tinoater

If I can wade into this discussion, it seems like you are arguing different scenarios of anarchy. If you took a city and took away government you would have gang warfare, fighting over necessary (and unnecessary) resources as people tried to cling to the previous way of life. However if you took a rural area with an adequate or abundant amount of food then things would be different, some would probably try to aquire excess food and possessions by force, but most would not as after all it's not in the soldiers interest to fight.

Your tone definately fits your avatar doom . You make a good point about natural global disasters, living sustainably on Earth definately rules out safeguarding against them, so perhaps living doesn't have to be sustainable to work out like sustainable living would long term. If the race would get wiped out after x years anyway, then living past it with a destroyed environment and degrees of social oppression would still be a plus. If that's true then it bodes well for the bulk of your argument, which still seems to rely on using finite resources (no matter how large) and continuous growth. I've gotta point out that nothing can be "more sustainable" only less unsustainable, that crucial distinction has led us into alot of our problems with resources, notably fish stocks and oil. My main concern with space travel is the assumption that it is possible to achieve reliably, and that terraforming is ever really an option, after all we know the physcial detrimental effects on long-run astronauts. Growing up watching sci-fi I used to assume one day we would be terraforming planets, travelling faster than light, using teleporters and forcefields but I haven't seen even theoretical plans for these on a useful scale. We've reached the uncertainty principal in physics, I wonder if there is an upper limit to development in engineering that would make space travel impractical. It is true that pre-agricultural life expectancy was shorter than today, but that certainly doesnt mean thier lives were miserable. Pre-agriculture there was an abundance of natural plant and wildlife which would have made gathering the necessities of life not difficult, that coupled with greater natural health and strength (teeth, bone density, child-bearing) would have made life much easier than living wild is today. Although this is a pretty moot point now as the planet would take an age to get back to anything like that stage. The great thing about civilisation are its achievements that's for sure, but it's the overuse of them which are the foundations of alot of the problems we have today.

This is exactly the kind of argument that gets given, but I don't think it's built on anything but assumption. Spacetravel isn't easy and it's not cheap, imagine somehow mining and transporting back to Earth, a future Earth with an even greater population and consumption, the tons of the materials that we use on a daily basis, and when you take into account speed limitations the resource harvesting portion of the universe could certainly be seen as finite. If we did find a way to support our consumption from the mining of offworld resources then this would lead to an increase in population of Earth undeniably, which in turn would mean that any non-trivial pollution would add up emormously and cause significant problems. I can't see moving the population off the Earth ever happening. Relocating 6+ billion people would take a scale of technology and knowledge well above what we have, and infact may never be feasible. It's never been shown that the continual advancement of technology is assured. If we could overcome all the technological hurdles then we are still in a situation where we have an ever expaning population and consumption and finite resources, so if the logical conclusion of civilisation isnt collapse is it to just spread outward consuming all resources as it goes? I'm not sure what you mean about the stone age pollutants. For the vast majority of the stone age humans were hunter gatherers living in small probably autonomous groups, a small population and simple living kept consumption low and other than their remains and discarded tools, they did'nt really leave trash.

Putting the difficulty, danger and expense aside is this really a solution? All it does is allow us to satisfy our consumption by using extraterrestrial resources which doesnt solve the original problem, in fact would probably worsen the environmental effects here on earth. This is a common rebuttal but it isn't really an argument. Not being part of civilisation certainly doesn't alleviate any of its problems, and because of the dominant expansive nature of civilisation reverting back to the tribe-sized autonomous groups of the past, which relied on foraging and hunting in a world of plenty of wild animals and natural growth, just isn't possible anymore with the incredible depletion of sea-stocks and natural wildlife. If you want to hear some arguments for what I think, and don't mind sitting throught ALOT of perhaps unnecessary elaboration, strange pauses and spiritualism I'd recommend checking out Derrick Jensens Endgame:

Trying to complete Braid (without knowing youve gotta do it in a strange order and wait a couple hours).

As critical as the west's financial, energy and environmental situations are, isn't the underlying problem fundamentally civilisation itself? Two assumptions seem to exist at least in the developed world: The assumption that consumption can continue, and infact increase, to meet our desire for an ever higher "quality of life". The assumption that population can increase forever. I can't imagine either of these assumptions ever being confronted and dealt with, so isn't civilisation certain to eventually collapse? Even if we make it through the current problems of governmental finance and replacing oil as the most useful resource, at some point afterwards increased population would cause either a social or environmental problem that would be almost impossible to recover from. Very few people (and even fewer who aren't off-puttingly spirtualistic about it) seem to be considering that our very way of life isnt sustainable long term, so is this just because civilisation could be made to work long term, or just because its so unpleasant to think otherwise?