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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: 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.