[FredPret]

"On our way out"!? If you believe this, why? Who told you this? Do you actually think 8 billion people are about to drop dead?

On the other hand, if you're deliberately spreading hyperbole to get people to act, please stop - it's backfiring.

[Cthulhu_]

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.

[thom]

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.

[onlypassingthru]

>bug populations have halved in a decade

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.

[goatlover]

So humans aren't on their way out, it's not even clear global human civilization will collapse as opposed to adapting and mitigating before then.

[JohnMakin]

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?

[roamerz]

>>Do you actually think 8 billion people are about to drop dead?

In no more than 100 years or so, yes.

[bruce511]

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.

[FredPret]

Which resources will be scarce, and why?

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.

[shiroiushi]

>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.

[FredPret]

> ignore the massive amount of overhead space

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.

[shiroiushi]

>I allowed for some overhead, but even ifyou double or quadruple the space requirement, it's abundantly clear that space isn't an issue.

I think you'd have to more than quadruple the space, but sure, I do agree humans don't absolutely need to be spread across the world. Still, I think you're discounting things like resource extraction (mines), but I guess since people don't normally live in such places we can ignore those.

Personally I have wondered sometimes what the world would look like if almost everyone concentrated into cities laid out like Tokyo (i.e. very dense, and not very car-friendly). There'd probably be a lot of abandoned places.

>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.

Forgive me for not knowing that much about agriculture, but are greenhouses and hydroponics really viable for growing enough food for all of humanity? (Of course, they wouldn't be much help for growing livestock or seafood.) And has anyone really shown vertical farming to be viable? It looks like a nice idea in theory but seems to require advances in robotics to be economically feasible.

>Ontario happens to have an absolute crapton of water - 20% of the world total. But that doesn't matter. Water goes in a cycle.

Ontario might be OK here, but a lot of cities really do face freshwater shortages, for instance in the American southwest and Los Angeles. Of course, it'd help if people didn't use so much water for their lawns...

[roamerz]

>>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.

[bruce511]

Oil springs to mind. Other things might include slow-growing hard woods.

Yes our technology allows for new mining techniques, and there are lots of reserves of some things, but ultimately it's all finite.

[adastra22]

Touché

[JohnMakin]

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

[FredPret]

Again, that's a crazy thing to conclude from even the most pessimistic global warming predictions.

[lm28469]

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

[JohnMakin]

> 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.

[00N8]

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.

[FredPret]

You realize we get a say in all this right?

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.

Defeatism is not the way.

[gapan]

> 1k years ago we were still dying of hunger and lack of hygiene.

We are still doing that. In fact, there are more people affected by hunger today than 1k years ago. And things are getting worse, not better. [1]

[1] https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-h...

[FredPret]

They're complaining about a rise in the absolute number of hungry people, not the rate of hunger.

I hope you're not arguing that the rate of hunger has done anything but gone down drastically in the past 1000 years.

That there are short-term oscillations change nothing about the very obvious long-term trend. Keep in mind also that most economies are still recovering from Covid. Heck, the EU is a rich area and is still recovering from 2008.

Now, 1000 years ago, there were ~0.3B people. [0]

The daily calorie supply is hard to get, but in 1200 it looks to have been about 2000kCal in the UK. [1]

Now we're up to 3000kCal per person per day, for 27x the population. [2] And honestly, we're not even trying to maximize this number at all; farmers are optimizing for profit, not for maximum calories. Absolutely enormous tracts of land go uncultivated. Hydroponic farming is used for minuscule percentage of our food supply. We're nowhere close to maxing out the food supply.

When I see complaints like yours I can only conclude one of these:

1) The people involved truly don't get the idea of rates, or long-term trends in rates, or the impact of technology on our lives

2) They aren't arguing in good faith and simply want me to be sad.

Both of these devalue the source of the argument.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...

[adastra22]

Only because total population is so much bigger now. On the whole we are dealing with an obesity crisis, not famine, even in developing countries.

Famine was largely eradicated by the invention of the Haver-Bosch process.

[nine_k]

People are hungry not because the civilization fails to produce enough food. It fails to produce enough order to let this food reach the hungry.

The causes of any prolonged famine are political: local overlords and thugs grab the food and keep it under their control, so that they would stay on top of their local social pyramid and / or profit from reselling.

[Qem]

Beware the Asymptotic Burnout hypothesis proposed to explain the Fermi Paradox: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2022.002...

[goatlover]

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.

[pjc50]

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.

[cyberax]

> may not be inhabitable in a relatively short period of time

This is pretty much nonsense. Worst climate change predictions do not make the planet "uninhabitable", only some parts of it.