That will probably cross the tipping point for non-anthropogenic warming and if it starts the putative clathrate gun we will bust this planet back to the prokaryote stage, and those single-celled organisms will be lucky if Earth doesn't start to resemble Mars.
Our species will not survive in the long run, we are an evolutionary dead end.
Our demise will also be speeded up by our ever increasing population. We are on a inescapable path towards increasing our numbers to 10 billion by the end of this century no matter what we do to stop the growth.
The official UN population projections do not take into account the precipitous declines in Total Fertility Rates around the world, which will result in a much sooner peak.
There’s one more important variable. Per person impact on resources should be weighted by income. A subsistence farmer in Nigeria uses far less resources than a US lawyer. Or a less accurate method would to do it by country weighted by GDP.
You’ve touched upon a taboo and very sensitive subject Chris, a subject few are prepared to raise let alone engage in conversation, so If you haven’t already come across it check out Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa’s recent 2025 (free to view on YouTube) documentary film “GREENWASHED | Full Documentary [Official]”. If enough people view it, it might just go mainstream rather than just remain a taboo subject, something to be avoided and or ignored🤔
Actually, I think we're on the cusp of a population collapse. Quite a few pundits even think China's population is grossly overstated and could be at 1 billion or even less... If this is correct, we probably haven't yet reached 8 billion.
Fortunately---we have books written to disprove your certainties of collapse and chaos.
True---these books were written by desert nomads who didn't know where the sun went at night, but knew that the stars were just holes in the blanket of night darkness.
Volcanoes told them of the burning fires waiting below for 'sinners', and bolts of lightning from an otherwise benign sky-being offered the certainty of a wrathful god if we did not repent our sins.
the physical process of birth led to the logical conclusion of 'beginning'... (it all had to start somewhere)....and such a beginning had to have been in a 'lost paradise'----to which we must strive to return.
in the meantime, we must go forth and multiply, and in so doing, consume the planet through our god-driven greed..
but religious dogma blinds us to the fact that it is that one word--greed---that will bring about our collective demise.
we each consume beyond our need, and beyond that which the planet can supply and accomodate.
Musk and Bezos et al, are just extreme examples of the human condition.....we are all infected with it to a greater or lesser degree, and whether we belive those holy books or not.
I---and millions like me, can go anywhere on a whim, and earn more in an hour than it costs to feed me for a week. I can eat exotic foods from around the world if I feel so inclined---virtually free.
That is the basic, destructive EROEI that is causing the planet's support systems to collapse---the sheer consuming weight of all of us.
But the godnuts point to their books, and insist it will go on forever.
I wonder why B fails to mention the coming change in human population? He alludes to it with "extinction risk" and "foraging", but never quite comes out with a clear-eyed discussion of the die-off.
Perhaps the certainty of the premature death of 99% of the global population (leaving 90 million people, at most) is too dire to confront directly, but no discussion of The Empty Quarter is complete without tackling it. Perhaps that's in Part III?
And none of our decisions about what to do tomorrow make sense without understanding what's coming. Those of us who have family or other people we care about should be making preparations to help keep them from dying. It's as simple as that.
I don't think there is much you can do. Try to move to America (least populated large continent Vs arable land) or China? But not many people will be able to do this. And what for? 5-20 more years while looking forward to starvation?
I don't think there is much reason trying to fight knowing that outlook of the future.
My girlfriend really wants kids. She believes in rather soon coming end of modernity. She meant let's just raise the kids in preparation of ending life in maybe 10 year but enjoy life till then.. I have moral problems with such an upbringing. But we are so far down the road it doesn't matter anymore if we have 10 children per family or 0 child policy. The train has already departed...
Intending to, as I understanding it, either kill or abandon your children after 10 years, especially as you anticipate a mass societal turn to cannibalism, it would be very selfish (or, at least, more selfish than it is already, perhaps) for you to have children, but presumably you and your partner already know and have discussed this. I wouldn't usually comment on someone's personal choice here, but with your shared understanding of the likely future, it seems stark.
Besides even if you educate your child like it will be 10 years more or less - it will be tough if the child plays with other children who don't get this information. And you cannot really decide for a 10 year old, nor can you them take away it's chance of survival matter how small...
I mean, to a degree it's just a more extreme/intense version of arguments for not having children (anti-natalist arguments). Personally I don't think collapse will happen that fast, but realistically none of us can be certain about the timeframe, just the inevitability of it happening.
The more I learn, the more plausible a very rapid collapse seems.
