I owe TOD a huge debt of gratitude for spurring me to learn about energy and posing the question one evening in March 2009 "what would Shakespeare say about peak oil?" I had already started investigting literature for images of fossil fuels, but I opened my Riverside that evening and after a few minutes, the first line of "Romeo and Juliet" caught my attention. "Gregory, on my word, we'll not carry coals."

Back in graduate school, I had already wondered why Romeo and Juliet don't interact with other people when they are alone. After researching about coal smoke in London, I found that Shakespeare had made a determined effort to hide a secret play about Man and the Sun. Man worships the Sun, Man leaves the Sun, Man returns to the Sun (comatose Juliet). But she is not dead, really.

Anyway, based on Shakespeare's idea (it's not just in R&J; it's expressed in other plays too), a return to the sun (that is primarily using the sun's energy) means that a lot of competitive struggles may go away after a while, and people will be more cooperative and more kind to each other. So many things hve been done out of fear that someone else would get ahead. We don't really need so many of the luxurious material items, or want them, but we are understandably afraid of being humiliated if someone else has them and not us.

The change in this basic dynamic, one that was based on negativity and fear, will cause a lot of advertising and marketing to disappear over the next 100 years. People will just shrug----it's already happening----and they'll feel that the "elite" are not so elite and the "non-elite" are not so low either.

I see a more folkish, spiritual, less materialistic world. Good-bye, Goneril and Regan, the two nasty, brilliant scheming, competitive sisters in "King Lear". Hello, Cordelia, the quiet one (by the way, she is the sun figure). King Lear is Mankind, on his way back to the sun, (accompanied by his Fool, maybe the plays of Shakespeare) and he'll get there, and it will be spiritually positive in the end. We learned a lot on our journey.

Pen name---Gemma Nishiyama; my novel at Amazon is "Juliet is the Sun" about Shakespeare's secret allegories about the sun.

Design Fiction is so now

2100 doesn't seem that far away. Soloyent green lite, there is still 80 yrs left in the game? conservatively If the return side of the hump is identical to the up side and peak is now we will be living in the 1930's worth of FFs with 4 times the population.
grim but doable. And in more likelihood other streams of energy will flatten the impact.

A massive dystopia though.

the numbers of people are insane.

Organizationally a hardening of the social classes based on wealth will continue is my guess. The boiled frog analogy holds for me.

The average life of a species is 5-10 million years. So the species of today lived through the Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene.

The global average temperature in the mid-Pliocene (3.3–3 mya) was 2–3 °C higher than today, global sea level 25 m higher and the Northern hemisphere ice sheet was ephemeral before the onset of extensive glaciation over Greenland that occurred in the late Pliocene around 3 Ma. -- Wikipedia

I interpret that to mean the species around today are warm-earth species which survived several ice ages.

I know a scientist who studies Lazarus plants, i.e. plants that appear to be dead but revive magically when they get rain. The hope is to get better drought resistance in crops. Interestingly, many plants contain the Lazarus genes but they are not switched on. Which suggests they lived through long dry periods, as I guess the ice ages were, like Antarctica today.

The typical life style of a species appears to be: start small -> flourish -> be cut down by competition and climate -> adapt -> start small -> continue the cycle until fatal combination of circumstances causes extinction.

Something that interests me is how behavior and physical characteristics become aligned. Any species has its strong points and weak points. It has to get food, shelter, and make babies that will get food, shelter, and make babies, over and over, without destroying the habitat that supports it. Over time it learns how to behave in a manner that will make good use of its characteristics and environment.

This is where homo sapiens fails. It is a young species that has never experienced serious competition or disaster and is destroying its habitat. At some point there has to be a big die-off and emergence of a new homo sapiens with more conservation-minded behavior.

James Michael Greer is writing, in on-line installments, a novel "Stars Reach" set 400+ years in the future in the Mississippi River Valley. The plot driver is that around 2030 or so we made contact with an alien species and a long endurance communications post was set up in mid-America - and the search for that installation.

I am writing, in non-linear fashion, a fan fiction piece about the only society on earth that maintained social & political stability on the way down by making rational decisions - such as technology triage (while retaining records on how to later recreate the technology given up) - The Union of Scandinavia, and later, the Union of Scandinavia & Antarctica. Star's Reach- Scandinavia

http://starsreachscand.blogspot.com/
Alan

I made this comment elsewhere but...

Kropotkin as well as Darwin document how mutual aid is key to survival and ubiquitous through out the natural world.

The artificial, misguided focus on “survival of the fittest” has been one of the biggest factors in the downfall of humanity IMO.

I would like to see someone do some deep historical analysis of the historical evolution of this tragedy.

For the end of TOD, I've knocked together a forwarding looking article - exactly the type of thing that couldn't find a place within the data centric TOD structure. Hopefully some useful ideas here for what the post peak world will look like, suitable maybe for a campfire...

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Anatomy of a Decline

Introduction
This is a quick and dirty runthrough of how how the decline could play out, touching on a number of areas and laying out how peak oil could affect our systems of society. Like all scenarios and predictions, it should be used for illumination, not support – it will be wrong, and the first step about ensuring that it IS wrong is to recognise the signs and portents ahead of time.

Production Drivers – Tipping from Plateau to Decline
With the application of fracking to first US gas, and then oil tight prospects, it has become fashionable to believe that peak oil is overcome; that production can switch to the fracked sources, and that everything will be OK into the future (or at least the next five years, which is all that counts to the decision makers). The assumption is that application of this magic wand globally, together with other high priced sources, will enable production to continue at a sufficient rate, if at a higher price (~$110 per barrel).

There are several factors which have been missed however. Not only is the applicability of fracking still intimately connected to geology and thus limited in geography, any of these high priced sources are high priced BECAUSE their production rates are constrained. Either they only produce slowly, only produce for a limited time, or take so much application of equipment that you can only develop a few of them. The price goes up because the macroscopic rate of production per well goes down. As far as keeping the plateau going, that’s not a helpful situation – you are in a doubly red queen race of falling conventional production/falling field lifetimes, and falling rate of production at constant effort. Eventually that kind of death spiral breaks in a very definite way – if we have switched from annual growth to the plateau as the aim, then at some point even this is given up as well and people stop drilling with the aim of maintaining constant production. We should expect a phase change in approach/perception within the industry, with everyone switching at once as the economic and outlook factors force a new mindset as the new status quo.

In short, we will flip into decline when the puff runs out of the red queen drillers.

Reactions to Decline
How we react to decline is linked to how sharp that decline rate is. A 2% decline rate would mean a 1.75 mbpd annual reduction in production, whereas the geologic rate of ~6% would give 4.5mbpd. Obviously fracked oil is even worse though at present it is immaterial to the peaking question. At least in the early stages of the fall, I would suggest that decline rates of 1-2 mbpd could be expected, and that that rate could be hidden by accounting fudges. However within 2-3 years, we should expect everyone to recognise the decline had set it – so what changes would that bring to ‘the game’?

First, to the financial markets, the implications of peaked oil mean disruption, and thus the opportunity to make money. The attention given in the past few years to ‘peak oil’ probably mean the big concerns already have a book labelled ‘Peak Oil Game Plan’ on the shelf, ready to go. Cornering the market via control of the infrastructure seems a likely approach, spiking the price of oil in a very short timespan. At the same time divesting assets which will suffer in a peaked world will happen in the biggest Black Monday ever. Since this will be intimately linked to the shift in the attitudes of the drillers and will likely come early on – it will probably be pointed to as ‘the’ moment, even though it is only really a consequence of the physical reality playing out. The wise journalist has the right headline ready to go on this – can I suggest “the day the Earth stopped” as suitably messianic?

