Zooming out - will humans go extinct or what?

[johnny]

I thought that coal cannot form again as fungi have now evolved and the wood precursor to coal will not just sit there on the forest floor waiting to be covered by later forest material but will instead get eaten by fungi. So puts coal out of the equation. Since most societies went from wood to charcoal to coal to coke to oil then maybe not having coal is a bit of a blocker to the development of a future civilisation.

This is basically correct, yes. There will never be another period of coal formation like the Carboniferous.

The fungi hypothesis or lack thereof doesn't appear to hold up. Tectonics and plenty of organic matter seems to still hold up.

This tectonic- and climate-driven explanation for Carboniferous coals has been around for a while, Boyce says, but the new results make the case for it even stronger. “If you look at the stratigraphic distribution of coal over geologic time, it’s clear that fungi aren’t controlling accumulation rates,” because periods of coal formation come and go throughout the geologic record. But, he says, coal accumulation patterns make “a lot of sense in terms of wet climates and basins opening.” The formation of lignin requiring those fungi doesn't appear to be credible.

Future civilisations will not be powered by fossil fuels.

Predicting stuff is hard. Especially the future. I figure if folks can't add up basic resource numbers and figure the validity of easy stuff like peak oil claims across a decade, any claim of knowing what happens during the next 500-1000 million years is even more problematic. Oil and natural gas is far easier of course, oil generation for the prolific fields in California as one example are just 10's of millions of years old. If that, I believe I"ve seen claims of 5-10 million years old. Comes in handy being near a heat source where all those plates come together of course. So much oil that it sits around on the surface in places. Not the only place in the world, there is a place called Pitch Lake that is the same, near other tectonic activity in the Caribbean. Trinidad Tobago perhaps? Get yourself a bucket and get some...it is just geologic fecal matter. It'll be around for as long as the plates keep moving around I imagine.

[UndercoverElephant]

"Sustainable" needs to include "Capable of defending its own territory."

That's totally dependent on who is attacking, Victorians coming for neolithic tribes? No chance they could be sustainable by that definition, same with the native Americans etc.

That is exactly why civilisation was doomed from the start. Evolution is an arms race between predator and prey species, and between competing individuals or groups within a species. If the Victorians hadn't come for the neolithic tribes, then the Spanish or the French would have come for them instead. Their tribal way of life was on the wrong side of history. All of which just re-enforces the brute fact that we cannot go backwards. We are part-way through the process of creating a new sort of social organisation in nature, rather like the first social bees and ants, but the process evidently isn't finished. The tribal humans that started that existed before the start of this process were very much aware that they needed to be able to defend their own territories. Even chimps understand this.

[UndercoverElephant]

OK then. It seems like we can all agree that humanity wont go extinct. But can you give any scenarios on the nature of the collapse?
In my opinion one, some or all of the following will trigger it ...

- Resource depletion / Overpopulation
- Internal takeover followed by civil war leading to collapse
- Government mismanagement / debasement of currency / resource mismanagement
- External invasion
- Mass migration
- Depredation by neighbours / colonisers
- Global warming / weather events
- Earthquakes
- Exhaustion of society / Lack of moral fibre
- Technological burnout / most people no longer have an understanding of technology required for life / lack of skills of how to survive
- AI
- Aliens?
- Asteroids / Gamma ray bursts / Solar coronal mass ejections

Most of these are aspects of the same problem, which is overpopulation and ecological overshoot. I don't think you need to worry about the aliens and gamma ray bursts, or geological activity. Or AI. It is pointless trying to guess the details. We are all going to get much poorer, life is going to get much harder, our social norms will degrade, lots of people will suffer from illness both mental and physical, there will be more wars and a lot of death.

Ultimately we need to change our economic/monetary system or the poorest 50% of the population will start dying, which will lead either to the collapse of democracy or the overturning of the current system, or both.

[UndercoverElephant]

Canals again ? Only if there is a sufficiently strong authority to enforce safe travel. Roads and canals are no use if not policed. So expect to need either a strong government and police force, or well armed convoys.

