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Published on the Doomstead Diner on September 29, 2013

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With the latest in “Now we Will, Now we Won’t” bomb Syria back to the Stone Age progress toward War in that theatre, I got to pondering on how War has evolved here since the early days of Ag Civilization into it’s current incarnation.  Besides the technology for killing evolving quite a bit over the millenia, the Goals changed as well, and so did the means of Resolution when a given War came to a “Close”.  The second aspect is much more interesting, but to begin a review of the Techno-Progress of warfare is in order, because it impacts on the second in many ways.

By the time real large scale Wars developed in the early Ag Era, Hunting methods had already evolved some means of Death at a Distance, most notably the Bow and Arrow at the beginning.  With this technology, you had maybe say 200 yards of Killing Range, though at that distance accuracy was pretty minimal and it was mainly a matter of luck for a large number of Bowmen to send flying arrows in the general direction of the enemy and hoping they hit somebody.  With Longbows, probably you gotta wait until the enemy is inside 50 yards to actually aim at and hit someone in particular.  Depends a lot on your position on the terrain where the battle takes place also, if you hold the “High Ground”, you have a good deal more range than those coming at you from below.

On the defensive level at this time for those being shot at, Wooden Shields were pretty good also, since at distance the arrow has to be shot in a high parabolic trajectory to make maximum range, so you know where the arrow is going to come from, basically above you on it’s way down.  Hold the shield over your head and slightly forward at around 45 degrees, the arrows will hit that first, and not penetrate.  Only once you get pretty close can arrows be shot with a flatter trajectory that could hit you from the front.

So, as long as you were working with mainly Infantry, while some portion would get taken out before the armies met Mano-a-Mano, most of the real killing occurred when they finally engaged with the Swords, Battle Axes, Maces and so forth.  Pretty even playing field at least between 2 different Ag Societies that both had some metal working capability.  Winning or Losing such a War was mainly a matter of who had more numbers and better control over the High Ground where a battle might be fought.

Team Strategies were developed during this period to move large groups of soldiers around a battlefield, Phalanxes being the main one.  This borrows from the Herd idea in Nature, where only the exterior of the Phalanx is exposed to arrows and so forth being shot at them as they get close to the enemy.  This sort of battlefield organization persisted right up until Gunpowder made it’s appearance well into the modern era.

Besides the Death at a Distance in War Tech evolution in the early years, the other big “advance” was in the area of Mobility as Horses were enlisted and Cavalry was deployed.  The great advantage of this was the speed at which you could move these soldiers around a battlefield, allowing you to Outflank the enemy who was without Horse, or who had substantially fewer of them.  Groups like the Mongols who had LOTS of horses in this period were able to do a lot of damage to larger populations of more sedentary ag societies because of the speed at which they could move around the battlefields.  There were some means of defending against a Cavalry attack of course, like this one depicted in Braveheart:

The Advent of the Wheel which led to the Chariot increased the advantage of using Horses by a good deal after this, though their use was more limited to Flatland areas.  Nice thing about a Chariot was the Charioteer could move quickly, then stop and shoot his Arrows from a stationary platform, much more accurate than shooting a Bow from Horseback.  So you outflank the enemy, get close enough to shoot flat trajectory arrows from the side, and then when anyone starts running in your direction to take you out you giddyap your horse and GTFO of there, setting up again somewhere else to do the same thing again.

The Romans used all these War Techs of the era about as well as could be done, and were able to expand their Empire quite far with it.  Where things fell apart for the Romans was not so much on the Battlefield, but in the administration of all the places they conquered over time.  More about that later. in the second part.

Prior to the development of Gunpowder, or rather prior to its application in Cannon and Muskets, there were numerous developments on the Defensive End in War Tech after the Roman Empire went through its Collapse.  On the personal defensive level, Body Armor became quite popular.  With metal working improving, stuff like Chain Mail and Metal Helmets and Breast Plates became available, and for a short while even Full Suits of Armor were used.  Not real clear here how many “armies” actually all suited up this way, probably very few.  First off very expensive for the time in energy to create such things, and besides that they weigh a LOT and reduce your mobility by quite a bit as well.  So they probably were limited to a few of the King’s most wealthy Vassals and Honor Guard, rather than an entire army suited up like this.  Helmets however and Chain Mail were probably a lot more common and certainly provided a good deal more protection from getting bashed than a leather helmet or vest.

The defensive end developed a lot more on the large scale with Castles and Fixed Fortifications through the Medieval period.  If you could get one of these places erected, it provided a pretty safe haven against all but the most organized large marauding bands of Zombies of the period.  In these places the War of Attrition idea really took hold, which was to see who could last longer, the folks inside the Castle with stored up food and a water supply, or folks on the outside who would have to last for a year or two or 3 of siege on the castle trying to starve them out.  Eventually they speeded this up some by employing Trebuchets to hurl really big Rocks at the castle walls and knock them down, thus enabling the attacking army to breach the stronghold.

Shortly after this the Cannon started getting deployed, and that basically spelled the end of Defensive Warfare of this type right up to today.  With a couple of decent 40 pounders, you could reduce Castle Walls to Rubble in no time at all, so they pretty much stopped building them.  However, you still did have to move these INCREDIBLY heavy things around and get them in place, which was quite hard and slow even with lots of horses.  For the bigger Nation States forming in Europe during this time, they ALL had Cannon, and you began to see the Napoleonic Wars type battles over there, and here in the FSoA the War of Northern Aggression, aka the Civil War.

Once the Internal Combustion Engine got developed, the issue of moving around this Heavy Equipment at decent speed was mostly resolved, though there were not THAT many vehicles available at the time of WWI and that was mostly fought as a War of Attrition in Trenches dug out to avoid oncoming Bullets and Mortar fire.  The fortification idea was pursued by the French in the aftermath of that war with the Maginot Line, which rather than putting up a Solid Wall  put up a virtual Wall of Artillery which in theory could hit everyone coming at them from Krautland.  The Industrialists of Krautland overcame that one by producing a lot of Tanks for WWII, able to do an End Around the Maginot line and set up Blitzkriegs wherever they rolled to.

