Should We Power Down The Planet?

[phillip1882]

at the current rate of technological progress, we'll need roughly 25 earth's by the year 2050.

this leaves us with one of two choices, either dovote practically every resource to faster than light travel, or shut down and ban all technologal advancement since roughly the 19th century. the first option is highly risky, it's a one shot all or nothing proposal. the second option would cause alot of hardship in the near term but humanity would survive for many more generations, even though it's highly improbable we'll ever get beyond our solar system. which option do you think we should take?

 

[Buffy]

at the current rate of technological progress, we'll need roughly 25 earth's by the year 2050.

 

What does this refer to? And if it involves taking one lone statistic and extrapolating it blindly, don't you think that there may be other countervailing statistics?

 

 

When we make assumptions, we contribute to the complexity rather than the simplicity of a problem, making it more difficult to solve, :phones:

Buffy

[ErlyRisa]

Imagine all the people with solar panels (a fragile device), and at some time in the future there is a riot for whatever reason...would the solar panels survive a mass riot?

 

Sometimes the problem isn't tech.

 

Thankfully alot of people are learning via Touch screen devices, what it is to adore tech.

 

25 earths: I have heard this quote too, and thats actually an under estimate. 25 earths is calculated with the style of people of today, it should actually be alot higher once you account for the 3rd world joining in on a similar lifestyle. I say fair is fair, those that lived the jetsetting life stop, and those that are in the 3rd world get to go too Paris for a holiday from the simple life.

 

At this late stage: the easiest way too crash the planet is to crash the planes...in my opinion they are not needed anymore anyway, especially not for work related activities.

 

Alot of people have ideas for planetery capable travel on the cheap (apart from sailing) Sadly, this type of living requires the ability for people too exchange base sustenance (food) for free.

 

There have been times in human history when the food is abundant and the people are not travelling...the only place the fruit pickers would ever travel is to the castle wall for some outdoor cinema (theatre). Today alot of people would have difficulty living such a lifestyle: Thankfully there is diversity, sadly some of it requires alot of energy input.

 

Sharing food and being artistic is what humans usually like to be (thankfully) ...it could be different, humans could behave like spiders or somesort of leech like animal.

Edited January 18, 2015 by ErlyRisa

[pgrmdave]

25 earths: I have heard this quote too, and thats actually an under estimate. 25 earths is calculated with the style of people of today, it should actually be alot higher once you account for the 3rd world joining in on a similar lifestyle. I say fair is fair, those that lived the jetsetting life stop, and those that are in the 3rd world get to go too Paris for a holiday from the simple life.

At the rate that AIDS is spreading, 150% of people will have AIDS in a few decades!

[ErlyRisa]

At the rate that AIDS is spreading, 150% of people will have AIDS in a few decades!

 

I guess that must include the 10Bill lives Tom Cruise saved.

[JMJones0424]

at the current rate of technological progress, we'll need roughly 25 earth's by the year 2050.

This is an extraordinary claim.  You should know better than to think that such a claim would go unchallenged on this forum.  What information leads you to make this conclusion?  Nothing else can be accomplished in this discussion until I know where you are coming from.  Your two choices are meaningless if I can't understand your underlying supposition.

[Eclogite]

I too would like to see supporting data, however, I suspect he may be within an order of magnitude of correct. We are currently using a whole variety of resources at an unsustainable rate - euqivalent, let us say to the equivalent of two or three Earths. As wealth spreads so that the developing world becomes the developed world the demand on these resources grows geometrically. It is not too difficult to imagine his twenty five Earths figure being true in 35 years time.

[JMJones0424]

It is not too difficult to imagine his twenty five Earths figure being true in 35 years time.

I commend your imagination.  If it isn't too difficult, then perhaps some support for the claim would be appropriate?

Edited January 22, 2015 by JMJones0424

[ErlyRisa]

The beauty of the quote 25 for 2050, is that it depends on what kind of human(s) you use todo the calculation.

 

an Ethiopian is the norm -- then probably no, you don't need 25.

a Technological world that is still stuck with incandescent lighting -- then yes.

 

A post apocalyptic world (some future war wipes out half of us) then again no (but we all know what happens pre/after/during war - it just accelerates even faster)

 

In a peace situation: Where everyone on the planet is aware of how the other guy is living, and the guy living in a sky-rise refrigerator does not want to live as those living economically (hut+bicycle)...then 25 earths is an underestimate. The problem is, if the sky-rise people do leave and live on the land then you are back too a similar situation to Ethiopia where we just don't fit, and wars start.

 

Personally I think energy wise: It is perfectly possible for the outlying suburbs to supply almost enough energy via solar to keep LED lighting running in the city.

 

Passive city building designs would have tobe created - the problem with the passive designs is that their dimensions and artistic feel is locked - they would all look the same....and many people have tried, but for some reason the designs don't sell.

 

Alot of people, now just do their imaginative work in Virtual, knowing full well that it will never come too fruition.

 

...Sort of like all those Patents that just never made it.

[CraigD]

at the current rate of technological progress, we'll need roughly 25 earth's by the year 2050.

I’m not sure Phillip1822 knows, or knows how to find, a source to back up his claim, so I’ll try.

 

I believe the source is Mora C, Sale PF (2011) Ongoing global biodiversity loss and the need to move beyond protected areas: a review of the technical and practical shortcomings of protected areas on land and sea. Mar Ecol Prog Ser 434:251-266. I think the actual quote from which the “25 earth's by the year 2050” comes is:

In a business-as-usual scenario, our demands on planet Earth could mount to the productivity of 27 planets Earth by 2050 (Fig. 4).

The authors are referring not to quantitative consumption of resources, but to a more abstract measurement of biodiversity as measured by various indexes generated mostly from counts of the number of species of various kinds alive at various times. I find their arguments convoluted, though this may be because I’m inexperienced with this kind of literature. My main issue with it is that it appears to assume that there is a per-living-human requirement for living species – that is, that a population of 12 billion humans require that the world have 2 times as many living species as a population of 6 billion.

 

The other points in this paper and others by the authors are clearer to me. One of their major ones is that biodiversity depends not just on protecting a given planet surface area of habitat, but of assuring that different kinds of habitats are connected by protected “corridors” that allow species to travel between them.

 

this leaves us with one of two choices, either dovote practically every resource to faster than light travel, or shut down and ban all technologal advancement since roughly the 19th century.

Mora or Sales nowhere in their paper or elsewhere I’ve read suggest that a ban on technological advancements made since he 19th Century would avert the biodiversity catastrophe they predict. Rather, they suggest (via Fig 4 in the paper) that a decrease in world population from its 2011 number of 6.9 billion to about 6.4 billion (about its 2004 number) would be sustainable. This is based on an assumption that continued technological advancement will, by 2050, improve biodiversity by about 20%. They're actually proposing not to ban technological advancement, but to promote it.

 

The possibility of faster than light travel is considered by nearly all physicists and technologists to uncertain. Though it’s intensely interesting and thought-provoking, the idea of devoting nearly every resource to achieving it is, I think, science fictional.