's resources are severely depleted, the species might be able to survive a while longer.

AFTER THE FALL

But even if a few people manage to survive worldwide population collapse, civilization will not. The complex association of cultural traits of which modern humans are so proud is a consequence of abundant resources, and cannot long outlive their depletion.

Civilization refers, in its derivation, to the habit of living in dense nucleated settlements, which appeared as population grew in response to plentiful resources. Many things seem to follow as a matter of course when people live in cities, and wherever civilization occurred, it has involved political consolidation, economic specialization, social stratification, some sort of monumental architecture, and a flowering of artistic and intellectual endeavor (Childe, 1951).

Localized episodes of such cultural elaboration have always been associated with rapid population growth. Reasons for the abundance of resources that promoted this growth vary from one case to another. In some instances, a population moved into a new region with previously untapped resources; in other instances the development or adoption of new crops, new technologies, or new social strategies enhanced production. But the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mayas, and even the Easter Islanders all experienced a surge of creative activity as their populations grew rapidly.

And in all cases, this creative phase, nourished by the same abundance that promoted population growth, came to an end when growth ended. One need not seek esoteric reasons for the decline of Greece or the fall of Rome; in both cases, the growth of population exhausted the resources that had promoted it. After the Golden Age, the population of Greece declined continually for more than a thousand years, from 3 million to about 800,000. The population of the Roman Empire fell from 45 or 46 million, at its height, to about 39 million by 600 AD, and the European part of the empire was reduced by 25% (McEvedy & Jones, 1978).

Even if world population could be held constant, in balance with "renewable" resources, the creative impulse that has been responsible for human achievements during the period of growth would come to an end. And the spiraling collapse that is far more likely will leave, at best, a handfull of survivors. These people might get by, for a while, by picking through the wreckage of civilization, but soon they would have to lead simpler lives, like the hunters and subsistence farmers of the past. They would not have the resources to build great public works or carry forward scientific inquiry. They could not let individuals remain unproductive as they wrote novels or composed symphonies. After a few generations, they might come to believe that the rubble amid which they live is the remains of cities built by gods.

Or it may prove impossible for even a few survivors to subsist on the meager resources left in civilization's wake. The children of the highly technological society into which more and more of the world's peoples are being drawn will not know how to support themselves by hunting and gathering or by simple agriculture. In addition, the wealth of wild animals that once sustained hunting societies will be gone, and topsoil that has been spoiled by tractors will yield poorly to the hoe. A species that has come to depend on complex technologies to mediate its relationship with the environment may not long survive their loss.

INTO THE DARK

For Malthus, the imbalance between the growth of population and means of subsistence might be corrected, from time to time, through natural disasters, but the human species could, in principle, survive indefinitely. Malthus did not know that the universe is governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics; he did not understand the population dynamics of introduced species; and he did not appreciate that humans, having evolved long after the resource base on which they now rely, are effectively an introduced species on their own planet.

The short tenure of the human species marks a turning point in the history of life on Earth. Before the appearance of Homo sapiens, energy was being sequestered more rapidly than it was being dissipated. Then human beings evolved, with the capacity to dissipate much of the energy that had been sequestered, partially redressing the planet's energy balance. The evolution of a species like Homo sapiens may be an integral part of the life process, anywhere in the universe it happens to occur. As life develops, autotrophs expand and make a place for heterotrophs. If organic energy is sequestered in substantial reserves, as geological processes are bound to do, then the appearance of a species that can release it is all but assured. Such a species, evolved in the service of entropy, quickly returns its planet to a lower energy level. In an evolutionary instant, it explodes and is gone.

If the passage of Homo sapiens across evolution's stage significantly alters Earth's atmosphere, virtually all living things may become extinct quite rapidly. But even if this does not happen, the rise and fall of Homo sapiens will eliminate many species. It has been estimated that they are going extinct at a rate of 17,500 per year (Wilson, 1988, p. 13), and in the next twenty-five years as many as one-quarter of the world's species may be lost (Raven, 1988, p. 121).