The production decline, the geology, the price spike, the market collapse, will form the right ‘crisis point’ for government action – and again I think that a play book will already be written and ‘on the shelf’. How that plays depends on the precise position of the country, its industry, and its policies:

As we move down the table, the impact is more significant, faster, and thus more likely to cause collapse. As we move right in the table the country is more able to deal with it because of better GDP (if it wants to), but if it mismanages things it can equally well collapse.

Governments and Markets – Bifurcation
Within the governmental reaction, there is likely to be a level of bifurcation and triage as the organisations of the state seek to both maintain the status quo, whilst at the same time positioning the state for the changed circumstances.

First, not all usages of fuel are equal, and the using the market to determine between them will likely cause more problems than a more command and control approach would yield. In a typical economy as much as half of the consumption could be considered ‘vital’, for items such as trucking, air travel, mass transport, services, farming, politicians vehicles, etc. Those governments in the ‘high tax’ regime are most likely to implement explicit rationing and direction of fuel to particular usages, possibly via a differential taxation system (as the UK already does), and possibly even more explicitly. Lower levels of taxation are correlated with less interventionist governments, and likely more underhand approaches to fuel allocation which will probably lead to earlier breaks in key systems and more strife as people see the rich wasting fuel whilst food trucks lay idle.

The rationing will bifurcate the market into parts where price rises are held in check, and parts where multiples of the generic price rise will be felt as the burden of higher prices is allocated unequally. This will hit first, hardest, and fastest on the long distance commuters – ride sharing will rocket, but it will likely start the bifurcation along geographic lines, within countries and regions.

The Public
With the markets and government playing out their pre-prepared plans, what impact will befall the general, voting, public?

Well first, even with the advance notice that has been played out, it will be a shock. Government reactions to the oil decline will seem disproportionate to the size of the problem. Fuel will still be available at the pump and people will grumble at the cost, but accept it. However, as the years tick by, the new normal will switch to fuel becomes less of turning the tap and more hunting out a precious resource. Industry, food, service jobs etc. will all be affected by the higher prices and lower availability, putting the knife into many companies, increasing unemployment and over the life of one administration turning whole areas of the countries into wastelands – ones which there will be no money to fund safety nets for its inhabitant, and where transport is difficult. Restrictions to travel, either implicit or explicit, will become the norm in these regions.

It appears, both from policies already enacted and reactions to the GFC, that the reaction of most governments will be heavy handed in policing, and to segregate whole sections of society in a grand triage action. Those who can’t ‘afford it’ will be pushed out, and out will mean unable to reach work and thus unable to survive. If you are resourcing a society for the downslope of the oil age, how many people do you need, how many mouths? The US already has some of this, as does the UK – geographic regions and outer suburbs that are held at arms length and used as ‘people dumps’. It would appear that the governments are pinning their hopes on domestic spying to keep tabs on all malcontents (at least taking into account that they haven’t actually stopped these actions, or changed in any way, after being exposed). Their approach to avoiding the MENA ‘arab spring’ problem is likely to be the knock on the door in the early morning - time will tell if the panopticon is any better than East Germany’s spying operations at preventing revolution. However, as bad as this sounds, it is probably going to stay a better alternative than revolutions would be – it’s not generally the cream that floats to the top in such situations, and there is no change of government that’s going to fix the effects of oil decline on the living standards of the general populous.

‘lands Model – Turns that take you down
Pulling this and other post decline effects together, it is possible to view the post decline world as an intersecting set of ‘lands’, where unequal resource allocation occurs, and where the effective decline rate seen by the members of those ‘lands’ will be different.

The most understood of those is Jeffrey J. Brown's Export Land Model – 'Exportland' the differing circumstances of exporters to importers where exporters fulfil domestic needs first (and thus suffer no decline in availability) and where importers feel the full force of declining supply (and thus higher decline percentages).

However, there are the other forms of unequal resource allocation, with equal or greater impact on the individual. First, there is ‘Refineryland’ – where exported oil can only actually go to those countries or regions that have refineries to accept and process it, are on pipelines, or who can attract the tankers to their shores. Those countries who host these refineries will insist that domestic concerns are met first, before any exports of refined product are made, thus the countries depending on the export of refined product are at a disadvantage and will feel faster decline rates.

Second, there is ‘Militaryland’ – where military force and strong arm economic factors can be brought to bear on exporters to ensure oil flows in particular directions. Not only do we have the situation of Canada, where US tactics are likely to require all oil flows south, we have overt military force, used to gain control of resource and ‘protect interests’. China is likely to insist that contracts are honoured, and if not, will seek to grab control as needed. The likely outcome of this is being a member of Exportland will be something of a poison chalice for those not big enough to take charge of their own destinies.

Third is ‘Rationingland’ – where local government action seeks to apportion limited fuel resources to defined uses. And last is ‘Wealthland’ – the generally understood situation where if you can’t afford it, you can’t use it.

If you are on the wrong side of all of these various ‘lands’ you suffer an effective decline rate which is the product of these various effects. Thus, if the natural decline rate = 2%, the wrong side of:

• Exportland accounts for half of all demand.
• Refineryland is 20% of countries (bigger users tend to have their local refineries)
• Militaryland is 80% of countries
• Rationingland is probably half of all demand, and
• Wealthland is 80% of people

and the combination effectively multiplies the natural decline rate by approximately 30 times, to 60% pa. As such, if the ‘lands model were to play out directly, we would expect defined groups of users to fall in sequence, with available, affordable, fuel dropping to zero within a year or two. Obviously that is not likely to be case, and declining fuel availability will not be a regimented as the ‘lands model would suggest. However, the illumination it provides, that the post peak world will be one or unequal allocation and fast local decline rates will be the norm, helps to show how to adapt.

These effects can already be seen to happen in places like Bangladesh, where access to fuel and power are becoming difficult and stratified with position in society/business.

Break points – I can takes no more
With the scenarios described, it can be seen that regions will likely suffer ‘fast collapse’ against a background of a heavy handed panopticon state control – so the question of how people react determines the eventual destination.

The process of triage, with the police state to enforce it, brings the ever present likelihood of civil insurrection. However it also brings with it the likelihood of states breaking down into smaller autonomous units. Those on the ‘up’ side of any ‘lands demarcation have the incentive to break from the rest to preserve their position - those on the ‘down’ side, to break away to get more control and the promise of a better situation. As such the forces on all sides will be to force countries towards smaller independent regions, split along have/have not lines. This will particularly play out in the US, where existing divisions between and within states will intensify.

Adaption
For the individual, the primary question is how you navigate this post peak world. The usual advice of localise and move to the non-discretionary part of the economy is fine. However, in the context of the above model, this is not necessarily sufficient. Other advice on adaptation includes:

• Location in a country with its own production (not exportland), enough military and economic force to resist strong arm tactics (not militaryland), and its own refineries (not refinaryland). It should also have a robust industrial base, a low GINI index, and high fuel taxation already. I don’t think any country actually meets all of those requirements, but Canada and Russia probably tick many boxes.
• Location near/in regions of wealth/power and with exportable basic resources/industry. Whilst the immediate reaction of most is to look towards the ‘pastoral idyll’ as the primary model, the issue is that subsistence farming has always been at the bottom of the pile in even medieval economies – and are thus likely to find themselves in the ‘discarded’ regions.
• Prepare and purchase now. The speed of the decline could well catch out those who look to headline global figures and expect that to be the general case. If you want solar panels, get them now. Same for electric bikes, insulated houses, etc. Whilst you might have time to adapt later, the expectation and the planning assumptions should not be for years to decades of notice, but for fast fall and limited liquid funds when it does happen.
• Banks, and the global credit bubble will not survive the early stages of decline (but I think most already realise this). Money in the bank or pensions is likely to be lost.
• The world that results will remember what it has lost and the localisation of supply and production will be felt deeply. It is likely that global trade will continue, but with many wealth imbalances collapsed in the decline, trade is likely to reset to trade in resources and basic items primarily. At a minimum we are looking at a regression of a few hundred years in social structures, but still with high tech devices. The world that results will be a localised world with global reach.
• Paradoxically, careers which are virtual, online, and where expertise/skills are key to the delivery of value, might be the most secure skillsets in the post peak world. Being able to move or transfer that derived value to those areas which maintain their modern society, might be the smartest move.

