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Each other

Maybe so...

I think the best that we can hope for is it'll be about like now... "half will have enough, the other half won't"...

I just shake my head every time I read all these grand pronouncements about "doubling food production in the next 30 years"... You can't open an agricultural magazine without reading that audacious statement at least ONCE within its covers, often several times. It's the latest "buzzword" or catchphrase to "come down from the mountain" of the PTB in Washington and elsewhere within the industry... Like saying it over and over and chanting it like an incantation is somehow going to make it happen...

Not bloody likely...

More like a collapse as described in Jared Diamond's book, or resource wars... Think fighting is bad now over oil and stuff, wait til folks are fighting over food and water...

Later! OL JR :)
 
Maybe so...

I think the best that we can hope for is it'll be about like now... "half will have enough, the other half won't"...

I just shake my head every time I read all these grand pronouncements about "doubling food production in the next 30 years"... You can't open an agricultural magazine without reading that audacious statement at least ONCE within its covers, often several times. It's the latest "buzzword" or catchphrase to "come down from the mountain" of the PTB in Washington and elsewhere within the industry... Like saying it over and over and chanting it like an incantation is somehow going to make it happen...

Not bloody likely...

More like a collapse as described in Jared Diamond's book, or resource wars... Think fighting is bad now over oil and stuff, wait til folks are fighting over food and water...

Later! OL JR :)


Collapse is a really interesting book. There are so many examples of societies in the past that adopted practices that helped them in the short term, but led to their eventual collapse.

There certainly is a chance that we have already passed the carrying capacity of this Earth to support our huge human population, or we will soon pass it. It seems like to me we definitely consume more resources than our global ecosystem produces, and we are basically running through the stored resources that have been banked over thousands or millions of years. It's as if we've been given a trust fund that could generate a nice income, but we are spending more than that, burning through the capital, and eventually there will be nothing left.
 
Collapse is a really interesting book. There are so many examples of societies in the past that adopted practices that helped them in the short term, but led to their eventual collapse.

There certainly is a chance that we have already passed the carrying capacity of this Earth to support our huge human population, or we will soon pass it. It seems like to me we definitely consume more resources than our global ecosystem produces, and we are basically running through the stored resources that have been banked over thousands or millions of years. It's as if we've been given a trust fund that could generate a nice income, but we are spending more than that, burning through the capital, and eventually there will be nothing left.

True...

What's really scary is that our entire world economies, indeed the entire world socio-industrial system, is based on the idea of perpetual growth. If our economy isn't steadily growing, it will rapidly collapse. Most of our systems, be it food, fuel, money, whatever... it all is based on the idea of perpetual virtually unlimited growth.

Problem is, it's a faulty premise. There ARE limits and "stuff" eventually DOES run out... therefore, disaster is inevitable... it's just a matter of WHEN the limits are reached, not a matter of "if".

Later! OL JR :)
 
And once again we may have the answer to the Fermi Paradox. We have this silly notion that somehow the “aliens” will be smarter and wiser than we are.

Really? Why is that?

Remember any alien culture begins at the same starting point as we did; primitive hunter gatherers that are basically just one tiny step above pray. As they advance they are going to run into the same problems that we have and since physics is physics and thus chemistry is chemistry they are not going to have “Magic Alien Dust” with which to power their advancing, growing, technological society.

In other words they’ll have to deal with the same crap we’re dealing with, with the same resources and with no better answers than we have.

Now some people will say “Maybe the aliens will learn to live in harmony with nature” to which I answer; perhaps they will but if they do they will probably never advance much beyond that aforementioned “Hunter Gatherer” state of affairs because as sure as God made little green apples all it would take is for one group of that harmony living society to realize that the wheel or burning coal gave them a whopping big advantage over those other folks and it’s off to the races.
 
The Fermi Paradox boils down to “Where is everybody?”

One solution postulated as to why there appears to be no advanced intelligence in the galaxy is that none survive long enough, at least as a technologically advanced society, to get themselves off their home world.
If they're capable of interstellar travel, they'd be so far advanced over us that they could remain unseen if they chose to do so. They'd probably send un-"manned" probes. On the not "hearing" anyone with SETI, some prof recently pointed out something interesting - even WE will soon be impossible to detect at interstellar distances due to a transition from old, high power, analog communications methods to more efficient, low power, digital spread spectrum technologies.

Based upon what's happening in the Middle East and Ukraine right now, perhaps they've visited already and decided that there was no intelligent life here.
 
What's really scary is that our entire world economies, indeed the entire world socio-industrial system, is based on the idea of perpetual growth. If our economy isn't steadily growing, it will rapidly collapse. Most of our systems, be it food, fuel, money, whatever... it all is based on the idea of perpetual virtually unlimited growth.
And, believe it or not, that quest for growth is mostly due to our monetary system. If they don't use our system, there is no need for constant growth.

Money is created ENTIRELY from the creation of DEBT (except coinage). Unfortunately, when that money is created, it is only generated for the amount of the principle, not for the principle + interest. Thus, a continuous growth in debt is required to cover that interest. This debt growth is an exponential curve which absolutely, positively requires periodic recessions and bankruptcies to reset to a manageable slope, those bankruptcies serving as a way to wipe out debt owed by malinvesting companies, an important Darwinian force in capitalism.

