[BtdTom]

7.5+ billion people and counting, some of which enjoy the highest standard of living our species has ever known. Those that don't enjoy that standard of living want it, drawing down from a pool of finite resources.

Now throw in the ramifications of climate change like drinking water shortages, food and resource scarcity, and migrations from coastal cities - the opportunity for conflict will only rise amongst people and nations.

My concern is that this can lead to large scale nuclear war. Yes I'm aware of MAD, but that doesn't protect us from everything. Look at Vasili Arkhipov, Stanislav Petrov, Boris Yeltsin and the Norwegian Rocket Incident. They are just a small number of publicly known incidents where large scale nuclear war was almost triggered due to computer glitches and/or miscommunication. The proliferation of nuclear weapons adds additional challenges in maintaining the peace and we must also deal with existing nuclear actors experiencing wide swings in political leadership - like what has happened with the US presidency.

We live in interesting times.

[kiba]

It's not the resources that's the limiting factor, it's the side effect from our consumption

[makerofspoons]

The world will be forced to give up this standard of living by force, be it human or by nature, and it is not going to be pretty.

[rblion]

FWIW, during my one and only ayahuasca retreat...I remember hearing "It will get worse before it gets better. Free yourself of the Disease."

[vertexFarm]

Lately I've been wondering if a full-scale thermonuclear exchange might actually save us in the long run. Our endlessly growing industry is going to eventually wipe out much more of our biosphere than even a worst-case nuclear exchange would. Imagine that. It might actually end up dampening our industry and giving us more time. Sure, fallout is a terrible thing--you have a bunch of deadly isotopes hanging over a region with a half-life of 80,000 years or so--but what is the half-life of a Sahara desert? How would most of the world hunker down and survive if nearly all latitudes resembled that for the next few million years? What about when our oceans completely collapse? There's already dead zones the size of entire continents out there. How long will that last when the whole thing is a dead zone and has to start over? If that happens, all large, complex life on land will be 100% fucked. That would last so, so long that even if humankind somehow miraculously managed to survive (fyi: they wouldn't) the survivors would no longer be anatomically modern humans by the end. They would have slowly differentiated and adapted and evolved through several stages of new, distinct species along the way. Our sentence for the crimes we're carrying out today will be that long.

The great oxygenation event is probably the most similar historical precedent for what could happen if we continue chemically sterilizing the oceans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

We're in for a very tough time--I don't want to sow any seeds of defeatism or unnecessary cynicism, but we are no longer looking at a choice between catastrophe and a continuation of our normal way of life. We are looking at a choice between catastrophe and utter cataclysm. Between hundreds of millions of deaths and billions. This is going to eventually come to truly desperate measures. Humankind will not get through this without having to make some incredibly difficult and bloody decisions in the future. Every day we dawdle and ponder what to do makes the decision our descendants will get stuck with more and more horrific and Pyrrhic. It will eventually come to a point that the most rational decision is to start attacking industry and agriculture with force. That's terrible, but there will come a day when it's an act of basic self-defense. It will also lead to strife and death and famine for millions. But we no longer have the privilege of choosing an option that doesn't involve suffering and atrocity--we have missed our best chances and in the future we will be forced to choose based on the degree of harm, not whether or not there will be harm. The horrors of the 20th century won't even hold a candle to what we're currently laying out for our offspring. It's utterly shameful.

The world today is safer, more civilized, and more prosperous than it has ever been in history, but this is a false stability that we're borrowing against our own future to maintain. It's eventually going to come back to us with a shitload of interest.