-----------------------------------------

It will be interesting to see in future years, how much of this occurs.

First of all, I'd like to thank Nate for his great posts over the years and also for the opportunity for a couple of key posts; my favorite being A Trip to Todd's. Now, on to the future!

I had actually prepared a key post on this topic but then Campfire died. I see several key elements: Big is bad/Small is beautiful, Everyone is productive and, finally, Personal responsibility in all things.

1. Big is bad/Small is Beautiful

In a nut shell, this means the end of organizations (with the exception of some societally run manufacturing). This would include government, business including health care, finance, schools, etc. This would also be true of living arrangements, my expectation being that people would live in productive family or affinity groups on sufficient land to produce their needs not suburbs or cities.

Necessary actions would be taken on the basis of consensus. Yes, this is time consuming but it eliminates the "middle man" of government.

I want to stick in a special mention about health care since Obamacare is around the corner. There won't be hospitals and health specialists. But, there is no reason people cannot learn the basics of emergency medicine to take care of 90% of their needs. It also means going back to the past for natural remedies but there is now a large body of research showing that many are better than today's drugs. This does mean that more will die than now but isn't that "life"?

2. Everyone is productive

No paper pushers and useless eaters. This is necessary because society will not have an excess to support them. There would be no "consumer society" or stores but rather people would receive an entitlement of goods they cannot produce that would be delivered once a year.

3. Personal responsibility in all things

This is the key. You want to be healthy? Then live a healthy life. You want food? Then grow it. Live on a road? Then maintain it.

My key post would have run about 5,000 words so I'm leaving a lot out such as the "Robust Internet". In any case, society would be more tribal. All durable goods would be user repairable for generations. The idea of "progress" would be replaced by living a satisfying and fulfilling life which those of us already living low on the hog know is possible.

Todd

What is the population and energy throughput per capita relative to today?

What is the energy mix? How do we interact with eachother and other species?

How is human society organized in 2100? - (or 12100)

Questions 1-3 for the year 12100.
-- See "The Next Million Years" by Charles Galton Darwin. This 100 page monograph was publishes during the 50's and can be downloaded free. CG Darwin assumed that greatly reduced numbers of humans would still be around in a million years surviving primarily on income energy. I assume organization in small perhaps isolated tribes.

Nate- specifics, as to what will- or should- happen next I find to be not only elusive, but almost a waste of effort. We are on the edge of the utterly unknown, and our vision is formed by what lies behind us. And very few of us could ever agree even on what's behind.

I just want to raise an additional possibility for what lies ahead; from my standpoint as a biologist.

Possibly? Probably? Speciation.

Pure biology. This IS what happens. A species becomes excessively successful; expands beyond its carrying capacity. That process involves the creation of a large number of nearly 'null' genetic variations in the population, which because it was so successful last year did not result in mortality. The perfect gene pool for new specializations to separate.

H.G. Wells took it to extremes, for literary reasons; Morlocks and Eloi. But - his logic there was very sound. If you look around- we already have sub populations where gene flow is now reduced between groups (as well as previous isolated groups now hybridizing- then re-isolating.)

My biggest worry is the rise of Homo ferox (my name). The mafias and other organized crime groups are- exactly that. Homo sapiens, if it exists, is clearly endangered, right now. And as someone, possibly Paul Ehrlich, put it (approximately) "The long term survival value of a large brain has not, yet, been demonstrated."

And that, at least, is demonstrably true.

I think fusion will eventually be harnessed, either by mainstream science and technology (which would however suffer greatly during any societal decline) or by a genius thinking in a different way. When that will happen is impossible to know. In the interim humans will perforce poke along with a smaller population and sustainable resource usage.

After fusion there could be another surge that makes the last century pale in comparison. The energy would be available to escape the Earth, opening new frontiers that would allow emigrating humans to act pretty much as they do today. Those deciding to stay on Earth would either end up with a small population living in luxury or a large population living cheek-by-jowl.

Pretty much the future depicted in Star Trek.

How is human society organized in 2100?

My thought is that as fossil fuels sunset, so does the middle class.

The upper class always had servants, that will not change.

The lower class did everything themselves, and it was almost a lock-in to any upward weath/quality-of-life movement.

It is my opinion that the fact the middle class exists, is because machines act as our servants (air conditioners, refridgerators, clothes and dish washing machines, automobiles), and allow us a better standard of living and free us up from labors we would historically have had to do ourselves.

So for the specific of 2100, I am predicting people will be driving less, using air conditioners less, etc. The middle-class will be less of a percent of the population than today.

Sorry to be the doomer here, but 2100 we will have a much more boring and much deader world. Large swats of land in North Africa, Middle Est, Western USA and Australia will be so hot for parts of the year you die just by being there. Those places will be depopulated. Agriculture will have collapsed everywhere. Costal cities swamped. The sea will be dead and anarobic bacterias will spew up sulphurhydrates that will stink rotten eggs and kill you. Some people will still live on in north central Asia, far away from the stinky oceans. They will have primitive techs and use leftovers from the Ancients (thats us). There are no bees, no trees and few flowers.

As for the energy mix, I don't consider it an important or even interesting question.

My hope for the future is that we look towards those societies trending downwards in population growth (some in absolute terms, some with declining birthrates) and decide to emulate them rather than work at changing them. There are many avoided costs with a declining population - fewer schools, greater employment (and how loads of unemployed young people are supposed to be paying enough taxes to offset their costs is beyond me) lighter draws on resources, less maintenance of infrastructure, a larger role for natural processes to do their thing. Yet all we hear about is "the costs of supporting pensioners." Suppose the trend of a declining population is self-limiting - that is, supposing we do not stop reproducing entirely - how do we make this work and support it as a gradual, peaceful, and beneficial trend for the planet?

Policy and opinion makers seem to completely dismiss any role for birth control (possibly because most of them are men, and they just don't think about it), in spite of the fact it has become widely used in only the past generation - and the effects are already evident.

It isn't clear that the US's higher birth rate in comparison to Europe is translating into more "good jobs" and better lives for young people. Automation and outsourcing will continue, so there will be even fewer "good jobs" for children born now. How to support those rational people who are electing to have fewer children in recognition of the fact there will be fewer jobs in the future, and an unsustainable strain on the planet from an increasing population?

A while back, before some policy changes at TOD, I contributed this to the pool of thinking about the future:
Bottleneck by William Catton - A Review
November 24, 2009
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5954

George

So Nate what have you been doing since you left TOD? When you left I had the impression it was because you were temporarily overwhelmed with your PhD coursework/research and I expected you to come back.

Do you have a website or are there forums you are active on?

I see no question about the availability of minerals. Copper, silver, phosphorus etc. Aldous Huxley first mentioned phosphorus in the novel Point Counterpoint in 1928.
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2008-04-01/phosphorus-apr-1?

Many thanks to TOD and it's many contributors and commentators over the years. An invaluable resource that helped me learn a hell of a lot about the predicament we face!

My 2 cents is that the world will become a more localised, depopulated place.
As net energy production declines, incomes will fall in real terms and prices of necessities will rise. We'll see civil wars in some places, other places will pull their act together, maybe Scandanavia, Russia and Canada. We as yet don't know how to shut down nuclear power plants in a safe manner, where will all that waste be stored for 10,000 years? Already Fukushima risks depopulating Japan if reactor 4's spent fuel pool topples over.

The population will decline as healthcare services recede, people have fewer kids and as climate change ravages large swathes of the Earth leading to declines in food production. God knows if some madman will take the helm of a country with nuclear weapons? What happens if a nuclear war is triggered over resource scarcity?

