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Rare earth metals aren't rare as in uncommon, they are rare as in "not concentrated". They aren't mined very many places because no one had any use for them till very recently. When people talk about shortages they mean "yearly supply won't meet yearly demand in time" and not that it will be absolutely depleted. (although in general that applies to everything, there isn't really any mineral that is possible to actually "run out of" meaningfully on earth, it's always "run out of at X price point" )
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Feb 10, 2017 15:15
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Space mining is a dumb nerd fantasy. Yeah but so is the fall of man.
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Feb 10, 2017 21:07
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SavageGentleman posted:sorry what? Did you completely miss the last posts? Going "well technology will solve everything" is not even a proper argument - it's basically a statement of faith... which becomes even less believable when the posts before you pointed out that our amazing technological solutions of the last centuiry were only possible because they were powered by the same 'free'/high eroei oil that is running out and is replaced by more and more diluted variations. And seeing how badly projects like ITER are over budget/mismanaged, the chances of fusion power coming online in any meaningful/afforbale way before our economies are buttfucked by water/soil/resource/oil shortages, climate change and its sociopolitical effects are really slim. Resources aren't running out today, they aren't running out tomorrow. There really has been few times in human history where someone can talk about society in 300,400,500 years and actually have anything meaningful to say because of the way technology reshapes the world over timeframes like that.
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Feb 11, 2017 18:10
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Spangly A posted:yeah there is literally no way any western lifestyle is long-term sustainable and without unforseeable technology developments the world's either going to need to re-evaluate it's resources or let poor people starve in their millions, growing eventually to billions It's gonna be the second one.
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Feb 11, 2017 20:07
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SavageGentleman posted:And it's exactly here where we're running into massive problems. The cheap oil sources that powered our rise through the 20th century are running out and alternative energy sources are not doing so well on the eroei front - if they will ever get online. By what metric are they "running out"? Like I am sure you will claim that the government and oil companies all conspire to hide the truth and you know in your heart the apocalypse is coming any minute now to punish the wicked but all the data anyone seems to actually have shows a world where fossil fuels are gonna be just fine for a very long time. Like maybe you are right and your sci-fi story about what the year 2185 or whatever is better than someone else's sci-fi story, but it's all sci-fi stories once you are talking about far flung times in the future.
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Feb 11, 2017 22:57
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SavageGentleman posted:This is just the US example, but it's similar on a global scale: You seem well informed enough in the rest of your post that it seems like you are trying to trick people rather than not knowing that this isn't true. World oil production hasn't followed that graph in any way that is similar.
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Feb 12, 2017 00:27
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SavageGentleman posted:welp, seems you're right! Crude Oil production seems to keep up on a global level for now. Knowing that the planet is finite, this will not stay like that forever, but anything that keeps us afloat a few more years hels, I guess. Yeah but it's not "a few more years" like 4 years, it's "a few more years" like "well beyond the rest of our entire lives". And at that point you can still do the whole "everything is finite!" and "it's just faith that technology will change" but there is something absolutely realistic about the idea that a human simply can not talk about what technology will be like a hundred years after their life or whatever. It's just not a meaningful conversation that is possible to have.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:05
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Blue Star posted:I agree with the people saying that believing in technology to save us is basically faith. Its magical thinking. The problem is that technology progress is actually slowing down. Compare 1900 to 1950, and then 1950 to 2000. The 1900-1950 interval is way more impressive and saw way more technological progress. Cars and electric power becoming widespread, radios, film, television, airplanes, nuclear energy, x-rays, peniccilin, rockets, submarines, tanks. Now look at the 1950-2000 interval. Computers, cell phones, internet, video games....um....better visual effects in movies.... This is incredibly stupid.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:41
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Rime posted:That's a pretty stupid post, but it's less stupid than believing that technology is going to continue fixing things forever and we will never suffer again thanks to human ingenuity. You are the one crying the end is nigh, who's the cult?
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Feb 12, 2017 02:46
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Why would anyone ever believe technology might solve any problems? what has technology ever done for me!? Name one problem technology has ever solved! they haven't even made videogame graphics better since 2007!
