[GeneTraylor]

Whenever I see an easter island head, I can't help but draw parallels between our global civilization and theirs.

The eastern islanders consisted of around a dozen tribes, each competing for resources with others. It's thought that all of these statues were put up in a race by chieftains, competing with one another to put up the biggest, most refined and the best statue.

I wouldn't be surprised if they competed in their standards of life too. ("I eat X for breakfast, lunch and dinner!") I certainly wouldn't be surprised by the fact that they might have had political factions, special interests and a life rife with complicated political maneuvering. (it was certainly in the short term interests of statue makers to be against conservation and egg chieftains on)

After all we're the same species and they were just like us.

However what they failed to realize was the inescapable fact that they were living on a small piece of land in the middle of a vast ocean. Their seemingly inexhaustible resources were pitiful by any standards.

As time wore on and their population boomed, a point came when all of these factors came together. Their squandering of resources combined with their unsustainable way of life for a large population faced off with their limited resources, and the result was ugly. Their entire civilization collapsed.

Most of the population was lost to famine. Their civilization descended to cannibalism to survive. This degraded civilization became the perfect breeding ground for disease and even more people died. This cycle went on and on until their entire civilization was wiped out and the entire population nearly eradicated.

I shudder to think what it must have been like to live in this world. It must have been a nightmare.

Today like the eastern islanders with their statues, we keep on building taller and taller structures, better and more lethal weapons, and crazier systems. We compete with one another for status symbols at personal, regional and national levels.

Today we are just as isolated on this tiny blue ball, with a finite amount of resources, a booming population, combined with special interests and huge egos.

Like the eastern islanders we have nowhere to go...

[spindritf]

That's a really captivating story with a strong message but it's far from obvious whether it happened, and whether it happened like you describe:

http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-...

Especially the claims of cannibalism seem a little far fetched.

[Tichy]

Interesting, he also posts a response by Jared Diamond: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-...

I had heard about the "JD is wrong, rats were the culprits" theory before and always wondered about JD's reaction.

[GeneTraylor]

I might be wrong, but I'm sure I read a detailed discussion somewhere about how they analyzed burial pits and found large amounts of cuts as if the flesh had been flayed and so on. Apparently they did detailed DNA analysis and even found human bone fragments in waste pits.

I can't seem to find that discussion online right now. However I did find a rebuttal by Jared Diamond on the same site to this argument;

http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-...

On a side note I think that it is uncomfortable for us to think about the demise of everything we cherish in this way, and that's why we tend to shy away from discussing this more openly and rigorously.

It's interesting to see how the blog post I cited ended with the same note;

>>>The islanders did inadvertently destroy the environmental underpinnings of their society. They did so, not because they were especially evil or deprived of foresight, but because they were ordinary people, living in a fragile environment, and subject to the usual human problems of clashes between group interests, clashes between individual and group interests, selfishness, and limited ability to predict the future. Does that remind you of any problems that we ourselves face today? That’s why we find Easter’s story so gripping, and why it may offer us lessons. You’ll find good coverage in Bahn’s and Flenley’s new book.<<<

[spindritf]

That's the response from Jared Diamond who wrote a book (mentioned in the comments below: "Collapse") with pretty much the same story as yours, of course it will end with a similar conclusion.

[GeneTraylor]

Yeah, I'm thinking about buying the book as soon as I have the spare cash.

[jmelloy]

Put your college professor mindset on, because you're going to need it.

For books about war, famine, disease, and horrible death, I find his books incredibly dry.

[sateesh]

Jared Diamond tries to make sense of history in a methodical manner referring to researches done in diverse areas spawning evolutionary biology, archaeology, ecology etc. I would expect any such serious book (though targeted towards readers not steeped in diverse fields which he refers) would appear dry.

[GeneTraylor]

Hm. I don't think that's going to be a problem, it might take me a while to read his work, but that's okay. That said, I'm used to such books and a world rife with war, famine, disease and horrible death.

