NASA got blamed for
this piece in other stories and it was a little too much to let lie. So here goes.
Everyone likes to talk
about the one percent. That children, is
in a fully developed civilization, the one person in one hundred or one hundred
and fifty or the BIG MAN whose real role is to invest those assets continuously
in an attempt to generate income essentially for the community. This allows him to choose winners and losers. In short the BIG MAN needs those assets
working for the community and that is what we see happening constantly.
We can do better in
capitalizing the total base but it will be at most sufficient to optimize the
individual’s productive capacity. That
alone will eliminate any form of poverty.
We have also already
learned that redistribution means the elimination of both jobs and opportunity
and the acceleration of poverty itself with the historical Communist Regimes
true masters of the art.
Then we come along to
resources, Yes we can go serious damage but it is also clear that our pricing
system triggers a robust response that while not quite instantaneous is quite
fast enough to ruin the fool betting on it.
Right now our whole energy regime is passing through a massive
transition that will clearly remove both coal and oil and in time natural
gas. It just will not be overnight but
it will still be fast.
Recall that we have
been shuttering coal thermal plants in favor of natural gas. That is now idle capacity. I also tracked a local oil based power plant
put in place in 1960 as a reserve plant.
It effectively never got used at all and was eventually I think sold to
a third world country still burning oil.
Whatever the final
energy resolution happens to be, just remember that we can tap deep geothermal
all day and all night perpetually. Add
super batteries and energy will become almost free. In that case we can build underground
habitats, use the oceans as a heat dump and live happily ever after for a
billion years.
With all other
resources we also have ample alternatives that will also become cheap with
cheap energy. As we now transition to
space based humanity, we also will have all the resources of the universe open
to us.
The only thing that is
able to cause us real grief is if we decide to engage in a true global war in
which all societies participate and we actively destroy our sustenance and
cities as well. There is evidence that
at least one modern society blew itself up with nuclear weapons. Considering the present depth and
distribution of modernism today that will hardly slow us down. We will simply rebuild populations at speed
and restructure our society to go forward.
Society Is Doomed,
Scientists Claim
By Marc Lallanilla,
Assistant Editor
March 18, 2014
There's never been a shortage of doomsday
scenarios. From the dreaded Mayan Apocalypse of 2012 (remember that?) to the
havoc wreaked in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," people have been
predicting the end of civilization for as long as there has been a
civilization.
The trouble is,
they're sometimes correct: The Roman Empire fell spectacularly, as did
the Mayan
civilization, the Han Dynasty of China, India's Gupta
Empire and dozens of other once-mighty kingdoms.
But how, exactly, do
powerful empires collapse, and why? Researchers now believe they've found an
answer, one that has troubling implications for today — because we're clearly
on the road to ruin.
Societal collapse —
more common than you think
The researchers' first
task was overturning "the common impression that societal collapse is
rare, or even largely fictional," as they wrote in their report, to be
published in the journal Ecological Economics.
In fact, they argue,
the rise and fall of great social structures is so common a theme in human
civilization — recurrent throughout history and worldwide in scope — that it's
more the rule than the exception.
Advanced societies
frequently collapse unless steps are taken to regulate resource consumption and
economic stratification.
Credit: By Karl Tate,
Infographics Artist
Most studies of a
society's collapse have looked at the specifics of how one civilization
declined, citing individual causes such as a disaster (earthquake,
flood), loss of resources (soil erosion, deforestation)
or human conflict (war, uprising) that led to the particular society's
downfall.
But the researchers (funded in part by NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center and the University of Maryland, College Park) cast a wider
net. They aimed to create a useful mathematical model that could help analyze
how any society might fall — including our current global, technically
advanced, interconnected society.
The balance of nature
The model they arrived
at takes inspiration from the classic notion of predator vs. prey, sometimes
referred to as the "balance of nature." When a deer population grows,
for instance, the wolves that
feed on those deer reproduce more successfully, too, and so the wolf population
grows.
Everything is fine
until the wolves become too numerous and overreach, eating so many deer that
there isn't enough venison to go around. Then, as the number of deer plunges,
the wolf population drops due to famine, until equilibrium is reestablished and
the cycle begins anew.
Informed by this
paradigm, the researchers developed a
relatively simple formula with four factors influencing social collapse:
nature and natural resources, the accumulation of wealth, the elite and the
commoners. The team calls their model Human And Nature Dynamics, or HANDY.
A HANDY tool
The researchers used
the HANDY model to analyze three different social scenarios: an egalitarian
society with no elite class; an equitable society with workers and non-workers
(students, retirees, disabled persons); and an unequal society with a robust
class of elites.
The egalitarian and
equitable societies could produce a sustainable civilization and avoid collapse,
even with a high ratio of non-workers. Social collapse was more likely after
people overreached and depleted natural resources. Importantly, even without
any social stratification, collapse could occur if a society exhausted its
natural resources.
In the unequal
society, however, collapse was almost unavoidable — and these were the HANDY
scenarios that mirrored our current globalized society.
The income gap
"The scenarios
most closely reflecting the reality of our world today are found in the third
group of experiments, where we introduced economic stratification," the
researchers wrote, referring to uneven wealth distribution. "Under such
conditions, we find that collapse is difficult to avoid."
Other recent research
backs up the authors' claims: A 2012 study from the journal American
Sociological Review shows that the income
share of the top 1 percent of Americans grew rapidly after 1980 —
from 10 percent in 1981 to 23.5 percent in 2007, an increase of 135 percentage
points.
Meanwhile, the bottom
three-quarters of the U.S. population has seen slow economic growth, with
predictable results: A 2011 study published in the journal Psychological
Science found that happiness, trust in others and life satisfaction plummet
when income
inequality is high.
Technology won't save
you
For those who believe
that there must be a technological fix to all this despair and destruction, the
researchers found that the historical record provides "testimony to the
fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex and creative civilizations can be
both fragile and impermanent.
"It may be
reasonable to believe that modern civilization, armed with its greater technological
capacity, scientific knowledge and energy
resources, will be able to survive and endure whatever
crises historical societies succumbed to," the authors wrote.
"But the brief
overview of collapses demonstrates not only the ubiquity of the phenomenon, but
also the extent to which advanced, complex and powerful societies are
susceptible to collapse."
Not all is lost,
however: Societies can moderate the two factors that contribute most to social
meltdown: the exploitation of natural resources and the uneven distribution
of wealth, the researchers said.
"Collapse can be
avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per-capita rate of
depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are
distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion," they wrote.
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