It's not going to be a lot of fun on the way down, those who will survive have to be very, very lucky!

I would like to point out that 2100 is exactly as many years from us as 1926 was. Do we have any historians here? How has the world changed from 1926 to now? The technology comes to mind. Anything else?

Ursula K LeGuin: Always coming home

Campfire final exam
I have much enjoyed and profited from the Oil Drum, and offer sincere thanks to all.

Over the 7 + yrs I have been here, I have made a few points over and over, to not much visible effect, but no matter- what I have said is said by many, more persuasively, and to a wider audience. Here is my summary, for me as much as anyone.

First. It is simply wrong. on voluminous and highly visible evidence, that everyone is bottomlessly greedy and selfish. I have done a lot of travel in my previous life as a company exec. and I have found such evidence everywhere on the globe. A large majority of people have NOT been greedy and selfish. They have wanted to be cooperative when they could.
The obvious mitigation of greed and selfishness is to distribute essentials so people can be otherwise.

Footnote; My sad experience is that there is one class of human which actually can be relied upon to be more or less greedy and selfish- MBA’s from all the most famous business schools. Since I gave up being an exec, and sought “more highly trained” people as company leaders, I found them not only unethical but also downright foolish. Fool here defined as “one whose actions benefit no one”. Their actions not only defeated their own private purposes, but also resulted in serious harm to everyone. Over and over. Every one of these “highly qualified” sociopaths was tall, good looking, and charming.

Second. There is no way to predict any detail of climate effects. This is a well known fact of simple logic, so I am puzzled by the predictions of so many of you good folks. Never forget the lecture by Prigogine about climate - here, as in any complex situation highly sensitive to small perturbations, detail prediction rapidly decays in precision to the lower limit determined by physics. So, if for example, we increase the temperature of the atmosphere, all we can say about its future with any certainty is that the extremes can be wider.

Third There are plenty of relatively obvious passable ways forward for humanity despite its present condition of extreme overshoot and depletion. One example: recognizing the greatest sin is foreclosure on future opportunity, we agree to work for the benefit of all; we stop doing unnecessary, wasteful things; we use those resources to move entirely off carbon and on to solar, which we know full well how to do; we limit our reproduction and let nature take the excess population in due time; in the interim we use our overabundance of junk as raw material for the construction of the new world, which can be a paradise, done rightly.

I rest my case. Be good.

I think it is important to keep in mind that fire was around before homo sapiens evolved. We evolved in an environment where fire was already available. This shaped us. Foe example, it allowed and encouraged us to have weak teeth, because we eat cooked food.

It is commonly thought that man invented fire, but it is more accurate to say fire invented man. It made us what we are.

Nate, thanks for this thought provoking post. You have been much-missed here.

My initial response before reading y'alls... (a mix of coulds and shoulds)

Energy throughput a fraction of today's - 1/4th? 1/10th?. Population certainly half or less than today. Religion must be killed (but given that it's a creation of the human mind, of course it won't be). Ecological awareness must be spread – this will occur naturally (but 'too late' in the short term thought horizons of those of us alive today) as it will be bloody apparent to everyone living that human overpopulation and consumption of fossil fuels has laid waste to the natural systems upon which we all ultimately depend. Other self-aware species? I can only hope the dolphins will make it, but given what we're doing to the oceans, I don't have high hopes. The other great apes* have no chance, and will be gone well before 2100, in the darkest throes of the bottleneck, likely to come around or before mid-century. Those alive in 2100 will regard us as devils and fools.

Society must be organized more tribally, communally, locally, cooperatively. Today's intentional communities movement, particularly the ecovillage wing, is a nod in the right direction, though with a long evolution to yet follow. Penny Kelly's book “Robes” may come be be revered as prescient. People will certainly have to be vastly different than those today in regards to simple, basic knowledge of seasons, sun-paths and the like. Those in 2100 will not be orienting their houses to face the street, but rather to face the sun. Young people of the day will aspire to nurture the world back to health, in any way that they can, from fostering some small bit of habitat for something wild to thrive in, to finding new ways to benignly harvest sunlight for some task.

…

But when I look at the various snippets that others have included here, it seems to me almost impossible that we make it to 2100 with anything like today's world remotely intact. There are numerous possibilities that others have touched on in their posts, that I will merely list together here and point out that some or all of them are likely to come about in some form, such that any coherent society at that date is unlikely. In no particular order whatever – slavery, dead (or nearly so) oceans, uninhabitable continental interiors, nuclear waste release, wars of various sorts, mineral depletion (on top of our raison d'etre – energy depletion), sea level rise, greatly diminished biological diversity, climate chaos, toxic soil, poisoned/depleted aquifers, religious zealotry gone rampant, soylent green...

There are, of course, more.

*One of the more moving moments of my life came back in 1985 in Washington's National Zoo, when amidst a day of wandering the 'exhibits' and feeling more and more oppressed by the plight of the beings on 'display', I had a few moments alone at the enclosure of a large silverback gorilla. I recall vividly marvelling at the massive size of his head, but much more poignant was the clarity I had whilst we looked into each other's eyes that this was a sentient, self-aware being. I know it's projection on my part, but he almost seemed to be saying to me, 'How could you do this to a fellow being, let alone such a close cousin'. And, 'Your time will come, my friend, your time will come...'

I think more then a few necular power plants will have "melted down" (either the core, the cooling pools,or both)!!
This will create unlivable conditions in many areas that might have otherwise been useful. The added pressure of reduced land will further amplify deplorable conditions. Survivability decreases as options/choices are removed. Competition increases resulting in population losses due to fighting, starvation, and diseases. Fudalisim and "war lords" will rule the day. I believe a new "Dark Ages" will result that lasts for centuries.

DAD

I think climate change will be the big issue in 2100. Have you seen this article or a summary of it?
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034018/article

I think the world is going to do very little about cutting carbon dioxide emissions resulting in very high temperature peaks resulting in tens of millions of deaths for those living in the tropics and a quite unpleasant climate for those living in the U.S.

Politics is about who gets what. Before 2100 this will become an urgent question as climate-induced natural disasters overwhelm stored supplies and social coping systems.

People will not sit still and accept their fate. They will move, on foot, by bus and truck, in their millions, flooding into the more fertile areas. And this will lead to clashes.

Politicians with the answers will rise to the top. And the answers will include references to ancient enmities. "They did [whatever] to us in the past, therefore they do not deserve to live." To religious and ideological chasms. "They believe [whatever], they are cockroaches/infidels/a threat to our way of life, they do not deserve to live." To past behavior. "Their own fault. They used their resources recklessly and gave no thought for the future. We will not pay for their irresponsibility."

One way or another, the surplus will be culled.

I see a patchwork quilt world of gated communities, refugee camps, local and regional wars, with maybe a few areas like Switzerland managing to live like we do today. A Pareto world, where 20% live the good life and the rest struggle to scrape by.

Will there be a "soft landing" as we depopulate gracefully? It's possible. The ideas and technology are out there. But not, I fear, the willingness to be self-denying for the benefit of the greater good.

Thanks Nate for all the contributions.

Thinking about it for the last 7 - 10 years I tend to imagine a society similar to today's but with more inequality and more technology. A tiny minority with advanced technology and boundless opportunities and luxuries. A small middle class toiling away comfortably (in relative terms) and a vast majority living in a near survival poverty (A lot like third world countries where you find extremely wealthy people gated away from the poor).

Assuming there isn't a phase change or tipping point that halts investment in technology (like some unforseen systemic collapse, a global war or a cultural mindshift against science), I think Biology will show impressive advances (the cost of sequencing DNA is shrinking exponentially, and synthetic biology could be about to explode as printing proteines meets computational genomics). I think this will result in a mixture of disaster and progress. Unforseen viruses, crops, biofuels, organisms, ... who knows, maybe Humans can even be altered to do photosynthesis themselves. If progress continues to accelerate like it does now I would expect modified humans (The minority who can afford it) being healthier, longer living and acquiring new capabilities.

