The Roman Empire took 250 years to collapse, yet in hindsight we still consider it to have just stopped at one point. Likewise, we look at mass extinction events in the geologic histories as if they were one off blips, but e.g. this Hangenberg Event I just googled spanned 100K to several hundred thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangenberg_event
But we're living a mass extinction event if you consider biodiversity and populations in non-human species has plummeted; bug populations have halved in a decade, with that bird populations have taken a hit, ten billion crabs starved because of a heat wave (https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/research-confir...), etc.
No, 8 billion people won't drop dead, and life will continue in many ways, but in our lifetimes we'll see worsening food scarcity because of climate change (already happening), consequent famines, mass migrations, wars, etc.
But for a lot of people it mainly means food gets more expensive and the relative wealth of food choice we've had will be reduced, and houses will be built differently depending on the new climate trends.
That or the gulf stream will stop and the northern hemisphere gets covered in a mile of ice again. But that too won't happen overnight.
A thousand years after the fall of the western Roman Empire, the eastern empire fell. Five hundred years after that, a rocket named for the Roman god of renewal helped put men on the moon. I wouldn’t write us off.
Which will have a direct impact on the price of food as the pollinators disappear. Professional pollinator might be a high growth career in the coming decades.
It’s extremely difficult to reconcile posts like this with the clear historical examples of silly supply chain issues due to minor disruptions.
I don’t believe “civilization” is as resilient as you think. The late bronze age collapse, and all the mystery surrounding that event, did indeed take place over hundreds of years in a vast “global” society.
I very much doubt anyone in that society could have predicted such a spectacular collapse. It’s not really a disputable fact that civilization has collapsed many times before and probably will again before we have to worry about these silly “billion year” concerns - maybe let’s just focus on the next 200 years?
For those who missed the point of this concise note;
There are 8 billion people alive today. A few handfuls of whom will be alive 100 years from now.
Everyone dies.
Will the birthrate drop? Likely yes. Will resources become more scarce? Some, definitely yes. Will life be easier or harder 100 years from now? That's harder to predict.
Improved technology + greater demand = more resources become economical to mine. (Our deepest mines are ~5km and have actual humans toiling away in them. Heavier - and more valuable - metals tend to be deeper.)
This planet has a ridiculous amount of water, most of it just needs energy to be treated or desalinized.
We get more energy from the sun than we could even think to use, not even mentioning the gargantuan stores of uranium and thorium.
We have enough space to give every human (not just every family - every individual human person) a large house on a big yard. This wouldn't even cover the earth - we could fit all that in just Ontario.
>We have enough space to give every human (not just every family - every individual human person) a large house on a big yard. This wouldn't even cover the earth - we could fit all that in just Ontario.
These kinds of calculations aren't very useful IMO, because they ignore the massive amount of overhead space needed to support a human life in a modern society: roads, train stations, airports (I guess not necessary if everyone lives in Ontario...), schools, water treatment plants, electric power generation facilities, farmland, commercial buildings, office buildings, warehouses, factories, landfills/garbage processing, the list goes on. Look at any modern city, including the dense & walkable ones: the amount of total space for housing, while significant, isn't that much of the total land area of the city, and that's ignoring all the stuff outside the city needed to make the city work (especially agricultural land, but also power generation, and other dirty industries that are either well outside cities, or on their periphery).
Also, at a very minimum, humans need food and water to survive. You're not going to grow enough food for your family in your yard (and certainly not year-round). And freshwater resources are scarce in many places. Ontario cannot grow crops year-round, and only has so much water.
I allowed for some overhead, but even ifyou double or quadruple the space requirement, it's abundantly clear that space isn't an issue.
> Ontario cannot grow crops year-round,
It can, and it does. There are greenhouses and hydroponics - we would never spontaneously concentrate ourselves like this but if we did mass hydroponics and vertical farming would suddenly become much more economical.
Also, in this scenario we're free to move our ultra-dense spot anywhere on the planet, I just like Ontario.
> and only has so much water.
Ontario happens to have an absolute crapton of water - 20% of the world total. But that doesn't matter. Water goes in a cycle. If you have a large starting volume, the only limiting factors are energy and money to purify used water.
>>We have enough space to give every human (not just every family - every individual human person) a large house on a big yard. This wouldn't even cover the earth - we could fit all that in just Ontario.
Not to be nit picky but it would be a subjectivity pretty small house if you wanted a yard of any useful size. My quick math said you’d have about 1446 sq ft per person (not including the niceties like roads, stores and fast food joints)
In all honesty though I was surprised it was that close.
Do you actually think they literally meant 8 billion people are going to drop dead? because the meaning was fairly obvious as written - after 200 years of industrial revolution we are left in a situation where the planet we live on may not be inhabitable in a relatively short period of time
Let's talk about it in a hundred years when we struggle to grow food and have to deal with hundred millions/billions of climate refugees.
You don't need 8b deaths to see we're clearly not on a positive trajectory, ocean acidification, wild weather patterns, climate feedback loops, famines, &c. will be problems we have to tackle by the end of the century and will absolutely destroy our capabilities to develop. All it takes is a major event and we're fucked, something that sets us back even 150 years, and it's game over, we wouldn't have the means to go through another industrial revolution because we used all the easily accessible sources of energy
Come on... mammals exist for a mere 300m years... if you worry about the death of our sun in a BILLION years but not about climate change you're an absolute clown, we'll face a couple of near (or full) extinction events by then
> Again, that's a crazy thing to conclude from even the most pessimistic global warming predictions.
Not really considering the "most pessimistic" predictions have the Atlantic current completely shutting down within the next 100 years (wipes out food supply), tons of countries like bangladesh becoming actually inhospitable from heat/humidity index (billion+ people dead), sea levels rising several meters (massive percentage of humanity lives near a coast), etc. - could go on for a while. Frankly, I don't think you really understand what you are talking about and suspect you're going to turn this into a pedantic "well that won't completely annhilate all human life so you are wrong" kind of back and forth that I don't feel like engaging in so I'll just wish you a good day and move on.
Tragic as it would be, that worst case global warming scenario is still more of a "set human population levels & quality of life back 200 years" situation, rather than a literal extinction event though. I see a lot of hyperbole & doomerism around these topics online & I think pushback is fair.
We should be doing more to prevent the worse global warming outcomes. The stakes are billions dying or having miserable lives, which should be motivating enough. I don't think it helps to spin a dark fantasy about it being too late & humans actually going extinct. In the long run, an 8x reduction in human population & a few centuries of bad weather isn't really even a close call, let alone a legitimate extinction risk.
Humanity is immensely capable of large-scale adaptation.
10k years ago we were getting chased around by sabre-toothed tigers.
1k years ago we were still dying of hunger and lack of hygiene.
100 years ago the first biplanes took to the sky.
Now look where we are. Human progress is exponential. There's every reason to believe that we'll be capable of dealing with our problems as they come. Malthus was wrong 200 years ago, and you are wrong now.
We have clean energy options in solar, nuclear, and battery storage. These are getting better, cheaper, and safer every day. We've got people working on geo-engineering solutions. We've got remote work. We're automating and localizing manufacturing.
What does an "uninhabitable" Earth mean? Do you mean less habitable than the Sahara or Antartica, or the Himalayas? Because some people do inhabit those places, and more could if they needed to. There's no scientific evidence whatsoever that all of Earth will become uninhabitable for humans. That's just doomerism.
I think it was a poor taste piece of pedantry: in 100 years, almost everyone currently alive, 8 billion people, will be dead. It's just that new people will have been born in the meantime.
On the other hand, if you're deliberately spreading hyperbole to get people to act, please stop - it's backfiring.