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[Reelya]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The General Motors streetcar conspiracy (also known as the National City Lines conspiracy) refers to allegations and convictions in relation to a program by General Motors (GM) and a number of other companies to purchase and dismantle streetcars (trams/trolleys) and electric trains in many cities across the United States and replace them with bus services. The lack of clear information about exactly what occurred has led to intrigue, inaccuracy and conspiracy theories with some citing it as the primary reason for the virtual elimination of effective public transport in many American cities by the 1970s. The story has been explored several times in print, film and other media, notably in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Taken for a Ride and The End of Suburbia.
During the period from 1936 to 1950, National City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Trucks, and the Federal Engineering Corporation—bought over 100 electric surface-traction systems in 45 cities including Baltimore, Newark, Los Angeles, New York City, Oakland and San Diego and converted them into bus operation.
In 1946, Edwin J. Quinby, a retired naval lieutenant commander, alerted transportation officials across the country to what he called "a careful, deliberately planned campaign to swindle you out of your most important and valuable public utilities—your Electric Railway System". GM and other companies were subsequently convicted in 1949 of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products via a complex network of linked holding companies including National City Lines and Pacific City Lines. They were also indicted, but acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the ownership of these companies.
By the time of the 1973 oil crisis, controversial new testimony was presented to a United States Senate inquiry into the causes of the decline of streetcar systems in the U.S. This alleged that there was a wider conspiracy—by GM in particular—to destroy effective public transport systems in order to increase sales of automobiles and that this was implemented with great effect to the detriment of many cities.

In the 19th century, city transit systems were rail-based, first with Horsecars and later cable railway or trams powered by electricity. Electrically powered Trolleybuses were also common.
At one time, nearly every city in the U.S. with population over 10,000 had at least one streetcar company: nearly all were privately owned and were later dismantled.[1] Author and former U.S. Senate antitrust attorney Bradford Snell estimates that in 1920, 90% of all trips were via rail using 1,200 separate electric street and interurban railways with 44,000 miles of track, 300,000 employees, 15 billion annual passengers, and $1 billion in income. Only one in 10 Americans owned an automobile

tl;dr: almost every American city used to have electric light rail networks, they were systematically bought up and scrapped by consortiums of car companies.

[Ancre]

Oh, no, american cities were built before cars were a thing. Atlanta had all sort of fun little historic signs scattered across downtown and midtown, about how the name of the city came to be, or the guy who burned the city during the secession war, or whatnot. Similarly, I read a lot of stories about how american cities had streetcars systems before they were taken apart in the fifties or so. And the downtowns and city centers everywhere have lots of pretty buildings from the thirties and before (well, when they're not put down). Sure, they grew large during the 20th century, but that's true everywhere. The US have more history and cool architecture than they realize. They just don't like living in it.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

tl;dr: almost every American city used to have electric light rail networks, they were systematically bought up and scrapped by consortiums of car companies.

That doesn't make any sense. If GM could just buy the rail networks that they saw as a threat to their business, why would they dismantle them? They could just use them and sell cars at the same time. Destroying them would cost them money and using them would make them money.

[Reelya]

They replaced the electric rail services with buses and sold the buses. Also, making people more reliant on cars at a point in history where few people had cars lead to big increases in sales.

Most of this is on the public record, with court document spelling out the magnitude and conspiracy convictions.

[Frumple]

tl;dr: almost every American city used to have electric light rail networks, they were systematically bought up and scrapped by consortiums of car companies.

That doesn't make any sense. If GM could just buy the rail networks that they saw as a threat to their business, why would they dismantle them? They could just use them and sell cars at the same time. Destroying them would cost them money and using them would make them money.

Presumably they'd be able to get a net profit by junking the rail networks and selling the (presumably less efficient, i.e. needing more units to cover the same area/population.) busses and cars.

Basically they, apparently, got more money by spending money to dismantle the lines and then selling something else. Profit uber alles, et al.

[LordBucket]

run out of resources

...ok, serious question:

What resources are we going to "run out of?"

Here are some things we're not going to run out of:

1) Dirt/water/sunlight/food/plant fibers: these things are obviously replenishable/recyclable.