Energywise, I think cheap solar PV reaching 20% - 30% efficiencies could be a game changer. If it trully becomes cheap we could see it included everywhere: pavements, walls, cars, windows, etc. Imagine the side of a bus stop. Such a surface covered with PV and oriented towards the sun could generate now 400W and cost $300. But if costs drop to 10$ and it's twice as efficient, you might ignore orientation and stick the panel there even if it only produces 100W ... who cares at that price? So another factor of 10 or 20 in the price and a doubling in efficiency could really change architecture and energy. I see a good chance of this happening. Of course storage could be the missing link or the black swan that changes it all. Regarding transport I would say more people will be priced out [Making the 1st world resemble the 3rd]. I think all renewables will be pursued aggresively for profit and fusion could be a large disruptor (with unintended consequences like storage of radioactive containment materials, accidents, or excessive abundance of energy).

Year 12,100? Anything goes. Technology could have continued, population brough under control and fusion+fission+renewables feed a world where synthetic biology can create any animal and we can live centuries (Aubrey De Gray style)... or perhaps even upload our intelligence to "the matrix" ... or only hunter gatherers are left in a wasteland and everything in between. Impossible to say.

// I've started theoildrumS for the readers interested in keeping the TOD conversation alive.

Thank you for your excellent efforts over the years, Nate.

Your comments on resources and human behavior have greatly helped to shape my thoughts on the near term future. During the last few years, my outlook has gone from happy ignorance (not really very satisfying after reading the 'limits to growth' in the mid 70s) to despair as the realization that politics and business are completely ill-equipped to deal with anything less than 'healthy' (exponential!) growth and are very good at ignoring bad news, to something like pessimistic optimism.

It would seem that there is going to be a lot of pain as cherished business models fail. This is going to be difficult for all, but particularly those that have not ever thought about the issues of living on a small, round world with dwindling finite resources.

I see the near term future as being characterized by increasingly less subtle and persistent problems that refuse to acquiesce.
Some time ago, I would have expected that an $85B per month debt program like QE3 would set the US economy on fire, but it now only produces moderate life signs.

There are some very worrying clouds on the horizon: Recently, I was listening to an interview with Susan George (Transnational Institute) where she was discussing the illegitimate power of transnational corporations, as well as the interconnections between the world's major companies, mostly financial institutions. She was describing how fragile this arrangement is, and that a failure of one of these corporations any well cause a domino failure of the remainder.
How likely is this as the exponential growth model runs up against fundamental limits?

I often describe farming production as having been dialled to '11', which is clearly unsustainable. Agribusiness is highly dependent of fertilizer and fuel inputs, which are fast approaching peak supply and exhaustion. Peak phosphorus is likely to be 2030 and this will produce a very significant reduction in food production.

It is reasonable that hunger and strife will take its toll on the human population, particularly in the poorer parts of the world. Is it possible that all large African animals will be eaten during the course of the famines in a series of events reminiscent of Easter island?

It is clear that the human population will have to decrease to a sustainable level. I feel that the UN population projections are far too conservative and the population could reduce more dramatically towards the one or two billion that are likely to be sustainable. Particularly as storm events become more severe, affecting the remaining agriculture.

Children born today will live in interesting times!

Thanks Nate.

For quite a while, PO talk would veer to the narrative. We've always been story tellers, and it is often the best way to get a point across. The lament I heard back then was we needed a paperback bestseller, maybe several, to get the message of PO across. Now the that issue of PO has moved over, it's how do we go from here, and again, searching for a narrative.

"But ah, the stories we could tell" Jimmy Buffet. It's always the stories, bushman or modern man--great photo.

And if it all blows up and goes to Hell...

Much has been said of this Campfire portion of TOD. Both sides. But one I haven't heard mentioned, who pushed and shoved for this forum's creation till he was about banned, was Airedale.

Thanks Airedale.

We don't have to design new societies. There are stable societies that lasted for thousands of years:
- agricultural societies in China, Korea and Japan
- peasant societies on the Nile
- the tribes of Africa

F.H. King documented the first in Farmers of Forty Centuries, Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan.

We have hieroglyphic records that show the fellahin lived in much the same fashion from 3,000 BC to nearly the present day.

The early explorers discovered an unspoiled Africa that was teeming with game.

I'm not sure what happened in the East. The Aswan High Dam and population pressure is finishing the Nile people. And African game has succumbed to private property, fencing, and the AK-47.

The title of Nate's thinkpiece is "Towards Homo Sapiens" - implying we are not there yet. I think we were there, but something happened. Some mutation produced Homo Titanicus which dominated the earth for a while. Homo sapiens will arise again from the survivors in the lifeboats.

Nate:
The first item you posted was in 2006:
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/6/7/235952/0498

The last was yesterday (so far)

Your last Campfire was "If I was a billionaire" in November 2010.

From me to you, a heartfelt, "Thank you!" for all of the time, energy (curious pun here), and caring you have taken, used and shown over the many years you have been participating. I have enjoyed all of your musings; not sure that I didn't express disagreement from time to time, but that would have been rare.

Good job.

Have missed the Campfires!!!

Craig

Thanks, Nate, for bringing the Campfire back one more time. As a non-technical type, this was always my favorite part of the Oil Drum. Your chosen illustrations for this post say it all. Things are going to be getting pretty primitive, by and by.

This really is a hard topic to answer given the level of uncertainty we have. I guess you could as easily conclude that humanity would be thriving as much as you could conclude the end of our industrial/technological civilisation.

Fun!

Thanks, Nate.

Alexander

I'm starting a new thread because the earlier comments involving ethics are now intermingled with so many others that following them them is a pain.

I hope to comment later tonight on some technical aspects of life as i imagine it will be lived in 2100.

I'm pasting in my comment. The title means nothing, it's just the file name I used to save it.

I agree with Twain; ethics are a matter of principle, at times when one is prosperous enough to afford principles.

At other times, ethics can be described as `"rules composed by people in power who are hopeful those less successful than themselves will play in a game rigged against them".
I don't embrace this cynic's position, but I can't easily refute it.

I think of myself as a conservative, but I'm more of a populist and realist.

Keep in mind the saying that if you aren't a liberal when you are young, you have no heart; and that if you aren't a conservative when you are old, you have no brain.

Todays real conservatives are truly yesterday's liberals.I know. I was young once myself, as strange as that seems to me today.

I have numerous relatives who are dependent on govt handouts, mostly old folks on social security and medicare, one nephew on disability due to an auto accident. Life would be very hard for me, looking after my ancient father, if it weren't for his ss check, and my own, even though we own a nice little farm with all the usual modern day equipment ,and a nice house, all long since paid for.

At my age, given the current economic situation,I doubt I could earn enough money to support us and look after him too.

My family is mostly hard core Baptist,although I am a closet atheist, and we look after our own. My mother lived at home, bedridden for her last whole decade, with not a single day away in a nursing home. My father will never have to live in a nursing home unless I am unable to care for him.

I have many acquaintances of all political stripes who have happily shuffled their older relatives off to die heartbroken of loneliness among strangers in a strange place. I'm careful not to talk to them about such subjects as ethics, because I have a big mouth and am too apt to tell them what I actually think of them.

I would be living a harder and shorter life without the benefit of the group ethic as manifested in these govt entitlements.

Now as to the ethics of the next century- they aren't going to be a whole lot different from the ethics we practice today.

Government may shrink in some cases down to the size of individual families and bands.

Ethics may seem to fall to the wayside as the size of the survival problem grows, but the core principle involved will endure so long as we endure, because ethics are no more- but no less!!! - than a special facet of evolutionary psychology.

There seems to be a good bit of evidence emerging for the existence of what we might call universal human ethics, or maybe even universal ethics.
Our ape cousins unquestionably display behaviors best explained as ethical, and other species from dogs to dolphins seem to have evolved at least the beginnings of ethical behaviors.

