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The scale really is fundamentally different. What we are now, and what ware doing now, is just completely unlike anything that existed until a couple hundred y

by retrac 6y ago

The scale really is fundamentally different. What we are now, and what ware doing now, is just completely unlike anything that existed until a couple hundred years ago. This chart on land use maybe helps make the point https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-over-the-long-term https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-over-the-long-te... The emerging global civilization entered some sort of exponential consumption curve a few hundred years ago and the entire planet has been swallowed up in it. The collapse will be of a scale and impact never before seen, because we've never seen anything like this. The usefulness of analogy to previous collapses seems limited to me. Consider just in absolute terms like the amount mined. We've strip-mined all the easily accessed deposits on the whole planet at this point. If there's a serious technological regression, will our descendants even have the means to access basic resources like lithium? We've extincted all sorts of species on a scale unlike previous civilizations, as well. Unlike every other previous collapsed civilization, there's no going back to the climate-stable and resource rich world of preindustrial humanity to try over again from.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
Well, we have vast piles of resources sitting around in landfills ;) When the Roman Empire collapsed, and the Saxons saw the concrete aqueducts they left behind, they thought that a race of Giants had built them. They'd lost the ability to even comprehend what was involved in building such things any more. It took us about 1000 years to get back to that kind of constructional know-how. But the Saxons thrived meanwhile. It turns out that you don't actually need concrete aqueducts in order to make babies. I've wandered around SE Asia a bit. If Civilisation collapsed there's plenty of people there that wouldn't hear about it for a few years, and wouldn't care much even then. Life will go on. People will cope. They'll carry on having babies and growing food. If we can just somehow make sure the knowledge survives, it might not even matter that much. Our descendants can work out other ways of building stuff, more suitable to the circumstances they find themselves in. Who knows? They may develop better solutions because they never had the easily strip-mined resources. Japan had very poor iron ores. To make steel weapons they had to develop some incredible methods of forging this poor ore. They ended up producing (arguably) the best swords in the world. Constraints can be overcome and adapted to. We will cope.

by retrac 6y ago

marcus_holmes 6y ago

Well, we have vast piles of resources sitting around in landfills ;) When the Roman Empire collapsed, and the Saxons saw the concrete aqueducts they left behind, they thought that a race of Giants had built them. They'd lost the ability to even comprehend what was involved in building such things any more. It took us about 1000 years to get back to that kind of constructional know-how. But the Saxons thrived meanwhile. It turns out that you don't actually need concrete aqueducts in order to make babies. I've wandered around SE Asia a bit. If Civilisation collapsed there's plenty of people there that wouldn't hear about it for a few years, and wouldn't care much even then. Life will go on. People will cope. They'll carry on having babies and growing food. If we can just somehow make sure the knowledge survives, it might not even matter that much. Our descendants can work out other ways of building stuff, more suitable to the circumstances they find themselves in. Who knows? They may develop better solutions because they never had the easily strip-mined resources. Japan had very poor iron ores. To make steel weapons they had to develop some incredible methods of forging this poor ore. They ended up producing (arguably) the best swords in the world. Constraints can be overcome and adapted to. We will cope.