This is a radical reduction in biological diversity, although life has survived other die-offs, such as the great collapse at the end of the Permian. It is unlikely, however, that anything quite like human beings will come this way again. The resources that have made humans what they are will be gone, and there may not be time before the sun burns out for new deposits of fossil fuel to form and intelligent new scavengers to evolve. The universe seems to have had a unique beginning, some ten or twenty billion years ago (Hawking, 1988, p. 108). Since that time, a star had to live and die to provide the materials for the solar system -- which, itself, is several billion years old. Perhaps life could not have happened any sooner than it did. Perhaps Homo sapiens could not have evolved any sooner. Or later. Perhaps everything has its season, a window of opportunity that opens for a while, then shuts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to acknowledge the advice and encouragement of Virginia Abernethy, Thomas Eisner, Paul W. Friedrich, Warren M. Hern, David Pimentel, Roy A. Rappaport, Peter H. Raven, and Carl Sagan, who read earlier drafts of this paper.
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PPS---As of 11:00 PM 1/15/2013 this thread has had 35,317 views.

PPPS---I'll bet Beer w/Straw hasn't seen this yet. Please don't tell the annoying little kitty...Shhh.
 
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If we could harness the power of a black hole...

No wait, if we could build a "spaceship" by putting some badass looking quasars around our solar system. Moving it toward like alpha centauri. We'd be able to mine and colonize that solar system.

Like pirates!

:jawdrop:


Aaargh! There be a lot of resources in that there system!
 
Good grief! Banking in kindergarten! They might have grown up sane....
Never mind, most of them will grow up but won't grow old. In the current global system, no political will - i was going to say exists, but that's not true. It exists, it just can't get any power, because the holders of power have all the killing- and propaganda- apparatus. Any number with $ in front and zeroes behind it tends to turn otherwise healthy brain tissue to grey fluff: people, even people in responsible positions, can't seem to think around the money. So, the ones who have most of the money already are rushing around like alcoholics at last call, hoovering up the last dregs of wealth. It won't do them any good, because after the collapse, their gems and pictures and gold-plated toilets won't be worth anything.
A collapse always makes a big mess and leaves a lot of crow-food scattered about. This one will also leave dead farmlands and oil-slick oceans, burned-out cities and waste - a lot of angry, crazy destruction.
There is simply no way to prepare for it. If i were young and ambitious, i would probably try to join a co-operative town with its own food and energy production. We should have been going that way for decades. Those big wind farms are a silly alternate energy source: they're too big, far too expensive, tied into an unmaintainable grid - and unpopular. Even the late and feeble efforts that are being made are wrong, because they're based on money-culture, industrialism, large-scale commerce - the past.

Oh, we're getting oil out Alberta now. It's the dirtiest, most destructive source of energy; half the province is already trashed, water low and dwindling, native populations displaced... but our government is committed to tar sands "development", at any price. oil has peaked - even the crappy stuff will be ever-harder and more expensive to come by. But they won't stop, won't change direction. I can think of nothing rational to say about this, except Good night and Good luck.
 
...Breaking News...

<<<WE INTERRUPT THIS DISCUSSION OF THEORETICAL APOCALYPSE TO BRING YOU BREAKING NEWS OF THE ACTUAL ONE>>> ;)

The following thread was started by somebody somewhere:

I introduce it here to show how apocalypse is an inherently difficult concept to deal with.

Peak Oil Denier said:
it appears the UK high street has gone into meltdown in the past week : High Street retailers: Who has been hit hardest?

16th of january - Blockbuster goes into administration
15th of january - HMV: How the top dog lost its bite
11th of january - Jessops camera stores to close with loss of 1,370 jobs

the common thread appears to be competition from supermarkets and on-line suppliers
makes you wonder whether Waterstones will be next ? it's the only one left in its line of business (just like Jessops for cameras and HMV for music) whose business model is in direct competition with supermarkets and the internet (although it would appear they have made a pact with the devil - Waterstones and Amazon's Kindle turn a new chapter - i wonder whether it will last)
Click to expand...

Peak Oil Denier said:
it appears the UK high street has gone into meltdown in the past week : the common thread appears to be competition from supermarkets and on-line suppliers
Click to expand...
That is one possible interpretation. It is the most palatable explanation the mainstream media could fashion for mass consumption.

I have a different interpretation. I think it is a sign that the economy is about to crash. I was expecting to see things like this about now (hypothesizing). I am expecting to see many more signs very soon.