When that is NOT allowed to happen to the debt/money supply through interest rate manipulation, the government deficit spending and the speculative malinvestments that that enables, as has been the case for about 30 years, you end up with the dot.bomb boom/bust, the housing boom/bust, and the bond/equities boom and pending bust, each one larger than the last with the bottom of each one deeper than the last. Next time, the Fed and the fedgov have absolutely no headroom to pour money in to mask the negative impacts of the bust. The Fed can't lower interest rates lower than they've already held them for a historically long six years.

S&P500 chart showing bubbles/busts

https://www.google.com/finance?chdn...INDEXSP:.INX&ntsp=0&ei=TcnXU5GPFcf1qAHT3IGoCg

Learn about your money. A very interesting story that very few know and QUITE a racket. Still, it CAN work if recessions ARE allowed to complete their course which, like I said, hasn't been allowed for 30 years. This isn't a "conspiracy nut" video even though some of the opening quotes shown might make one think so:

[video=youtube;jqvKjsIxT_8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqvKjsIxT_8[/video]

Critiques of the film corrected in the later Money as Debt II and III:

https://paulgrignon.netfirms.com/MoneyasDebt/disputed_information.html

I linked to the first version because I think it explains the basic monetary system most clearly.
 
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Remember any alien culture begins at the same starting point as we did; primitive hunter gatherers that are basically just one tiny step above pray.
And that is exactly why I heard a scientist say, in a Through the Wormhole I think, that we shouldn't make an effort to intentionally broadcast OUR presence to the universe because we could easily be viewed by a far more advanced civilization rising up as predators in their own environment as we view lower animals, not necessarily as food, and treat us similarly.
 
And that is exactly why I heard a scientist say, in a Through the Wormhole I think, that we shouldn't make an effort to intentionally broadcast OUR presence to the universe because we could easily be viewed by a far more advanced civilization rising up as predators in their own environment as we view lower animals, not necessarily as food, and treat us similarly.

The point I was making is that there are no advanced civilizations because no technologically advancing civilization survives long enough to get off their home world.

They either get clobbered by some natural force; Super Volcano, Asteroid/Comet Strike, Nearby Nova/Super Nova take your pick there are a bunch of them, or else they do themselves in.

The latter could be from war, natural resource depletion, disease, economic collapse; once again there are many possibilities to choose from.
 
The point I was making is that there are no advanced civilizations because no technologically advancing civilization survives long enough to get off their home world.
I know, I was making another point from your point. ;-) And I don't agree that NO advanced civilizations survive long enough, we're advanced enough to colonize Mars if we'd make an effort.

They either get clobbered by some natural force; Super Volcano, Asteroid/Comet Strike, Nearby Nova/Super Nova take your pick there are a bunch of them, or else they do themselves in.

Plate tectonics was very important in our evolution. Among other things, punctuated equilibrium is very important in evolution because it culls the herd and allows new forms of life to develop. Massive volcano eruptions do that.

Nearby gamma ray bursts (GRBs) would be most problematic in areas of extremely dense star populations, like globular clusters. They have to be close enough and pointed in exactly the right direction.

If we find other solar systems with large outer gas planets to act as asteroid/comet deflectors/sinks as ours do, the inner rocky planets in those systems might have the sweet spot of just enough impacts to drive evolution, but not enough to kill everything. Of course, even our planet has experienced massive impacts that killed all surface life, but extremophile bacteria lived on deep within the Earth. Other huge impacts were survived by deep ocean life. Once evolved, it seems that life is extremely robust.

Admittedly, advanced life is far more fragile than bacterial, but even in our current state of technology, we could protect ourselves from the most likely threat, impacts, if the proper effort was made to prepare. A more advanced civilization could probably survive GRBs

The latter could be from war, natural resource depletion, disease, economic collapse; once again there are many possibilities to choose from.
We've managed to survive so far and I suspect we will continue to do so for a very, very long time after we create a proper comet/asteroid detection/deflection system.

The universe is so unimaginably huge that I'd wager that it's filled with many advanced civilizations. Our advanced communications methods will soon unrecoverably drop way below the noise floor at cosmic distances and it's only been since the 30s that we've even been detectable, a mere 84 years, an instant in time. Practical interstellar travel is extremely difficult and unless they're within 84 light years of us and just happen to be listening in the right direction, they wouldn't even know of us. If they've heard us and set out to meet us, unless they can travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, they wouldn't be here yet.

Since we are only beginning to be able to detect the atmospheric O2 (and other) signatures of life on worlds in other planetary systems, who knows how many potential exploratory targets for alien life confirmation probes there'd be for an advanced civilization to check. If they were advanced enough to send a probe here and communicate with it using faster than light quantum comm, they could undoubtedly hide them from us, too.

So, I don't find the apparent fact that we haven't been locally and obviously checked out by alien civilizations as any negative indication whatsoever that there aren't all kinds of them out there. Same goes for not hearing them. They've had only a mere 84 years to hear us.
 
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