As I see it, while the evolved human ethic is universal, it is also highly flexible in practice. An inflexible ethics system would be of no more use to us than a simple blind instinct, such as the tendency to freeze for a moment when we hear a strange unexpected noise; this is too say, it would likely be of some help, but it would also likely result in a lot of undesirable behaviors too, in terms of survival.

Here's a very short story I once wrote "upon a midnight dreary… weak and weary" when I grew particularly disillusioned with my species as the result of pondering many a volume of history, philosophy, and scientific lore.

Writing it helped me reconcile the religious ethics imprinted on me as a small child (love thy neighbor, except when God wants you to stone him , or worse) with an understanding of our true origins and nature, and our evolved universal human ethic.

I am afraid this story will prove to be all indicative of what most of the human race will experience within the next century, given the high likelihood that overshoot is going to be in full flower well before 2100.Of course some lucky people in the right places may escape the worst of overshoot and collapse.

If this little story resonates, I may try to write one about survivors in a more inviting environment, and post it before comments close.

I have never titled this story.It's from memory.

Jonesey moved from group to group doing all he could to encourage and comfort his little band, helping here to bandage a bleeding foot, there to repair a a split boot with a length of leather string cut from the small roll in his ever shrinking pack, making sure every body had water at least. In the beginning ,everybody had had enough food,if barely so on short rations, to make their escape. Jonesey still had food but he would not eat tonight.The smaller children would eat at least a little.He would see to it.....The adults who had nothing left would do without.

They would be running at again at daylight. The semi domesticated wolves hunting them could see quite well in the dark, and track even better, due to the night moisture on the rocky ground and sparse grass. Night travel was no good anyway, they were too tired.Daylight travel would be faster after a nights rest.

He gave a little boy his last piece of dried fruit .His mother's eyes telegraphed a heady mix of gratitude ,invitation, hope, and fear.Her man had not returned after two days away on a foraging expedition .His own woman had died during the raids.They both knew her man would not be back. She was still young and attractive despite the filth of hard travel , and he knew her as a highly skilled and energetic worker.He smiled in return.

They were within a day's travel of the river that promised temporary safety. The land on the other side was under the control of a lord to whom Jonesy was distantly related, and Jonesey knew one of the lord's captains personally. They would be accepted as members of the lord's tribe…..

But they weren't going to make it- they were still a mile short of the safety of the water when Jonesey heard the baying of a pack hot on their trail.Once in the water, they would be safe from the wolves, which would have to swim, while the men could stand.Every man was armed with a spear and a club made from steel salvaged from "cars" left from the Magic Times.The spear blades had been ground to a near razor edger on stones after many days of patient labor. A wolf in water waist deep to a man can cannot run, nor leap, nor twist and turn sharply .Any wolf that got within reach of a man so armed and placed would itself be eaten within the hour.Nor was it unreasonable to hope for assistance at the river, for the lord of the lands on the other side would have watchmen and patrols out.

The wolves were too close, and the weakest of of his people were falling father and farther behind. To halt was to die.The wolves would surround them and hold them for the Huns- so named by his people for a legendary race of vicious warriors from the dim past .The Huns would take a few of the youngest women for slaves, and torture the rest of the band before feeding them to the wolves.He could not march his band once the wolves caught up- they would pick his people off one after another.

He dropped his pack, and taking only his spear, trotted back to the old woman farthest back. She knew it was to impossible to carry her. He embraced her and whispered in her ear that he loved her, and they would all be together again, as Jesus promised, on the Other Side.She turned and kneeled, and crossed herself. Jonesey struck off his mother's head with a powerful sideways swipe of the swordlike blade of his spear.

The famished wolves stopped to feed.

He found solace in the arms of his new wife, and in the antics of his newly adopted son, but it was a very long time before he was heard to laugh again.

I grew up in the 1960's when despite the Cold War we were so optimistic that technology would continue to develop solutions to our problems. What did we think would save us? Easy, I called it "the GE solution". General Electric and other big tech companies were promising (a)nuclear fusion (b)space travel and the rest would be handled by big pharma in the form of good worldwide birth control. It will probably go that way but I will not live long enough to see it. I go to church since my stroke, and realize how alluring the "end of the world" stories are to the religious and secular alike. No one likes to know that the world may go on without us, that we are not needed, that it will end for us not with a bang, but with a whimper. The odds are we will die in bed alone and the world will go on.
RC

For a thorough take on this subject by a real anthropologist, go to Amazon.com and check out "The Laws of Physics Are On My Side" by Walter Haugen (that's me, BTW). The book is about culture and energy. The main thesis is that culture has served us well over the last two million years, but over the last 150 years we have been replacing culture with cheap oil energy. Now, since energy is not so cheap we have to either go backwards or go forward. We cannot go backwards since evolution doesn't go backwards. In order to go forward we have to give up on nation states. This is heresy for most progressives - hence the proliferation of fuzzy-wuzzy schemes to save civilization, greenwashing, and despair.

One-third of the book is analysis and two-thirds of the book is solutions. This is the proper ratio for our postmodern world. You can read all kinds of articles and books on how bad things are. We know that it's bad. The question is: "What are you going to do about it?"

Year 2100.
World Population 500 milion-1.0 billion. Still reducing.

Demographic projection made before 2020 were totally wrong not only because they predicted a stabilization
of Homo sapiens (Hs) population around 9-10 billions, but because they predicted a strong increase
of natality rate in case of collapse of population due to mortality. A new phenomenon started
by mid XXI century, was called Hs collective depression or Hs Lemming syndrome. Nobody was
willing to have children any more, and those who wanted, found it difficult for biological reasons that
were impossible to investigate (Scientific Research as it was known till the first half of XXI cent. was
over) but probably linked to environmental degradation of human habitats.

Climate change effects. Most of the equatorial and tropical ecosystems are virtually a desert.
The first six report of IPCC resulted to be conservative about the possibility to go beyond a tilting point
in the CG process. The 400 ppm limit of CO2 was largely overtaken, although nobody knows how much
due to the failure and dismission of the network of climate parameters mesurements: meteo station
satellites etc.
1/3 of fertile soil was totally lost by erosion and desertification, another third strongly reduced its productivity.

Population is concentrated in periartic areas: former Canada, Scandinavia, Russia southern Argentina.
Wild macrofauna is virtually extinct, globally, both on land and seas. Protein diet for humans is provided by
residual insects and marine organisms, Chicken and rats. Bovine, pigs and ovine are very rare and
available only for the political and military elites.

Tropical, subtropical and temperate forests have been cut to provide fuel and land for the populations
struggling for survival.
A severe crisis in the plant life was also determined by the severe reduction of pollinating organisms.

Cities were abandoned everywhere and are presently mined for materials and metals.
Residual industrial activities and urbanization are surviving in the populated areas where authoritarian regimes
migled with mafia organizations regulate what can be defined as a feudal-war economy.
National languages still survive in self segregated communities often fighting each others for
political dominance and resources. International languages are english, cinese, arabic and spanish.

Electrical power is still produced for industrial and
food production purposes using residual fossil fuels that can be easily extracted and simple renewable plants mostly
mini hydro, some fotovoltaic, and new technologies developed during the crisis.
Wind farms and many other high tech plants have been abandoned due to the growing difficulties in servicing them.

Sometime across the half of the XXI Cent. there have been a sequence of regional wars in which
nuclear weapons were used. The radioactive contamination due to these events and to
a number of nuclear power plants accidents happened in the phase of the failure of regional electrical networks
is a sizeable cause of human mortality and reduced fertility and of environmental degradation.

A series of major airborne lethal epidemics killed 30% of global population in 20 years across the mid of the century.

