What's the over/under on civilization?

Quote: Pacomartin

Certainly "cities" as we see them today didn't exist.

I read once, probably from Jared Diamond, that Damascus, Syria is the oldest continually-populated city in the world. Settled around 2000 BC.

Quote: kenarman

Electricity is the key to all the technology, without it your technology eventually disappears. Centrally distributed electricity would be the first to disappear. Solar would be gone once we ran out of batteries. Small local windmills might last for a quite a while for a mechanically inclined person who could keep finding creative ways to repair it.

What may go faster is satellites and that will be a huge thing. So little works without them. Consider how many people as we have discussed cannot read a simple map. The USA is more and more to the point we are unable to compete in space. The last shuttle flew 5 years ago. We are not even really working on a current manned project. To get to the moon took 8 years, when we had never been to space. Now 5 years after 50 years of space work and we cannot make a replacement?

If satellites start to fail then most communications start to fail. Everything slows. I can see where in 20 years there will be just a minority of people who can read a map. We may already be where half can barely do it.

Quote: kenarman

Electricity is the key to all the technology, without it your technology eventually disappears. Centrally distributed electricity would be the first to disappear. Solar would be gone once we ran out of batteries. Small local windmills might last for a quite a while for a mechanically inclined person who could keep finding creative ways to repair it.

Computer skills while valuable quickly become useless without the techs to keep hardware and the connected devices working.

We had relatively advanced societies millenia ago and I think the worst case scenerio is that we end up back there. We just won't have as many advanced tools as we do today, that might even be a good thing.

Sure, I get that, My point is that infrastructure doesn't need a huge mass of people. Less people does not mean that all those things will disappear. Why would all these skills disappear? Would those that are left suddenly forget how to fix a watermill or maintain a solar energy device? Would boats suddenly not sail because the world population is 1/10th of what it was?

Yes, the world would look -different- but many of those things would still be able to survive and work.

Quote: AZDuffman

It is this way. Gas pipes, water pipes, sewers, and electric lines all need to be maintained. We forget they do, but they do. Technology cannot repair a water main for example. Roads need repair. Back in my PCO days I learned just how many things need maintained and how they fall apart when you do not do that maintenance.

Quite, but the number of people needed to repair a water main and fix a road is less than the number it was 100 years ago. I'm saying mass depopulation doesn't render all infrastructure to disappear and fade away. Maintenance and construction would be valued. Technology does repair water mains, right now. Leak detection means it's faster and easier than it was before. I'm not talking a robot replacement. I'm talking about all the tools and machines and skills we have -today- that make every task easier and quicker than it was before.

The efficency of human's has been increased by several orders of magnitude by advances, and economics has driven that. 1 hour of light used to be really, really expensive. Now you wouldn't even think about the cost to run a 60W bulb. And we have the ability to run 60W bulbs 'of the grid'.

Scarier would be the loss of trade and the globalization. If -travel- between manufacturing centres became a thing of the past, then we would be in a different place from today, but civilization wouldn't disappear. It'd look different.

Quote: TheCesspit

Quite, but the number of people needed to repair a water main and fix a road is less than the number it was 100 years ago. I'm saying mass depopulation doesn't render all infrastructure to disappear and fade away. Maintenance and construction would be valued. Technology does repair water mains, right now. Leak detection means it's faster and easier than it was before. I'm not talking a robot replacement. I'm talking about all the tools and machines and skills we have -today- that make every task easier and quicker than it was before.

Nobody is saying it will disappear right away, at least I am not. It has taken Detroit 50 years to collapse to where it is today. It takes less people than 100 years ago, but it takes more money. You may have leak detection, but someone still has to get out there and fix it. Someone still has to pay the bill for it all.

Areas will depopulate. What makes it hard is when it is uneven. Detroit did not just close a few wards of the city and move people. Population fell here and there but everything still had to be paid for. It caused other services to collapse.