2) Iron, tin, aluminum, copper, uranium: there's not particularly any shortage of these things. Currently located sources are generally near the 100 year supply mark, and "currently located" does not mean there's no more 100 years from now. It means there's no point prospecting for more when we have 100 years worth already. Some of them, like iron, can be usefully measured in "percentage volume of the planet earth." These are NOT small quantities we're talking about. And, even if they did magically vanish it wouldn't be a huge problem because they're generally recyclable. And even if they weren't, if there were going to be shortages, we'd have decades of advance notice to find alternatives. We've only been using nuclear power for 60 years. Civilization will not end if we're using some other source of power 100 years from now. Civilization will not end if we're using carbon and ceramic instead of steel and wood as building materials.

3) Gold, diamonds, neodymium: things like these may exist is relatively smaller supply than other materials on this list, but even so they're not in particularly short supply relative for our need of them. They're just not that important. Which is why gold and diamonds are used primarily for jewelry rather than industry. And neodymium is not as rare as its "rare earth" status might led you to think. In any case, it would be no more than mildly inconvenient to certain industries if we ran out these things. Even if all of these things were to vanish completely from the planet 10 years from now...life would go on.

4) Empty space: This is SO not an issue. 90% of the human population of planet earth live in only 10% of the space. There's no shortage of space. People just prefer to live next to each other. If you want more people, there's plenty of room to put them, and without any dystopian soylent green overpopulation nonsense.

And that's assuming that we continue doing things the way we do. Everyone here is a Dwarf Fortress player. So I trust you'll all understand that there are three dimensions for us to work with. There's a LOT of available space if you simply go up or down. And incidentally there's nothing stopping us from using that vertical space for things other than storing people. You can grow food in the z-axis and build parks and pools and anything else you want up there too. There's no reason to build exclusively at surface level. Even constrained to the ground, there's easily room for dozens of billions of people and all the constructed farms and amenities that go along with that. Use vertical space and there's room for trillions.

So what is it you guys are worried we're going to run out of?

Spoiler: the real answer (click to show/hide)

The real answer is money. There's no actual problem here. Earth can easily accommodate multiple trillions of people, and human civilization could go on for millions of years until we get bored of existence if we really wanted it to. There are no material shortages and no technical limitations. The only reason it appears differently is because purely artificial shortages can be created due to the way our society uses money.

If there's no food at the grocery store, it's NOT because "earth ran out of food" and if there are no more houses it's not because "earth ran out of space." Rather, it would be because somebody didn't properly arrange the little green pieces of paper we for some reason choose to allow to decide for us whether we do what we want to do. This entire issue of supply and scarcity is a completely illusory, manufactured problem.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

As before, even in a hypothetical post-scarcity society where we are using resources with maximized efficiency, Earth will never be able to hold trillions of people! (Not that it will actually even come up, since population growth is going to level off.)

[LordBucket]

Earth will never be able to hold trillions of people

Why do you believe that?

Read my explanation and try to refute it. What's stopping us from simply using the available space?

oil

60 seconds on google will show you more alternatives than you will ever actually take the time to read.

rare earth metals

As mentioned, these things are just not that important. I don't imagine society collapsing due to a sudden shortage of gadolinite or yttrium.

by run out, I mean 'get to the point of being so low that
it's not viable to extract what little of it there is from the area')

Technology improves. There's no incentive to invest in development of improved refining and extraction technologies for materials we have a 100 years supply of. As mentioned before, it was originally predicted that we'd run out of "usable" uranium in 1976. yet here we are 36 year later using uranium at a much greater rate than we were, but we now have an 85 year supply. And there's 300 times as much uranium of the next lower grade. 85 years is a long time to figure out how to use it.

I'm talking about economies going to shit, that sort of thing.

That's an artificial problem, and fairly inconsequential in the scheme of things. We had a depression in the US in the 30s. Life went on. Would it really be such a big deal if we have another one 100 years from now because oil gets more expensive?

we may just be fucked over regardless

Why? What exactly is it you're worried about?

[mainiac]

It's worth noting that China produces the vast majority of the worlds rare earth metals just because they chose to subsidize it's production and other places didn't.  20 years ago they were producing very little.  So if we are running out of our current resources that just means we go back to exploiting the other 93% of the world's landmass.