[gbog]

Ok, nice prose of your, but the tiny blue ball thing is bullshit. Any plane on window seat will show you that the Earth is enormous and empty for most it's parts, even in China.

Don't think I advocate more cars and buildings. It's just that the tiny crowded ball argument is wrong, and dangerous, as it can be used to build a nasty antihumanism.

[GeneTraylor]

>>> nice prose of your <<<

Thank you, but my prose is far from being nice. You should see my boss with a red pen around my prose. :-)

>>>but the tiny blue ball thing is bullshit<<<

Carl Sagan has another take on the matter. :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M

>>>Any plane on window seat will show you that the Earth is enormous and empty for most it's parts, even in China.

Don't think I advocate more cars and buildings. It's just that the tiny crowded ball argument is wrong, and dangerous, as it can be used to build a nasty antihumanism.<<<

I would argue that treating our resources as essentially endless because of the sheer size as compared to the individual fails to take into account that there are now 7 Billion people on this earth. Each and every one of them deserves a better life, they deserve to be able to have a luxurious bath, flush toilets with water, wash hands with water, eat processed foods which take a lot of water to make, wash their cars with water, drink pure water and at the end of the day consume around 315 litres of it. Of course, today not everyone lives like that except for wealthy countries (the statistic is based upon the US) but I think everyone wants a standard of life like that. If somehow, tomorrow 7 billion people started consuming water like that then we would drink up 2 205 000 000 000 litres of fresh water in a day, but the total possible water supply we can access (and this includes the glaciers) is only 3.5 × 10^19 litres...

That's quite an easy way to run out of water.

Now if you do the same with energy, with waste, with consumption and so on what you have is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. The way we live today just can't last. I think that you can solve this problem using technology, but its roots lie deep in our societies.

What's frightening over here is that there is no way out for us. Unlike our ancestors we simply can't burn and move on. The earth is where we have to make our stand. I really think that it's important for people to start taking the gravity of the situation seriously. We need solutions, and we need them fast. Our time is running out.

I think that there is no greater form of humanism than realizing that all of these people need to be saved from such an horrible end and devoting your entire life to creating a better future.

[randallsquared]

we would drink up 2 205 000 000 000 litres of fresh water in a day, but the total possible water supply we can access (and this includes the glaciers) is only 3.5 × 10^19 litres...

That's quite an easy way to run out of water.

Water doesn't vanish after it's used. Also, putting your first number in scientific notation helps put this in perspective: 2.2 x 10^12 . Seven orders of magnitude. Close to 15 000 0000 times as much.

That's not to say that work isn't needed to develop cheap recycling appliances, and to build water systems that recycle and reuse waste water rather than dumping it all into the environment, but it's not a very hard problem on the scale of things humanity can accomplish -- it mostly just requires more energy.

Energy will continue to be the limiting factor for a long time, and eventually (after essentially perfect recycling of all material civilization requires) the limit will be waste heat. But as others have mentioned, we have a whole solar system to use as well, and moving the highest heat processes to space would allow us to radiate it away without affecting the earth. Technology which is clearly within our reach would allow the earth to support trillions of humans -- admittedly at a more crowded level than I would prefer. :)

[GeneTraylor]

>>> Also, putting your first number in scientific notation helps put this in perspective: 2.2 x 10^12 . Seven orders of magnitude. Close to 15 000 0000 times as much. <<<

Hm, I made a big mistake in that comment. I should have added that we have access to this much, but the real catch is energy and how we are currently limited to tapping into it and the total resource we can access is X.

Thank you so much for pointing this out.

>>> it mostly just requires more energy <<<

Yeah as I argued in another comment, that really is the unmentioned catch over here. I should have elaborated upon that in the parent. Sorry.

Even if most of humanity doesn't reach that level of consumption, we will need to start unlocking some of this resource sooner or later. What really worries me is the amount of energy we need to unlock all of this water locked away in glaciers, ice caps and so on and then actually manage to process and distribute it for final use.