Tanks and this sort of warfare though while suited well to most of the European continent and MENA where most of those type of battles played out was NOT so good either for the Naval War pursued against Japan at that time, or later the Wars pursued in Korea and in Vietnam, where the terrain just wasn’t well suited for rolling Tanks.  Although certainly Aerial Warfare was pursued in Europe with the Firebombing of Dresden and the v-2 Rocket Campaign of Werner von Braun against London, not to mention the dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, going full on into Death from Above as the War Paradigm really took off with Vietnam and the use of Helicopters to move troops around the Jungle in place of Armored Personnel Carriers and Jets delivering Napalm to incinerate the Jungle cover of “Insurgents” aka local Villagers to be MASSACRED in My Lai.

Techno Warfare of this sort reached it Zenith in the current era, with Drone Aircraft delivering death basically anywhere, and in relative safety for the Drone Pilot, sitting comfortably at a Work Station at Langley or on an Aircraft Carrier etc.  However, while delivering Death in relative safety has become possible this way, it is still damn difficult to actually gain any CONTROL over a given area just by dropping bombs on it.  This brings us to part 2 of the story, the Objectives and Methods used for controlling a neighborhood after prosecuting a War on the local residents.

Returning back again to those early Ag Wars even Pre-Rome but extending right through that time period, nobody “made peace agreements” really with Conquered peoples.  Generally speaking, all Adult age Males who managed to survive the war got dispatched to the Great Beyond, since these guys were dangerous to keep around and made lousy slaves.  Children were taken to be raised as Slaves, and Women were taken to breed more Slaves.  The objective of the War was to take over the Land the other group held and replace it with your own group of people, adding in the Class of Slaves to do the scut work in that neighborhood.

This had all sorts of problems of it’s own, even though if you got kids young enough and bred a slave class, maintaining the Order and keeping said Slaves in line was a Costly Bizness.  it requires a good size Military/Police force and a class of Overseers as well.  You have to feed the slaves at least enough so they do not die of malnutrition, clothe and shelter them so they don’t die too fast from exposure to the elements also.  When your Slave Keeping Protocols get TOO BAD, the slaves REVOLT, which again is a costly exercise to squash down.  Precisely how many people you can actually enslve in your population and remain in control of it is a bit unclear, but overall it probably is not more than20-30%.  Taking Rome as an example here:

Estimates for the prevalence of slavery in the Roman Empire vary. Estimates of the percentage of the population of Italy who were slaves range from 30 to 40 percent in the 1st century BC, upwards of two to three million slaves in Italy by the end of the 1st century BC, about 35% to 40% of Italy’s population.^[27] For the Empire as a whole, the slave population has been estimated at just under five million, representing 10 – 15% of the total population. An estimated 49% of all slaves were owned by the elite, who made up less than 1.5% of the Empire’s population. About half of all slaves worked in the countryside, the remainder in towns and cities.^[28]

Roman slavery was not based on race.^[29] Slaves were drawn from all over Europe and the Mediterranean, including Celts, Germans, Thracians, Greeks, Carthaginians,^[30] and black Africans, usually called “Ethiopians” in Greek and Latin sources.^[31] By the 1st century BC, custom precluded the enslavement of Roman citizens and Italians living in Gallia Cisalpina, but previously many southern and central Italians had been enslaved after defeat.^[32]

Inside Italy itself, you might have got up to 40% slaves, but this is only because Italy ALSO housed the proponderance of the Military, and besides that Slaves who lived inside the Center of the Empire probably lived better than many Roman Citizens who lived in peripheral territories lived, at least while the resources were steadily flowing into that neighborhood from outlying areas through Taxation.  The further out you went, the harder to maintain and control a large population of Slaves.

After the fall of of Rome, there still was similar types of Consolidation going on in Europe as the Feudal era took hold, enslavement was still pretty common when one group defeated another in a War, but once these incipient Nation-States consolidated up under common languages and slaves taken were assimilated into these societies, this bizness began to wind down.  Economic slavery began to replace explicit slavery, and though certainly non-stop Wars were fought all across Europe through the Middle Ages and into the Colonial Era, you no longer got the kind of deal where ALL the Adult men were sent to the Great Beyond and the Defeated Nation-State was absorbed into the political system of the conquering nation.

Rather what begins to appear here are “Economic Reparations” for the war, where the defeated group has to pay the Winners.  War becomes less about acquiring the territory and populating it with your own group of people then it becomes about gaining economic advantage, coopting the Elites of that neighborhood and getting them to run the country in such a way that they pay tribute to your Dominance.  This sort of behavior probably reached its Zenith with the defeat of Germany after WWII, with the Treaty of Versailles.  This document in terms of Economic Reparations essentially made the entire Kraut Population SLAVES working to pay off the Debt accumulated by everyone for running this War, WITHOUT the Brits, Frogs or Yanks actually taking over their Goobermint and running the defeated Krautland as a Colony.  Local KRAUT leaders were expected to collect the necessary Taxation to pay off the War Winners here, in MONEY, not specifically in land acquisition.

Colonialism had a lot of problems, the main one being that if you went and installed your own Goobernators in a territory, the local population HATED that person and his Tax Men.  Particularly if there were Racial/Religious/Ethnic differences between the Installed New Colonial Goobermint and the local population of J6P, it wasn’t generally too long before REVOLTS happenned, cue the American Revolution on that one.  Or look at British Colonial Rule of India as another example of the problems you get when you try to impose rule on another society without actually physically wiping them off the face of the earth (at least the Males) in the Olden Times.

The methodology pursued over the last century was to Co-opt a Leadership Class of the Conquered Society, offer them AMAZING WEALTH & Perks to become part of the Global system of Industrialization, and for the real Rulers of this, hide in the background as much as possible and let all the Local Goobermints take the blame for any problems.  You hold everyone hostage through Debt, and the War proceeds onward Economically here, until there is yet another breakdown of the System of the World, as Neal Stephenson phrased it.  Said breakdown occurs regularly of course, Strauss & Howe call it the “Fourth Turning”, it is the relatively predictable outcome of an economic system based on Debt which has around a 2-5% Interest Charge placed on it.  This allows said economic system to operate anywhere from around 60-90 years generally speaking before all hell breaks loose and the only way to rejig the monetary system si with a real big WAR that pulls in everyone using said monetary system.  Same shit has repeated itself at least a half dozen times or so since the 1500s, using this same sort of monetary system, though the Age of Oil and Computers have made some significant changes in the dynamic.

Out of said repetition, Strauss & Howe developed the “Four Turnings” theory of generational collapse and rebirth, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the ecological theory of Four Cycles put forth by Holling & Gunderson back in the 70s.

