faetal on 8/11/2016 at 13:44
Summer wear is certainly going to become increasingly appropriate.
faetal on 8/11/2016 at 13:48
Starker, re the foods thing, try to picture this:
Your group has managed to find a safe place to stay for a while, with running water nearby and a good place to keep lookout for impolite fauna. You've managed to spend half of the day looking for nearby food, but as usual, all you find are the vines with the bitter berries. So long as they leaves are cooked well and the white foam skimmed off before serving, the bitterness can be overcome by mixing with the last of the mustard which was found in the submerged shipping container you found. If you eat enough, you'll have enough energy to last through the day to try to find an alternative tomorrow, so long as the stomach cramps or dysentery don't knock you off of your feet.
Versus
Hey, I'm a HUMAN, I can eat EVERYTHING :D
Vivian on 8/11/2016 at 14:03
I could write an equally plausible scenario in which a luckier group finds somewhere with enough food to live. There are billions of us, after all.
Also I don't think anyone eats leaves? Tubers or fruit, surely? Leaves are for browsers.
Starker on 8/11/2016 at 14:04
Will humans really revert to tribal societies? I don't think our technologies are that dependent on high tech. And it's very hard to imagine a situation where we are forced to forage all our food and are incapable of growing anything. Also, unless it literally happens overnight, we have time to adapt and make preparations.
faetal on 8/11/2016 at 14:28
Our tech is basically stored information once the actual materials wear out. Assuming we don't have the resources to continue to have a global internet, who is carting round the mobile library of humankind's collective scientific findings and technical manuals?
Vivian - that's exactly my point, we don't know what we will have to eat. Of all existing plant life, how much is edible and nutritious enough to sustain us and allow us to thrive? Also, after an extinction event and again (I'm starting to think that my needing to repeat myself means that people aren't reading what I say), we're talking about what happens over a few thousand years if the conditions change such that we can not thrive like we have been able to, there may not be billions of us and we may not be able to be as widely distributed if certain areas. Destruction of biomes and desertification is already an existing phenomenon, so it's not a stretch to imagine that there will be large areas closed off to anything which requires regular shelter, food and water after a climate cataclysm (reminder disclaimer: GIVEN ENOUGH TIME).
Whether we revert to smaller tribal groups will depend on how many of us remain and how well we get along I suspect. Years of resource wars and social unrest may leave a bit of a scar in the collective psyche, but depending on how well we're able to keep accurate histories, or how practical it is, or even whether the usual psychopaths decide to design history to manipulate societies bears some thought.
Again (and please try to keep this in mind), I'm talking about how bad it could be, not what I expect it to be on average. If you think what I am describing is not possible, then detail your WCS and say why it is the better definition of hwo bad things could be. If your logic is strong, then I'll surely concede.
Vivian on 8/11/2016 at 14:40
Well, we survived the 100,000-odd years of the last ice age (and in fact had spread over the globe by the end of it) and we were barely throwing pointy rocks when that kicked off. Not bad for an equatorial ape. Even in the earliest Triassic there were areas with surviving, functional ecosystems. And my point about high population and global distribution is that wherever these refugia end up being, it's highly likely that we will be there too. Because we're everywhere already.
Now, you're saying well what if literally nothing edible survives, and I'm saying we have managed to extract calories from places entirely made of ice, from some of the driest places on earth etc, and using (for us) very simple tools. Over the timescales you're talking about as well - how long have inuit and aboriginal australians been doing their thing for?
There are scenarios in which we can't survive, and you can keep turning up the heat until that's true, but given how past things have turned out (and loads of things survived the PT), things will survive, and we are well placed to be among them. Yes yes if all there is is poison ivy it will suck, but what's eating the ivy? Are there insects? Rats? Things to hunt? Within-generation adaptability is pretty much our special move, don't forget.
faetal on 8/11/2016 at 15:26
Ice age comparison doesn't really work to my mind, because the temperature shifts were not enough to knock out the food webs in Africa and Asia where humans were primarily located during the last glacial period. We weren't having to dig food out from the snow per se, just having to deal with cooler temperatures affecting the scarcity of things.
During the P-T extinction due to warming, whole different set of challenges. Approx 95% of life on earth gone and with a far slower change of events to adapt to. I'm guessing the same temperature shift accelerated 10x would be even more catastrophic.
Also, maybe I'm not clear, but I'm not talking about nothing anywhere being edible, I'm talking about a sufficient reduction in abundance such that we're no longer the top player within the rule-set. We're energetically expensive and there may be scenarios where our ingenuity doesn't account for the shortfall in resources - I've made this clear to the point of jotting down a equation earlier in this thread. Carrots may still exist, but if there is enough to feed 10,000 humans for a year in a world containing 500,000 humans, competing with something which can do more with those carrots and thrive on the fucking Japanese knotweed that has strangled the shit out of everything else, then we're facing the kind of competition which may see us dwindle and disappear.
