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Our range of habitat has been artificially extended by cheap plentiful energy. Watch this space.
by polotics 5y ago
Our range of habitat has been artificially extended by cheap plentiful energy. Watch this space.
- zarzavat 5y agoIndigenous peoples have been living in all corners of the globe for thousands of years. The range of our habitat has stayed roughly the same since antiquity, but the population that any given land can support has been vastly boosted by technology.
- sudosysgen 5y agoNot really. Given pelts and basic hand tools human populations can survive damn near anywhere.
- ben_w 5y agoBoth of these things are true, depending on what is meant by our range of habitat. A small number of people can survive just about anywhere just as you describe, but current population densities are not sustainable in many places without cheap abundant energy. (I’m not actually concerned with us running out of cheap abundant energy; PV is already fantastic in this regard, and in a hypothetical collapse of all dispatchable power sources that included never being able to make more batteries, we would be severely inconvenienced rather than utterly finished).