EPTEnding World Hunger - Page 6
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TanGeng
Sanya12364 Posts
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Savio
United States1850 Posts
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WhiteNights
United States252 Posts
I will write a big post responding to the big post by integral on the previous page but I am lazy right now. | ||
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KlaCkoN
Sweden1661 Posts
On October 29 2009 15:21 WhiteNights wrote: The objection to "Haber process ggnore" is that natural gas which is required to make nitrogen fertilizer via the Haber process is non-renewable and therefore cannot be said to be "long-term carrying capacity." However, we probably have enough natural gas for the next, I don't know, fifty or so years at current levels... and if you consider that only 3-5% of said natural gas is used in the Haber process, if we were to try and make it last as long as possible by eliminating all non-Haber-process natural gas usage we'd have like a thousand years before we ran out, which I think is more than enough time to transition to renewables. I will write a big post responding to the big post by integral on the previous page but I am lazy right now. Where did you get the idea that natural gas is non renewable? As of right now there are several methods of making it out of renewable waste (trees, dead animals etc) (There are several refineries _currently_ in operation using methods like this) And the technology improves constantly. The most common way right now though afaik is making it out of coal which is (at least on short scale) unlimited. Projects in working include farming algae and using them instead of dead animals. This is totally ignoring the fact that natural gas aren't even really required for the haber process at all, if a working fusion plant is invented we might as well get the hydrogen straight from the sea, it's all a matter of energy. Sooner or later we will need to expand into space to extract the minerals necerssary to power continued technological expansion but with recycling technieques constantly improving we have time. The entire idea of non renewable resources is based on the assumption that technology stays right where it is right now, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that to be true. | ||
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niteReloaded
Croatia5282 Posts
Feeding people that can't feed themselves will only make those idiots reproduce more and make a bigger problem. Castrate those fuckers and problem is solved. Human life is overvalued. | ||
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L
Canada4732 Posts
On October 29 2009 11:37 TanGeng wrote: The your entire premise is that humans can't identify or predict how scarce food is in the world or that human beings once identified how scarce food is in the world will won't change their reproductive behavior in account for the scarcity. Or perhaps you are just really pessimistic about the human race and wonder if all people will figure out that at a certain point it isn't such a good idea to reproduce. Or maybe it's just pessimism that the technological growth of human race will not find a substitute source of resources with energy being the key to just about everything. Aren't there plenty good examples of people choosing not to reproduce? There are people limiting their reproduction based on how expensive it is to raise children. I'm sure not even half of them have understood this ecological argument of carrying capacity and overshoot. If energy becomes expensive or if food becomes expensive then the incentive to conserve and not reproduce will become ever larger (or there can be wars as populations bump into one another and that will kill off the population). And if need be humans will squeeze ever last bit of fossil fuel out of the shale and then spread to the stars and get energy by farming the sun in space. You realize there are plenty of examples of incidents in which humans have overgrown the carrying capacity of their area and then died off, right? You can 'choose' to not reproduce all you want, but unless everyone follows your lead, you're still going to overshoot during good years, then have a catastrophic crash during bad years. The entire point is that humans CAN identify how scarce food will be, but NO ONE IS DOING FUCK ALL ABOUT IT. People are focused on researching technologies to incrementally lower environmental impact per person without dealing with the other part of the equation: the amount of people. If you think current distribution problems are large, wait until energy prices increase and we run out of hydrocarbon deposits to make plastics out of. We're running on borrowed time, but no one has the balls to step up and state that the volume of humans on the earth after the green revolution, 21st century medicine and the removal of total war has exploded beyond that which is sustainable. We aren't sustainable now; give us 100 years at our current consumption rates and our ways of life are done for. Adding more people and increasing their rates of consumption to boot isn't going to help. coal which is (at least on short scale) unlimited. Lol. | ||
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KlaCkoN
Sweden1661 Posts
On October 29 2009 23:02 L wrote: If you think current distribution problems are large, wait until energy prices increase and we run out of hydrocarbon deposits to make plastics out of. . lol ~~ | ||
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Biochemist
United States1008 Posts
KlaCkoN, could you elaborate why you think L's statement is so funny? Plastics have invaded every industry, and increased the profitability of some of them by orders of magnitude. It will be a serious, serious problem when nobody can afford to make them anymore. | ||
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pyrogenetix
China5098 Posts
I heard somewhere that tons of food goes bad and rots every year because there's too much and no where to store it and like half the food that gets transported around Africa rots because the infrastructure is so poor. oh and by distribution I mean wealth as well so no one starts going up my ass about that | ||
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KlaCkoN
Sweden1661 Posts
On October 29 2009 23:56 Biochemist wrote: I don't have time to reply to everyone in this thread, but it's all been good reading. It'll be interesting to see how the earth responds to the depletion of fossil fuels. With any luck it will be a somewhat incremental transition as prices continue to rise until it's just not economically feasible to use any more. KlaCkoN, could you elaborate why you think L's statement is so funny? Plastics have invaded every industry, and increased the profitability of some of them by orders of magnitude. It will be a serious, serious problem when nobody can afford to make them anymore. Because we won't run out of hydrocarbons. Green plants or algae make them for free using solar energy, we only need to do some chemistry to get the exact hydrocarbons we need. And as I've said before there is already _right now_ several ways of doing this, these methods will improve and they will as oil prices continue to rise. In the mean time the deposits of coal under antartica are projected to be beyond gargantuan. Improvement in up stream exploration technology mean that we soon are ready to access oil sands etc, which will also ease the transition. People seem to be affraid of some kind of scenario where we wake up one day and the oil is just gone. It won't happen like that. | ||