In this model, the “Release Phase” corresponds to the Fourth Turning described by Strauss & Howe, and it seems to be a regular feature of all Biological Systems.  On the Positive side of looking at the Collapse this way, you can Expect/Hope For a “Rebirth” or “Reorganization” phase to follow the Collapse Phase, if you go by the Timeline of Strauss & Howe this should come 15-20 years down the pipe for this Fourth Turning Event.

The problem with looking at this event in this way is that it ignores aspects of Homo Sapiens development which are NOT Cyclical and NOT Repeated, as well as Physical Conditions of the Earth Ecosystem which are not cyclical or repeated.  In our War Example here, the Wars of today are NOT repetitions of the Wars of Old, they utilize a whole lot more Energy to prosecute them along with Technology that was not available in days of yore either.  The Biomass of Homo Sapiens is now around 7B, which it NEVER was in all of recorded history for sure, and you have to make some pretty far out assumptions to believe such a biomass of Homo Sapiens existed in an Atlantis Civilization that preceeded this one.

The conditions which produced all the Fossil Fuels utilized during this particular cycle also are unlikely to be repeated, since the Sun itself is on a non-cyclical path to its own destruction, which in the more near term makes the Biosphere on Earth unlivable.  MAX time for this might be 500M years from present day, but many factors could make that time period a whole lot shorter, right down to the Near Term Human Extinction timeline proposed by folks like Guy McPherson, who think Positive Feedback Loops will make the planet uninhabitable for multicellular life forms by Mid-Century or so.

When you bring all the variables together here, is seems Unlikely to me that this particular “Release” phase will result in the same sort of “Rebirth” phase that came in the aftermath of the Great Depression or the Civil War before that.  Each of those Rebirth phases came at a time where the Human Biomass was much lower, and there still was copious amount of Stored Energy of Fossil Fuels to Exploit and use for rebuilding and developing a still more complex paradigm.

Regardless how this next set of Wars is pursued, whether it is with Chemical Weapons, Nuclear Weapons or even just “conventional” weapons like Bullets and “Regular” bombs and mines, the outcome of the war is that it is likely to exhaust the supplies of fossil fuels we have a bit faster than they otherwise would be burned, and upon conclusion whoever managed to “win” this War would have about nothing left with which to administer and maintain control over another population.

Picture say India in the Setting Sun Years of the British Empire in the late 1800s, with a few Brit Sahib Goobernators controlling all of India with a  few Warships, an Honor Guard of Troops equipped with Repeating Rifles and some Artillery to protect their Forts.  Take away all these Techno-Adavantages for maintaining control, how long does this small group maintain control over the much larger poulation of Colonial Slaves they have working for them and paying them Taxes, aka PROTECTION MONEY?  Not very long, IMHO.

The Techno Army/Navy/Air Force we have may persist a while longer, it is likely to be the last of the systems developed under industrialization to Run Outta Gas, but inevitably they will run out.  It has always taken economies of scale to pull up Oil and Coal, even when it came cheap and easy.  Running refineries, fixing broken parts, replacing sunken ships, all this will become ever more difficult as the Wars for Resources are pursued by the Industrial Military.  In the end, they will put themselves Outta Biz, and they will not reappear again in a New Cycle, not in the next few Millenia anyhow for sure.  So under no circumstances imaginable here will the NEXT Turning bring about a rebirth of the type we saw before, when there was much energy still to access.  Nor will War be the same as it was, ever increasing in size, global scope and technological prowess.  All dependent on accessing copious amounts of energy, which will be consumed by the very machine that accessed it in the first place, so long ago when the first Metal was smelted to produce Bronze Spear Points and later Chain Mail and Body Armor.  This was unidirectional, not cyclical, and we have reached the end of the road for this paradigm, though to be sure it may take a decade or even 2 to work through this end game completely.

What will we see on the OTHER SIDE of this, if in fact anybody does manage to survive the conflagrations to come here?  I cannot answer that question to be sure, but I seriously doubt we will go trakking the stars or setting up colonies on Mars in the aftermath of this.  Best Hope, the few surviving Homo Sapiens will learn to Garden the Earth, and keep Sentience going until the Sun fries the Biosphere to a crisp in a few 100M years.

RE

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Published on the Doomstead Diner on September 8, 2013

Discuss this article at the Environment Table inside the Diner

This week on his Blog The Archdruid Report, John Michael Greer took a look at the REAL long term outcomes of Collapse, on a 10 Billion Year long scale for Homo Sapiens, which basically takes us right to the end of the Working Lifespan of the Sun, the main source of Energy driving forward all life on Earth, not just Humanity.

This is not the first set of such speculations, in fact it is a direct response to a similarly titled article by Ugo Bardi on his Blog Cassandra’s Legacy last year.  Ugo in fact did a bit more in his treatment of the issue, first he chronicled the LAST 10B years up to today, and then presented 2 possible long term scenarios, one more upbeat and hopeful, the other a bit more doomy and gloomy.

The question is, WHY are both these Collapse Bloggers concerning themselves with such long term outcomes anyhow?  Generally speaking at best most people are only concerned with what will occur to them in what remains of their lifetimes, perhaps at most extending into the lifetime of their Children &  Grandchildren.  After that, what does it really MATTER how long Homo Sapiens survives here?  EVENTUALLY we will die out under almost any scenario you care to dream up.  So how different is it for YOU if Extinction comes in 100, 1000 or 1,000,000 Years? Unless you believe in Reincarnation and that said Reincarnation can only occur on THIS planet, in THIS corner of the Universe, it doesn’t matter at all when Homo Sapiens goes the way of the Dinosaur here.

The lengths of time being bandied about in both Ugo and JMGs posts are quite enormous, Geological Time Scales really.  In fact we have nowhere near 10B years possible for continuation of Homo Sapiens on this Planet, the Sun goes Red Giant and consumes the Earth long before that, and even long before THAT as the Sun burns up its fuel supply of Hydrogen and starts burning more Helium, it will get hot enough to boil off all the oceans on the planet and make it quite unlivable for ALL carbon based life forms we know, INCLUDING my favorite Extremophiles, the Tardigrades.

The Main Sequence The Sun, like most stars in the Universe, is on the main sequence stage of life. Every second, 600 million tons of hydrogen are converted into helium in the Sun’s core, generating 4 x 10²⁷ Watts of energy. For the Sun, this process got going 4.6 billion years ago, and it has been generating energy this way every since. But there isn’t an unlimited amount of hydrogen in the core of the Sun. In fact, it’s only got another 7 billion years worth of fuel left.