Without a functioning police force then we're heading for anarchy. Full Mad Max.

I wonder about the role of community in future, historically communities have been bound together through generations of village life, marriage and family ties. People from other areas, Saxons, Vikings, whoever, felt no reason not to slaughter or enslave them - it simply wasn't an issue for them.

There was always a sovereign power whose responsibility it was to keep out external armies and slavers. This was true even in pre-Roman Britain. Somebody (or group) has to be in charge.

Modern life lacks those old family and village ties, our communities are already fractured even before TSHTF, can we expect things to improve ? Neighbourhoods are being burgled by people who live in them, neighbour fights neighbour, and more people from ever farther away are arriving every day.

Can we expect self-policing communities to coalesce from this muddy mix ? Or are we going to see ever more authoritarian government trying to keep a lid on the situation ? The police seem hard pressed to keep their own house in order, and we know that ever more crimes are not investigated.

Probably a bit of both. If local communities can become self-policing then central governments will probably stay out, but if they have to intervene then the policies and penalties are likely to be harsh. Look back to the pre-modern era and law and order was largely kept by people being terrified of being convicted of what we now consider relatively minor crimes.

[UndercoverElephant]

Any sustainable culture will be self limiting in both resource consumption and population. Such cultures have evolved on pacific islands where the finite nature of the resource base was very evident, but Easter island shows that such culture is not guaranteed, and previously sustainable societies can evolve very quickly into destructive ones.

I am not sure Easter Island was ever sustainable.

Globally, any sustainable culture will be extremely vulnerable to any nearby high population high resource culture just walking in and eradicating them.

"Sustainable" needs to include "Capable of defending its own territory."

I think Jared Diamond holds Tikopia, also in the Pacific, as being an example of sustainability. I think it is only about one quarter of a square mile in area. Easter Islanders spent a lot of time and resources on erecting Moai (sp?).

Diamond uses that as an example precisely because it was so small. The people instinctively understood overshoot, or learned hard lessons about it.

Easter Island is a very unusual example because it was so exceptionally isolated.

[UndercoverElephant]

I am unclear on how clever monkeys made a new ecological niche by polluting the biosphere as they became more cleverer.

They made a new ecological niche long before that. Already 100,000 years ago humans were living in a way that no previous animal had done. We were entirely dependent on brain power. A creature with a human body but a chimp's brain would die out instantly.

Seems like polluting the biosphere was just a side effect of us consuming and burning and polluting, etc etc, as our cleverness grew. So we changed the climate along the way? Cool...so did the Azolla, and a fern didn't need cleverness at all. Just more time than us humans have needed.

Our cleverness hasn't grown much recently. What has grown is our knowledge about how to overpower nature. I don't understand the rest of your comment. Plants don't need cleverness at all, and most animals only depend on it as a peripheral feature. Only humans depend on it for their survival.

We have evolved, yes. How we used our evolved cleverness led to more fouling of the nest. So sure...change will happen, voluntary or involuntary. Sounds like how we have dodged past claims of Apocalypse doesn't it? Change happened. We don't know what we don't know until the pressure of the situations perhaps forces a change that matters. It works...until it doesn't.

Yes.

Catton outlines like 6 or 7 of these events down through our history in "Overshoot". Are you discounting the next one, if only because we can't see into the future?

I don't understand. Are you asking whether I think we can avoid collapse?? I don't know what you mean by "dodging past claims of apocalypse" or "discounting the next one".

[UndercoverElephant]

I thought that coal cannot form again as fungi have now evolved and the wood precursor to coal will not just sit there on the forest floor waiting to be covered by later forest material but will instead get eaten by fungi. So puts coal out of the equation. Since most societies went from wood to charcoal to coal to coke to oil then maybe not having coal is a bit of a blocker to the development of a future civilisation.

This is basically correct, yes. There will never be another period of coal formation like the Carboniferous.

The fungi hypothesis or lack thereof doesn't appear to hold up. Tectonics and plenty of organic matter seems to still hold up.

That is still being debated academically. Experts disagree.

