CCPO apparently you have not been paying attention. Claiming the collapse will be temporary is just another form of denial.

Ron, don't be patronizing. I am as big a doomer as exists on these pages. That said, show me any evidence whatsoever, based on Peak Oil issues, that civilization will never rise again or that science and technology will simply stop and never start up again. This view is untenable and unsupportable unless you are going to throw in runaway global warming. But even then, I could see a future that is undersea and/or underground. Yes, it's a long shot, but to say it is impossible from the vantage point of today is hyperbole, don't you think? (If not, then you are claiming a level of precognition that could make you famous and rich! ;) )

Gail is in a field dominated by numbers. We tend to see things colored by our areas of expertise, so my comments were not meant as criticism. It is a legitimate question. I suspect she may see too much in the numbers, and not enough simple human common sense being applied in the future.

Cheers

Ron, I would tend to agree that technological civilisation is pretty much a one-shot deal.
For many although not all resources I have tended to disagree with Limits to Growth type analysis (exceptions being fossil fuels, rare earths, helium etc.).
However you need plenty of energy to overcome the problem of going to lower grade ores, so unless you have plenty of cheap energy then Limits to Growth type analysis does indeed apply - you simply can't utilise the more plentiful lower grade resources.

Although quite a lot of scavenging could take place on the remains of our civilisation, going through the waste dumps, it is pretty difficult to see how you could build up a new civilisation sufficiently to utilise the lower grade deposits without first having access to the high-grade deposits we have exhausted.

To take one area critical to early industrialisation, the UK, even the move from wood to coal which started in around 1200 due to scarcity of wood supplies would not be possible.

Soil depletion, the reduced amounts of phosphates we have left, the depletion of oceanic productivity and on and on seem to indicate that in any time scale of less than 50 million years if we do go down we ain't coming back.

Modern solar and wind, not to mention nuclear power, all rely on a very sophisticated and possibly fragile support system - even solar thermal needs all sorts of technological gubbins.

Here are a few of the resource constraints to the development of another technological civilisation which would be critical in varying degrees:
Coal
Whale oil
Oil
Natural gas
Guano
Phosphates
The by-products of these industries - for instance sulphur
High grade deposits of virtually all minerals

If islands of truly high tech do not survive, it seems improbable that they can be re-created.

Bingo! A clear-eyed response, EOS. I am a short-, medium- and long-term doomer. I am not a till-the-end-of-all-time doomer. In fact, being so implies a level of arrogance even I don't subscribe to, and I've no shortage of opinion or confidence.

I did not discuss how many people there would be, their standard of living, life expectancy, etc., so to say I "have not been paying attention" based on the scant info in my post and my posting history is simply not accurate.

One thing I do believe in is cycles. They are everywhere in life, in history, in systems... they dominate. This is what was so exciting about Chaos Theory twenty years ago: it changes your view of everything subtly because you realize there is a pattern to literally everything. That pattern is often knowable in the broadest terms, but almost impossible to predict in the short term.

One pattern that dominates all of nature is the cycle of birth, growth, decline and rebirth. What we don't know is what the nature of the far future cycles will be. The assumption that new uses of energy, new ways of harnessing it, new ways of applying it, etc., will simply never again occur is almost ludicrous. It goes against what we know to be the nature of the very universe itself. However, systems do end, species end and civilizations end. We may well have ended ourselves. In fact I think it likely, but ONLY if we cannot adjust to climate change. An energy shift alone is not going to end humanity, so the cycles will continue less a planet we simply canot live on. At some point in the future, new, likely greater, civilizations will rise. Greater may not mean we live more technologically than we do now on a day-to-day basis, but it may well mean we live **better** technologically than we do now. I look at passive solar home design as an excellent back to the future example.

On a different note, I am not the most polite person on these boards. That is with intention. However, I do try not to be harsh simply because someone disagrees with me. I will be hard on people for their way of doing things. (The one exception is Global Warming which I have discussed previously.) For example, I used to give DaveMart a hard time on the nuclear issue, but it wasn't because he was such a staunch supporter, it was because every thread got twisted into a discussion of nuclear while he ignored some obvious problems. Dave stopped doing that and we have no problems. In the end, we learned from each other. But to tell someone they haven't been paying attention because they just disagree with you, with reasonable support of their opinions, is unjustifiably rude.

But it's not a big deal. I enjoy both Ron and Gail's work.

;)

Cheers