I guess I’d like B’s thoughts on whether or not our civilization is the most complex & specialized in history. Is it the most globally interdependent & dynamically connected? Is it deeper into overshoot than any previous? And do the answers to those questions have an impact on the speed and severity of our collapse?
Is the Seneca effect something that applies to our civilization? If so, in what way? Can we plot it out somehow?
I’d like a deeper dive on the future of food & water & all the associated variables & impacts. How does peak cheap/easy oil affect the production and distribution of food? How does climate change tie in? How does economic breakdown factor in? Migratory pressure from areas already destabilized, etc. It’s all about the food, man. Just like his analysis has identified key concepts/bottlenecks (diesel fuel), food is the master resource for a functioning society.
He seems to have a very thorough grasp of the idea of cascading systemic risk, of how it’s a web of dominos and compounding feedback loops, but still pushes the idea that it’s going to take decades to break down.
Perhaps his analysis is so high level that it’s not really relevant to a family trying to plot out a path to survival? From a risk mitigation standpoint, does it matter whether slow or fast collapse is more likely? Should we not prepare for the worse future, regardless? If yes, should we maybe mention that even if we think a slow degradation is the most likely scenario?
Carl Sagan said: “All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.”
Human extinction is most plausibly driven by a post-overshoot collapse that irreversibly reduces energy surplus and industrial complexity below the threshold required for spacefaring capability. Following this collapse, humanity persists in small, Earth-bound populations vulnerable to accumulated long-term extinction risks. Human extinction is not imminent, but it may already be locked in if complexity collapses before spacefaring becomes irreversible—I would argue that we are already past that point.
Thank you, this is comprehensive and truthful. At 71 I am in the odd position of facing my own mortality at the same time as contemplating the end of life on this green earth.
A Buddhist tenet that I find helpful here is that:
“Nothing lasts and Life goes on”. This is simply another way of expressing the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and equally as true.
Yes, our industrial civilization is doomed in the long run, perhaps within a century or two...But the next 100.000 year Ice Age, one of many in the last 3 million years, will restore much of the land, the water aquifers which we have greatly depleted, and most other factors necessary for human life as hunter-gatherers...But it will make creating another high tech civilization extremely difficult if not impossible....
I’m curious where or what B feels will keep the hundreds of nuclear power plants from overheating (and the already existing waste safe) in this near term diminishment of energy sources? Won’t the unleashing of even a few if not dozens of “plumes” of toxic winds have a major/global impact on nearly all of the potential scenarios related to survival of humans and more than human life on earth?
Absolutely. This is one of the major catastrophes facing humans and it is never mentioned. Basically, all (100%) of nuclear power stations with stored or active rods (all of them) will melt down because of failing energy of cooling systems in an unstable future. This will release vast amounts of long lasting radioactive elements into the air and subterranean water. Humans are too dumb to have planned or built safe, long term storage of highly radioactive used fuel rods. We don't even have a Plan B for safe radioactive decay.
"all (100%) of nuclear power stations with stored or active rods (all of them) will melt down because of failing energy of cooling systems in an unstable future."
----------
NONSENSE.
Yes, reactors with recently used fuel and some recently used & stored spent fuels require active cooling and are a HUGE liability in case of extended disruptions to cooling water, electrical power & on site knowledgeable stewardship, we are RISKING many, many Fukushima level disasters world wide (& worse) at all those reactor installations and spent fuel storage pools. We NEVER should have built out the early military/naval pressurized water designs as "enlarged" models for civil power reactors with all their vulnerabilities to interrupted cooling & loss of management.
However: The vast majority of spent fuels are not prone to "melt down". By the time they have been moved to dry cask storage, they are WELL past that danger.
We SHOULD be winding down every one of those melt down prone design reactors world wide, not extending their lives and/or rushing to build more.
We MIGHT consider building reactors with better designs that are self limiting and not liable to melt down... If we could rationally manage the pollution from fuel production and radioactive waste they produced, rather than following short term profitability and screwing future generations with our garbage.
So even if Entropy Wins is grossly inaccurate to write “100% will melt down”, as someone who seems to have looked into this more than I, how many meltdowns does it take to cause major loss of human and more than human life (or life expectancy) and radically disrupt the ecosystems of the planet?
I don't have any good answers for you. All I can say is that a majority of those susceptible to melting down doing so in a short space of time is probably more than we can handle, especially as we have mostly sited them near major population areas and next to large bodies of water/rivers.