That's a really interesting but hard engineering problem.

>>> Technology which is clearly within our reach would allow the earth to support trillions of humans -- admittedly at a more crowded level than I would prefer. :) <<<

Can you please elaborate more?

[Turing_Machine]

<I>The earth is where we have to make our stand</i>

Why? We have a whole solar system right on on our front porch.

<I>but the total possible water supply we can access (and this includes the glaciers)</I>

Water doesn't just get used once and then disappear forever. Now, one could certainly make an argument against (say) sucking water out of the Oglalla Aquifer faster than it gets replenished, but that's a localized problem. We aren't going to "run out of water". Really.

[GeneTraylor]

>>> Why? We have a whole solar system right on on our front porch <<<

This is an honest question, not a rebuttal. How would you get those resources here, or us over there?

>>> Water doesn't just get used once and then disappear forever. Now, one could certainly make an argument against (say) sucking water out of the Oglalla Aquifer faster than it gets replenished, but that's a localized problem. We aren't going to "run out of water". Really. <<<

Well it would have been labored to add that although it would take a large amount of energy to purify water, or perhaps desalinate our oceans, the loop can be closed. The problem really is that it takes resources to keep that loop closed.

I think that all of our issues today boil down to how we convert energy to extract work, if we do manage to make something like fusion work then all of these concerns could be undermined with technology, but how do we get from here to there?

[randallsquared]

How would you get those resources here, or us over there?

There are a number of high-startup-cost, low-running-cost schemes for putting stuff in LEO, and as someone once said, LEO is halfway to anywhere in the solar system, energy-wise. Some possibilities are laser launching, space elevators, launch loops, and electromagnetic guns.

Some of these have much higher startup costs (to be effective for human launching, a gun would have to be very, very long and possibly cost the most of any of these, but shorter ones could launch material at very high acceleration with much less up-front cost), and some of them have awful failure modes (the space elevator could spread destruction in a narrow path wrapped all the way around the earth if it failed in the wrong way, via separation from the counterweight), but they're feasible.

The cheapest ways of getting to orbit, therefore, approach the cost in electricity of the task, which is less than 10 KwH per kilogram, or about $2USD per kilo. A recent flight from coast to coast cost more than that for me.

[GeneTraylor]

I've actually thought about this a bit, and I think that a really interesting design for a launch gun would be to encase the payload in a cover composed of diamagnetic material and then pump liquid nitrogen through channels made inside the material. The material would become perfectly diamagnetic and it will repel all fields, so you can easily levitate it and use it's tendency to go from a stronger to a weaker field to accelerate it.

I don't know for sure, but I think that the main advantage of doing something like this versus just putting a magnet over there, would be the fact that an accelerating magnet in such an assembly would generate huge amounts of back-emf and you would have to a) sink that and b) compensate for that.

However I don't know much about what other people's designs are, but I would like to change that. Do you know any resource where I can learn more from the scratch on how to build something like this?

Also where can I read more in detail about launch loops, laser launching, and space elevators?

[gbog]

I see a demographic problem if and only if Americans continue spreading their unhealthy way of life.

[mooism2]

It's not about Americans spreading their unhealthy way of life. It's about non-Americans claiming that life (more or less) as their own.

[gbog]

Well, you know, I live in Chine since 8 years and, in some ways, there is a profound influence of the "American way of life", mostly through the channel of Holywood movies. The matter could be worse: Chinese have the weight on their side, they can't change so fast as to lose their identity, but still, they have an idea of what should be an happy life that is formatted by these f* movies (really hate then, sorry). For instance, they think everyone should ought to live in an appartement in a tower, own a car, drink canned soda, eat industrial food cooked in microwave, have only one overprotected child, work in suits, go shopping each Saturday, watch baseball on a gigantic TV on Sundays, etc.