[10ebbor10]

we may be fucked over regardless because, as stated previously, meteor, some unknown supervolcano (e.g. Siberia (apparently all of Siberia is expected to be a supervolcano. last time it erupted, it is suspected it caused a MAJOR extinction)), zombie apocalypse, aliens that have a desire to fuck up our shit, etc. etc.

And whilst rare earth metals aren't the only things that could cause an economic collapse, it sure as hell wouldn't help. good point on the constant improvement of refining and extraction technologies, though.

It's closely speculated that the eruption in Siberia was caused by a meteroid impact on the other side of the planet.

Rare Earth's are quite important though, and are vital for most Green technologies. (Wind solar tidal.) Several other rare earths are used in the construction of nuclear reactors.
Also, what's stopping from using all the available space is that not all space is equally useable.

[Heron TSG]

You don't strictly need rare earth metals to make a windmill generator. All you need is a magnet. Rare earth metals allow you to make incredibly powerful magnets, but AlNiCo (Aluminum Nickel Cobalt alloys, sometimes with titanium added) make very good magnets as well. You'll just need twice as many windmills. Or better yet, make your own permanent magnets by producing an AlNiCo alloy, melting it, and letting its magnetic domains develop within the field of a rare earth magnet. With one rare earth magnet, you empower tons of somewhat lesser magnets to run the windmills.

[Reelya]

A good limit for population might be gained from looking at the total solar energy received by the Earth.

http://www.ecoworld.com/energy-fuels/how-much-solar-energy-hits-earth.html

That site estimates the total Earth's surface receives 20,000 times more energy than consumed by the human race at present. Assume that the average consumption per person is 1/10th the "western" average, and that in the future we will consume the same amount of energy per capita as the west (automation, life support etc). That leaves total solar radiation Earth receives at 2000 times the current levels. Multiply the population of the Earth by 1000 and you'd be using ~50% of EVERY joule of energy which the Earth receives. Wall-to-wall solar panels. Especially since no energy extraction scheme will be 100% efficient.

Even with all the known uranium and thorium for fuel, it'll last a blink of the eye at consumption rates of 10000 times the current world total. So solar would be the only sustainable source.

Ain't going to happen.

Next, we have to consider the oxygen supply.
http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/respiratory/question98.htm
a human being uses about 550 liters of pure oxygen per day (at rest, more if you get out of bed).

So humans are currently consuming about 4 trillion litres of oxygen per day. are we really going to find a sink for 2000 trillion litres (~4 trillion KGs) of carbon dioxide per day? Thats 4 gigatons a day, or ~1200 gigatons per year. And this is just from breathing, not taking into account any other activities we may do that generate carbon.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm

Humanity currently outputs 29 gigatons of CO2, and nature processes 750 gigatons.

Now, average pop density, assuming we live on land:

510,072,000 sq km. * 29.2% land (assume we want to leave the oceans intact) = 148941024 sq km. Divide 5 trillion people into this gives 33570 people per square kilometre. FOR EVERY INCH OF LAND. Forget EVER walking on the ground again. that's ~30 sq metres of surface per person. So obviously walking on the ground will be against the law. And the population will be far too dense to even consider personal vehicles.

[LordBucket]

That site estimates the total Earth's surface receives 20,000 times more energy than consumed by the human race at present. Assume that the average consumption per person is 1/10th the "western" average, and that in the future we will consume the same amount of energy per capita as the west (automation, life support etc). That leaves total solar radiation Earth receives at 2000 times the current levels. Multiply the population of the Earth by 1000 and you'd be using ~50% of EVERY joule of energy which the Earth receives. Wall-to-wall solar panels. Especially since no energy extraction scheme will be 100% efficient.

Using your figures and assumptions, the population limit of earth would be 7 trillion people.

[Reelya]

See my thing about breathing. And that 7 trillion assumes wall-to-wall global solar panels over the entire planet, at 100% efficiency, thus killing all plant life and the ocean algae.

btw the oxygen-consumption figures are for "at rest" people. So obviously it's LOW

[mainiac]

Or off planet solar panels which could sustain however many people we could physically fit on earth.  But it would make more sense to move people off world at that point.  If you start mining out the moon and building O'Neil cylinders then you are looking at the capability to sustain populations in the tens of trillions without even resorting to high density living.