How will civilization handle its dwindling resources?

[TroonsDid911]

8 billion people burning through every single finite resource on the planet at an astronomical rate. How do you think mankind will solve this problem?

https://www.worldometers.info/oil/#:~:text=World%20Oil%20Reserves&text=The%20world%20has%20proven%20reserves,levels%20and%20excluding%20unproven%20reserves).

47 years of oil left, after that we are back to the 1850s. Meanwhile we are saying that climate change is the biggest threat to humanity.

 

[Lowlife Adventures]

Ideally by getting third world countries to practice birth control. I'm wondering if long term population goals should be set. Of course, I'm not suggesting a cruel hard limit where excess population is killed. Although any country that tries to do this should be careful not to fuck it up like what China did with their one child policy. I think in China's case they wanted to become a dominant market force but also have a smaller population and you can't really have both. Countries that will try to keep the population at a certain amount may just have to settle with being minor players economically (but is that really a bad thing if the smaller population makes it easier to provide for the citizens & ensure a high quality of life?)

 

[batterybee]

I played a lot of Rust through my adolescence so i am prepared to do what must be done to survive.

 

[The Backwards Man]

If we weren't retarded, we'd just live in out fallout style future with nuclear energy. But since we are retards, well I guess I'm just gonna become a mountain man.

 

[teriyakiburns]

47 years of oil left

If you believe the breathless media coverage, based on the prognostications of people with a vested interest in attracting attention, we've had only 40 to 50 years of oil left for the past century. You, and they, are falling for the belief that "proven reserves" are the sum total of all the oil left in the ground, but that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the term.

Proven reserves are not all reserves, they're merely the known reserves that have been explored sufficiently to prove their viability. Unproven reserves - those that have been explored sufficiently to be certain they exist, but whose full extent hasn't been conclusively tested - generally tack another 50 years on, and known fields - those that have been discovered but not explored - are estimated to tack another 50 on top of that. oil companies generally only maintain about 40 to 50 years of proven reserves at any given point in time, as there's little economic justification to conclusively proof more than that. They will move more reserves into the proven category as needed, to maintain that buffer, and continually explore to find more fields that can later be proofed as required. Or they would, if governments weren't restricting their activities so tightly. There are known fields throughout the world that are currently untouchable due to government intervention.

Point being, breathless doomerism aside, there's a lot more oil out there than just the proven reserves.

 

[The Punished Mitch]

There are no dwindling resources, certainly not to the extent Klaus and Krew would have you believe. Oil and gas field refill at astounding rates.

 

[TyrasGuard]

Nigga just press enter and type "cheese steak jimmy's"

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

There are no dwindling resources, certainly not to the extent Klaus and Krew would have you believe. Oil and gas field refill at astounding rates.

Refill how?

 

[Sparkletor 2.0]

If we run out of oil (we won't, see @teriyakiburns post above) we will just go back to using coal. To justify the use, scientists will tell us that global warming is not caused by greenhouse gasses, climate change is a normal thing that happens to the Earth.

Refill how?

Plate tectonics shift the shit under the ground and more oil gets created, or something. I'm not a scientist.

 

[N Space]

8 billion people burning through every single finite resource on the planet at an astronomical rate. How do you think mankind will solve this problem?

We won't, we have mismanaged renewable resources such as forests and fish banks so I don't see why we would fare any better with non-renewables.

Oil and gas field refill at astounding rates.

Plate tectonics shift the shit under the ground and more oil gets created, or something. I'm not a scientist.

I don't know about gas, but oil and carbon don't replenish at all. Hundreds of millions of years ago no organism could digest cellulose, thus, the remains of vegetation never rotted and were smushed deep underground forming the carbon and oil we know of today. This doesn't happen nowadays because plenty of organisms can digest cellulose so the carbon involved remains in the biosphere.

 

[Stan]

Utilize the haber born process and Dyson spheres to harness enough solar energy to clone 12 Ethan Ralphs and thereby produce a corn harvest to feed every man, woman and child for 100 years into the future

 

[Angry Alt Right Nerd]

It's OK humanity has survived thousands of years without electricity, I'm sure all of us people of civilization are ready to accept a lower standard of living and won't complain about eating bugs or having to work or anything like that.

 

[DeadwastePrime]

asteroid mining clearly. that and mining from the surface of the moon and mars. maybe mercury can just be our little mining planet that we disassemble because who the fuck needs mercury as a planet anyway?

