Taking your idea to its logical conclusion, Patty, there is a more efficient human-to-energy conversion than that wasteful mechanical bicycle pedaling. Human bio energy, tapped directly, could supply enough to run all the machines, if you take all the humans and link their bodies with wires. Keep them suspended in nutrient solution and feed them an attractive virtual-reality program to distract them from the fact they’re being ripped off.
the Olduvai theory
What was the name of “that” movie???
Or was it a documentary.?
We can switch a lot faster if we need to, but I never said we wouldn’t see blackouts or things along those lines. I just said we had other alternatives before we engaged in large scale infanticide.
Change “its logical conclusion” to “an insane extreme” in your post, and I agree with you 100%.
Not really. Cite.
The electric power consumption of a typical US home is around 24kwh/day, or about 1000 watts. This equates to about 1.3 hp. A “healthy human” can generate about 0.1 hp for 8 hours continuously. So (assuming 100% efficiency) you’d need 13 teenagers on stationary bikes to supply the needs of each house.
At average US electricity prices, 8 hours worth of power (8kwh) would cost 80 to 90 cents. What’s the chance of keeping 13 teenagers fed and happy for 8 hours on less than a buck? Not high, I’d say.
So the cost of electricity will have to spike up rather sharply before the ‘teenagers on bikes’ scheme looks attractive.
Duncan bases his Olduvai theory on the measurement of world energy use per capita over time, stating that it peaked in 1978. Even if we limit ourselves to just the US, we see this is true Cite.
However, we also see that our energy use per capita has been on the rise in the US for the last 22 years, even though our population has grown and we employ much greater energy efficiency.
The trouble with the theory, and many of the rebuttals against it, is that it the conclusions drawn both paint pictures that rely heavily on the notion that worldwide access to Industrial Society levels of energy reserves is distributed in some socialistic fashion.
While worldwide energy use per capita may be on the decline, it is growing here. It may be possible that other nations are already heading toward an Olduvai future, or may skip directly to it having never had the opportunity to exploit any Industrial-style resources they may have had, while we maintain a high standard of living here in the US for some time to come.
Also, those who point out that there are a number of under-exploited energy resources that will increase in use once the increasing price of our current resources makes them that much more attractive seem to fail to notice that this will only help the wealthiest of countries. Poorer nations will find themselves cut off.
A ‘stone age’ scenario may happen if a few powerful people see the end of fossil fuels and capitalize on it, but this would require the end of multiple fossil fuels at the same time. It would surely set us back a might.
But we are not going to run out of all fuels all at once. It’s going to be gradual most likely oil, nat gas, coal, nuke with many decades in-between each. I admit that the transition will be a bitch but we really have vast power resources in the sun (including biofuels, wind & water), and the earth (geothermal) which we have just begun to tap.
There is potentially other forms of energy and others places to get raw material.
Fusion holds great promise if we can only figure the whole thing out w/o blowing up the city. The moon has vast resources of He3 which some have predicted would be easier to fuse and be economical to mine and ship to earth.
The non-biological theory of oil could mean that we could get this stuff on mars, though not cost effective to ship we may be able to relocate there.
This is ultimately why I feel we should be spending a lot more money on space, we either have to one day move there or when the fuel runs out here we are stuck - forever.
For a different take on the Population Bomb this is a good intro read. The article is about is Julian Simon. Simon won a fairly famous bet with Paul Ehrlich (who popularized the ‘Population Bomb’ idea).
Slee
Technologically, we already have the rabbit out o the hat, and several more besides. It’s simply not cost-effective to do so right now. In fact, we pretty much have the yechnology to sustain ourselves indefinitely. It’s not all there now, but we can clearly see how we can do so with time (which we do have)./ The only challenge is engineering. While it won’t be easy, there’s no fundmental reason we can’t.
n. technology that makes a person squeemish when using it
Look, the only technological “rabbit out of the hat” is fusion power. Of course it would be insane to depend on the future availability of fusion power.
But we aren’t dependent on affordable fusion power someday, somehow becoming available. We already know dozens of ways to get non-fossil fuel power. The cheapest and easiest way would be to build more nuclear fission power plants and use those plants to generate electricity.
Nuclear fission isn’t some pie in the sky rabbit out of the hat. France and Japan get almost all their electricity from nuclear power. We could build more fission plants if only we wanted to. Except we don’t want to.
There is a lot of confusion in these energy discussions, especially about oil. Oil is used overwhelmingly for transportation. Only a miniscule fraction goes into electrical generation. Is oil irreplaceable? Will civilization collapse without cheap oil? Well, we might be paying a lot more to drive across town 30 years from now, but why would that cause electrical outages? We don’t need cheap oil for electricity. We don’t use oil for electricity.
As long as we have energy from some source, we’ll have a way to convert that energy to electricity for home or industrial use, or to some other form for use in transportation. As long as we can build nuclear fission plants we’ll be able to power our houses and industry and create fuel for transportation.
There are no technological breakthroughs required. No magic new scientific principles.
Since the “pulling the rabbit out of the hat” phrase was mine, let me clarify. Khadaji referenced the thought that “In the history of man we have never had a resource crisis because whenever one resource has grown scarce we have always discovered a newer (and better) resource to fill its niche.”
No one in this thread is defending the catastrophic prediction scenerios. What some are arguing is that infrastructure solutions take time. Even with no regulatory hurdles you cannot just slap bang together dozens of nuclear power plants. Hell, my kitchen redo took close to a year! You cannot just convert the automotive fleet over to hybrids or (?someday?) fuel cell vehicles in the span of one to two years. Industry depends on transportation, for its raw materials and for getting its goods to market. Right now that means a dependence on oil. Oil based products are a large portion of our raw materials themselves as well. Increase the cost of oil dramatically (and here we are not talking about the levels we saw this summer, but peak oil dramatically) without having alternative solutions in place and the cost of everything goes up dramatically, not just the cost of driving across town.
So what are the posibilities? [ul]
[li]Peak oil is actually many decades away. Okay, infrastructure improvements may have been unneeded althought hey could still be argued for on the basis of decreasing continued increases in greenhouse gases. Worst case, we help reduce the risk of greenhouse warming and spent some to do it.[/li][li]Peak oil is only a few decades away. Countries that have used the time to put the infrastructures in place to deal with it will be at a substantial advantage over countries that do not. Quality of life is maintained. [/li][/ul]
No stone age needed, but I’d prefer to manage my risk by being prepared. I’ll save my gambling for Vegas.
Good point.
Not even 1% of electricity in the US is generated from oil. Coal is far and away the most significant fuel used to generate electricity, followed distantly by Nuclear and Natural Gas.
Keep in mind, though, that all fossil fuels are non-renewable energy sources, and if we look at those altogether, then we get almost 2/3 of our electricity from that group of fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). I think sometimes people mistakenly equate “oil” with “fossil fuels”.
Still, there is no reason, as we’ve both said, that we couldn’t get almost all of our electricity from nuclear power if we had the will to do so.
Myself, I’m taking up flint knapping skills as we speak. Its best to be prepared, and when civilization collapses and we are all back to wearing skins and living in caves you guys will all be asking me to make you hand axes and such. 
-XT
Hand axes are sooooo Paleolithic. I’m hoping we only get knocked back to the Neolithic. I will outhunt you with my Clovis points, then I will steal your women! 
considering you live in NM, I’m surprised you didn’t opt for Clovis yourself…
They look too hard to make. I hand axe though…THATS probably within my limited capabilities. If its not done with a computer then I’m all thumbs.
-XT