NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

[Scootaloo]

2. Well, duh?

Our entire "civilization" is reliant on cheap and high-powered energy resources of fossil fuels. These are finite resources, even before worrying about the other considerations they raise.

Humans are also a famously short-sighted species. It's not our fault, as far as our biology is concerned, we should still be tropical plains-dwelling melon-eaters with a life expectancy of forty years. We're just not able to really plan years, much less generations, into the future. And even if some visionaries among us are, more short-sighted primates come by and dismantle the projects tor the here and now (good and relevant example - Reagan removing the solar panels from the white house)

What this means is that we will keep on burning fossil fuels until we reach a point where we spend more energy getting them than we can produce from them. At which point we will go "Oh shit, now what?" because we won't have prepared to any meaningful degree for that event.

Agriculture - the base point of any civilization - is currently based on petroleum. Not just hte energy needs of shipping, machinery, etc., but also the peripherals - hard to have a hose without hydrocarbon polymers. To say nothing of where all those fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides come from. The industrial farm will collapse, and the several billion people who depend on that industry for food, are going ot find themselves in a tough spot. Not that they'd be able to afford it anyway as the petroleum drought will end up putting most people out of work - we'll be having food riots well before the agricultural industry starts running dry.

andhten what, generations down the line? Well, fossil fuels are still depleted, along with most of hte minerals we were using for all our gadgets. Plastics of course are a thing of hte past. We won't be able to sustain megalopolis cities anymore. So. yeah. Irreversable collapse. The fossil fuel boom was an absurd and brief chapter of human history.

Unless, somehow, some way, we manage to defy human tendencies, put the smart guys in charge, and turn all of our production towards tapping into solar, tidal, and geothemal energy sources. The systems and functions of our planet provide more energy than we'll ever need, more than could ever be dug up in the form of coal or uranium, and all we have to do is invest the money and resources NOW for a system that will keep running until the next giant asteroid sneaks up on us.