Signs of recovery of ecosystems could be observed (if someone was there) in the vast areas abandoned by Hs. Although
the CG ha severely changed the ecological condition in those areas, life is not completely extinct
and is restoring a network of viable ecological interactions among existing populations. In these
areas almost all the phila of animals and plants are still represented, though by a limited number
of species.

I can't be more optimistic than this as far as year 2100 is concerned.
Ah yes, the italian Berlusconi vs anti-Berlusconi saga came to and end well before 2025 and
is presently totally forgotten within the tiny Italian refugees communities scattered in the north. :-)

I have many dark visions, but in this post I will try to open up to possibility.

It is 2100 and

I see a school of wondering monks who teach the principals of permaculture, recovery, and renewal to those living in barren and degraded landscapes. New forest gardens stabilize the soils and catch the water. New belts of terracing create more arable land. Hill foot forests and swales trap all falling water and help it percolate into the ground. The monks carry seed from village to village, town to town. Carefully saved, and preserved, thousands of years of human nurture, these seeds provide food, medicine, timber, containers, shelter, and more.

I see young men flocking to be part of huge missionary expeditions to restore degraded spaces. Young labor that was once thrown away in ritual warfare is turned into a vast pay-forward system from repaired lands to damaged ones. The young learn social, organizational, and engineering skills. Villages and towns build and decorate elaborate painted wagons that form the tiny houses that sustain the young men during their adventures. There is great pride in the outfitting and the supplying of surplus as it is a mark of having husbanded the land that it is capable of surplus.

Another school of wandering monks combines the teachings of western science and eastern meditation. They teach observation and truth seeking. Communication and reconciliation. The art of non-violent communication. Spiritual healing from violence. Techniques to create novelty in sameness and adventure in less changing and sustainable world.

Young women flock to nunneries where they learn mathematics, accounting, healing, nutrition, permaculture, and management skills. Having naturally longer viewpoints, women are much prized by society for a natural intuition for sustainable action. They polish a natural bias for social capital with skills and training and form the future leadership.

The nunneries build and maintain calculating machines for "seeing the future". They house libraries. They preserve the printing press and give out copies of important work. When a new landscape is restored, they gift on a new press and carefully carved copies of vital and preserved knowledge to a new temple and nunnery. The alphabet, being a key piece of new knowledge, spreads world wide, allowing simple and rapid printing of many texts.

Free Glaziers travel from village to village. They travel with a set of hand polished mirrors and mirror molds in a wagon. They setup in town and build a solar furnace. Here the Free Glazier uses the mirror molds to create a new set of solar furnace mirrors. Then they begin to turn out glass for windows, solar water collectors, tile roofing, bowls, ceramic knives, scalpels, and other high temperature goods. They churn out Portland cement and plaster of Paris. They cook brick. After training up an apprentice over several years, they pack up their mirrors and molds and move onto another village. A auto catalytic solar industrial revolution based on sun, sand, chemistry, and geometry.

On market days everyone gathers for trading, gossiping, music and dance. Most everyone can play some music. Everyone can sing. Public dance happens often in the communally built village or guild halls. The beer is excellent. Plays abound. Pageants and parades. Mock battles. They tell the stories of how the land must be treated to keep the people well. Festivals and festivities mark the changes of the seasons. Bright ribbons, bells, and bangles.

Permaculture. Permanent Culture.

While there are any number of possible scenarios set one hundred years after an energy resource peaking context, let's examine the drivers of "Post Modern" civilization;

1. Food sources: With few fossil energy slaves, the vast bulk of the remaining population will return to an agrarian 'lifestyle'. Large corporate agricorps will have long since collapsed, and knowledge of effective organic techniques will be lost for the most part, resulting in dramatically lower yields and a dramatically lower population. Open pollinated seeds will be hard to come by. Wildlife populations will have been over-hunted and unavailable for the most part. Ocean acidification may be at the point where little seafood is available to the human population beyond the coast. Inland waters may be populated for the most part with carp and snakehead.

2. Water sources: There will be no municipal water for drinking, irrigation, washing, etc, beyond the type available several hundred years ago. Climate change will significantly change precipitation patterns, in many cases in a more erratic nature.

3. Weapons: Mostly bows and arrows, spears, and similar rudimentary armaments, though shields, pole weapons, catapults, and the like will begin to re-emerge. Firearms will be predominantly unworkable, but revered as the artifacts of the "Ancients".

4. Government: Act III will have witnessed much misguided finger pointing, blame of the innocent, and mob hysteria, with nation states failing and replaced by a wide variety of feudal states.

5. Knowledge: Since most knowledge resources of today are becoming more and more online, books that could last one hundred years without good shelter and environment conditioning will become increasingly rare. Printing presses will likely resurface, but may be focused primarily on the propaganda of the local feudal lords and\or religious leaders.

There will be some sort of transition into another Dark Ages, with a likely transition back into a Middle Ages, with hopefully a return to the Enlightenment.

I'm reminded ironically of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy, where the Foundation is established to record knowledge before the collapse of the Empire. Who is the Hari Seldon of our time?

We are squandering our energy inheritance on whimsy and panache, and the time will come when we are turned out into the street to fend for ourselves in a remarkably different manner.

There will be no Dr. Who to rescue us from ourselves, but then again, perhaps a return to a simpler life will bring humankind back down to Earth, in more ways than one...

-------------

"Much that once was, is lost, for none now live who remember it. History became legend. Legend became myth..." - Galadriel

I'd be sad if we devolved into tribal life and didn't reach state levels again, read Steven A. LeBlanc "Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage" to understand why.

The only way we could avoid returning to variations of the past that can be seen in anthropology and history textbooks would be an educational system that taught ecology (especially systems ecology), critical thinking skills, philosophy of science, evolution, and other enlightenment ideas as Carl Sagan so beautifully expressed in his book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". In a world where 9 out of 10 are growing food and other basic labor for the elites, this could probably only be made available to a small percentage of the population. Since most people prefer superstition, perhaps this isn't as unfair as it seems. Ideally there would be a system of merit so that even the poor children with great intelligence and curiosity would be given the opportunity to pursue an education.

As far as government goes, Venice had the only "workable" system that comes to mind. I can only describe it poorly in such a short space with memories of a book I read many years ago. The gist is that the wealthy run society -- in the past royalty and wealthy merchants directly, now the wealthy can rule indirectly by hiring lobbyists to change the laws so that their looting of the middle class is "legal", corporations, and campaign financing. The coincidence of such a high level of corruption and resource depletion at the same time is not good for us now, but in the future, this could be prevented by copying Venice's system, where they rotated their rulers through the various governmental bureaucracies so that they understood how their actions in one department affected the others, and -- here's the most important aspect -- if they stole money or were inept, their own wealth was at stake and used to repay or fix matters. I think this came from David Landes "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor".

Other good ideas about how to run a civilization:
Weatherford's "The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire" and "Product Details Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World".

I don't have any good answers to these questions. So instead of good, I'll go with long-winded. (I realize I've played a bit fast & loose with the premise here by entangling the scenarios of Act IV with what happens in the early stages of Act III, but that's how I roll).

________________________________________________

I think the responses here reflect the fact that these questions are hard to answer.

To me it seems fairly clear that by 2100, many chickens will have come home to roost. Human population will have peaked sometime between now and then between 10 and 20 billion and the roller-coaster ride to <1 billion will be in progress. That twice-chewed soon-to-be world will not be significantly powered by oil; jet contrails will be rare in most places. The climate will be hotter, weather will tend to be screwed up versus what we're used to, monsoons will be dicey, glacial melt and deep aquifers will be petering out. This stuff is baked into the cake.

Saying this stuff would cause some to brand me a "doomer", but I' not sure what would reasonably constitute doominess. There's (a) one's mental model of reality, and (b) whether one chooses to be pessimistic or optimistic, passive or active about it.

