The Oil Drum

You might want to read Jared Diamond's Collapse, if you haven't.  He talks about what it takes to succeed as a sustainable society.  People do it, so obviously, it's possible.  We can be smarter than yeast, under certain conditions.

One interesting thing that's come out of anthropology research...size matters.  Societies that succeed in becoming sustainable are either small, with "grassroots" control, or large, with strong "top-down" control.  Medium-size societies (and large societies with weak central control) cannot be sustainable.  

Very small societies are small enough that everyone can see the problems, and everyone has a stake in fixing them.  With very large societies, individuals can no longer see all the problems their society is facing.  But the king can.  And he has a stake in protecting his entire kingdom, because he derives his wealth from the entire kingdom.  And he wants his heirs to inherit said wealth and kingdom.

But medium-sized societies suffer Easter Island-like collapses.  They are too large for individuals to understand what is going on throughout the society.  But they are not large enough for a central government to arise.  People may have a stake in their own valley, but not in the one next door.  So they collapse in internecine conflict.

So your idea of "small petri dishes" might work...if all the petri dishes agree that sustainability is the goal.  My worry is that some will try to maintain their standard of living.  For example, Ohio could burn tons of coal, not caring that it causes acid rain that kills all the crops in New England.  Canada could dump pollution from tar sands and other mining into rivers that flow through the U.S., not caring that they're poisoning people downstream.  

Technology today has global consequences; that being the case, I really don't think "grassroots" will work.  Eventually, we will return to small petri dishes.  We won't have the energy to do otherwise.  But the powerdown has to be managed by a strong central authority.  

Sounds like a new Fox reality show.

In the short term we're all dead.

Every pop forecast gaussian curve puts humanity at less than a billion by 2100.

Back up via Game theory along the Gaussian and 40
years from now we have maybe 3 B.

Backup 70 years and pop is down by a billion or maybe stabilized at current levels.

Just stabilization means 325,000 humans must be
removed over and above the current rate of dieoff.

You're talking major human relocation and readjustment.

Meanwhile today-
By Paul Craig Roberts

01/29/06 "ICH" -- -- Two recent polls, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll and a New York Times/CBS News poll, indicate why Bush is getting away with impeachable offenses. Half of the US population is incapable of acquiring, processing and understanding information.

America has become a rogue nation, flying blind, guided only by ignorance and hubris. A terrible catastrophe awaits.

Finally "fat tail"s (think inverted Gaussians at asymptote)
are prime breeding grounds for Self Organizing Criticality.  Think sand piles and which falling grain of sand will cause the certain avalanche.

We have not seen the greatest event to occur in our lifetimes.

This is exactly the problem-- our willingness to overrun others to take their resources.  Basic, fundamental competition, no different than yeast in a bottle.  Humans need to move past this modus operandi.

Yeast in a bottle are not subject to competition with other organisms - there is no other yeast (or anything) trying to eat their limited food.

It appears to me that many groups who never adopted our cursed modus operandi lived near other groups that did. The short term disparity usually involved the eradication and/or absorption of the former by the latter.

The earth is not a bottle and we don't all behave the same.  Yeast do not kill each other for limited resources and bottles do not have renewable resources.  We kill each other regularly for things that sustain us - allowing the limited but renewing sustenance to better sustain the survivors.  It ain't pretty but it is smarter.  

Why the geological timescale?  If we must consider our actions in that frame, why stop there? Let's work on preventing the eventual cooling off of the earth's core or the death of our sun (whichever comes first).

I agree with the premise of Guns, Germs, and Steel. I think he was arguing, not that we are genetically programmed to invent computers and cars, but that circumstances are what drove that invention.  Not racial superiority, not the inherent superiority of Christianity or democracy or free market capitalism, but accidents of geography.

IMO, Diamond's work does not imply that complex technology is inevitable.  The underlying premise of his work is that humans are all the same.  We can develop very different cultures in different circumstances, including sustainable ones.  We can also suffer the fate of the Easter Islanders, despite our fancy technology.