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from the we-are-all-one-big-happy-family dept.
Add all of us up, all 7 billion human beings on earth, and clumped together we weigh roughly 750 billion pounds. That, says Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, is more than 100 times the biomass of any large animal that's ever walked the Earth. And we're still multiplying. Most demographers say we will hit 9 billion before we peak, and what happens then?
Well, we've waxed. So we can wane. Let's just hope we wane gently. Because once in our history, the world-wide population of human beings skidded so sharply we were down to roughly a thousand reproductive adults. One study says we hit as low as 40.
Forty? Come on, that can't be right. Well, the technical term is 40 "breeding pairs" (children not included). More likely there was a drastic dip and then 5,000 to 10,000 bedraggled Homo sapiens struggled together in pitiful little clumps hunting and gathering for thousands of years until, in the late Stone Age, we humans began to recover. But for a time there, says science writer Sam Kean, "We damn near went extinct."
Some of the survivors must have coupled with lizards. How else could there be so many lawyers today?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by legont on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:06PM (5 children)
There definitely was no great technological civilization. In fact if we are to loose just one generation of educated adults, intelligent life on earth will probably never recover.
The reason is that we used up all the easily accessible resources such as surface copper and iron. Yes, there is no shortage of resources, but to get them requires a significant level of technology that can't be rebuild without access to the resources.
Yes, in time geological processes will reshuffle the surface but it will be a long time during which we'll be hit by space rocks, changing magnetics, or whatever and finally collide with Andromeda. The humanity is fragile. The probability of getting to this point was extremely low; the probability of recovery is way lower still.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:36PM (1 child)
hold on. the copper and iron that was used is still easily accessible in car graveyards and transformer boxes (the electricity thing with a lot of copper).
couple that with the burning of wood, and you can easily recover technology at the middle age level.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:49PM
Well, the middle ages level requires access to iron, and that's pretty much gone. What there is access to is steel. You might get to something pretty much equivalent based on reusing steel, but that would be very different in detail. But from that you could develop glass in ways that our ancestral civilization didn't, though we probably have. Also ceramics. But a lot of the things that we depend on are based on accessible ores that are just gone. Even the accessible coal is of such poor quality that wood is probably a better choice. Perhaps optically based smelters could be devised. (I've heard of one being built, but it must not have been economic, because that was a decade ago, and I haven't heard of it since.) After you get enough heat, you can do most anything, even fractional distillation of metals. (Zinc comes off fairly readily if it's part of an alloy. If it's the oxide you may need to wait for electro-chemistry.)
So it's not clear that there's no way forwards, but the way our ancestral civilization used is blocked.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @12:44AM
I think you lost your train of thoughts—i. e., the reasoning of your assertion:
As insightful (not: interesting) as your argument goes, this lost reasoning is not necessarily true. It depends on whether some civilization has reached the point of no return. Has it today? I'd think so. When was it for our civilization? Maybe at the end of the 19th century, maybe a little earlier, maybe a little later. I think there's some space left for some (relatively) highly developed ancient civilization which broke down.
Not that this was my firm belief/agenda to be pushed, but I'd not exclude it definitely, as you did.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Sunday November 05 2017, @02:52AM
I drove from Colorado to California a few days back and saw plenty of easily accessible resources such as surface copper and iron. The stuff is just sitting out in the open ready for mining.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Monday November 06 2017, @02:38AM
I wouldn't worry about copper and iron so much. If civilization ended tomorrow, they'd be plenty of metal around, already mined and highly refined.
The stuff I'd worry about is fossil fuels. Our civilization was bootstrapped by plenty of easily accessible coal and oil. That stuff is gone, and what remains in the Earth would be pretty much impossible for an early industrial society to get access to, and that assumes that they'd even know where to find it in the first place.