Ok. Let me reword that then ask you a question. All 100% of nuclear power stations holding stored or active fuel rods will EITHER Meltdown OR Remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years. The Question... You correctly state that stored dry fuel rods will not melt down. The question is what percentage of nuclear power stations hold dry storage rods AND NO other fuel rods needing active cooling. I would suspect an extremely few. Therefore my original statement of 100% meltdown may not be factually correct, but damn close. In other words, we are leaving thousands of highly radioactive sites for thousands of years for any descendants that might survive that long. Cheers and thank you for your interest.
That "Joe Neubarth" claim is ludicrous. The bit about just helicoptering all those recently used fuel assemblies into the ocean is particularly amusing-
Ask the Chernobyl helicopter pilots about all of that.
I can’t offer a heart emoji to the sobering reality of your comment which confirms my own understanding, but I appreciate someone else recognizes this looming horror.
We no longer have farms. We have planting surfaces where crops are grown by machines plowing the surface, depositing GMO seeds, pesticides, herbicides, and adding fertilizer, and in some cases, irrigation by depleting aquifers.
Yep. Have to use lower-intensity energy sources rather than dense fossil fuels. And where do we find them? Look in a mirror. Duh! See that efficient organism looking back at you? So get off your dead ass and DO something instead of whining and bitching and starting arguments. Start with growing food using manual labor. Then think of other alternatives. You can do it bunky. I published The Laws of Physics Are On My Side in 2013 - thirteen years ago. It is still relevant. But you don't have to buy my books. You can do it on your own.
Before the exploitation of fossil sunlight, it took fifteen people on the land to support each person in the city.
Today, one farmer supports about 700 in cities. Very few of those 700 know the slightest thing about farming.
I think a lot of people — including many in this comments section, perhaps — assume that growing food is simple, and they're waiting in the cities they don't want to give up, until they absolutely have to provide for themselves.
It's something that takes years to get good and and to get going. Not too many of those 700 city folk will be able to do it.
"Take, for example, the many native North American or other indigenous tribes, who decided not to engage in grain agriculture, metallurgy, mining, building cities etc."
----------
This is both overly simplistic and factually incorrect.
Corn is a GRAIN. Amaranth too was used by pre contact peoples as we now use cereal grains...
Both Americas hosted agrarian societies of many kinds, meanwhile those now deemed "hunter gatherers" engaged in silviculture and other deliberate food & materials production driven modifications of their biomes, there was VERY little of either continent's land masses with biomes which had not been DELIBERATELY & functionally modified by humans well prior to Eurasians "discovering" the Americas.
Those first peoples did copper, bronze, silver and gold extraction and related metallurgy on both continents. They MINED AND SMELTED ORES as part of that suite of technologies, they did FAR more than utilize native gold, copper and found meteoric iron for metallic tools & ornaments.
They built cities on both continents, please do Google on the name "Cahokia". A full on city (4,000 acres!) near present day St. Louis IL, built by what we would probably class as a hunter/gatherer society.
If you want to claim that non/less wholehearted use of what we now might identify as "modern" extractive, agricultural or engineering technologies were some kind of INFORMED CHOICE, you're going to need some proof to convince me.
Quote: "... many native North American or other indigenous tribes...". The word "many", not "all". There were "many" native North American (and South American) peoples who did not practice agriculture and remained hunter gatherer societies. I'm Australian, here 60,000 years (far longer than human settlement in the Americas) of indigenous societies did not develop or use "farming" to produce food for harvest & storage. Your comment on "informed choice" is extremely interesting. I think a lot about this. There were numerous examples of pre agricultural societies (10 kya) in Mesopotamia, the Levant, India, that tried agriculture but eventually reverted to Hunter gatherer. But obviously many that eventually stayed farming. The main advantage was militarily believe it or not. Farming communities had one big disadvantage, they had food that could be stolen by roving bands of hunters. But the farming community had one huge advantage, they could support more people on a limited land area. The farmers outnumbered the roving hunters & could repel the planned theft. Eventually, right up to today, the farmers dominate (and steal from) the hunter gatherers.
As humans were few it made sense to despise cannibalism. As resources run out however until a balance is found cannibalism may the the best insurance policy for survival. So the more the population the more food in the future. Old meat is better than no meat so to say.
Yes some people may get mad human disease , also feeding our future human life stock so much antibiotics and other things ain't healthy, but cannibalism will happen anyhow once structures have fully broken. That is if there is no nuclear war.
That way there is most certainly a surviving small population
I don't think it will be institutionalised... It will result from anarchy. In some regions earlier in some later, in some remote islands maybe never.. of course it could be that some powerful country like China or USA will try to speed up that process to keep order longer in their own place...
