Quote:
Originally Posted by AstralTraveller
Out of all the hot air expended so far this comment is closest to the nub of the issue. Once you understand that our economic system is not stable in the long term, everything else is rearranging the deck chairs.
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Yep...
Permit me to elaborate for those not seeing it yet if you will. Whilst this is a a bit of a maths lesson and implicitly boring by definition, it may just turn out to be the most important of your life.
To truly understand the situation we are in you need to understand how a system behaves that exhibits growth at a constant percentage ie) the exponential function.
You can read the wiki article on the exponential function but good luck parsing it for a clear understanding of the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth
Here is (what I hope) to be an easily understandable version: Anything that grows exponentially, be it the mould on your bathroom wall or world energy demand (a function of population growth) will keep doubling in a period of time that is easily estimated by dividing 70 by the %age growth.
If a system grows by 3.5% per year then it will double approximately every 20 years (70/3.5) if the growth rate is 2.8% then it will double approximately every 25 years, and so on.
Now here is the sting in the tail of this tale...(basically why we are screwed) Consider how such a system grows over multiple doubling periods; for arguments sake lets say it's the amount of sugar grains that the argentine ant colony in your basement pilfers from your pantry. The ants breed at a rate that results in their population growing at 2.8% per day. After the first 25 days this ant colony has consumed 1 gram of sugar.
At day 50 they have doubled their consumption so the total of sugar snaffled is 3 grams.
At day 75, their consumption rate has gone up to to 4 grams per period so the total consumed since they first arrived is 7 grams. At day 100 the consumption rate has doubled again to 8 grams for the doubling period...
The thing to notice here is that the consumption of sugar required to sustain the colony over any 25 day period is equal to the amount of everything that they have consumed to date +1.
Ergo, if the world economy is growing at 2.8%pa and let's say that over the entire history of the human race we have consumed 50% of the resources available that underpin this economy, then by definition we have enough resources left to keep the show rolling for another 25 years before the cookie jar is empty.
You can apply the same principle to oil reserves, ocean acidity, arable land, water resources, atmospheric GHG's... what ever, and still come to the same conclusion. Basically we are living in the last decade(s) of human civilisation before the planet's people carrying capacity is exceeded. Even if we devoted the entire planet's resources to terraforming Mars and were successful to the extent that it was the equal of earth in all respects, it would buy us only another 25 years before the wheels fell off.
if you are young and imagine that the support structure you see today is going to exist in 50 years time when you need it, well the answer is no, not even in the most optimistic scenario can it possibly be so because it is mathematically impossible.
Anyway, I favour a tessellated placement of deck chairs.
It is slightly more efficient. (and affords a better view of the band)
c
I'm guessing that there is perhaps no more than 5 people on this forum who will actually attempt to understand the information in this post. (please prove me wrong)
, but it just isnt used enough.
Haddels will live 4 eva 
