::stares at number::
That looks way wrong. Make that million, not thousand, sorry.
But look what happened as a result of, say, just 9/11. It became much harder to fly (even impossible to fly for a day or so due to lockdowns). Now what do you imagine would happen if planes started flying into buildings each day? Don’t you suppose that would have a much larger impact? Now just in total lives lost, but such great panic that, at some point, ALL air travel would cease. the risk would be (or would seem to be) too great to take a chance.
Could we adjust? Sure, but the adjustments might become more burdensome. If you and everyone were unsure they’d come back alive every morning if you dared leave for work, I think civilization would have a serious breakdown.
Well lets see, once we figure how fusion works we will want a clean way of creating energy, which means He3, which means we will have to learn to live on the moon. After that mars is the next step. When He3 becomes scarce on the moon we will have to mine the gas giants for more fuel. So we will be pretty diverse in the solor system and a stray stike on earth wouldn’t wipe us out. Now if we can’t figure out intersteller travel we are pretty much doomed as the sun goes to He fusion, though a few outer colonies may survive.
I’d say more that we all can count.
Plenty of time left. Oh, we may manage to kill a large number of ourselves, but not all of us.
Mankind’s survived a lot of bad shit and will continue to do so.
We might very well have some breakdowns. We are having them all the time. Expect them. It’s change.
But is civilization anything more than some huts and a central campfire? That’s what it is to me. People working together.
It’s very tough right now as the world gets smaller and smaller. Witness threads about how you should dress during jury duty. It’s different in different places. Yet I’m sure I could get along just fine with those that disagree, and adjust to their customs. Some can’t. Most can.
As the world becomes smaller, and we have more interaction, there will be less local customs. We will all become more similar (that saddens me). And less likely to ‘nuke’ our neighbor. We have a long row to hoe right now, but I do think we will work it out.
Knowing what civilization has done in the last few thousand years, or the last few hundred. We seem to adjust pretty well.
Could a person from 1000 years ago adjust to today? Probably. It would take time but I believe they could probably become a functioning member of society. Could a person of today adjust to what life was like a thousand years ago? Lots of people in the industrialize world could certainly. Many do today anyway.
Short of some type of cosmic disaster like a meteor, I think we have a long, long time on this planet. We may need to start over again and again, but I don’t believe ‘civilization’ will completely die.
Silver jumpsuits for everyone 
Good or bad, I believe we are here to stay for a long, long time.
The vast VAST majority of folks are rational. They will not permit ‘planes flying into buildings every day’.
I daresay you try something stupid on a plane today and you run a great risk of getting snuffed. A rational person looking at the results of 9/11 might feel a sence of duty to keep the damage to a minimum. I know if I’m within range of a box cutter weilding lunatic and it’s on a plane, I’m doing my damndest to make him stop breathing.
Your scope is too short. 10 years from now, one of two things will have happened: The delays will be gone, or we will have adapted. Remember, 10 year old have never lived without the Internet. My three year olds will look at me in wonder (or pity) when I tell them I grew up with a B&W TV, one Color TV, and three channels.
You can’t build a nuke device with just a dozen or so good buddies in your back yard. You need materials, resources, etc. Most often supplied by governments. Governments of countries. So, yes, you destroy their countries. Maybe not their countries of birth. But their sponsor countries. Everybody knows a lot of the organizations in the mideast have unofficial sponsors in the forms of governments. If one such group blows up a U.S. or European city with a nuke, its sponsor country could quite reasonable be held liable in some form. Whether that constitutes destroying the capital city or wiping out the whole country I don’t know. I think wiping out the whole country would be most likely to give other players at that game pause. But just letting countries use their “secret” terrorist orgs blow up your cities because the terrorists don’t wear the Iranian or Syrian army uniform is a formula for national suicide.
First, why would you assume that Ethanol will be $10/gallon? We already produce it and sell it for around $2.50. The oil sands are profitable now, and if oil stays above $70/bbl, so is shale oil. That’s enough oil right there to last us for several decades.
Second, you’re treating ‘the infrastructure’ as some monolithic thing, which must be changed all at once. But it’s not. It’s a vast web of various supply methods, and it’s already changing. Go look at how many gas stations in the midwest pump E85 now. Compare it to five years ago.
‘The infrastructure’ will mutate over time. Maybe more people will buy plug-in electrics. This will stress the electric power grid and drive up electricity prices. This in turn will stimulate demand for nuclear power or other power sources, while also stimulating demand into more efficient electrical appliances, computers, etc. In the meantime, if E85 becomes a popular option, more auto manufacturers will offer flex-fuel vehicles. As the cost of energy increases, supplies shift as more types of energy become cost-effective.
In the end, we may well end up paying more for our energy. Maybe quite a bit more. But this doesn’t spell disaster. The U.S. spends less than 10% of GDP for all the energy it uses. If the cost of energy doubled over a decade, the result would be a 1% of GDP increase in costs per year. The U.S. economy is currently growing at about 3.5% of GDP per year. So a sudden shift in energy costs would manifest itself as slightly slower growth, or a change from slight growth to a slight recession.