Quote: kenarman

Electricity is the key to all the technology, without it your technology eventually disappears.

For sure, which makes me wonder.

Ever see that Coronal Mass Ejection stuff on Discovery? Guess there was one in like the 1890s or 1900s. Wiped out everything. Granted, there was almost nothing electronically worth fussing over back then, but they say that such a CME today would crush everything. Grids, satellites, computers, everything electronic (which is to say, everything) would be wiped.

You really don't realize what electric does for us. Obviously everything economic is run by it. I might have "$2,500", but only $12.57 of it is in tangible currency. The rest is a number in a database. Every vehicle, done. Every refrigerator, gone. How much agriculture is either controlled, planned, or run based on computer model or computer control? All of it. Wtf would you do without water? How's it going to get collected, treated, pumped to your home without electric? The first month would probably result in ten of millions of American deaths alone as lack of sanitation and raw water starts taking people down.

It's a very weird thought. The worst, most destructive, deadliest, and by FAR the most expensive disaster we have ever seen, and not one real, natural thing on Earth would be affected by it directly. Earth doesn't change, water doesn't change, air doesn't change. It just destroys a construct, the shell we have built up around us. Lose electric, lose everything.

Quote: Face

For sure, which makes me wonder.

Ever see that Coronal Mass Ejection stuff on Discovery? Guess there was one in like the 1890s or 1900s. Wiped out everything. .

'The largest recorded geomagnetic perturbation, resulting presumably from a CME, coincided with the first-observed solar flare on 1 September 1859, and is now referred to as the Carrington Event, or the solar storm of 1859. The flare and the associated sunspots were visible to the naked eye (both as the flare itself appearing on a projection of the sun on a screen and as an aggregate brightening of the solar disc), and the flare was independently observed by English astronomers R. C. Carrington and R. Hodgson. The geomagnetic storm was observed with the recording magnetograph at Kew Gardens. The same instrument recorded a crochet, an instantaneous perturbation of Earth's ionosphere by ionizing soft X-rays. This could not easily be understood at the time because it predated the discovery of X-rays by Röntgen and the recognition of the ionosphere by Kennelly and Heaviside. The storm took down parts of the recently created US telegraph network, starting fires and shocking some telegraph operators.'

Why are the lines so different in different regions?

North Korea has a totally different over/under than does London or Vegas or Tehran?

Some people are betting how long civilization will last while others are betting if it will ever come to Australia or Indonesia.

Females in India are not permitted to make book on Civilization unless they've been raped twenty times.

The Maori in New Zealand think there civilization will continue until they've declared every white owned mansion as being built on Maori sacred ground and therefore owned by the Maori.

The Finnish are too busy running marathons and taking saunas and snow baths to vote on anything.

In BVI the sports books are only open on feast days and are operated by coconut crabs.

Quote: Face

For sure, which makes me wonder.

Ever see that Coronal Mass Ejection stuff on Discovery? Guess there was one in like the 1890s or 1900s. Wiped out everything. Granted, there was almost nothing electronically worth fussing over back then, but they say that such a CME today would crush everything. Grids, satellites, computers, everything electronic (which is to say, everything) would be wiped.

That's hardly the only danger.

There's a volcano under Yellowstone prone to extraordinarily HUGE eruptions of ash. If it blows, it will be a catastrophe of major proportions which might wipe out civilization in North America and other places.

An asteroid impact would be comparable, and of course that's a possibility too.

For ending civilization, though, you need to end humanity. To do that, a super volcano, or an asteroid impact, or a massive solar ejection aren't enough (or even the three together). You'd need something more energetic. Like a large supernova, positioned just right (or wrong), to shower our Solar System in hard gamma radiation for several weeks. Or having a rogue planet impact the Earth. Or having a star pass too close to our Solar System.

I think the most likely cause of our doom are viruses and disease.

Since the invention of antibiotics, we have accelerated their evolution into heartier, more resistant, and more deadly forms.