As the Sun creates more helium at its core, the Sun burns a little more hydrogen. This causes the output of the Sun to go up. You won’t notice it now, but in about a billion years, the output from the Sun will have increased by 10%.

A more luminous Sun is bad news for Earth.

In 1.1 billion years from now, the Sun will be 10% brighter than it is today. This extra energy will cause a moist greenhouse effect in the beginning, similar to the runaway warming on Venus. But then the Earth’s atmosphere will dry out as the water vapor is lost to space, never to return.

In 3.5 billion years from now, the Sun will be 40% brighter than it is today. It will be so hot that the oceans will boil and that water vapor will be lost to space as well. The ice caps will permanently melt, and snow will be ancient history; life will be unable to survive anywhere on the surface of the Earth. The Earth will resemble dry hot Venus.

So really, you are talking MAX about 1B years from today for life to exist on earth in any form at all, because once the water boils off, life of any sort we are familiar with cannot exist.  Indeed, Tardigrades can remain Viable near Absolute Zero and throughly dehydrated and Pop Back to Life once back in an environment with liquid water around, but they don’t “live” while they are dehydrated in the near absolute zero temps of space.  Liquid Water is ESSENTIAL for life as we know it, all the chemistry which life is organized around occurs in Aqueous Solution of one sort or another.

When you consider this fact of life (sic), its actually probably long before all the Water actually Boils Off the surface of the Earth that life disappears in 1-3B years, it really just has to get hot enough that most of the water is Vapor and whatever tough little Tardigrades remain can’t cool themselves enough and end up dehydrating.  So maybe good Outside Possibility for some higher plant & animal life forms is another 500M years.  When you look at how long it took Dinosaurs and other Vertebrates to develop originally, this timescale is on the order of 100sM of years.

As you can see, this whole Biz began back there in the Pre-Cambrian period around 600M years ago, culminating in anatomically modern Homo Sapiens only in the last 100K years or so, though Proto-Homos existed a good deal earlier than that going back maybe 2M years.  So what do you think the odds are that say our good friends and co-inhabitants of the Earth right now, the Tardigrades who are capable of handling a good deal tougher environmental situation than we can will have enough TIME and good fortune to evolve toward Sentience before the planet becomes uninhabitable even for THEM?  IMHO, the likelihood is quite small.  JMG does overcome this barrier by starting with Raccoons and Crows as the progenitors of sentient species, but based on the current spin out it seems unlikely that any higher organisms have a real good chance of survival when multiple Nuke reactors go super-critical and/or there is a phytoplankton collapse due to ocean acidification.

John Michael Greer thinks at least SOME Homo Sapiens will last a good deal longer than Nature Bats Last’s Guy McPherson’s mid-21st Century prediction for Near Term Human Extinction, he’s projecting out numerous Civilizations of Homo Sapiens rising and falling here over the next bundle of Millenia before finally sputtering out a million or so years down the line.

A hundred thousand years from now:

Carbon dioxide levels drop below preindustrial levels as the oceanic anoxic event finishes its work, and the complex feedback loops that govern Earth’s climate shift again: the thermohaline circulation restarts, triggering another round of climatic changes. Humanity’s seventy-ninth global civilization flourishes and begins its slow decline as the disruptions set in motion by a long-forgotten industrial age are drowned out by an older climatic cycle. The scholars of that civilization are thrilled by the notions of fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration; they have no idea that we dreamed the same dreams before them, being further in our future than the Neanderthals are in our past, but they will have no more luck achieving those dreams than we did.

A million years from now:

The Earth is in an ice age; great ice sheets cover much of the northern hemisphere and spread from mountain ranges all over the world, and sea level is 150 meters lower than today. To the people living at this time, who have never known anything else, this seems perfectly normal. Metals have become rare geological specimens—for millennia now, most human societies have used renewable ceramic-bioplastic composites instead—and the very existence of fossil fuels has long since been forgotten. The 664th global human civilization is at its peak, lofting aerostat towns into the skies and building great floating cities on the seas; its long afternoon will eventually draw to an end after scores of generations, and when it falls, other civilizations will rise in its place.

1000 years from now. In the year 3000 A.D. the ecosystems of the planet have completely recovered from the damage done by human activities during the second millennium. A sophisticated planetary control system manages solar irradiation by means of space mirrors and the concentration of greenhouse gases by means of CO2 absorbing/desorbing plants. The planet is managed as a giant garden, optimizing its biological productivity. The Sahara desert is now a forest and the thermohaline currents pump oxygen in the northern regions, full of life of all kinds. The solar and wind plants used during the previous millennium have been mostly dismantled, although some are still kept as a memory of the old times. Most of the energy used by humankind is now generated by space stations which capture solar energy and beam it to the ground in forms easily usable by humans. Research in controlled fusion energy continues with the hope that it will produce usable energy in 500 years. Humans are now less than one billion, they have optimized both their numbers and their energy use and they need enormously less than they had needed in the more turbulent ages of one thousand years before. The development of artificial intelligence is in full swing and practically all tasks that once had been in the hands of humans is now in the “hands” of sophisticated robotic systems. These robots have colonized the solar system and humans now live in underground cities on the Moon. The new planetary intelligence starts considering the idea of terraforming Mars and Venus. The first antimatter powered interstellar spaceships have started their travel to far away stars.10.000 years from now. There are now less than a billion human beings on Earth who live in splendid cities immersed in the lush forest that the planet has become. Some of them work as a hobby on controlled nuclear fusion which they hope will produce usable energy in a few thousand years. The New Intelligence has now started terraforming Mars. It involves similar methods as those used for controlling the Earth’s climate: giant mirrors and CO2 producing plants that control the Martian atmosphere, increasing its pressure and temperature. The terraforming of Venus has also started with similar methods: giant screens that lower the planetary temperatures and immense flying plants that transform CO2 into oxygen and solid carbon. That will take a lot of time, but the New Intelligence is patient. It is also creating new races of solid state beings living on the asteroids and orbiting around the Sun. The exploration of the galaxy is in progress, with spaceships from the solar system now reaching a “sphere” of about a thousand light years from the sun.

Of these two Sci-Fi scenarios, Ugo’s is slightly more grounded in real science with a better grasp of the numbers and timelines involve, but really in both cases the speculation out there past 1000 years is just an exercise in creative imagination.  Obviously none of us will be around to verify if either of them even came CLOSE to the truth, at least not from this side of the Great Divide anyhow.

