[Eight Ace]

[quote="Recycled Spooge":ab2de]Don't make this into a west vs. east thread. I don't want it to be another nationalist bullshit thread. It has nothing to do with west vs. east, north vs. south, bla bla bla... go somewhere else if you want to have some "hey we kicked your nation's ass in this and that war, and we have free health care and you don't" thread...[/quote:ab2de]

Don't talk shit because you don't understand or can't read what is being said.
I mentioned the "west" once, in a rather derogatory way I thought...and the
"hey we kicked your nations arse.." sentiment is entirely you're own invention,
for whatever reason eek:

And as for your invitation to "go somewhere else...", you may be a wanker who can't
interpret a simple post, but you're not a mod, so shut the fuck up you pompous twat.

[Oddball]

I really see the future as what Fallout was. Overpopulation leads to over consumption leads to desparate grab for resources leads to fighting leads to nuclear war.

Hydrogen fuelled cars seem promising but it does take natural gas to produce hydrogen.

There is some project going on in Australia about this huge solar powered tower thingy. It has fields and fields of glass panes surrounding it and it is designed so that the sunlight heats the air underneath the glass and rises through turbines in the tower.

There are a zillion alternatives to petrol. Petroleum should be used to build, not to burn. I think it was Dimitri Mendeleev who said that if your going to use petroleum you might as well fuel your oven with $100 bills.

However, ATM I say that in 100 years mankind won't exist. When you think about it dinosaurs lasted millions and millions of years and it seems that mankind's history is but a blink of an eye in the history of the Earth.

[Slaggg]

A Part of me agrees with you Oddball.

But I also ask you to look at your own quote in your Sig. cool:

[Ydiss]

And at the same time our existence is so totally insignificant - What are we to the universe? A tiny speck of dust in a huge empty expanse of deathly cold, filled with trillions of other insignificant specks of dust. Some of which may have living creatures asking similar questions of themselves.

I'm sorry, but if man was meant to find other life, other living planets (or vice-versa) don't you think that, in the millions of years that this planet has been inhabitable, that it would have happened already?

It's a huge, empty void. It's there for a bloody reason, it's life-less for a bloody reason and it's limitlessly vast for a bloody reason. Unless man magically comes up with some kind of super "warp" technology like all the books, movies and series like to make-believe then we will never have the resources to push a single atom as far as the nearest solar system, let alone one with habitable planets in it.

That nearest solar system is Alpha Centauri. 2 light years away. 2 light years equals 2 full years traveling at the speed of light. The speed of light is approximately 186,000 miles per second. Don't even try to do the maths on that one.

The fastest mankind has managed to travel using solid/liquid fuels is still recorded in miles per hour and isn't anywhere near the figure above. For us to travel to the nearest solar system (again, let alone all the other billions of solar systems out there) at current speeds would take more than a life-time. So, at current progression of technology there isn't a hope in hell that we'll somehow manage to visit other living planets within 100 years.

Oh, and also, just to establish my point on this before I get back to the actual topic... This planet is able to sustain life due to many freakish and extremely unlikely occurances, none of which any of us has any control over.

To list just a couple: It's exactly the right distance from the sun and has exactly the right amount of atmosphere to protect us from that sun, without which we'd all be dead. This atmosphere is there only because Earth just happens to have a core of iron. This core is what creates the huge magnetic field that envelopes the Earth in such a way that it just happens to deflect most of the lethal and harmful rays that our sun spews out. Without that iron core we would not exist.

And that doesn't take into account the fact that life evolved once the surface cooled from a mass of molton lava.

So, to presume that there has to be life on other planets, just like ours, is as silly as saying we're the only life in the entire universe. Neither can be proved so neither is true. To hope somehow that we will reach a planet that has gone through the same extreme freakish accidents as Earth and that this will be our salvation from killing it is totally insane.

The world would live on happily until it was consumed by the sun, millions upon millions of years from today, if humans never existed. Religion, "civilisation", buildings, fuel, industrial waste, murder, destruction are all inventions of humans. They weren't here until we grew these brains capable of reason and they won't be here when we're extinct.

No matter how advanced we are, anyone who believes that humans will not be out-lived by this planet is a fool.

Unfortunately, as Spooge correctly pointed out, our own destruction and extinction will be expedited by our own actions.

So fucking what. When it's all over and we're all dead, who will mourn us?