But for it to happen in an orderly way as in soylent green it would need to happen fast (before 2040 I guess) and it doesn't make sense. If you have the power to pull it off you can rather extinguish people before risking eating their unhealthy meat. I rather think it will happen slowly. First just eat people who died in fighting or natural causes. Then likely groups will form that roam around to find human groups to eat.. it will happen as all modern structures have broken or the last order is breaking.
I don’t disagree although I don’t really see it becoming institutionalized. If there really is only 6 lbs of flesh-protein per human left on this planet now, it will ramp up exponentially leaving our means of production systems in the dust.
You would likely need to eat at least 15 or 16 decent sized people to make it through the year, more if you're working hard to catch them or it's cold out.
You need to examine central American pre contact agriculture based civilizations, several of which declined at least partly due to nutrient depletion (largely depleted phosphorus, the hardest to come by of the NPK "big three" nutrients). Their ritual warfare, human sacrifice and cannibalism served certain functional purposes.
Yeah. But they didn't know about many things like crop rotation and so on. Of course there is also overpopulation, but much less severe Vs Eurasia and Africa.
Agroforestry was very Common in the Alpes aka Pond Fish and other Wild Food. This helped a lot while 2. WW but nowadays all is heavy degraded and no eatable trees at all and even fungi is now rare. Going down to Permaculture or less impact Agriculture is not so easy with less wild Food. Even wild escargots are now super rare, a food very common in old Vienna and Alpes.
Excellent analysis B, thank you. I tend to think it's more likely that humanity will go extinct than otherwise, but probably won't be around to find out!
In my junior year at Wittenberg University, I married an IBM systems engineer in training who ran the school's IBM computer. That was 1966, and for my Physical Chemistry project I wrote a Fortran program projecting how long it would take for ALL of the energy containing solid matter in the universe to decay into pure energy, so entropic decay. The room filling IBM computer could not handle the question, but I got an "A" anyway. That was 60 yrs. ago. Have a blessed day/evening. The real physical question today is how long it will take for enough of global ice, absorbing 144 BTUs per pound, to melt to the point that the hydrological cycle can no longer support life on earth, and 1.2 trillion tons are melting annually now as 321 million square miles of oceans are heating to nearly 70 degF on the surface. Any budding physical chemists out there?
An excellent piece ‘B’ of THS. I doubt I’ll be around when the worst effects of of the Poly and Meta-crisis bear down on humanity, but anyone under 45 yoa is likely to and certainly a child born today will experience its effects. The effects of a heating planet are already baked in, the thermal inertia being stored in the oceans will see to that, and then there’s the effects of depleting primary energy resources heightening the effects ecological overshoot.
There isn’t one of humanity’s problems, now predicaments, that couldn’t be made better by a reduction in population, but that’s a taboo subject, though one Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa’s hasn’t been afraid to raise as well practicing what she preaches, and that’s presented in her recent 2025 (free to view on YouTube) documentary film “GREENWASHED | Full Documentary [Official]”🤔
Your statement about Time being fundamental is basically correct. But, on the scale of the Universe, Time and Entropy are synonymous. And the statement could be flipped "An increase in Time is what gives Entropy direction" and still be accurate.
"An increase in time" is what gives anything direction. No time, no events - stasis. That is not what we observe (and would be impossible to observe anyway).
To say that entropy increases *with* time is not the same thing as saying that entropy increase *causes* time. How can something that is dependent on time be the cause of time?
Great piece, as usual, but I think you are being overly optimistic.
Point 8, about climate change, overlooks aerosol masking, which will ensure that climate change accelerates as industrial activity declines:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365849668_The_largest_elephant_in_the_room_aerosol_masking
That will probably cross the tipping point for non-anthropogenic warming and if it starts the putative clathrate gun we will bust this planet back to the prokaryote stage, and those single-celled organisms will be lucky if Earth doesn't start to resemble Mars.
Our species will not survive in the long run, we are an evolutionary dead end.
Our demise will also be speeded up by our ever increasing population. We are on a inescapable path towards increasing our numbers to 10 billion by the end of this century no matter what we do to stop the growth.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#table-historical
The official UN population projections do not take into account the precipitous declines in Total Fertility Rates around the world, which will result in a much sooner peak.
Counter link:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/06/peak-population-projections/
EDIT: this won't help though because of aerosol masking.
There’s one more important variable. Per person impact on resources should be weighted by income. A subsistence farmer in Nigeria uses far less resources than a US lawyer. Or a less accurate method would to do it by country weighted by GDP.