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Feb 12, 2017 02:47
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Spangly A posted:because that's what you think technology is. The rest of us call what you're thinking of magic. This is the greatest threat to the species yet faced; perhaps we will overcome, but indications currently aren't too good. "You have too much faith in technology and treat it like magic! Also I have identified a particular technology as so vital to human life that I believe the human race would cease to exist if it does not remain exactly as it is in 2017 forever till the end of time and no conceivable technology could ever replace it"
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Feb 12, 2017 03:09
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It's also weird to claim that oil is NEEDED for human civilization and human existence because of the fact of how late it came into the modernization of the world. Like we already had radios and movies and stuff before we had cars. The US was supporting a population of 100 million in 1910. Like cars are certainly a major factor in the US culture. And if a wizard vanished it all in an instant that would be bad. But it's not even hard to think of what a technological civilization would look like without oil since we went through quite a few years of rapidly modernizing cities before it even was a big thing. Like people were living in skyscrapers before cars were common.
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Feb 12, 2017 03:42
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rudatron posted:Oil is an absolute necessity now, because most of the products of the 'green revolution' require oil. Or do you think pesticides and fertilizers make themselves? Or just think about the incredible mechanization of agriculture that we have. You can't turn the clock back, we have a lot more people alive now than we did in 1910, and that is basically off the back of oil discovery and usage. Fertilizer is made from ammonia. Modern fertilizer is made from natural gas in the west and coal in china. Not oil. Pesticide isn't particularly a fossil fuel thing at all. Like yeah, if a magic wizard comes and makes oil disappear in a day then it'll be bad. But the idea that oil is vital to human civilization is absurd. The human race had invented fax machines before it had oil wells.
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Feb 12, 2017 05:15
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stone cold posted:Hope you don't use anything made of plastic! Like I said, if a wizard comes and casts a spooky magic spell that makes oil cease to exist all at once then yeah, we are screwed. I don't even know though? Is there any products that are vital to human civilization's survival that require plastic be as cheap as it is? If the price of plastic rose 10x because it became so valuable that doesn't even seem like it'd increase the price of most things more than a few cents. The cost of materials in anything plastic so tiny.
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Feb 12, 2017 05:29
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stone cold posted:I hope you literally never need a medical procedure, lol What medical procedure has even 1% of it's cost be the material costs of plastics? Again, we are not facing a crisis where a wizard is going to teleport all our oil to the void one day. quote:Like you keep pointing back to 'well humans were alive before oil', and yeah, not poo poo, but poo poo has changed since then. Populations have increased, supply chains have become more complicated, global shipping is a real thing now. You cannot turn the clock back. Just seems weird how people are crying "wah, you have too much faith in technology, it's not going to save you!" while also having this weird belief that humans need specifically oil to even exist or have civilizations. Like I guess the only faith in technology allowed is some weird faith that oil is a savior which sure sounds suspiciously like a bit of "fact" some rich companies are invested in people believing on a large scale!
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Feb 12, 2017 05:51
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Funky See Funky Do posted:We can't feed 7 billion people without oil. That's not even up for debate. Modern agriculture is completely reliant on having oil. Not just to grow the food but to move it to the population centres which are, these days, almost always nowhere near where the food is grown. A reduction in the availability of oil is also a reduction in the availability of food. It doesn't have to disappear, there just has to be less than we need. The earth supported about 2 billion people before we had cars or used oil widely for anything particular. Again, unless the problem is that a wizard magically magics away all the oil in the middle of some night there is no situation where we can not power our tractors. Burning oil is the power source we use for things right now, it's not some inherent god given one true energy of life or something. People existed before it. There are other sorts of energy. People fuss about building nuclear power plants and solar power plants and say not in their back yard and we have the luxury right now to say "no, your right, not in your back yard", but when the choice becomes the fall of man or building a nuclear power plant in a town that doesn't want it we are probably going to go with building the thing.