Predicting stuff is hard. Especially the future. I figure if folks can't add up basic resource numbers and figure the validity of easy stuff like peak oil claims across a decade, any claim of knowing what happens during the next 500-1000 million years is even more problematic. Oil and natural gas is far easier of course, oil generation for the prolific fields in California as one example are just 10's of millions of years old. If that, I believe I"ve seen claims of 5-10 million years old. Comes in handy being near a heat source where all those plates come together of course. So much oil that it sits around on the surface in places. Not the only place in the world, there is a place called Pitch Lake that is the same, near other tectonic activity in the Caribbean. Trinidad Tobago perhaps? Get yourself a bucket and get some...it is just geologic fecal matter. It'll be around for as long as the plates keep moving around I imagine.

I'll let somebody else deal with claims of regenerating oil.

[johnny]

Seems like polluting the biosphere was just a side effect of us consuming and burning and polluting, etc etc, as our cleverness grew. So we changed the climate along the way? Cool...so did the Azolla, and a fern didn't need cleverness at all. Just more time than us humans have needed.

Our cleverness hasn't grown much recently. What has grown is our knowledge about how to overpower nature. I don't understand the rest of your comment. Plants don't need cleverness at all, and most animals only depend on it as a peripheral feature. Only humans depend on it for their survival.

Changing the global climate doesn't require us super special humans and our malevolent intent to consume voraciously. Plants can do it just by being...plants. I realize your focus is only humans, but there are very few new things in this world, and a species changing the climate isn't one of them.

Catton outlines like 6 or 7 of these events down through our history in "Overshoot". Are you discounting the next one, if only because we can't see into the future?

I don't understand. Are you asking whether I think we can avoid collapse?? I don't know what you mean by "dodging past claims of apocalypse" or "discounting the next one".

I am asking if you consider any possibility that the unknowns of tomorow (possibly even visible today but no one is noticing?) couldn't throw a BIG monkey wrench into the apparent underlying idea of "so sorry, so sad, most will die, maybe all" scenarios? Catton detailed changes that folks didn't see coming (could we call them a phase change?) AFTER they came along and wrecked all those Apocalyticism ideas that stretch back before modern civilization to far closer to the present. In other words, what odds do YOU assign to any of your decay/decline/doom scenarios being offset by the next, and currently unknown, phase change?

[johnny]

The fungi hypothesis or lack thereof doesn't appear to hold up. Tectonics and plenty of organic matter seems to still hold up.

That is still being debated academically. Experts disagree.

Indeed. Which is why this quote shouldn't have implied otherwise.

There will never be another period of coal formation like the Carboniferous.

"Never" is quite a strong claim for something that is still under debate, let alone perhaps the minority "expert" opinion.

I'll let somebody else deal with claims of regenerating oil.

Oil isn't generally "regenerated", it is just plain ol' generated. If you attempted to apply more heat and pressure to oil you end up with natural gas. And maybe oil shales. Unless you metamorphose it of course, then you get like...quartzite and marble and slate...and then you get basalts and granites when you REALLY go nutsy tectonic.

Oil is being generated this very day in active basins. Good news 100 million years from now when humans (now tripeds and still consuming like crazy?) begin drilling for the stuff all over again!

[PS_RalphW]

The clear history of civilisations is that the do die out. Not all of the people die, but numbers decline radically, culture changes, people migrate. Technologies are forgotten, libraries are burned. We know a vast amount about ancient Egypt because they were obsessed with death and the preseveration of bodies and they lived in a very dry arid country with plenty of space. We know very little of the Anglo saxon occupation of England because they were illiterate, used very little stone or hard pottery and lived in a very wet climate. They were propably closer to sustainable than most of the other cultures we have seen in this country. They replaced the roman culture and lasted equally as long. Cultures evolve, beliefs change, social norms change, moral 'standards' change all the time. When centralised control fades, tribalism and warlordism re-emerge. Some commentators see Russia descending into competing private armies, as Putin destroys Central authority on the fields of Ukraine. The exceptional aspect of the Roman civilisation is not that it collapsed, but that so much of its history and knowledge survived in monasteries.

