Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'? | Nafeez Ahmed | Environment | theguardian.com Well, it's been nice knowing you all

I'll believe it when I see it -- such predictions have been around since Malthus, if not Biblical times.

But but but ... the preppers can't be wrong!

After watching the opening episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey . . .

Standing Up In the Milky Way

you start to understand that humanity is a "blip" in Earth's geological time.

yeah, that's right . . . Seth MacFarlane from Family Guy is an executive producer!

I think it's pretty damned likely.

Why would commissioning such a study fall under the purview of NASA?

Which end?

We're too dominant for our own good. Nothing to keep our numbers down. Another 50 - 100 years of people scouring the oceans for anything edible it'll really be a big, wet desert and people along the coasts, most of humanity IIRC, will more and more go inland to compete with whoever they encounter.

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Technology will save us from ourselves. Well, unless it involves something as complicated as finding a missing jet.

Don't underestimate the microbes. The inexorable rise of sea level inundating the primitive sewer and water systems of the world's coastal mega slums will spawn the perfect combination for plagues, and international air travel will spread them far any wide before anyone catches on. Food additives, antibiotics in industrial meat, and obesity have compromised the immune systems of first world society and the plagues will run like brush fires through the big cities. The 'take home' lesson of the last great pandemic of 1918 is that quarantine and isolation are the only effective way to resist a pandemic, vaccines are largely a placebo to give the illusion that something's being done. Arrogant humanity will get a good hard lesson in the pitfalls of hubris.

Not likely. Science and technology are whores for the marketplace, controlled by the 10% who own 99% of the wealth. They have little or no use for the other 90% other than as consumers and at least half don't consume enough to be worth saving. The wealthy will be quite happy with a significantly reduced population and won't stand in the way of anything that will do that.

.

Because they have to prep the space ships to Mars for our final escape?

__________________
1979 Black on Black, 300CD (sold), 1990 Black 300SE, Silver 1989 Volvo 780, 1988 300CE (vanished by the hands of a girlfriend), 1992 300CE (Rescue).

Do they take American Express?

I doubt you can pay off the balance the next month, so I would think not.

__________________
1979 Black on Black, 300CD (sold), 1990 Black 300SE, Silver 1989 Volvo 780, 1988 300CE (vanished by the hands of a girlfriend), 1992 300CE (Rescue).

Well just how pricey are these flights?

Well like the old saying goes if you have to ask.

Strange someone mentioned a serious pandemic. The wife and myself discussed the ideal a few years ago if isolating ourselves at the cottage might reduce the chances of contracting something. That's if something started to run rampant like the black plague or whatever. Medical science has always claimed something is possible.

Delivery of food would break the isolation we thought even if there was anyone willing to do it.