Grim Outlook for Our Survivability
hubie writes:
The major drivers in long-term climate models are water and air contamination (through the effects of greenhouse gases), and deforestation. Quite a bit of hay and discussion has been made about the level of contribution of the former, but what is not in dispute is the latter. Between 2000 and 2012, 2.3 million km^2 of forests were cut down, which amounts to 2*10^5 Km2 per year. At this rate all the forests would disappear approximatively in 100-200 years. A couple of mathematical biologists considered only the deforestation part and modeled the survivability of our species given the rate of the disappearance of the forests. Their results were not very promising.
In conclusion our model shows that a catastrophic collapse in human population, due to resource consumption, is the most likely scenario of the dynamical evolution based on current parameters. Adopting a combined deterministic and stochastic model we conclude from a statistical point of view that the probability that our civilisation survives itself is less than 10% in the most optimistic scenario. Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilisation (see Fig. 5). Making the situation even worse, we stress once again that it is unrealistic to think that the decline of the population in a situation of strong environmental degradation would be a non-chaotic and well-ordered decline. This consideration leads to an even shorter remaining time.
They also note that according to the Kardashev scale, a Type II civilization needs to be able to harness the total energy output of their star to be able to spread across their own stellar system. Our civilization is many orders of magnitude away from that point and it looks like we are exhausting all of our available resources before achieving that technological level. If you believe the mediocrity principle applies, then perhaps the answer to the Fermi paradox question of "where is everybody?" is simply "they are all dead."
Journal Reference
Bologna, M., Aquino, G. "Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis", Scientific Reports 10, 7631 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-63657-6
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.