Thanks. Completely agree on both counts.
You’ve touched upon a taboo and very sensitive subject Chris, a subject few are prepared to raise let alone engage in conversation, so If you haven’t already come across it check out Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa’s recent 2025 (free to view on YouTube) documentary film “GREENWASHED | Full Documentary [Official]”. If enough people view it, it might just go mainstream rather than just remain a taboo subject, something to be avoided and or ignored🤔
Actually, I think we're on the cusp of a population collapse. Quite a few pundits even think China's population is grossly overstated and could be at 1 billion or even less... If this is correct, we probably haven't yet reached 8 billion.
Fortunately---we have books written to disprove your certainties of collapse and chaos.
True---these books were written by desert nomads who didn't know where the sun went at night, but knew that the stars were just holes in the blanket of night darkness.
Volcanoes told them of the burning fires waiting below for 'sinners', and bolts of lightning from an otherwise benign sky-being offered the certainty of a wrathful god if we did not repent our sins.
the physical process of birth led to the logical conclusion of 'beginning'... (it all had to start somewhere)....and such a beginning had to have been in a 'lost paradise'----to which we must strive to return.
in the meantime, we must go forth and multiply, and in so doing, consume the planet through our god-driven greed..
but religious dogma blinds us to the fact that it is that one word--greed---that will bring about our collective demise.
we each consume beyond our need, and beyond that which the planet can supply and accomodate.
Musk and Bezos et al, are just extreme examples of the human condition.....we are all infected with it to a greater or lesser degree, and whether we belive those holy books or not.
I---and millions like me, can go anywhere on a whim, and earn more in an hour than it costs to feed me for a week. I can eat exotic foods from around the world if I feel so inclined---virtually free.
That is the basic, destructive EROEI that is causing the planet's support systems to collapse---the sheer consuming weight of all of us.
But the godnuts point to their books, and insist it will go on forever.
it won't.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-More-resources-humankind-unsustainable-ebook/dp/B00D0ADPFY
I wonder why B fails to mention the coming change in human population? He alludes to it with "extinction risk" and "foraging", but never quite comes out with a clear-eyed discussion of the die-off.
Perhaps the certainty of the premature death of 99% of the global population (leaving 90 million people, at most) is too dire to confront directly, but no discussion of The Empty Quarter is complete without tackling it. Perhaps that's in Part III?
And none of our decisions about what to do tomorrow make sense without understanding what's coming. Those of us who have family or other people we care about should be making preparations to help keep them from dying. It's as simple as that.
I don't think there is much you can do. Try to move to America (least populated large continent Vs arable land) or China? But not many people will be able to do this. And what for? 5-20 more years while looking forward to starvation?
I don't think there is much reason trying to fight knowing that outlook of the future.
My girlfriend really wants kids. She believes in rather soon coming end of modernity. She meant let's just raise the kids in preparation of ending life in maybe 10 year but enjoy life till then.. I have moral problems with such an upbringing. But we are so far down the road it doesn't matter anymore if we have 10 children per family or 0 child policy. The train has already departed...
Intending to, as I understanding it, either kill or abandon your children after 10 years, especially as you anticipate a mass societal turn to cannibalism, it would be very selfish (or, at least, more selfish than it is already, perhaps) for you to have children, but presumably you and your partner already know and have discussed this. I wouldn't usually comment on someone's personal choice here, but with your shared understanding of the likely future, it seems stark.
Besides even if you educate your child like it will be 10 years more or less - it will be tough if the child plays with other children who don't get this information. And you cannot really decide for a 10 year old, nor can you them take away it's chance of survival matter how small...
I mean, to a degree it's just a more extreme/intense version of arguments for not having children (anti-natalist arguments). Personally I don't think collapse will happen that fast, but realistically none of us can be certain about the timeframe, just the inevitability of it happening.
Yes, that's my problem with it.
The more I learn, the more plausible a very rapid collapse seems.
I guess I’d like B’s thoughts on whether or not our civilization is the most complex & specialized in history. Is it the most globally interdependent & dynamically connected? Is it deeper into overshoot than any previous? And do the answers to those questions have an impact on the speed and severity of our collapse?
Is the Seneca effect something that applies to our civilization? If so, in what way? Can we plot it out somehow?
I’d like a deeper dive on the future of food & water & all the associated variables & impacts. How does peak cheap/easy oil affect the production and distribution of food? How does climate change tie in? How does economic breakdown factor in? Migratory pressure from areas already destabilized, etc. It’s all about the food, man. Just like his analysis has identified key concepts/bottlenecks (diesel fuel), food is the master resource for a functioning society.
