Comment by johnsea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnsea | Hacker News Reader

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Yes that's true. Personally I don't care too much about the precise prognoses but about the general idea. 40 years ago, the model was simple and also today I don't think the complexity could be modeled accurately.

There are examples in smaller areas, e.g. Easter Island, Trinidade South were 'over-usage' lead to consequences. I could image this to happen to the earth as a whole in time when we do not regulate.

The global system seems robust, yes. But there is plenty of oil still and most nations are stable. But who knows? This will/could change. For the former there is technology. But for the latter it seems difficult, a former-china-like-one-child-policy would be in order for certain regions, but I don't see this coming.

I think agricultural collapse is a great place to start researching. The book 1493 all about the ecological exchange of contact with the new world has some phenomenal perspective about it all. Our high input monocropping is pretty tenuous. Look at the lifespan history of commercial pesticides and fungicides, they used to be 30+ years around the turn of the century. Today, a newly discovered pesticide has a lifespan of about three years before it becomes not effective. The extreme lack of genetic diversity in our crops is a time bomb waiting to happen. If you think the Irish Potato famine was bad, it's going to be a mere footnote to the kind of agricultural disasters we will see come out of the next century. Rubber trees are a particularly vulnerable piece, 99% of all rubber produced in the world comes from southeast Asia from a handful of clones brought over from the Amazon. They can't monocrop rubber in South America because of leaf blight. Yet when that blight makes it over to se Asia on somebody's boot, things are going to get weird fast. No rubber means no industrial hoses, gaskets, and tires. We don't have any economic means to reproduce natural rubber. All the computers in the world won't make a difference.

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