Where do you see civilization going?

[The2ndWheel]

What's all this for?

That's it, "simple" question.

[Virginia Dare]

1. my "simple" answer...

:thumbsdown:

[back2basics909]

2. I have great faith..

.. in people. They may take their time but over thousands of years eventually we have made the correct choice.

I see a revolution coming. Something like the intensity of the 60's. It's due.

[BlueEyedSon]

3. Remember how it was 600 years ago? Sorta like that.

[Lerkfish]

4. 1984

[The Stranger]

15. Remember, remember the Fifth of November . . .

[Squatch]

5. I see it going to hell in a handbasket.

[Lars39]

6. I'm beginning to think that "civilization" was just a bump in the road,

and that we're returning to our natural barbaric state.

[NewWaveChick1981]

7. It's been on the decline since the Reagan era, and

I think it's just about time we cut this shit OUT and started moving forward!!! Why in the world should we regress? Bush & Co. want to see us return to the Dark Ages, but I've had enough of that.

[the other one]

8. My I-pod holds 1,000,000 songs!

:evilgrin:

[Options Remain]

9. there is an appropriate quote

Paraphrased "America will always do the right thing.... after exhausing the alternatives."

Now the bigger question of civilization. Civilization is moving in the right direction its just damn slow and the footdraggers are very loud. Of course any progress requires we navigate some of the near futire obstacles well and don't nuke ourselves out of existence.

[Minnesota Libra]

10. Nowhere but down from here - and I think there are many.........

.....people who feel the same way between global warming and an influx of illegal immigrants.:banghead:

[RufusEarl]

11. Energy!

thats going to be our downfall. We as a society are completely dependent on fossil fuels, and when we run out of the stuff its going to get very crazy.

The monthly % of our income that goes toward energy, is on the rise and it's out of our hands to do much about it. We can turn off the lights when we leave a room, we can walk to the grocery store instead of driving but thats not going to save us.

We should have started 30 years ago investing in renewable energy, just as president Carter suggest but Nooooo! So here we are on the Verge of running out of energy and nothing to replace it.

So thats what i think is going to happen, when the local gas station puts up signs saying NO GAS how do you think the population is going to react? I say it'll be a complete melt down, people want be able to get to work, food stuffs will rot in the fields, and commerce will come to a halt.

Have a nice day!

[JohnyCanuck]

14. Starting on the long road down.

The long road down: decline and the deindustrial future

by John Michael Greer


For more than three decades now, the world has been on notice that the long afternoon of industrial society is drawing to a close. The Club of Rome's epochal report The Limits to Growth (1973), the first of many persuasive studies, warned that unrestricted economic growth would collide with hard planetary limits sometime in the early twenty-first century, unless expensive and politically unpopular steps were taken soon. Of course those steps weren't taken at all. A failure of vision and political will on the part of leaders and constituencies alike threw away the decades that could have made a difference. Today we live in the shadow of that failure.

SNIP

The rise and fall of civilizations offers the same embarrassment on a grander scale. We know beyond the slightest doubt what happens to societies that outrun their resource base: they go under. Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World (1992) documents dozens of past cultures that ended up in history's wrecking yard for exactly this reason. One highly relevant example is the ancient Maya, who flourished on the Yucatan Peninsula of Central America while Europe struggled through the Dark Ages.

Like modern industrial society, the Maya built their civilization on a nonrenewable resource base. In their case it was the fertility of fragile tropical soils, which couldn't support intensive corn farming forever. On that shaky foundation they built an extraordinary civilization with fine art, architecture, astronomy, mathematics, and a calendar more accurate than the one we use today. None of that counted when the crops began to fail. Mayan civilization disintegrated, cities were abandoned to the jungle, and the population of the Mayan heartland dropped by 90%.

The parallels go deeper, for the Maya had other options. They could have switched from corn to more sustainable crops such as ramon nuts, or borrowed intensive wetland farming methods from their neighbors to the north. Neither of these happened, because corn farming was central to Maya political ideology. The power of the ahauob or "divine lords" who ruled Maya city-states depended on control of the corn crop, so switching crops or farming systems was unthinkable. Instead, Maya elites responded to crisis by launching wars to seize fields and corn from other city-states, making their decline and fall far more brutal than it had to be.

http://www.energybulletin.net/4624.html

[Taxloss]

12. Civilisation will muddle on, I hope.

as it always has. Grotesque catastrophes, dizzying golden ages - it's all in the future.My hope is that we spread beyond this planet, and beyond our human frame. That would help ensure our survival, and I think on balance Humanity is worth it.

[Squeech]

13. Fucked

Here are some macro reasons:

1) To run an advanced industrial society, energy can't be a limiting factor.

2) To run an advanced industrial society, information can't be a limiting factor. (I.e. you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.)

3) Freedom depends on the people's ability to escape or forestall or stand up to their oppressors. At this point there are no more frontiers, and the bad guys have much bigger guns.