Quote: (08-03-2017 10:26 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:
There's a school of thought that if we suffer a serious decline that we can never recover beyond subsistence agricultural living again.
That's because all of the "easy" resources that we built our civilisations with are completely tapped out. You don't find oil at ten feet anymore, and if the drilling rigs all fall into disrepair then what kind of technology tree would you need to get them started again, and how is it possible when the energy surplus of an oil based society was what allowed us to drill to thousands of feet, miles offshore no less?
And that's just one of a thousand supply chain issues that a true collapse would bring about.
The theory goes that the inhabitants of a planet have just one shot to build a civilisation that will take them to the stars, and if they fuck that up then the next civilisation elsewhere in the universe which is successful will inevitably find the fuckups tending their fields as they'd done for hundreds of thousands of years (assuming their planet wasn't a radioactive wasteland).
Yeah maybe their isn't much left for a second industrial revolution but look on the bright side. There is still a lot of coal left that's relatively easy to get to. At least we won't have to burn our building materials to keep our asses warm in the winter as we contemplate how bad our life sucks.
If you think about it, technology has given us time away from foraging for food and trying to stay warm and cool. That gave us time to make the Mona Lisa and other cool shit. Maybe it's better to return to foraging for food rather than for people to dye their hair blue and look for new ways to ass fuck each other. Everything eventually returns to the mean.