Managing the collapse

Without people there are no problems.

If a problem exists and it is not mitigated by having fewer people then we just need to continue having fewer people until it is mitigated.

The end game is that with no people there are no problems because "problem" is a construct of the human mind.

I hope that you see the point.

Doug,

The point that I am trying to make about people = problems is as follows:

If a "problem" exists here on earth with 6 billion people and if we can agree that the "problem" would not exist if we had zero people on the earth then I contend that there is some number between 6 billion and zero where the problem will cease to exist. I don't know what that number is but I  know that it exists even if the number is closer to zero than 6 billion.

So I think the argument certainly is valid that problems would cease to exist with fewer people.

Ken

OK...so exactly what is the topic here?

Watching the documentary movie How the Earth was Made the other day left me with the impression of how utterly miniscule the timespan of humans (maybe 100,000 years so far for home sapiens) on earth is relative to the whole timeline of the Earth (5+- billion years) and how relatively stable things have been geologically in human recorded history relative to the millions of years passed on Earth. 

Oil was supposedly formed 200 or 300 million years ago, before the age of dinsaurs ended 65 million years ago.  One might contemplate the ultimate outcome will be a few hundred million years pass during which nature redeposits or reforms resources like oil and metal, then a new civilization of some sort of creatures rises to use them up all over again.  Nevertheless, I guess we've still got to deal with the timeframe of us and our children as best we can.

Actually this isn't far from the truth, although anatomically we're mammals, our behavior is similar to a virus. Fortunately we are living in a self regulating system, and whether we like it or not we will be regulated. Personally I think we should self regulate to minimize the impacts from being regulated, but unfortunately this is not likely to happen, since regardless of politics human breeding is democratic, even in China under birth restrictions it was still democratic, and the majority of people aren't clued in enough to realize that over population is a huge problem and regulate themselves.

How will we manage this from a species perspective, badly, we never have. I think if I remember correctly Carl Sagan once said, there is a narrow window to achieve colonization of space where there are sufficient resource to continue our never ending quest for growth, he predicted that unless we establish a permanent sizeable colony by 2015 off planet, then we'll remain  here and go the way of the dinosaurs. So obviously if his prediction is right then we're toast, unless there's some alien input. So I expect that at sometime in the neat future we'll be mining trash heaps for their precious minerals and organics, It will be the real recycling generation. 

Anyway I have to go recycle dead tree's into fuel.

Mike, don't you think most people on this site are in agreement that there is a problem? 

Secondly, discussing strategies is very academic, and interesting.  But that's all.  Our leaders won't implement any management of the downward slope of the hubbard peak because they have not acknowledged there is a problem.  They are worse than in denial.  I don't think they realise there is anything to deny.

I would also still be interested to hear from people who have proposed strategies for getting us out of the predicament we are in.

"Even should oil run out tomorrow, there be great famine and a plague, and the human species reduced to a fraction of it's former size, say 1 billion (roughly 1/7 th the current population), the species couldn't care less. In fact it would still be the most populous species on the face of the earth and therefore the most successful, perhaps not as successful, but still the most successful. Yes I'm anthropomorphing the Human species, but it illustrates a point."

Sorry Mr. Gung

With 1  billion humans we would not be the most populous species.

That is unless you consider populous as people as opposed to 

crowded.

Of course the derivation is from the Latin, populus.

So by definition even if there were one person (people)

it would be the most populous.

If you use the definition of crowded then I think you still are off the mark.

As for most successful, well there are species that were here before us 

and will likely be here after us. ex. cockroaches.

So again the devil is in the details. How do you define successful.

btw What if the one seventh are all Muslims? I think there are about a billion of them.

I happen to be reading John Greer's latest book "The Ecotechnic Future" much of which is relevant to this thread. (highly recommend reading) He speaks of upcoming stages including "Scarcity" and "Salvage" leading to what he calls the "Ecotechnic Age" that is coming, -- an age that is one that nobody now has much of an idea as to what it will be like. I think that may be why we have such a hard time imagining what the future will bring. At the moment we are all looking at the Scarcity period by learning new skills and storing things up for the future. When we can't get the things we need as usual, then the Salvaging/scavenging will become commonplace and those abandoned buildings and cities will be centers of the junk yards of tomorrow. Where this all leads many years for now does not have many signposts pointing to what this longer term may be other than it is likely to be much different than today and and likely even beyond what we might imagine.

As to a timetable, he leaves much to the reader's imagination, but does a good job of posting some guidelines to think about as the following illustrates on pages 54 & 55:

A teenage Parisienne who sat daydreaming of her upcoming wedding on the day that Louis XVI summoned the Etats-General in 1788 would have been a grandmother on the day the Allied armies marched into Paris after the battle of Waterloo in 1815. Historical events rarely appear to have the same importance at the time that they are assigned in the historian's hindsight, not least because the everyday tasks of making a living and the stages of human life play a larger role for most people than the tumults that make the history books. Seen in retrospect, the changes that will follow the end of the age of cheap abundant energy are likely to be swift and global. From the perspective of those who live through them, though, those changes will take place over lifetimes, and will be powerfully affected by local and temporary factors that will make the broader trends harder to see. As petroleum production declines, for example, the scramble for replacements with less net energy will tend to drive fuel prices up. Economic contraction driven by the end of cheap energy will tend to decrease demand, and drive them back down. Factor in speculation, and in place of the steadily rising prices sometimes predicted in the peak oil literature, we can expect wild swings in energy prices, driving cycles of boom and bust of an intensity not seen in the Western world since the 19th century.

All of this spells trouble, without a doubt. To volatile energy prices and wrenching economic change, add the breakdown of public health and the likelihood that the end of the American empire will result in wars as bloody as those that followed the decline of every other empire in history, and the result is a recipe for massive change. As depopulation, migration, cultural drift and ecological change have their effects, those changes will be multiplied manyfold. From the perspective of some future Edward Gibbon of the year 3650 or so, outlining The Decline and Fall of the American Empire as he strolls past sheep grazing on the mossy ruins of ancient Washington DC, all this will doubtless seem traumatic enough.

For those who experience the process of transformation first hand, though, it will likely have a noticeably different appearance. The young Parisienne just mentioned, after all, did not go to sleep one night in the agrarian, half-feudal France of the ancien regime and wake up the next morning as a grandmother in the nascent industrial nation that France became in Napoleon's wake. Even those changes that brought grief into her life -any sons she had, for example, would have faced high odds of dying a soldier's death would have been spread out over the years, part of a fabric of many other experiences.

Similarly, the unraveling of today's industrial society can be expected to take place against the tempo of ordinary life. Those of us who live through any significant fraction of the process can expect to witness economic, social and political turmoil as dramatic as anything our ancestors have experienced. We will all be attending more funerals than most of us do nowadays, and our appearance as the guest of honor at one of them will likely come sooner than we expect. Most of us will learn what it means to go hungry, to work at many jobs, to watch paper wealth become worthless and to see established institutions go to pieces around us. A quarter century or so from now, the world may be a very different place, but the journey there will have taken place a single day's changes at a time, in a world far more diverse than the one we inhabit today.

Jim