So what is the underlying motivation for making these WAG projections?  I think it stems from the fact both authors have no real solution to the near term problems we face and so speculate on these long term outcomes, which all eventually end up in Extinction, except for a few REALLY WAGs which have Homo Sapiens leaving earth to go Star Trekking in one way or another.  Going back a few months here, I actually wrote a short such positive outcome in a thread run by Diner Dirdy Birdy:

My best case scenario:The monetary system crashes and Da Goobermint organizes quickly to keep food production and distribution going.  Shortages of fuel take all private carz off the road and people adapt utilizing more bicycles and walking, along with various public transport systems that are kept running a while with the diminished fuel supply.  JIT Trucking is also kept running by conserving fuel, long enough for transition to be made to local production.

A huge Public Works Project is undertaken with people educated in permaculture and small scale renewable energy construction, and a Land Reform Act is passed with Groups of People issued Land Grants all over the country.  Groups can either self-organize or a computer program puts people together based on a questionnaire they fill out about their belief system.  The Land Grants are issued in a Random Order via Lottery, and you get to pick your spot when your number comes up.  The size of the Land Grant depends on the current resources available where it is located in terms of Water and Soil Fertility.  The size is calculated to support the Group size +20% (to allow for fluctuation in reproduction).

Metal Tools and Farm Implements are produced and distributed out as long as possible, and die off is gradual and organic mostly from Old Age as the population returns to the land.

The other part of the Public Works Project involves decommissioning and removing the spent fuel from Nuke Plants.  The fuel si all collected, vitrified and shipped to the Marianna Trench where it is sunk in a subduction zone at the ocean floor.  Specialized Boring Capsules are designed which gather speed during the fall to the ocean floor and begin to spin rapidly.  When they hit bottom, they bore into the crust at the subduction zone.

Industrial plants are shut down and cleaned up also as small scale cottage industries take hold around the country.  Mother Nature does her part also, gradually degrading and rinsing out pollutants.  Ecosystems recover, and carbon content in the atmosphere begins to fall.  Extreme Weather events begin to lessen in frequency.

A century from now, a remaining 1B or so people on the planet live in Harmony with Nature, maintaining a relatively steady state of human biomass.  Story Tellers travel around the country on Horseback and around the World by Sailboat, and information is passed on verbally throughout the world.  Memory spans are vastly increased, and Wisdom is selected for naturally, and Homo Sapiens evolves to Homo Superioris, eventually gaining paranormal abilities with the ability to leave the body at will and travel the cosmos as a Quantum Flux able to instaneously appear anywhere in the Universe, visiting other planets with the ability to Incarnate in a symbiotic fashion with other life forms on these planets.

Human Sentience persists for Eternity, as the Quantum Flux can also jump from Universe to Universe in the Multiverse, once this Universe either cools to Absolute Zero in perpetual expansion, or Collapses back on itself for another Big Bang.

This particular scenario makes just about everybody HAPPY, including George Mobus of Question Everything since Homo Stupidus finally does achieve Wisdom in the end.  LOL.  It resolves the Die Off problem without resorting to Violence or explicit Eugenics making the Peaceniks Happy, and GAIA returns to a lush Green Garden of Eden making all the Tree Huggers very Happy too!  If I wrote more shit like this, I would be a WAY more popular Blogger!  LOL.  Of course, at the end of this exercise in Fantasy Thinking, I ranked the Probability of this outcome around .00000000001% or so.

The theme in JMGs article right from the beginning though is to Poke Holes in Peak Oil theory; the general idea is to demonstrate that we aren’t going to have a massive FAST Collapse, but rather a long Slow Catabolic Collapse where our lives will change only incrementally; and beyond that to express the Belief that Homo Sapiens will NOT go Extinct in the Near Term per Guy McPherson, but rather will persist a good long while Walking the Earth, and in fact have something of a Resurgence before finally giving up the ghost and making way for a New and Still BETTER Sentient Species which will last a whole lot longer before itself going extinct.

If you notice also, JMGs Sci-Fi fantasy also has archetypes in it that make HIM happy, there are future Historians and Anthropologists amongst the Corvins who go out and discover remnants of Human Civilization on the Moon, so the Knowledge of the Ages never gets Lost long as there are SOME Sentient beings around.  For JMG, the WORST possible outcome is not the Extinction of the Human Race, but the idea that all that Knowledge, all those years of tedious research in the Card Catalogues and Stacks of University Libraries would be LOST FOREVER!  Accckkkkk!  In the end, Sentience & Ingenuity Wins the Day in JMGs story, as it does in Ugo’s Positive Scenario also.  JMGs story of Sentience on Earth does come to a close finally, but not until after a real long run through many more Homo Sapiens Civilizations, then Raccoon and Crow Civilizations.  This puts off the inevitable “End of History” (and Historians! lol) for a mighty long time.  He also pops in a nice Upbeat Ending with some other NEW Sentient Species popping up spontaneously on some other planet floating around there out in the Universe, before IT either cools to Absolute Zero in perpetual expansion or Implodes on itself in another Big Bang.

What is noticeably speculative in JMGs post is where the Corvins get their Energy to run a Complex Society, he’s got sufficient Oil reserves rebuilding here inside 100M years to get the Corvins to the Moon and Back, sans any speculative energy technology of the future.  The problem here is that the Oil supply we got to burn up over the last 200 or so years if created in the typically accepted biotic origination goes back right to the beginning of the pre-Cambrian Era, and took a good 700M years to collect up all the Solar Energy and store it in all the dead life forms that existed over this time period.  Generating up the same amount of Oil over 100M years would require 6-7X as many life forms to be born and die over 100M years, and that is not inside the energetic parameters of what the Sun would provide over that time period.  Not to mention the problems of environmental degradation for producing more biomass, already evident.

Ugo relies on the old Star Trek meme of Matter-Antimatter Engines to drive this type of society Star Trekking in the long distant future, glossing over the small problem of precisely where we will get hold of the copious amounts of Antimatter necessary to annihiliate Matter in the Perfect Matter-to-Energy Transform.  Dilithium Crystals aren’t Ubiquitous on Earth, not even at Chinese Strip Mining Operations for Rare Earth Minerals.  LOL. Here on Earth Ugo does come up with the slightly more plausible idea of huge space based solar collectors,  however exactly how we will jack that much hardware up into space over the next century or two with depleting fossil fuel supplies is left unexplained.