 

[beautiful person]

More wars.

 

[Schwarzwald]

They've been pushing this "Overpopulation! Dwindling resources!" nonsense for nearly a century. It's scare tactics used to control the populations of the world.

At no point in modern history has there been an issue of true food shortages. Rather, the issue we've faced is primarily borne of distribution issues and secondarily of uneducated populations not knowing how to utilize their resources. There is plenty of food to go around, but getting it to the people of Africa is another issue, people who wouldn't even need handouts if they were educated and committed en masse to the concepts introduced and available to them. I've heard stories of water wells and bridges being constructed only for the do-good westerners to leave and come back in two months to see them destroyed.

We are blessed on this planet with sustainability, both through vegetation and the ability to hunt and utilize livestock, as well as the water cycle. True overpopulation would only come in the form of the entire earth being blanketed with people living on top of each other like Tokyo. Shortages might result from overpollution, overfarming, or nuclear fallout, but those are all issues we've addressed and learned from. Fossil fuels are, in fact, limited, but if worse came to worst we do have nuclear as a true option. God has blessed us beyond comprehension, both with our provisions on earth as well as our intelligence and problem-solving being able to address any true shortages that arise.

As people are aware of this if they apply thought to the matter, they've turned to a far more effective tactic to control the populace in the man-made global warming lie. It's something far less tangible and less understood by the average citizen of the world that can't be refuted in the short-term. Projections can be off base by magnitudes and nobody is the wiser, versus overpopulation fearmongers constantly having to eat crow. So long as at least half of society buys into the lie and they maintain political power through it, they get everything they could possibly want. It's essentially the same playbook as COVID over a very long period of time with not as many people paying attention.

 

[Claude Sigma]

To begin with, don't believe the lies about "only X years left!" because I'm old enough to remember them saying even less years 10 and 20 years ago.
But if that was real, well the market will simply slowly adapt over time. We will never have a moment where all of the sudden there is no more oil or whatever. The law of supply and demand never goes away, if something becomes scarce, then the price will go up. If the price go up enough, then the alternatives become more appealing.

If oil became 10x expensive over time, it would become cheaper to use electric for example. So that's what we would do. That's pretty much it.

 

[Omnium Ultimatus]

Simple. By hanging the megalomaniacal parasites in positions of government and industry, along with their affiliates.

Resources are abundant, even seemingly limited ones like oil. Climate change is a hoax, and carbon footprints are a non-issue when taking the abundance of trees into account.

Energy could practically be free and plentiful, and the world could sustain far more than 8 billion. Hell, the world could probably fit all 100 billion humans who've ever lived on Earth if there was no artificial scarcity.

Scarcity will always exist, as there will always be a limited number of things in existence. The problem is when scarcity is artificially enforced, and that's done on the whim of the psychopaths who inhabit these positions in the first place.

These creatures don't care about acquiring money or wealth, they have plenty already. No, they crave power and the high that comes with it.

 

[.iota.]

jared diamond (the author of guns, germs, and steel) wrote about this topic in an interesting and informative book entitled collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed.

the book discusses a number of specific historical and contemporary societies, and how those societies experienced failure or success depending on the way in which they addressed threats such as environmental damage, climate change, hostility from neighboring societies, and/or the withdrawl of support from other friendly societies.

reading this thread, i think that it's important to point out that, as "globalized" as the world may seem, we're still a tribal species. we generally value what is closest to ourselves - our family, our friends, our communities - more than we do what is beyond ourselves. this is of immediate benefit to us, but is often detrimental to our society.

civilizations are comprised of myriad societies, and, unfortunately, history indicates that civilizations collapse when individuals refuse to recognize and respond appropriately to that which threatens their society.

 

[Fathomless Eminence]

We need to set up impractical, punishment oriented governments that are centered around some kind of gimmick so spunky women can overthrow the system and set the people's minds free (use of bows optional).

 

[Absolutego]

I am so fucking exhausted with this Malthusian bullshit.
The more people there are, the more opportunities there are to discover new energy sources. We have done this time and time again, just recently with the shale revolution. The best power source on the planet currently sits aside, discarded because voters are idiots. Our food is so plentiful that our main problem contributing to famines is a fucking distribution issue.
Civilization will roll along fine despite morons like OP chicken little-ing about how everything's gonna collapse.