They can't believe it when I tell them I am living in a cheap courtyard house, rides a bike to work, never drinks soda, eat home cooked food, never watches TV, know nothing about baseball, climbs mountains on the week-end. In fact, it is the way their parent and grand-parents lives (eg. my neighbors) and the younger generation don't want that, they want the "American way", the supposed "comfort". Maybe a personal taste, but I think Chinese way is better, for me, my family and even for the little big blue ball floating in the universe.

Don't get me wrong: I know US citizen do not live like described, and I tell my friends and colleagues as much as I can. But the problematic part is, again, those f* Hollywood movies that have too much worldwide influence. (I therefore welcome any other influence, Mangas, Bollywood, Hong-Kong kungfu, anything else is better.)

[slevcom]

I smell a troll.

[gbog]

Ok, it may be "trollish" to say that the American way of life is unhealthy and bad for the environment and to express disapproval when this country spread its bad habits around the world. It is true nonetheless.

(Or maybe you think it is OK to eat 1kg of meat/day, own 1 car/person, drive 2h/day, eat burgers and watch TV?)

So facing this issue, two solutions:

1- Human being should be able to consume more, and therefore there need to be less of them.

2- Human being do not need to consume that much to be happy and, therefore, their demographics is not that much of an issue.

I let you choose.

[lkozma]

Even if the resources were enormous, exponential growth would still have to level off sooner or later.

[baq]

ask yourself how much land is required to support a single human for a year. mostly empty is how it must be, otherwise we've got problems.

[grannyg00se]

"A small amount of resources" does not necessarily have direct correlation with square footage. Even if every part of the earth aside from Europe and NA were empty, there would still be a serious issue with respect to resource consumption.

[netcan]

Population growth has some worrying trends if you start thinking in historical time frames. If we continue to grow as is, until we reach some sort of natural barrier we double the population ever 50-60 years. What will the world look like with 25bn (100yrs) or 100bn (200yrs)? What will it look like @ 1 trillion (say 300- 400 yrs)? Somehwere between 50 & 500 years from now we may know the limit. That's not that long in historical terms and it will probably be a recognizable world. Most of the same countries & cultures will probably still exist. Elvis might still be popular.

If growth does stop what will stop it? Culture (ie middle class western Europe) or something "natural" like famine?

[dapyx]

The population growth rate is decreasing (the average number of children per woman is down from 5 in the 1950s to 2.5 today) and in much of the industrialized world, it's already going down.

The population is still increasing, but much of it is no longer due to a high birthrate but due to an increase in lifespan.

[drewjoh]

Link: http://7billionactions.org/data

[rsanheim]

Yes.

Read _Collapse_.

[GeneTraylor]

Now I certainly plan to. Thank you.

[naz]

Nice writeup but it's easter, not eastern. If anything it's western.

[GeneTraylor]

Sorry I have dyslexia, I tend to get muddled up like that sometimes.

[Daniel_Newby]

> However what they failed to realize was the inescapable fact that they were living on a small piece of land in the middle of a vast ocean.

Their first problem was that they and their palm trees were too big for the island. A big body size means a low population count, and that means that range of random fluctuations overlaps with zero: extinction. This is why island species evolve towards dwarfism: the Flores "hobbits", dwarf elephants, etc. Like many species that are seeded onto an island, they died out before they could evolve to meet the challenges.

The second problem is that humans are not built for a stable, hospitable situation. Our ability to adapt to change atrophies, so that an emergency becomes a catastrophe. (Look up "water empire".) We are built for constant warfare, plagues, droughts, floods, and so forth.

> I shudder to think what it must have been like to live in this world.

About like the sad story of Rhodesia, renamed Zimbabwe and destroyed as an exercise in social justice.

> Like the eastern islanders we have nowhere to go...

If we build big enough, soon enough, we get the inner solar system, whose resources make our current civilization look like a molecule of water in an ocean. Then we can take the gas giants as an afterthought, whose resources make the inner solar system look like a molecule of water in an ocean. Then we get the galaxy.