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[Loud Whispers]

I rarely look at news any more, just makes me depressed.
I play more video games instead.

Yaay for video games!
Wait.. when are electrical devices going to temporarily screw up for a few days/weeks? 

They might not ever. Solar flares may disrupt electronics in orbit, but on the ground we have a magnetic field, the ENTIRE ATMOSPHERE, and the built in protection found in many electronic devices.

The next solar maximum is supposed to be one of the weakest on record, but even if it wasn't there's not guarantee that anything on the ground would be affected.

I've already said the next solar maximus was going to be one of the weakest yet >_>

Probably lost somewhere in this mess. Anyways, they're both unrelated, mostly. Btw, Earth's magnetic field protects us from a lot of cosmic radiation, the atmosphere does absolutely nothing except get polluted nowadays and HONESTLY, what protection are you talking about?

*Edit
Herp derp it's not a single solar flare, it's a storm of them! Jokes on them, it's predicted to hit us all in 2013.

[Tellemurius]

Erm Tellemurius, we can recycle our crap. That is known.

As for energy...

Sure it can't be destroyed, but it can be lost in bloody useless ways. Heat being the most pressing amongst them.

unless you're the monkey burning our trash then sure.

EVERYTHING we do loses energy in some way. No one's made a perpetual machine yet, so you won't need to be a monkey, or burn rubbish to screw the world over. Cars, people, Industry...

QFT. Thermodynamics, bitches.

Run your car's engine for awhile. Feel the heat? That's potential energy(gasoline) turning into near-useless thermal energy, gone forever.

>_> im thinking in more line of food or crafting materials.

[Loud Whispers]

Which wastes more energy. Also, guess how we make most of our food?
NITTTROOOOGEEEEEEN D:

[Tellemurius]

Which wastes more energy. Also, guess how we make most of our food?
NITTTROOOOGEEEEEEN D:

our air is 72% N2

[Sirus]

I rarely look at news any more, just makes me depressed.
I play more video games instead.

Yaay for video games!
Wait.. when are electrical devices going to temporarily screw up for a few days/weeks? 

They might not ever. Solar flares may disrupt electronics in orbit, but on the ground we have a magnetic field, the ENTIRE ATMOSPHERE, and the built in protection found in many electronic devices.

The next solar maximum is supposed to be one of the weakest on record, but even if it wasn't there's not guarantee that anything on the ground would be affected.

I've already said the next solar maximus was going to be one of the weakest yet >_>

Probably lost somewhere in this mess. Anyways, they're both unrelated, mostly. Btw, Earth's magnetic field protects us from a lot of cosmic radiation, the atmosphere does absolutely nothing except get polluted nowadays and HONESTLY, what protection are you talking about?

Actually, the atmosphere in combination with the magnetic field protects against most wavelengths of light. That's a big reason for telescopes in space; they can detect things like X-rays that simply can't penetrate to the ground. Plus of course the space rubble that would hit the ground if it didn't burn up first.

Yes, particles from the sun are different, but a several-mile-thick layer of mass provides better protection than nothing at all.

I was under the impression that many devices were capable of resisting some amount of damage. Maybe it's just plugged-in things.

[penguinofhonor]

my opinion is that the 2012 stuff is a great source of funny jokes

and nothing more

[Loud Whispers]

Which wastes more energy. Also, guess how we make most of our food?
NITTTROOOOGEEEEEEN D:

our air is 72% N2

MMhmm. And that stays in the air. Now what happens when it creates dead pools in the ocean?

[Criptfeind]

Seriously? You seriously think we will run out of food in generations? We have enough that we could survive a doubling in population. Which no one thinks is going to happen anyway. All over the world growth rates are falling, soon enough we will top off and start to decline.

And yes. People are starving and dying. But that does not mean there is not enough food for them, it simply means they do not have access to it. Seriously. I bet, for instance, if you moved my whole neighborhood out to a low functioning desert or some other place that is no good for growing crops you could feed like a thousand people with the farm land you would free up. The issues keeping people from getting food are land allotment, not having up to date technology, and shitty politics. The fact is there is not going to be a mass starvation the world over for a longer amount of time I can even think of.

[quinnr]

If the world ends, it will have ended, and I won't have to worry about it anymore. Therefore I shall go on not caring, after all, if I am still alive the world hasn't ended yet.

I am still hoping for the zombie attack, though...

[Frumple]

Seriously? You seriously think we will run out of food in generations? We have enough that we could survive a doubling in population. Which no one thinks is going to happen anyway. All over the world growth rates are falling, soon enough we will top off and start to decline.

Food's just one resource, not all of them, and the problem as I understand it is a lot of the stuff we're doing to be able to support a doubling of the population right now is very, very much unsustainable.

But yeah, I've heard estimates (or what degree of respectability I can't remember) of it hitting 10-12 billion before it starts leveling off. I've also seen numbers hit 20 billion or more too, though both of those were a few years back. We're already feeling the resource strain -- from inability or unwillingness to see it moved in such a way to reduce suffering -- with our current population. Every extra bit just strains it further, increasing the overall suffering of our people.

It also increases the rate that what we have that can't support a doubling of the population -- the other, even more finite than food and farming-related resources -- are consumed. The population we have now isn't sustainable, from what I've seen and read. A larger population is just going to make it burn faster.