BTW, the cost of energy was as high as 14% of GDP in 1980, and as low as 6% oof GDP in 1998. So it’s fluctuated a lot, without destroying the economy. You can see a graph of changing energy costs here.
But in order to prohibit it, more restrictions need to be put on our liberties. More conflict, more limitations, more burdens. At some point this may become so impossible that flying isn’t practical. What’s next? Checkpoints at borders of neighborhoods? What if the transportation infrastructure collapse causes serious food & fuel shortages? How far will we have to go before civilization breaks down?
You had color TV? We used to stare at the monochrome radio.
The dinosaurs ruled for 200 million years.
And that is taking into account world wide disasters, so I think we can expect to last roughly for 6 million generations. Our (really different from us) descendants, both biological and artificial, would by then already be gone to other star systems.
There are plenty of nuclear devices out there. From what I’ve read, dozens if not hundreds went missing when the USSR broke up. You don’t need to build one.
And a small terrorist cell doesn’t have to be affiliated with a country. Look at the 9/11 hijackers. They lived all over. A significant part of the planning was apparently done in Germany. Should the US flatten Berlin?
The point I’m making is exactly what you ignore in your reply – war can now be waged by individuals against whole nations. And by definition, they have a huge target to aim at, while the nation has nothing concrete to hit back at.
I fail to see your point, other than that you contention of change + hardship = TEOTWAWKI (google it)
Airline travel is not a ‘right’. The loss of airline travel will not lead to a dystopian society with no freedoms and Big Brother’s eyes on every street corner. I fail to see you you’re connecting the two. (And if you Quote Ben Franklin, I swear I won’t respond. Lest this get thrown into great debates.)
(grin) My nephew laughed out loud when I pulled my old 8-track deck out of the closet and played a tape for him.
Loss of airline travel will result in transportation disruptions. Continue the trend and staples will be harder to come by, maybe impossible. If people are afraid to leave their homes, the quality of life is decreasing, food is unobtainable, and each home is surrounded by barbed wire where everyone is afraid of and threatening everyone else, don’t you think civilization will have a serious breakdown? How long can society remain “polite”?
No, I don’t think Ben said that. At least not according to Amos.
Ummm, 911 was an Osama bin Laden gig, and that originated in Afghanistan, and if you’ll recall, we invaded Afghanistan. Of course, then our Idiot Leader headed to Iraq instead of sticking around and making life hell for the Afghan warlords on the Pakistani border, as he should have … but we DID attack the state that sponsored 911.
Do you have a cite for this extraordinary claim?
Nuclear weapons are not something the Soviet Armed Forces just left in broom closets. They did keep a pretty close eye on them.
Musicat:
Air freight is not a significant cargo transportation method; virtually all food and cunsumer goods get to your local mall by trucks or train and truck (if produced domestically) or ships and trucks (if produced overseas.) The loss of passenger air travel wouldn’t make a dent on your ability to get food, clothing, and various other goods.
That planes can be used by terrorists - and I don’t understand why we would expect this problem to get WORSE, and not better, since security measures against terrorists gaining control of the airplane are easily implemented - doesn’t mean an inevitable trend towards someone figuring out how to crash a Peterbilt rig into the Sears Tower.
I can’t think of a single ‘staple’ item that is primarily transported by plane AND airline freight is alot easier to secure than passenger service. The passenger airline industry is important but is not by any means vital to civilization as anybody living in the civilized world circa 1905 could tell you. Furthermore, I seriously doubt even something as relatively fragile as the airline industry could ever realistically be disrupted to the extent that you suggest because, quite frankly, we don’t have to remain ‘polite’ to maintain our civilization. If we face a situation where a minority group becomes the kind of trouble that you seem to be describing, well… right or wrong they wouldn’t exist for long. It would be ugly, brutal and quick BUT ‘civilization’ would chug right along over their ashes.
I thought this was pretty much a given.
http://www.bu.edu/globalbeat/nuclear/FPRI042701.html (Foreign Policy Research Institute)
And… http://clinmed.netprints.org/cgi/content/full/2002010001v1 - not a peer-reviewed article, but this claim is footnoted to The Economist
And even if ready-built weapons have not gone missing (very unlikely in my mind, despite official denials), there is plenty of weapons-grade material available if you have the readies.
Can’t argue with that. The best approach is a balanced one: neither dismiss the warnings in a haze of blissful ignorance, nor collapse into panic at every sky-is-falling alert being squealed from the fringes. We must give ourselves, and one another, the freedom to raise concerns and make dire predictions, and then we must take the time to evaluate those concerns and measure those predictions to determine their worth. We must neither corner ourselves with a threat we should have seen coming nor destroy ourselves with anxiety. The calm and rational middle course, here as in so many things, is the right one.
Look for Franklin Delano Roosevelt IV to run for President in 2012 on a platform of “finishing what his great-great-grandfather should have done.”