He seems to have a very thorough grasp of the idea of cascading systemic risk, of how it’s a web of dominos and compounding feedback loops, but still pushes the idea that it’s going to take decades to break down.
Perhaps his analysis is so high level that it’s not really relevant to a family trying to plot out a path to survival? From a risk mitigation standpoint, does it matter whether slow or fast collapse is more likely? Should we not prepare for the worse future, regardless? If yes, should we maybe mention that even if we think a slow degradation is the most likely scenario?
Recovering from the edge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bZNvnYyrcA
Carl Sagan said: “All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.”
Human extinction is most plausibly driven by a post-overshoot collapse that irreversibly reduces energy surplus and industrial complexity below the threshold required for spacefaring capability. Following this collapse, humanity persists in small, Earth-bound populations vulnerable to accumulated long-term extinction risks. Human extinction is not imminent, but it may already be locked in if complexity collapses before spacefaring becomes irreversible—I would argue that we are already past that point.
Thank you, this is comprehensive and truthful. At 71 I am in the odd position of facing my own mortality at the same time as contemplating the end of life on this green earth.
A Buddhist tenet that I find helpful here is that:
“Nothing lasts and Life goes on”. This is simply another way of expressing the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and equally as true.
From Dave Matthews. One Sweet World."
"Take all that we can get, when it's done, nobody left to bury here. Nobody left to dig the holes and here we can lie safely."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ-W7cUVwtA @ 2:30
Yes, our industrial civilization is doomed in the long run, perhaps within a century or two...But the next 100.000 year Ice Age, one of many in the last 3 million years, will restore much of the land, the water aquifers which we have greatly depleted, and most other factors necessary for human life as hunter-gatherers...But it will make creating another high tech civilization extremely difficult if not impossible....
I’m curious where or what B feels will keep the hundreds of nuclear power plants from overheating (and the already existing waste safe) in this near term diminishment of energy sources? Won’t the unleashing of even a few if not dozens of “plumes” of toxic winds have a major/global impact on nearly all of the potential scenarios related to survival of humans and more than human life on earth?
Absolutely. This is one of the major catastrophes facing humans and it is never mentioned. Basically, all (100%) of nuclear power stations with stored or active rods (all of them) will melt down because of failing energy of cooling systems in an unstable future. This will release vast amounts of long lasting radioactive elements into the air and subterranean water. Humans are too dumb to have planned or built safe, long term storage of highly radioactive used fuel rods. We don't even have a Plan B for safe radioactive decay.
@Entropy Wins
(Quote)
"all (100%) of nuclear power stations with stored or active rods (all of them) will melt down because of failing energy of cooling systems in an unstable future."
----------
NONSENSE.
Yes, reactors with recently used fuel and some recently used & stored spent fuels require active cooling and are a HUGE liability in case of extended disruptions to cooling water, electrical power & on site knowledgeable stewardship, we are RISKING many, many Fukushima level disasters world wide (& worse) at all those reactor installations and spent fuel storage pools. We NEVER should have built out the early military/naval pressurized water designs as "enlarged" models for civil power reactors with all their vulnerabilities to interrupted cooling & loss of management.
However: The vast majority of spent fuels are not prone to "melt down". By the time they have been moved to dry cask storage, they are WELL past that danger.
We SHOULD be winding down every one of those melt down prone design reactors world wide, not extending their lives and/or rushing to build more.
We MIGHT consider building reactors with better designs that are self limiting and not liable to melt down... If we could rationally manage the pollution from fuel production and radioactive waste they produced, rather than following short term profitability and screwing future generations with our garbage.
So even if Entropy Wins is grossly inaccurate to write “100% will melt down”, as someone who seems to have looked into this more than I, how many meltdowns does it take to cause major loss of human and more than human life (or life expectancy) and radically disrupt the ecosystems of the planet?
@John Wiercioch
I don't have any good answers for you. All I can say is that a majority of those susceptible to melting down doing so in a short space of time is probably more than we can handle, especially as we have mostly sited them near major population areas and next to large bodies of water/rivers.