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Feb 12, 2017 15:36
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Spangly A posted:no I'm just not making a positive statement on the matter until evidence predisposes one way or another Evidence of what? Evidence that the human race can survive without oil? Like I said we had fax machines and sky scrapers and 2 billion people before cars and oil were even a thing. And we have invented quite a lot of stuff since then. Quite a lot of other power sources AND oil doesn't disappear by wizards, we will still have oil no matter what if you want to pull some dumb gotcha about some specific use that absolutely requires oil and couldn't be anything else. Beyond that, on scales of 100+ years it's absolutely sane to assume the trajectory of science is going to bring a whole host of unknown technologies that we can't even name at this point. Between 1617 and 1717, between 1717 and 1817, between 1817 and 1917 and between 1917 and 2017 things were discovered that we literally did not even have words to describe. You can say there is no way to know that will happen again, and you are right, maybe science ended in 2014 or something, but at this point that seems like a risky bet. Like you are not being the calm and reasonable one assuming the end of science and the end of the human race and I'm being the wacky fantastic by saying "life will probably go on if one specific resource becomes more expensive slowly over several generations" Owlofcreamcheese fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 17:40
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Spangly A posted:Again I'm the guy saying science is nowhere near finished but if you can name a technology that replaces oil without massive population changes go ahead. You've literally got no idea what you're talking about or arguing for here. You can continue to justify your magical thinking to yourself but you've got nothing interesting to say. Why would I be able to name the exact combination of technologies? When in history has anyone ever been able to say the exact details of technological progress from 100 years after their death? Either I name technologies that exist now, then you say they don't work exactly perfectly now then throw the unsolved issues they have and demand I solve those problems right this second in a forum post. Or else I talk about beyond speculative far future sci-fi technologies that could exist in 100 years then you dismiss them as sci-fi. So the answer is "no technology can replace oil instantly in 2017 but nuclear power and things like solar could already do it given a generation of time to transition to them, then in some far flung future technology in it's infancy like fusion power will take over, but if you are really talking about hundreds of years the real answer is that modern physics is primitive and the energy sources of 2200 or whatever will be based on words and concepts we haven't even thought of yet, the same way it's been every century"
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Feb 12, 2017 18:05
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rudatron posted:If global civilization was structured such that resources were distributed optimally, political malfunction wasn't an issue, conflict and resentment could easily be defused, then it would still be a big problem, but not one that necessarily ends industrial civilization as we know it. But none of that is true, we live in an exploitative capitalist system subdivided into competing states with varying levels of stability and popular accountability - what the gently caress do you think is going to happen when resources start 'running out'? It all gets talked out rationally? loving Nope. Politics and political-economy is going to make everything more complicated, and likely much worse. That is true but that would be true no matter what. If a magic alien portal opened up that spewed forth infinity oil forever do you think we wouldn't just war nonstop about who owns the portal?
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Feb 12, 2017 18:10
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rudatron posted:There's also real limits on the technological advancement that has occurred, and no easy way past then, and especially no easy way past them in scientific funding keeps getting cut, to make up for budget shortfalls, in this age of austerity. We grow enough food right this second to feed 10 billion people. Then we throw a bunch away. We already in the west eat so much food that many of the leading causes of death are "ate too much food" We also grow hundreds of pounds of corn then go through giant complicated processes to make them into a couple pounds of hamburger that we then sell for 89 cents. We also grow nearly a billion tons of tobacco per year in the US. Plus uncountable acres of lawn grass that we fertilize just because we want to. Like, human food production has an awful lot of "slack" left before it leads to extinction. Starvation isn't happening on earth because there isn't enough food or agricultural capacity. It is easy to make some hank hill jokes about how a world where steak cost more or lawns weren't economical to fertilize isn't a world worth living in. Or if we had to stop throwing away tomatos with blemishes to feed everyone. But it's a world that wouldn't exactly be a hell dystopia.
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Feb 12, 2017 18:55
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Like 100% the US will decide to have millions die rather than redirect corn production from making mcdonalds hamburgers but that is a political issue not a technological one. We don't lack the technology to feed human, just the will to. I imagine if in 150 years einstein 2.0 invents magic zero point quantum wave dark matter engines that create limitless energy by drawing it from alternate universes or whatever that we'd still manage a way to have poor people in africa. Basically until we stop wanting that to be a thing. It's already not a technological issue preventing us from fixing extreme poverty. Inventing technologies won't solve it since current technologies already could if we actually wanted to.
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Feb 12, 2017 19:12
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