Assuming Homo Sapiens did die out in a Million Years or so, rebuilding Fossil Fuel resource would take the same 100s of Millions of years it took on the first go-round, bringing you right up to the time the Sun is Vaporizing the Water on the Planet.  Unless you buy into an a-biotic theory of Oil and project a slow refill of the near surface reservoirs, you just won’t have this type of resource around for the next sentient species to exploit, no matter how smart they are.  Even if Infants are capable of solving Fermat’s Last Theorem, without the massive energy necessary to get stuff up OFF the surface of the Earth into Orbit, and then further to power said Starships in the vast and cold interstellar void, no sentient life of any sort is ever leaving this Solar System.  Projecting such on outcome is simply an exercise in HOPIUM for people concerned that in the end all the knowledge disappears, and so the whole exercise of Evolution over lo these long Eons has no real purpose to it at all.

Religions circumvent this problem in all sorts of ways, the most popular being to postulate some type of Afterlife, and/or the existence of some sort of disembodied Soul which can exist and persist in the absence of a corporeal host.  I am OK with this kind of belief structure, in fact I buy into it myself these days in my own idiosyncratic sort of way.  Imagining the Universe to be Purposeless doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, and beyond that the Random beginning for Life without some sort of Intelligent Design also seems highly unlikely.  However, you most certainly cannot PROVE anything beyond what can be sensed and perceived, so whatever it is you do believe about this it is in the end just a Belief System which makes sense to you.

Returning from the world of Sci-Fi and fantasy thinking to the REAL WORLD of Collapsing Economic Structures, Depleting Resources and Population Overshoot, the real questions worth pondering on are not 10B Year Long Timelines for Universal Existence, but much shorter timelines in the lengths of Years, Decades, Centuries and maybe as far out as Millenia, but further than that is really a moot point, since the eventual Extinction of Homo Sapiens is a virtual Lock.  If you can answer the question of what the World will be like in YOUR neighborhood in a Decade’s time, this knowledge people living now can actually USE to better prepare for the world to come for them.  The outcomes won’t be precisely the same everywhere, there are different parameters in different locations clearly.  So being able to make a fairly decent prediction on this timeline also allows people to make better choices in Migration, if they indeed even have the ability and economic resources to migrate at all, which most really do not.  I mean really, if you currently are living on $2/day in a Mumbai Slum, you’re not going to be buying a Plane Ticket to New Zealand to find a better life.  Most people are pretty well stuck where they are, at least on the nation-state level.

A good understanding of the possible Century Long Timeline outcomes is also quite important in the Real Sense, because if these outcomes can be generally distributed and understood, it is possible still that Homo Sapiens could make some better choices now that would lead to better outcomes later.  So it is my belief that it is these timelines we need to focus on, not the long term existential ones.  I would look forward to articles from both JMG and Ugo Bardi which make some informed Projections on these timelines.  In both their 10B Year articles, they do cover the nearer term decades and centuries long outcomes, but they are of necessity Brief in this sort of treatment and not very well fleshed out.  You can make the fairly obvious predictions of lots of Wars taking place, but what will be the political and ecological outcomes of those wars?  What are the best means & method to be one of the SURVIVORS of those Wars?

I will look at some of these questions myself in a follow-up article to this, though next week’s Sunday Brunch article will be about a more current issue, the Submergent Economies of the BRICS nations, currently having some extraordinary currency collapse issues ongoing.  In the intervening time though, I look forward to chatting with Ugo and perhaps JMG on the Collapse Cafe about the various possible long term outcomes on the 10 Billion Year timescale.

RE

Off the keyboard of RE

Published on the Doomstead Diner on June 16, 2013

Discuss this article at  the Podcasts Table inside the Diner

Perhaps the most recent in the paradigms being pitched over the internet in terms of DOOM is the concept of Near Term Human Extinction (NTHE).  In this article, I’m going to look at some of the rationalizations for why this could occur, and what might be done about it if it is in the offing.

What does NTHE mean?  Well, in timeline terms, the folks who believe this is imminent talk in terms of a Century or less, and one of the main proponents of the idea, Guy McPherson of Nature Bats Last who we periodically Cross Post here on the Diner predicts such an Extinction Level Event (ELE) for Homo Sapiens could arrive by Mid-Century.  Since it is already 2013, that leaves only about 37 years to wipe out Homo Sapiens.  Guy, Monsta & myself had opportunity to hash over some of the possibilities on Friday, across 9 hours of Time Zones which was quite an edifying chat overall.  You can listen to the Podcast here and see how it affects your own conclusions about the likelihood of NTHE.

What is the Main Vector for this ELE as proposed on the Climate Level?  The primary argument is that it will arise from an overall warming of Global ambient temperatures by around 4 degrees Celsius, or around 7 Farenheit if you are more familiar with that scale.

The predicted consequences of such a rapid rise in temperatures are Devastating on about every level you can imagine.  Inundation of most of our highly populated Coastal Cities, extreme Weather Events with worsening Drought in Drought areas and worsening Flooding in Flood prone areas.

None of this could be handled very well in the current political climate most certainly, and then when combined with the synergistic effects of depleting Fossil Fuels to run the industrial economy and industrial agriculture, well, altogether you cannot help but see the reasonable Likelihood of an extreme Die Off event coming down the pipe through this period.  Does this make it an ELE though?  Will all this climatic change make 100% of the face of the Earth 100% Uninhabitable for Homo Sapiens?  Because 100% is a NECESSARY condition for Extinction.  Even a 1% survival rate does not qualify as an ELE.

I’m going to make an analogy here with the game PLAGUE, which I recently downloaded onto my Samsung Galaxy Android OP System Tablet, and spent quite a few hours last weekend playing.  The goal of said Game is to Wipe Out Homo Sapiens through Disease Vectors, and you can manipulate the parameters of the Diseases to make them spread faster, be more drug resistant, more Lethal etc.  Overall it is a pretty well constructed game, and addicting enough to make its designer pretty well to do by now I expect.  My old friends on The Burning Platform will be delighted to know I am easily capable of Wiping Out 7M Virtual People with Plague on a Daily Basis now. Actually a good deal better than that, I can WIPE OUT all 7B!  LOL.

Thing is, Plague makes a LOT of assumptions about how the various parameters will play out, most particularly how Goobermints will react to Plagues when they get under way and how much real “money’ anybody will have to research cures for such things.

In fact, my guess would be it won’t be any Wild & Crazy Super Lethal Virus that takes down Homo Sapiens in large numbers, but rather the re-emergence of good Old Fashioned Diseases like Cholera, Typhus etc that will flourish once we start having issues with keeping the sewage treatment plants operational.  Once the essential energy to run the large Shities becomes scarce enough, these places will experience MASSIVE population crashes, in fair short order would be my best WAG.