Ok. Let me reword that then ask you a question. All 100% of nuclear power stations holding stored or active fuel rods will EITHER Meltdown OR Remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years. The Question... You correctly state that stored dry fuel rods will not melt down. The question is what percentage of nuclear power stations hold dry storage rods AND NO other fuel rods needing active cooling. I would suspect an extremely few. Therefore my original statement of 100% meltdown may not be factually correct, but damn close. In other words, we are leaving thousands of highly radioactive sites for thousands of years for any descendants that might survive that long. Cheers and thank you for your interest.
https://www.facebook.com/JoseBarbaNueva/posts/pfbid02LHk7C55cbtZy5naDu4prn3TbBTzQbEQyacjYjSmGSawQaLUyBMDSDHr6NktCyZzQl
@James Charles
That "Joe Neubarth" claim is ludicrous. The bit about just helicoptering all those recently used fuel assemblies into the ocean is particularly amusing-
Ask the Chernobyl helicopter pilots about all of that.
I can’t offer a heart emoji to the sobering reality of your comment which confirms my own understanding, but I appreciate someone else recognizes this looming horror.
We no longer have farms. We have planting surfaces where crops are grown by machines plowing the surface, depositing GMO seeds, pesticides, herbicides, and adding fertilizer, and in some cases, irrigation by depleting aquifers.
You got a mouse in your pocket? Who is this "we" you write about?
I did this for fifteen years: http://EcoReality.org .
There are lots of people doing sustainable agriculture. Have you read "Restoration Agriculture", by Mark Shepard?
"But, but, but… THAT won't feed the world!"
No, but it will feed the survivors.
Yep. Have to use lower-intensity energy sources rather than dense fossil fuels. And where do we find them? Look in a mirror. Duh! See that efficient organism looking back at you? So get off your dead ass and DO something instead of whining and bitching and starting arguments. Start with growing food using manual labor. Then think of other alternatives. You can do it bunky. I published The Laws of Physics Are On My Side in 2013 - thirteen years ago. It is still relevant. But you don't have to buy my books. You can do it on your own.
"You can do it on your own."
Not too many can.
Before the exploitation of fossil sunlight, it took fifteen people on the land to support each person in the city.
Today, one farmer supports about 700 in cities. Very few of those 700 know the slightest thing about farming.
I think a lot of people — including many in this comments section, perhaps — assume that growing food is simple, and they're waiting in the cities they don't want to give up, until they absolutely have to provide for themselves.
It's something that takes years to get good and and to get going. Not too many of those 700 city folk will be able to do it.
(quote)
"Take, for example, the many native North American or other indigenous tribes, who decided not to engage in grain agriculture, metallurgy, mining, building cities etc."
----------
This is both overly simplistic and factually incorrect.
Corn is a GRAIN. Amaranth too was used by pre contact peoples as we now use cereal grains...
Both Americas hosted agrarian societies of many kinds, meanwhile those now deemed "hunter gatherers" engaged in silviculture and other deliberate food & materials production driven modifications of their biomes, there was VERY little of either continent's land masses with biomes which had not been DELIBERATELY & functionally modified by humans well prior to Eurasians "discovering" the Americas.
Those first peoples did copper, bronze, silver and gold extraction and related metallurgy on both continents. They MINED AND SMELTED ORES as part of that suite of technologies, they did FAR more than utilize native gold, copper and found meteoric iron for metallic tools & ornaments.
They built cities on both continents, please do Google on the name "Cahokia". A full on city (4,000 acres!) near present day St. Louis IL, built by what we would probably class as a hunter/gatherer society.
If you want to claim that non/less wholehearted use of what we now might identify as "modern" extractive, agricultural or engineering technologies were some kind of INFORMED CHOICE, you're going to need some proof to convince me.
Quote: "... many native North American or other indigenous tribes...". The word "many", not "all". There were "many" native North American (and South American) peoples who did not practice agriculture and remained hunter gatherer societies. I'm Australian, here 60,000 years (far longer than human settlement in the Americas) of indigenous societies did not develop or use "farming" to produce food for harvest & storage. Your comment on "informed choice" is extremely interesting. I think a lot about this. There were numerous examples of pre agricultural societies (10 kya) in Mesopotamia, the Levant, India, that tried agriculture but eventually reverted to Hunter gatherer. But obviously many that eventually stayed farming. The main advantage was militarily believe it or not. Farming communities had one big disadvantage, they had food that could be stolen by roving bands of hunters. But the farming community had one huge advantage, they could support more people on a limited land area. The farmers outnumbered the roving hunters & could repel the planned theft. Eventually, right up to today, the farmers dominate (and steal from) the hunter gatherers.
Once one bunch of farmer's "big man" figured out he could make the boys go and steal from SOME OTHER FARMERS, modern politics was invented.
As humans were few it made sense to despise cannibalism. As resources run out however until a balance is found cannibalism may the the best insurance policy for survival. So the more the population the more food in the future. Old meat is better than no meat so to say.