Here is an update of one of my prior charts:

BreakingNewsUpdate_zpsa5c2194a.png


This chart shows oil, the markets, the dollar, and gold all displayed relative to short term interest rates. The flatlining from the prior chart from December 2012 (see the OP), has now become a noticeable downturn. Since interest rates can no longer effectively be lowered, there is no way to stimulate the economy out of this decline. I think my chart shows the immanent end of economic growth. I believe we are now headed into a recession, and from there into a deep depression, and finally a rapid collapse and die off.

My hypothesis about rock bottom interest rates leading to a recession seems to be consistent with the data since mid july of 2012. We will have to wait a little longer to see if my hypothesis will be confirmed by the onset of a recession soon.

---Futilitist:cool:
 
Jeeves said:
Good grief! Banking in kindergarten! They might have grown up sane....
Never mind, most of them will grow up but won't grow old. In the current global system, no political will - i was going to say exists, but that's not true. It exists, it just can't get any power, because the holders of power have all the killing- and propaganda- apparatus. Any number with $ in front and zeroes behind it tends to turn otherwise healthy brain tissue to grey fluff: people, even people in responsible positions, can't seem to think around the money. So, the ones who have most of the money already are rushing around like alcoholics at last call, hoovering up the last dregs of wealth. It won't do them any good, because after the collapse, their gems and pictures and gold-plated toilets won't be worth anything.
A collapse always makes a big mess and leaves a lot of crow-food scattered about. This one will also leave dead farmlands and oil-slick oceans, burned-out cities and waste - a lot of angry, crazy destruction.
There is simply no way to prepare for it. If i were young and ambitious, i would probably try to join a co-operative town with its own food and energy production. We should have been going that way for decades. Those big wind farms are a silly alternate energy source: they're too big, far too expensive, tied into an unmaintainable grid - and unpopular. Even the late and feeble efforts that are being made are wrong, because they're based on money-culture, industrialism, large-scale commerce - the past.

Oh, we're getting oil out Alberta now. It's the dirtiest, most destructive source of energy; half the province is already trashed, water low and dwindling, native populations displaced... but our government is committed to tar sands "development", at any price. oil has peaked - even the crappy stuff will be ever-harder and more expensive to come by. But they won't stop, won't change direction. I can think of nothing rational to say about this, except Good night and Good luck.
Click to expand...

I am not young but I am ambitious. In 2009 I decided to leave civilization and attempt to emulate a paleolithic existence. I travelled to the Pacific Northwest and signed up at a wilderness college to learn how to hunt and gather. I'm not talking about survival skills, I'm talking about wilderness living skills. I spent a year learning all sorts of useful things. I know how to build a shelter. I can make a fire. I can fashion a bow and arrows and sort of hunt. I can make various traps and snares. I can skin a bear. I know a little about useful plants and I know a little about dangerous ones, too. I learned how to eat earthworms, bullfrog tadpoles, and garter snakes.

But the most important thing I learned from my wilderness training was that there was no way in hell I was ever going to learn enough to last two weeks in the wild without the benefit of modern technology. To have a decent chance of making it in the wild, you have to be born in the wild. Born into an intact culture that already knows how to live there. All learning is experiential. You can't learn how to live in the wild from a book. Even the most experienced instructor at the wilderness college had a hard time finding enough food to survive when he tested his skills in the forest for a week, taking only a knife with him. He managed to eat a few wild plants and a single small mouse. If he had stayed in the forest, he likely would have died.

Having learned my lesson, I am now back in the "civilized" world, studying psychological mechanisms of denial and Groupthink.

Great comment, BTW, Jeeves. I agree, we are stuck with an apocalypse. Welcome back.

---Futilitist
 
On learning and unlearning

Orleander said:
LOL, that's the easy part that just about anyone can do. Its the killing of the bear that's the hard part. ;)
Click to expand...

You got that right. This particular bear was the victim of a hunter's bullet. The bear was able to escape the hunter, only to expire on the road, right in front of the wilderness college. Finder's keepers is the rule of the jungle, and the rule of the locals. At the college we made uses of every part, and every opportunity to learn something.

I had to unlearn some Disney-esque morals. I grew up on The Jungle Book. My first kill was a goose, caught with the aid of a net. I broke it's neck. It effected me deeply. I still dream about that goose. And she was was delicious. My second kill was probably a garter snake. Or a bull frog. I don't remember.

The food I loved best was thimble berries.

---Futilitist:cool:
 
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