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tdotkrayzbetterthanu
Afghanistan7 Posts
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Biochemist
United States1008 Posts
On October 30 2009 00:15 KlaCkoN wrote: Because we won't run out of hydrocarbons. Green plants or algae make them for free using solar energy, we only need to do some chemistry to get the exact hydrocarbons we need. And as I've said before there is already _right now_ several ways of doing this, these methods will improve and they will as oil prices continue to rise. In the mean time the deposits of coal under antartica are projected to be beyond gargantuan. Improvement in up stream exploration technology mean that we soon are ready to access oil sands etc, which will also ease the transition. People seem to be affraid of some kind of scenario where we wake up one day and the oil is just gone. It won't happen like that. Growing, harvesting, and extracting hydrocarbons from living organisms will never be anywhere near as cheap or easy as just digging them up and purifying them. | ||
MrHoon
10183 Posts
On October 30 2009 00:26 tdotkrayzbetterthanu wrote: HURRRRRRRRRRR what is this like your 15th account? | ||
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KlaCkoN
Sweden1661 Posts
On October 30 2009 00:27 Biochemist wrote: Growing, harvesting, and extracting hydrocarbons from living organisms will never be anywhere near as cheap or easy as just digging them up and purifying them. Never is a strong word considering there are already (and we have only just started) refineries operating at least partly on the principle. But yes of course it's easier to just pick premade stuff out of the ground which is why we mostly do just that. However when /if/, that is no longer an option we will be forced to turn to other means and there _are_ other means, that's my point. | ||
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Love.Zelduck
United States170 Posts
lolol tbh tho, this thread looks a lot like the SC2 metagame threads. Paragraph after paragraph of nice conjecture about something so complex, future, and unpredictable that we have almost no real understanding of. | ||
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nttea
Sweden4353 Posts
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Krikkitone
United States1451 Posts
Currently Food Production > Food need (based on population) World Hunger is an economic social problem, not an ecological one especially because the "Global population problem" (the right side of the equation) Is solving itself the Nice way... population growth is dropping Worldwide, without any serious mass global starvations/wars/disease. People are having less children, because they Want to have less children (Not because food supplies are low, etc.) As for the larger concern of non-Renewable resources, almost no resources are truly nonrenewable, "easily exploitable" resources are non-renewable, and so certain standards of living are not currently sustainable.... but technology is constantly changing the ease of exploiting resources, as well as standards of living. So eventually, sustainable resources will be the easiest to exploit (because all the non-sustainable ones will have been exhaiusted). This will require a change in standards of living, but it will be more gradual, and probably masked by technological change (ie the s.o.l. could have expanded by 25% over a certain period with technological change, but will only expand by 10% because of the need to change from non-sustainable, easily exploited resources to sustainable, less easily exploited ones) Solar/Nuclear. etc. aren't That much worse than fossil fuels, and we do have a lot of fossil fuels Some Minerals may provide problems, but Junkyards will just become the new mines, or recycling takes over (like it does with platinum) Pollution/Waste will get more and more reporcessed/eliminated. There may definitely be entire ecosystems lost in the process, but I don't forsee any massive drop in the human population/average standard of living due to unsustainable practices. (random meteor attacks, massive wars, some random super bug possibly) ...unless we have more socialism, that could seriously mess things up (as it currently is with the developed world subsidizing their farmers) Also humans Are different than other species ecologically in a Very important way... humans "evolve" culturally, and Very rapidly.... Malthusian predictions assume that the human r (natural growth rate) doesn't change... it does and has and will continue to do so. The current path of human Cultural evolution suggests our population problem may be not having enough children.. if we stop replacing ourselves on a global basis and eventually fade out (although there will probably be corrrections for that in the decades and centuries to come) [note; Japan is not just some small part of the human petri dish, the Entire developed world is at/close to negative fertility rates, and fertility rates in most of the develoiped world have been falling over the past century] | ||
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HwangjaeTerran
Finland5967 Posts
the total for defense spending is between $925 billion and $1.14 trillion in 2009 Imagine how many condoms you could manufacture and spread with 1.14 trillion dollars? Edit. Im not saying all of that $1.14 trillion is wasted money, military research does produce a lot of scientifical breakthroughs and whatnot. | ||
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RoyW
Ireland270 Posts
On October 30 2009 05:30 HwangjaeTerran wrote: Well, In todays world almost everything is possible as long as there is money put into it. So maybe people should start taking money from places where it´s not needed like army forces. Nations like USA use alot of cash on "defence", this much--->+ Show Spoiler + the total for defense spending is between $925 billion and $1.14 trillion in 2009 Imagine how many condoms you could manufacture and spread with 1.14 trillion dollars? Edit. Im not saying all of that $1.14 trillion is wasted money, military research does produce a lot of scientifical breakthroughs and whatnot. Yeah, but spending nearly half of the entire world total, and comfortably more than the rest of the entire 1st world......I think we can comfortably criticise it as a source of wasted money. Starvation today is most definitely not a food production capacity issue, as we can comfortably produce enough food globally to feed to world more than once over. It seems that some posters indicate that certain aspects of human tendencies such as reproduction and greed are biological urges and therefore it's relatively futile to invest in combating/minimizing these things. But on the other hand, the donating food to the starving areas which does lead population increase is also due to a human natural biological urge, compassion. I don't see how this can be faulted on the same grounds as the reproduction is disqualified from critique. | ||
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