Yes some people may get mad human disease , also feeding our future human life stock so much antibiotics and other things ain't healthy, but cannibalism will happen anyhow once structures have fully broken. That is if there is no nuclear war.
That way there is most certainly a surviving small population
Soylent Green as prophesy. Humm.
I don't think it will be institutionalised... It will result from anarchy. In some regions earlier in some later, in some remote islands maybe never.. of course it could be that some powerful country like China or USA will try to speed up that process to keep order longer in their own place...
But for it to happen in an orderly way as in soylent green it would need to happen fast (before 2040 I guess) and it doesn't make sense. If you have the power to pull it off you can rather extinguish people before risking eating their unhealthy meat. I rather think it will happen slowly. First just eat people who died in fighting or natural causes. Then likely groups will form that roam around to find human groups to eat.. it will happen as all modern structures have broken or the last order is breaking.
Yes, getting over the hump of eating humans will happen fast because of mass starvation.
"9 meals away from anarchy"
I took it that way.
I don’t disagree although I don’t really see it becoming institutionalized. If there really is only 6 lbs of flesh-protein per human left on this planet now, it will ramp up exponentially leaving our means of production systems in the dust.
More like 40 lb. of meat per adult, boned, trimmed, ready to cook.
(Don't ask).
That # is still not comforting :-)
You would likely need to eat at least 15 or 16 decent sized people to make it through the year, more if you're working hard to catch them or it's cold out.
No, not "comfort food".
You need to examine central American pre contact agriculture based civilizations, several of which declined at least partly due to nutrient depletion (largely depleted phosphorus, the hardest to come by of the NPK "big three" nutrients). Their ritual warfare, human sacrifice and cannibalism served certain functional purposes.
Yeah. But they didn't know about many things like crop rotation and so on. Of course there is also overpopulation, but much less severe Vs Eurasia and Africa.
Agroforestry was very Common in the Alpes aka Pond Fish and other Wild Food. This helped a lot while 2. WW but nowadays all is heavy degraded and no eatable trees at all and even fungi is now rare. Going down to Permaculture or less impact Agriculture is not so easy with less wild Food. Even wild escargots are now super rare, a food very common in old Vienna and Alpes.
Excellent analysis B, thank you. I tend to think it's more likely that humanity will go extinct than otherwise, but probably won't be around to find out!
In my junior year at Wittenberg University, I married an IBM systems engineer in training who ran the school's IBM computer. That was 1966, and for my Physical Chemistry project I wrote a Fortran program projecting how long it would take for ALL of the energy containing solid matter in the universe to decay into pure energy, so entropic decay. The room filling IBM computer could not handle the question, but I got an "A" anyway. That was 60 yrs. ago. Have a blessed day/evening. The real physical question today is how long it will take for enough of global ice, absorbing 144 BTUs per pound, to melt to the point that the hydrological cycle can no longer support life on earth, and 1.2 trillion tons are melting annually now as 321 million square miles of oceans are heating to nearly 70 degF on the surface. Any budding physical chemists out there?
An excellent piece ‘B’ of THS. I doubt I’ll be around when the worst effects of of the Poly and Meta-crisis bear down on humanity, but anyone under 45 yoa is likely to and certainly a child born today will experience its effects. The effects of a heating planet are already baked in, the thermal inertia being stored in the oceans will see to that, and then there’s the effects of depleting primary energy resources heightening the effects ecological overshoot.
There isn’t one of humanity’s problems, now predicaments, that couldn’t be made better by a reduction in population, but that’s a taboo subject, though one Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa’s hasn’t been afraid to raise as well practicing what she preaches, and that’s presented in her recent 2025 (free to view on YouTube) documentary film “GREENWASHED | Full Documentary [Official]”🤔
"a rise in entropy [...] is what gives time a direction"
That is not correct. Time is fundamental, it would pass even if entropy was at a maximum level.
Your statement about Time being fundamental is basically correct. But, on the scale of the Universe, Time and Entropy are synonymous. And the statement could be flipped "An increase in Time is what gives Entropy direction" and still be accurate.
"An increase in time" is what gives anything direction. No time, no events - stasis. That is not what we observe (and would be impossible to observe anyway).
To say that entropy increases *with* time is not the same thing as saying that entropy increase *causes* time. How can something that is dependent on time be the cause of time?
And yet, electrons have been shown to travel backwards in time.
In "Q.E.D.", Feynman wrote it off as an artifact of math, but found it puzzling non the less. It seems to be a clear violation of "time is entropy".