[UndercoverElephant]

The fungi hypothesis or lack thereof doesn't appear to hold up. Tectonics and plenty of organic matter seems to still hold up.

That is still being debated academically. Experts disagree.

Indeed. Which is why this quote shouldn't have implied otherwise.

I am permitted an opinion.

There will never be another period of coal formation like the Carboniferous.

"Never" is quite a strong claim for something that is still under debate, let alone perhaps the minority "expert" opinion.

There really will never be a period like that again. It was created by life on Earth, and life on Earth has changed in significant ways since then. Evolution goes neither backwards nor in circles.

[UndercoverElephant]

The clear history of civilisations is that the do die out. Not all of the people die, but numbers decline radically, culture changes, people migrate. Technologies are forgotten, libraries are burned. We know a vast amount about ancient Egypt because they were obsessed with death and the preseveration of bodies and they lived in a very dry arid country with plenty of space. We know very little of the Anglo saxon occupation of England because they were illiterate, used very little stone or hard pottery and lived in a very wet climate. They were propably closer to sustainable than most of the other cultures we have seen in this country. They replaced the roman culture and lasted equally as long. Cultures evolve, beliefs change, social norms change, moral 'standards' change all the time. When centralised control fades, tribalism and warlordism re-emerge. Some commentators see Russia descending into competing private armies, as Putin destroys Central authority on the fields of Ukraine. The exceptional aspect of the Roman civilisation is not that it collapsed, but that so much of its history and knowledge survived in monasteries.

Just because previous civilisations have died out, it does not follow all of them will. Maybe eventually we will figure out how to get it right.

The mass-production of books means we will never lose scientific (and other) knowledge. Just one of the ways in which we have irreversibly changed things.

Yes, somebody has to remain in control. This has always been the case, and always will be.

[adam2]

I think that we can be reasonably certain that humans will not become extinct in the foreseable future.
Humans are too numerous, too widespread and too ingenious for any disaster to to wipe them all out.
I consider that the collapse of modern technological civilisation is entirely possible, but that is very different from extinction.
A lot of knowledge would be preserved in books, most books would soon succumb to the natural or man made perils, but given the huge numbers of reference books existing I would expect some to survive.

In the very long term, human extinction is possible when the sun blows up or goes out, but that is not expected for billions of years. We might have developed interstellar travel by then, but some believe this to be impossible.

[clv101]

In the very long term, human extinction is possible when the sun blows up or goes out, but that is not expected for billions of years. We might have developed interstellar travel by then, but some believe this to be impossible.

I read this today, really liked the perspective:
There's no planet B
https://aeon.co/essays/we-will-never-be ... -heres-why

[johnny]

That is still being debated academically. Experts disagree.

Indeed. Which is why this quote shouldn't have implied otherwise.

I am permitted an opinion.

Of course. But those crazy scientists, using science and stuff to contradict some of our opinions? How dare they, right?

There will never be another period of coal formation like the Carboniferous.

"Never" is quite a strong claim for something that is still under debate, let alone perhaps the minority "expert" opinion.

There really will never be a period like that again.

There are no facts in the future. You can't even pretend that a GRB isn't already inbound and doesn't happily handle the biologic scum that populates the surface of this planet, them running around consuming everything in sight without a care in the world.

It was created by life on Earth, and life on Earth has changed in significant ways since then. Evolution goes neither backwards nor in circles.

Yup...changed a bunch. Is still changing now. Just for the record, coal doesn't evolve, it is created from organic matter. Dead plants and whatnot. Doesn't really care how far evolved they are when they die. You might not have noticed, but we've got dead plants today, will probably have dead plants tomorrow, and when the plates move and create the next supercontinent....you really already know the outcome of all that happens between then and now?

I thought the folks who knew peak oil earlier this century was a crock were amazing, but folks knowing that geologic conditions and dead plants will never combine as they have so often in the past will never happen again across hundreds of millions of years? You should publish, there has to be an award available for that kind of prognostication.