As it has evolved here over time MOST of the current Overshoot of the population of Homo Sapiens now resides in the Big Shities.  So what happens here if you get a rapid Die Off of this population, the Demographic MOST susceptible to disease transmission due to its very close proximity and population density?

What occurs is that everything Industrial comes to a COMPLETE HALT nearly IMMEDIATELY.  All the Finance, all the Subsidy necessary to run Industrial Infrastructure collapses as soon as the Big Shities do.  This means such things as Clear Cutting and Slash & Burning of Amazonia Rain Forest also comes to a halt at this time.  With the Global Economy in collapse, there is no benefit to Brazil for selling Soy Beans to China, the Chinese are going to be busy Dieing by the Truckload.

What this then leaves are various scattered groups of Subsistence living people, and such people would be extremely hard to wipe out. Even assuming vast Climate Change on the order of a 4 degree Celsius rise in average Global Temps; reduced available land mass for growing things and varying Drought and Flooding depending where you happen to be located on the planet, you STILL will be left with Neighborhoods which are on the Border of one experience Drought Conditions, while the Other experiences Flooding conditions.  It is in such Border territory a few hardy Homo Sapiens can survive the cataclysm.  Remember here, it does not take MANY to survive an ELE, in the case of Toba it is estimated only 10,000 Human Souls or 1000 Breeding Pairs made it through that one.  They then managed to Breed Up to the current Population Maxima Event of around 7B, though we may make it to 8 or 9B if we don’t get a real fast collapse in the near term.

Rapidity is important here, because it is this which gives no time for Adjustment even for a few people.  What would it take to Knock Down the current 7B people living on the Planet to ZERO by Mid-Century as Guy McPherson hypothesizes as likely here, if not inevitable?

Well, if you call current Population at 7B and give it 35 years or so for the complete EXTERMINATION to occur, this means EVERY YEAR from now to 2050, on average 200M people will have to DIE EVERY YEAR more than the number of people born during the period.  Such a massive population collapse is not yet evident, though of course it can come at any time here in the next 35 years.  Each year goes by it doesn’t begin in earnest means Bigger Numbers required to make it happen in a shorter period of time though.

Back to Plague here, what happens in that game if you get massive Die Off rapidly, but it is not LETHAL everywhere?  Basically, you LOSE THE GAME, because even though you may have knocked down 6.5B people, the .5B remaining after the Plague get to Reboot.  Knocking off EVERYBODY is pretty hard in general, and you have to know the parameters of the game to make it happen regularly, but we do not know nor do we have control over the parameters operating here in the REAL GAME of Human Extinction.

I personally do not see how even a 10 degree rise in Global Average Temps would make the Planet Uninhabitable for Homo Sapiens.  That does not raise the temp past where Homo Sapiens can live.  Average Temps are now in the 60s farenheit, maybe this gets you to the 80sF, uncomfortable but not too hot to live.  Plus, that is AVERAGE, it still would be cooler than that near the Poles.  Just on Temps alone, I think you need 100F+ EVERYWHERE for Extinction.  This is above Operating Temp for Homo Sapiens of around 98.6 degrees, so you got no Heat Sink left at that point to cool with.

The only other means I see as possible that such a rapid NTHE could occur as a result of the Climatic Changes is with collapse of the Phytoplankton due to Ocean Acidification, a corollary of Climate Change whether you believe this results from Anthropogenic Causes as Guy does, or Geotectonic Causes as I do.  Thing is, Phytoplankton are single cell species, which adapt rapidly to changing conditions.  Not like say Coral Reefs, which most certainly completely collapse once the pH drops low enough that calcification cannot take place.  This is around 30 years down the line if the current trend line in Ocean pH decrease is followed consistently.

With such collapse, Breeding Grounds for many species of fish would be destroyed, so you lose this portion of the Ocean based fisherie also, but not the Fresh Water Fish that live in lakes and streams through the lifespan of said fish.  The fact that thus far we have ALREADY seen a 50% collapse in Phytoplankton is not a good sign of course, but this is  not complete collapse either.  Can those little buggers evolve fast enough to tolerate higher acidity/lower pH?  Nobody knows that, and you can’t model it in the lab either, because you do not have an Ocean full of the stuff and 50 years time to do the modelling.  The experiment only runs at the vast planetary scale, and all we can do really is watch it play out there over time.

Hard to say what would occur with Shell Based crustaceans also, losing shells would make them more vulnerable to predators, but most if not all of their predators themselves would be gone in this environment.  They also reproduce rapidly (though not as fast as single cell organisms of course), so they might evolve in some way to survive and handle the New Reality without their Shells.

On Land, while the increasing average Temp would have many negative outcomes, fact is because it would SO rapidly kill off MOST of Homo Sapiens, much of the Habitat destruction currently Ongoing would come to about a complete HALT, as rapidly as the Die Off proceeds, probably more rapidly because of dependence on the Finance model and the tools of Industrial Ag which would no longer be available in a Rapid Collapse scenario.  Good example here is Deforestation of the Amazon, which is really only occurring because of Huge Demand for Food Product from places like China, but once you start getting massive Die Off in China and collapse of World Trade, there is no further reason to pursue this.

So, what you run into here is a situation where because such a huge portion of Humanity goes to the Great Beyond so fast, most of the Negative consequences of Overshoot come to a halt along with that.  There will be fewer Habitats some Homo Sapiens could survive in, but not NONE.  For it to Go to Zero, EVERY last place still above water has to be Uninhabitable, and for that to occur in a 37 year time span to Mid-Century is not supported by any model I am aware of, though Guy can of course debate that point. (and he DOES!  Listen to the Podcast!)

The only real rapid NTHE Models I think are Plausible are tangential to Climate Change, Energy depletion and Environmental Degradation.  As Sewage Treatment plants fail in Major Big Shities and Die Off begins in earnest, returning to the Plague Game it is possible that a Disease or Diseases with a high enough Infection Rate and Mortality rate will develop that will Infect every Homo Sapiens on the Planet, and that certainly could cause a rapid Extinction.  However, for such diseases to make it to places like Nunavut for instance and flourish in that environment would be difficult, and likely slow to get there also.  Nunavut does not have a big Tourist Trade.