I'm really finding it hard to understand why you'd think we're literally exempt from ecological extinction.
faetal on 8/11/2016 at 15:28
We're really adaptable, but also really prone to scarcity due to our size, reproductive cycle, costly brain and lengthy delay in being independent.
Vivian on 8/11/2016 at 15:31
Aargh, I'm not, I'm just saying I think it's not unlikely we would have survived the PT, and that that is as bad as it's got so far. in your scenario above what stops us eating the thing that eats the carrots and/or our population going down? OK I'll go look at your equation. But I think this is turning into a non-argument. You are imaging hypothetical scenarios in which we are unable to survive, and I am imagining whether or not we would have survived past scenarios.
Oh this thing, right? "I'm thinking (unfavourable conditions - tech amelioration) * time" may not lead to survival". So we can't keep making our tech better, so we'll die off? Why can't we keep adapting our tech? I mean we're talking about shit made of stones and sticks.
Also, are we really that much more expensive to make than something like a boar? Are there data on these costs?
faetal on 8/11/2016 at 16:07
We could improve our tech, but could we do it rapidly enough to outrace the dwindling resources? I'm not sure why I have to repeat myself so regularly, but in response to:
Quote:
I'm just saying I think it's not unlikely we would have survived the PT, and that that is as bad as it's got so far
I've already said I agree, I'm just postulating on the
WORST CASE SCENARIO in which humanity v1 gets consigned to humanity v2's fossil collection.
It's difficult to directly compare humans versus boars, since you need to take into account diet diversity / adaptability and assimilation costs per nutrient to effectively get how easily lost energy is replaced through diet. It's also possible boars may not survive - depends what they eat - my overall point here is that when you remove the baseline allowance for humans to thrive to the extent that they can build tech momentum, they are subject to the same pressures as most other stuff. Let's not also forget that boars have two distinct advantages: litter size & development time until independence. Human couple 1 has realistically minimum one year between children with around 3 or 4 years of heavy duty care followed by another 5 or so of light care, whereas a boar can drop several young, who are good to go within a year and they can do this far more regularly, so could potentially beat us with pure numbers. Every time a human child doesn't make it, that's a huge percentage of that couple's potential reproduction lost versus the boar. At least if this hypothetical boar existed, we'd eat them, but that's a different subject.
Since the rate of warming we are seeing is unprecedented
and there there have been no MEs since humans have existed
and we're of a pretty unique phenotype, I'd say that projected hypotheticals have some value. There was no society to fall apart during the P-T extinttion. Besides, we're just talking, if we were drafting policy, I could imagine needing to be more cautious about what will definitely happen (besides, I've already stated that I think this is a rare event).
If an event is severe enough and knocks the environment enough to really make things extremely tough or even (over a long enough period), untenable, then without internet, electricity or even libraries (unchecked, over 1000s of years while we deal with the more important things like not outright dying, things degrade), our ability to continue where we left off tech-wise isn't assured. All you need is a few generations for expertise to die, knowledge to degrade, ideas to be lost. In a hypothetical scenario where food webs are hit hard over a short enough period, then rapid decline into resource wars, social chaos and segregation of societies (one thing we're great at is holding grudges based on perceived groups), all the while, the priority of maintaining high tech infrastructure gets replaced by a more basic drive to eat and drink.
My overall curiosity with such a hypothetical scenario comes from what I've seen from people like transhumanists / futurists who fetishise human technology via sci fi and presume that because we imagine ourselves advancing infinitely, then that must be what is destined. When you look at what humanity has done with something simple like finding out that you can burn the distilled remains of a few hundred million years of biological material in such a short space of time, you realise how completely fragile our modern civilisation actually is. If you look at this on a geological timescale, it's like humanity found a wrap of speed, snorted the whole lot in one go and are never expecting the comedown. I've long wondered if this would come about simply by running out of fuel and not being able to find something which can fully replace it on EROI terms, but then I went and did biology, realised how intricate food webs are and how each component doesn't respond to environmental changes in the same way, at the same rate, or with the same impacts on the adjacent food web links. The I got to reading about existing disruptions to food webs, projected ones and what the critical dangers were of triggering positive feedback loops, then finally got around to reading about the P-T ME, which is the only historically comparable situation and is likely to have been less sever because the rate of change was so much slower.
So I've thought about this for decades. Even after all of this, my default projection is still that after another ME there would likely be a huge reduction in a lot of species' head counts, many extinctions (by definition really) and humanity would shrink back and eventually resurge again if more favourable conditions are found or occur, and / or if the competition isn't stacked against us.
That said, in a WORST CASE scenario, I can also envisage us not being fit enough to work our advantages, which let's face it, has to be a possibility because the situation is without precedent, we are a living thing like anything else and thus totally prone to a new ecological model not being able to carry us and our tech advantage as it stands is closely tied to the world being at its most socially stable since records began (despite the media freaking out about ISIS every 5 seconds).
Is that clear?