One could be entirely oblivious to science, probability, and systems; buy into flagrant economic cornucopianism, and still be pessimistic about the future, assuming that asteroids, nuclear war, bird flu, gamma ray burster, morlock conspiracy or something else will knock us off. And then, based on that, decide to relax into nihilism or become active in exposing the proto-morlocks.

Alternately, one could become knowledgeable about the converging crises we're bringing about, and choose to passively accept a dire future world, or to actively try to affect the course of events.

There are various flavors, permutations, of this. Lately I've seen the rise in popularity of a "near-term extinction" MemePlex. A very smart and well-educated fellow recently presented dire climate information on an internet list I subscribe to. It was excellent & sobering data to consider... but his conclusion was that humans will be extinct in a very few years; he said that he expects the interior of continents to be uninhabitable within five years, and believes his neighborhood will be hot enough to denature proteins within that time.

I worry about this, because while this particular fellow is admirable and sincere, the conclusion (a) does not follow from a reasonable reading of the data, and (b) is nevertheless very seductive to those casting about for beliefs. Inside the human mind, "it's too late" functions in much the same way as "it isn't happening": it allows easy rationalization of doing nothing difficult or unpleasant, a mental "downhill roll" to a stable state.

Now, if the phrase "near term human extinction" comes to refer to whether mankind might be driven extinct by climate in the coming 200-500 years, I think it'd be valid, and would STILL be terrifyingly near-term by any sane criteria. However, that's not quite so nihilicious, because on that sort of time frame there might actually be a chance to alter the outcome if sacrifices are made and heroic effort expended in coming decades.

From where we sit, here in 2013, there are many possible outcomes by 2100 and by 12,100, near enough infinitely many when you get down to fine detail. We can't know how they'll roll out. The nature of sequence and path-dependence in evolving systems, the nature of chaos and complexity, mean that this is hidden from us.

However, there are some things about the future we can know with certainty. If the last dolphin dies in 2087, there will be no dolphins in 12,000 years or 12 million years. If all the coral reefs dissolve in acid, there will be no coral reefs for millions of years, and the web of life which involves them will cease to function. If the rainforests burn, most of the species in them won't be back. If all other self-aware primates die, we'll be the only ones left, forever.

It's easy to mentally conflate all the "bummer" scenarios, as though one version of a diminished earth and impoverished human future is equivalent to another, but that isn't so. There are many degrees and sorts of diminishment, and that diminishment is being locked in NOW, hour by hour.

Moreover, it's easy to focus on the looming human bottleneck event - the population crash - to the exclusion of all else.

However, as bad as it'll be - and our reversion to the planet's lesser carrying capacity will be a new scale of strife, carnage, heroism, and change - it's just a hiccup.

There have been roughly 100 billion human lives lived to date. The real question is, how many will be lived in total? That's what's now at stake, what's now being squandered. We have no mental handle on valuing "lives rendered impossible", "civilizations precluded". The difference between a future which holds 30 billion more humans living in terrible conditions versus 500 billion more humans living more normal lives. And that's a shame, because for humanity, that's the sort of choice we're making now... by not making it.

And this shouldn't be cast just in human terms. But by and large, if you look past the bottleneck, the same things necessary to allow the existence of other large species and habitats will be the things which will give future humans the best world, the best lives, and significant ongoing population levels.

The possible futures are arrayed in front of us. In some of them, the world is terribly hot, the seas are full of slime and bacteria, the background radiation level is high, the largest animal in the world is a sickly cow, hummingbirds only exist in old books, and the prospects for any sort of human civilization surviving are dim. In other futures, the world is hotter but mostly livable, vertebrates still thrive in many seas, large wildlife exists in many places and humans have come to live with some dignity, some laughter and in some numbers in a new balance on the planet earth, and most of the crises from human overshoot and CO2 have passed.

A choice between such divergent outcomes would be the immediate, paramount concern of any sane, sapient species.

(cricket chirps).

There are uncountably many scenarios in between these two. What we do or fail to do now is steering our future between such outcomes, even with nobody at the steering wheel.

We don't know, can't know, just what the relative probabilities are. But we can know many constraints on those probabilities. More CO2 in the air and seas is worse. A world without rainforests, glaciers, and a stable climate is worse. An anoxic, acidic ocean is worse. Etc. Duh.

So here's to Homo sapiens: a damn good idea.

Let's evolve into them while we can.

There is an alternative outcome to the future of Homo sapiens: The release of an energy technology beyond oil. What if it's true that advanced energy technology is and has been in use for 40 to 50 years - replicated, reversed UFO technology, but it's being kept hidden by the private contractors that build replicated crafts for the obvious reason that the release of such technology would immediately render investments in fossil fuels rather worthless.

I'd like throw out the question: what would the future for Homo sapiens look like if the world suddenly had access to a non-petroleum based energy source that was cheap and non-polluting and could completely replace fossil fuels and atomic power? How would global politics and social-political systems unravel and change. How would this affect investments, railroads, hedge funds, Middle Eastern and other countries that depend on oil revenues, etc. Who would be the winners and who would be the losers?

IMHO, there is no "sustainable human future". Our brains and their evolved psychology locked that door tens of thousanfds of years ago. The human brain evolved as a limit removal mechanism, and its powers are always applied preferentially to overcoming obstacles to growth. This springs from our nature as living organisms whose primal evolutionary programs are the search for energy, and reproduction. These programs result in growth - in population. consumption, activity levels and cultural structure - whenever growth is possible.

Because our brains are so effective at that task, we have become the planetary apex predator. As such, sustainability is not in our future. Instead, a long period of dynamic, oscillating descent over the next several thousand years is most likely. My money is on a a reversion toward the pre-civilization mean over the next thousand years, as the loss of resources, knowledge and climate conspire to reduce our circumstances.

We will begin this process over the next hundred years, with the slide beginning as early as 2040. We will of course fight like demons to stop the slide (in full agreement with our genetic programming) though we will probably do a lot more damage to the environment in the process. We will likely try with all our might to cling to civilization and rebuild our former glory, resulting in century-long waves of decline and partial recovery. Different physical, environmental and social situations around the world will result in a great diversity of regional outcomes by the year 2100. To put it plainly, a simple "slide to oblivion" is not in the cards for any species that could recover from the giant Toba volcanic eruption in just 75,000 years.

In 12,100? The easy prediction is to look back 12,100 years from here, to 10,000 BC. The problem will be a hot planet rather than an iced-over one, but the consequences will be similar - a patchwork quilt of human bands spread thinly through the shrunken habitable portions of the globe, a world population of around 5 million, living with neolithic technology levels.

Smoke 'em while you got 'em.

I've been thinking about this for a couple days. Here I am going to explore some more about the mindset aspect of this question.

If we assume that our group mindset is set in stone then I feel that it is all but a given that we will by 2100, more or less, end up in a Mad Max world where small bands of people fight for survival destroying what little is left of our natural world.

I feel that this is unlikely to happen because of a forcing effect that is strongly modifying our group mindset. My argument rest on the notion that our present group mindset is in a highly unnatural state that is maintained at high cost. At some point this will end and I will explore two possible turning points that will end or counter balance this effect.

The forcing effect I am referring to is the roughly billion dollar a day (in the US alone) advertising, marketing, lobbing, government/corporation propaganda brainwashing we are all exposed to. To believe that this is not having a major effect on our group mindset, is at best naive. I feel that it is creating a hyper competitive group mindset that is far from natural. It is so familiar to us that most can not imagine a more balanced competitive/cooperative mindset that I propose is our true natural state.

Worse case is at some point the expense of this effort will be unsustainable. If our future course of events take this long to self correct, our lives will be rather ugly but at least healing can begin and there will be some hope for the future.

A more hopeful outcome is that within say 20 years, the cognitive dissidence caused by the gap between our reality and what we are told our reality should be will become so great that this will force a group mindset change that will overcome/counter balance this forcing factor.

Sure this is only a small approximation of a much larger picture but hopeful it will be of value.