Is Earth F**ked?

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Originally Posted by RandBlade

No it's because of science.

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Originally Posted by RandBlade

If not science then what?

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Science advancements and R & D costs money. Access to modern medicine costs money.
Knowledge is redistributing wealth of information, and that education costs money.

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Originally Posted by Lebanese Dragon

I think you have to thank both science (industrial revolution mainly) and capitalism for the average wealth increase (which led to greater average lifespan), and then thank science twice for making their be worthwhile things to buy in regards to medicine (which even further increased lifespan).

We should thank science, capitalism, and to some degree the redistrubution of wealth/social safety-nets.

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That's what I meant. :up: But especially the public programs....that require tax dollars.

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Originally Posted by EyeKhan

So goes the title of the paper/ talk scheduled for tomorrow at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting. Essentially the point is that sustainability in our civilization is impossible. Full title and blurb about it from Science:
IMHO I have two responses:
#1. It's not about "Earth", it's about human civilization. But I recognize that most people think of the two as one in the same, so whatever.
#2. I've resigned myself to the reality that "yes, human civilization is fucked" for quite a while now.
Comments? Thoughts? What do you guys think? Are we, or our offspring anyway, fucked?

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All the problems of civilization can be tracked back to finances.
* Wars are cock fights where the poor put the casualties, the middle class put the money and a few people make tons of money.
* Economic crises are rushed by big speculators that artificially alter prices by allocating or deallocating huge amounts of money in a certain market. This creates prices changes. Inflation makes people to lose buying power, deflation causes unemployment.
* Poverty is not about logistics of food or overpopulation. 25% of US grains are used to feed cars while about 700 million starve in the world. Hunger is caused by the lack of access to money. And of course nothing has been done to grant poor access to money. Charity gives them bits of food, not access to a source of money so they can buy their own food. money that is printed in a QE is not given to the poor, or even the Americans. It is given to bankers.

We have 400 years of having the same crisis over and over.
If you dig in detail in history, you will find that if you replace houses with stocks, you move from 2008 to 1929.