Humans are cockroaches. We survive everything. Even fallen cities had survivors. They probably went somewhere else, and fallen cities tend to be places where the payment for janitorial services was missed so they stopped being repaired and nature did the rest. And nature is an aggressive SOB. You can lose a paved road in about 5 years, just from windblown seeds and water. So its not all pillaging and fire and teeming hordes of barbarians. People love to talk about the Roman empire falling, yet they tend to be the less educated so don't realize it took about 400 years to collapse. Stair step after stair step, generation after generation, values declining and being discarded until what made it an Empire didn't exist there anymore.
Discover Magazine online posted an article which is kinda sloppily written titled: Society Is Doomed. It's the usual limited drivel about the diverse causes of collapse. The truth is a lot simpler. Societies collapse because there's drought. Its always about famine. Drought leads to crop failure and no civilization is more than three meals from rebellion. Remember that phrase. It's true. The article is another one of those thinly veiled diatribes that we should all be liberals and peg our hopes to egalitarianism, or authoritarianism by the enlightened, specially educated liberal tyrants like we've got in charge now, running this country into the ground. Of course. The thing about insane loyalty is it is insane.
The good news is that collapse is inevitable. Only Water Monopolies last, because they can open or close a canal gate and a million lives are lost through deliberate famine. This is the population control aspect. But collapse comes due to lack of drinking water to irrigate crops. What if you don't have to depend on nature to provide that water? What if you can get it out of the ocean, cheap enough to use it to grow food? This is why I keep harping on Cheap Desalination. It is the second best protection from famine, and prevents collapse by buffering water supply. I feel the same way about wild game, and terraced fields and dredging reservoirs and planting wild orchards and heritage seeds in places where they'll self-cultivate. Do this everywhere. Refill the fossil aquifers so all those abandoned farms in the Dakotas and Nebraska can be used again, growing grain. Apply the same technology and efforts to fixing soil and water supplies so everywhere dry can be growing food. Just because we have enough to eat doesn't mean we'll be breeding like rats in Riyadh. Raising kids is a lot of work. A bit of a bother. And they kill themselves off doing "Hey bubba, watch this!" stunts so not all of them live long enough to have more rats, I mean kids of their own. Environmentalists believe that the entire human population should be what we had in the Stone Age, with no technology beyond fire and skins and stone tools. True Luddism couched in angry hatred for the rest of us. If that isn't selfish, I don't know what is. This is a good reason to ignore the buggers.
I would like for California, where I live, to get serious about cheap desalination, starting in Los Angeles where they get only 11 inches of rain a year, enough for 150,000 people yet they have 12 million living there. Most of their water comes from up here and is pumped uphill and over a couple passes to reach LA where it tastes terrible and is loaded with poisons which are likely responsible for the violence there. LA has great weather, since it rarely rains, and it's warm. It needs to get it's water from the Sea. This should be a priority and should be implemented very soon, using no petrochemicals, because we're going to ship those to China as long as they can pay. Since Malaysian Muslims just (two weeks ago) murdered 237 Chinese citizens for some reason, I'm thinking China may get peeved about it. The Chinese coast gets lots of rain. Inland is where the deserts lie, and has had some form of aquifer, mostly man-made, for a couple thousand years. In the last few years, the Chinese started bulldozing them in order to sell more bottled water. Corruption in China is so well understand they plan for it. The very nature of Confucian Philosophy is that. The Uighur Muslims of Western China getting screwed over by the Commissar with the brother in law in the bottled water business was cited as the reason for the Hijacking. That this story leaked several years ago, and the Chinese have done NOTHING but make it worse, it could lead to retaliation. That's probably speculation, but maybe it's true. Cheap Desalination won't do much for the Uighurs, but it will do wonders for the West Africans, for the Sahara, for Peru and Chile and Ecuador, and for Baja Mexico which would be transformed by cheap water for agriculture. Right now, Baja Mexico is a 1500 mile long peninsula surrounded by warm seas, with mountains tall enough to get snow, and dry as a bone most of the year. What little water they get is usually from broken up hurricanes that reform after crossing Central America from the Caribbean and end up becoming pretty thunderstorms in the desert Southwest of the USA after dumping some heavy rain as it drifts up the Sea of Cortez like angry wasps. This is a useful stretch of land, provided you can get water there. The desert soil will grow good crops, if there is water. This is one of the ironies of the desert. While some parts are unusable due to excess calcite, other parts are extremely fertile. The Sahara blooms with 1-3 inches of rain. The Mojave is the same. Small amounts of water and stored seeds erupt, grow, pollinate, and drop new seeds in a matter of a week or two for the next annual rain. Rather amazing resilience. Osage Oranges are a nasty orange ball of fiber meant to be eaten and carried by mastodons, now extinct, yet have managed to hang on despite lacking their natural seed spreading mechanism. Nothing else would eat them.
I think, if the USA breaks up, states like California and Arizona and Texas, all having close ties with Mexico despite pretending to resent each other, may find themselves entrepenuers building cheap desalination and selling it to rich farmers or businesses interested in agriculture to start developing the exceedingly cheap coastline down in Baja. With work, it will bloom. And food is money. People always want money.
So when articles tell me that humans are just going to slaughter each other in an endless cycle of collapse because it always happens like that, I laugh. Cheap Desalination is already happening. We likely won't do it with the current Nihilists in charge of govt turning us on each other like starving dogs. We'll do it for our own profit as this Union fails and the Nation becomes independent states, bonded by trade agreements rather than endless turning the other cheek so some Eastern Bastard can feel smug. Hell with them. California Republic should be finding the cheap ways to make seawater fresh and strengthen its natural resource so when harder times come, they aren't so bad.
This is also why I think we should legalize cheap scooters properly and make that the first option, not $15 million dollar bus stops. How many scooters can you get for $15 million bucks? Scooters won't work in Wisconsin Winters, but I don't live in Wisconsin. I live in Sunny California. We care about Water, and our roads stay dry most of the year, and only a few places get icy. The rest of the state would work fine with scooters. I really wish the local bike shops offered a motorcycle safety training course here, so I don't have to drive down to Rocklin, which is 45 minutes in traffic, three days, and $300. Additional courses cost more commutes, more time, more money. It should be up here. There are people interested in it, even old people, who ride scooters because they would rather pay for a hundred tanks of gasoline to get 100 mpg scooter than grit their teeth filling their gas guzzlers. This is an easy answer to fuel economy. It should be the answer well before electric cars. You can buy your neighborhood scooters for the cost of one bus to carry them, nevermind the cost of the bus driver.
Collapse in modern times is idiotic. Adapt.
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