And yes. People are starving and dying. But that does not mean there is not enough food for them, it simply means they do not have access to it. Seriously. I bet, for instance, if you moved my whole neighborhood out to a low functioning desert or some other place that is no good for growing crops you could feed like a thousand people with the farm land you would free up.

Maybe. Take it from someone in a farming community, even if not directly involved with the farming. Just because an area's green doesn't mean it's arable and able to be used for large-scale, or even smaller scale, farming.

The issues keeping people from getting food are land allotment, not having up to date technology, and shitty politics. The fact is there is not going to be a mass starvation the world over for a longer amount of time I can even think of.

And a larger population is just going to make the issue worse.  Land is as much a resource as any other, can be consumed just as readily, and (from what I understand, with said understanding being admit-ably incomplete!), is generally not a resource that is renewable in short time spans. More people means a higher demand on that land, which consumes it faster and often renders it unusable for longer periods.

There's also no guarantee (that I've seen, anyway; I'd absolutely love to see solid evidence to the contrary) that getting up to date technology to a sufficient amount of the world's population is even possible. A lot of the stuff that places like the US use to output massive crop surpluses take an industry base that many areas would have trouble supporting.

And as you say, shitty politics. We've fairly conclusively seen that the folks that are capable of producing the food are either unwilling or unable to move it where it needs to be to keep people from dying. If it's bad now, how much worse will it get when the population is half again or more larger?

I will admit openly, though, that when I say few generations I'm talking the more toward the upper end of that, two-three hundred years. Even I don't think there's going to be genuinely major impacts in my lifetime, or even in the generation after mine (Though we're already feeling it and the next batches are going to feel it even harder). That's the lower end of the distance you have to be considering when you're talking species wide survival, generally, because a lot of the immediate impact stuff we do (50-100 years) won't bear its fruit until then.

Which means, yeah, most people can't be arsed to give a shit. Too far into the future to matter to them. Which, as I've been saying, is probably going to be what kills us. We're doing crap that's going to be having impact hundreds of years down the line and not giving a shit about it. It's not exactly surprising that signs are pointing to that biting us in the ass.

[Tellemurius]

So my question is what is your solution? My solution is continuing research, so far your sounds like the "final solution"

[Frumple]

Gods. Damned. Contraception.

Not having more than two children to a couple, with possibly incentives for those that just have one.

Not breeding like idiots doesn't take culling. It takes two brain cells to rub together and maybe, just maybe, overpower yer g'damn reproductive organs long enough to not screw over your species.

That would be th'ruddy start. If we can at least try to slow down the problem long enough to figure out how to get more of us to actually think beyond the immediate generation and stop screwing us all over, we'd be a lot more likely to not hit a critical mass situation where there's no damn thing we can do. Science might push the deadline back further, but it'd take a g'damn miracle to actually allow the infinite growth, infinite consumption paradigm our species is trying to run itself on to not end in tragedy.

I honestly don't think it'll happen, but at least trying, here and there, in little bits, to help work toward something more functional, is part of what keeps me going from day to day.

[Grakelin]

Scientists aren't the ones making the positive claim that 2012 is the end of the world though, so your duality doesn't hold up.

Besides admitting to confirmation bias, what exactly were you trying to say?

[MrWiggles]

Scientists aren't the ones making the positive claim that 2012 is the end of the world though, so your duality doesn't hold up.

Besides admitting to confirmation bias, what exactly were you trying to say?

That's not admitting to confirmation bias. I'm not quite sure, how you got that.

[Grakelin]

I'll break down the posts for you:

Me: It behooves us to research the things we believe in extensively, because placing our trust in a scientist because he is a scientist is no different than placing our trust in a priest because he is a priest.

Capntastic: That duality doesn't add up because, like me, scientists don't say that 2012 is the end of the world. Therefore, scientists being correct, what you have said is incorrect.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the implications behind your post, which is why I ask you to rephrase, but it feels to me like you maybe you've misunderstood mine and given a flippant response to what you believe is an "Evolution is just a theory, don't trust them scientists" comment. I don't mean to imply that you should disbelieve a scientist's findings. Rather, you should examine them. They are, after all, required to show proof of their findings. You haven't examined something until you have questioned it and nitpicked it extensively. Not bothering to research and see if a claim made by a person with a doctorate is true, but simply accepting it on faith that the doctorate would not lie, is no different than believing than believing a priest is correct in telling you homosexuality is unnatural and a sign of mental illness. The latter claim being something that was believed by people with PhDs in psychology in the early part of the last century. If we were meant to take academic claims as gospel, there would not be a division of opinion on climate change and its causes.

What irks me, Capntastic, is that you are not an idiot, but chose to zero in on a chance to give a largely irrelevant one-liner as a response to what I said anyway. Indeed, your comment doesn't hold water even if I was trying to tell you that scientists are deceitful. Did I claim that priests were saying the world was going to end in 2012? A 2012 Doomsday scenario based on the calendar of an extinct culture has nothing to do with what modern religious leaders have to say.

You have irked people with poor communication in the past, so I'm willing to accept that I may have understood you. What exactly where you trying to say?