Also of course is the possibility that as Available Energy drops below Critical Mass, it will not be possible to keep cool the Spent Fuel Ponds in the plethora of Nuclear Reactors spread across the world, there would be many Meltdowns on the Chernobyl/Fuk-U-shima model and perhaps also Super Critical Events where some Reactors actually BLOW on the Nuclear Level.  If they all go this way, it could spread enough Radioactive Poison through the atmosphere to make most animal life impossible.  Homo Sapiens is probably amongst the first to go in this scenario, only fitting since we were the Dummies that dropped these Killers on the Landscape to begin with.

Global Thermonuclear War, quite possible once the REAL FIGHT begins over the remaining resources of the earth also could spread enough Radioactive Poison around to Knock Down Homo Sapiens in short order. This is also a possibility, but is also is only tangentially related to the ongoing Climate Change.  Extinction here does not come as a direct result of the Climate Change, it is just a corollary of Industrialization and the insatiable Jones for more electricity in more places all the time.

Then of course there are those naturally occuring phenomena which have led to ELEs before, Asteroid Collision and Super Volcanic eruption such as the Toba Cataclysm 75,000 years ago which led to the genetic Bottleneck for Homo Sapiens, leaving only perhaps 10,000 Human Souls or 1000 Breeding Pairs left walking the Face of the Earth in the aftermath of that one.  This of course though also was not really an ELE for our species, since enough were left standing to re-breed up now to the tune of 7B Human Souls inhabiting the planet at one time.  Are the consequences of Industrialization and the burning of Fossil Fuels really WORSE than Toba, where this can do a better job with total EXTERMINATION than that one was able to accomplish?  Does not seem likely to me, certainly not on such a rapid timeline and more certainly not without other tangential factors also coming into play here.  I still do not see how even an average Global Temperature increase of 10C does this in and of itself in such a rapid fashion.

Some folks would argue that this is Nit Picking, if you only leave alive 10,ooo people, 99.99999% of us are as good as extinct ourselves.  The difference though is that even EXTREME Die Off still leaves open the HOPE that the Great Experiment with Human Sentience can be rebooted one more time, and perhaps in the next iteration we will do a bit better job managing our Stewardship of the Earth.  As I move along the Collapse Highway here, this is my Hopium.  If you buy the idea we are going Extinct here for sure; there is NO POSSIBILITY anymore it can be averted; what reason is there to do anything else other than Party Like it is 1999?  No reason to make any changes in lifestyle anymore, and you might as well Snuff your kids now,  since they are just going to grow up in a world where everyone around them is Dying, including them before they make it to 40.

MAYBE this will occur.  there most certainly are out there numerous Vectors which could enable such a Rapid Extinction Level Event, but not a one of them is WRITTEN IN STONE.  Climatic Theories are just that, THEORIES.  Not proven fact and based on some Mathematical Models which themselves have identifiable flaws in them.  For Guy and many of his readers on Nature Bats Last, they talk about such things as “Acceptance”, growing comfortable in a sense with the idea that Homo Sapiens is going the way of the Dinosaur.  This thinking process evolves out of the 5 Stages of Grief model proposed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross back in her 1969 book Death and Dying

The stages, popularly known by the acronym DABDA, include:^[2]

1. Denial — “I feel fine.”; “This can’t be happening, not to me.” Denial is usually only a temporary defense for the individual. This feeling is generally replaced with heightened awareness of possessions and individuals that will be left behind after death. Denial can be conscious or unconscious refusal to accept facts, information, or the reality of the situation. Denial is a defense mechanism and some people can become locked in this stage.

2. Anger — “Why me? It’s not fair!”; “How can this happen to me?”; ‘”Who is to blame?” Once in the second stage, the individual recognizes that denial cannot continue. Because of anger, the person is very difficult to care for due to misplaced feelings of rage and envy. Anger can manifest itself in different ways. People can be angry with themselves, or with others, and especially those who are close to them. It is important to remain detached and nonjudgmental when dealing with a person experiencing anger from grief.

3. Bargaining — “I’ll do anything for a few more years.”; “I will give my life savings if…” The third stage involves the hope that the individual can somehow postpone or delay death. Usually, the negotiation for an extended life is made with a higher power in exchange for a reformed lifestyle. Psychologically, the individual is saying, “I understand I will die, but if I could just do something to buy more time…” People facing less serious trauma can bargain or seek to negotiate a compromise. For example “Can we still be friends?..” when facing a break-up. Bargaining rarely provides a sustainable solution, especially if it’s a matter of life or death.

4. Depression — “I’m so sad, why bother with anything?”; “I’m going to die soon so what’s the point?”; “I miss my loved one, why go on?” During the fourth stage, the dying person begins to understand the certainty of death. Because of this, the individual may become silent, refuse visitors and spend much of the time crying and grieving. This process allows the dying person to disconnect from things of love and affection. It is not recommended to attempt to cheer up an individual who is in this stage. It is an important time for grieving that must be processed. Depression could be referred to as the dress rehearsal for the ‘aftermath’. It is a kind of acceptance with emotional attachment. It’s natural to feel sadness, regret, fear, and uncertainty when going through this stage. Feeling those emotions shows that the person has begun to accept the situation.

5. Acceptance — “It’s going to be okay.”; “I can’t fight it, I may as well prepare for it.” In this last stage, individuals begin to come to terms with their mortality, or that of a loved one, or other tragic event. This stage varies according to the person’s situation. People dying can enter this stage a long time before the people they leave behind, who must pass through their own individual stages of dealing with the grief.

Even if a Near Term Human Extintion is TRUE though, from my POV having such an attitude is counter productive.  You have to believe in SOME CHANCE here, or there is no reason to Fight the Good Fight anymore.  To me, Giving Up is not an Option, not until the Fat Lady Sings, and she is not singing yet IMHO.  I don’t buy NTHE until the Phytoplankton Collapse here, or until every last square inch of the Earth has consistent temps above what a large mammal like ourselves can survive at.  This is not evident YET, though to be sure models and Positive Feedback Loops that could make it so are out there.  It is not a LOCK, not yet, though no doubt it does look pretty nasty overall.

No way to make it through if you ACCEPT it as inevitable.  You gotta make the fight BELIEVING you can win, right up to the day you Buy Your Ticket to the Great Beyond. Tough times ahead, to be sure.  I am confident however that SOME people will make it through the Zero Point.  They will be DINERS!

In the words of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson…

You won’t find any Weirder bunch of Collapse Professionals than the Diners anywhere else on the net, I GUARANTEE it.

RE