God? On-looking aliens (who've been studying us from "afar")? Ghosts who roam the planet in some kind of human-invented after-life?

Hah! No one will. The universe will continue into oblivion and not one living creature will be aware of our small, insignificant impact.

[pest]

I havent bothered to read all (any) of the responses, but here is my take. Yes, we are destroying our environment, but when big oil controls the economy and government, theres not much happening in alternative power sources. Its getting better, but not fast enough. Currently, solar energy costs about 20 times more than fossil fuel power and until there is any type of economies of scale, it wont get much better. Forget hydro, now we have to deal with tree huggers and their free flowing rivers. Wind power is gettig better, but it is only useful in very few places. There are some new deep water tidal/current projects, but they are extremely expensive. I personally think the government should do more to promote green power, but their ties to oil make that unlikely.

Overpopulation does not come from 1st world countries. At least not the biggest offenders.

Your biggest environmental abuses and disasters also happen in emergin 3rd world countries, not the 1st world.

I thought the ozone thing was getting better with the discontinuation of use of hydroflorocarbons. Dunno.

The world wont come to a screeching halt when fossil fuels are depleted. First it will get hard to find and very expensive, making alternatives more attractive and leading to more efficient use of what we have.

Global warming is kind of scary.

Augusts blackouts had nothing whatsoever to do with fuel.

I cannot say if everyone will live with the first world standard of living some day anymore than you can say they won't. The future is uncertain. Anything can happen. 100 years ago you would have been stoned if you stated that we could travel to the moon and back or that we could travel across country in 3 hours and that that was slow compared to what military aircraft could do.

[Oddball]

Originally Posted by Slaggg

A Part of me agrees with you Oddball.

But I also ask you to look at your own quote in your Sig. cool:

Good point biggrin:

Though it's hard to take an optimistic stance sometimes

We cannot escape the 2nd law of thermodymanics,
entropy increases and all our energy conversions make the total energy less useful.

Even with that being said though we still have the Sun, which keeps pumping new energy into the Earth "system".
The best thing for the first world to do is to make our energy conversions as efficient as possible. I think if more people use more efficient devices (change lights to fluorescent, use 94% AFUE furnace instead of that old 1970s POS in your basement, etc.) we will eventually reach an equillibrium (provided we stop using oil for electric generation), and should last a few centuries more.

[Slaggg]

Originally Posted by Oddball

Though it's hard to take an optimistic stance sometimes

Aint that the truth. Sometimes it is more difficult to remain optimistic about our collective future. What with the shitty economy, the media shoving 'bad news is the only news' down our throats, EA continually fucking things up for us ( happy: ), and all the rest, I wonder where things are heading. At times like that, I do one of two things: I either remember our history, and see that things have been so much worse, in so many different ways. Or, I just take a good, long look into my girlfriends eyes, and remind myself that right here, right now is the best, and most important moment of my life. Carpe Diem!

[Proteus]

Meh, let our kids deal with those problems.

[Recycled Spooge]

[quote="Eight Ace":6d3a2][quote="Recycled Spooge":6d3a2]Don't make this into a west vs. east thread. I don't want it to be another nationalist bullshit thread. It has nothing to do with west vs. east, north vs. south, bla bla bla... go somewhere else if you want to have some "hey we kicked your nation's ass in this and that war, and we have free health care and you don't" thread...[/quote:6d3a2]

Don't talk shit because you don't understand or can't read what is being said.
I mentioned the "west" once, in a rather derogatory way I thought...and the
"hey we kicked your nations arse.." sentiment is entirely you're own invention,
for whatever reason eek:

And as for your invitation to "go somewhere else...", you may be a wanker who can't
interpret a simple post, but you're not a mod, so shut the fuck up you pompous twat.[/quote:6d3a2]
I don't care. Bye.

[ShagNasty]

we only use fossil fuels because we can charge for them. believe me our government has shit to blow your mind away. and if you think other wise o well. shit we prob already have cold fusion but why use it for the public. thats secret shit. lol the_finger:

Edited by Ydiss. Please reduce the size of your sig. Thanks.

[MrLevinstein]

People won't change...

When the Car was popular in the 50's there was a prototype of a car that ran on corn oil, it was dismissed because we already used fossil fuels, despite the car producing no harmful exaust or usingfossil fuels. We have the technology for hybrid cars but they really arnt successful because people are reluctant to learn new things.

Look at it this way:
You have a choice between low power shower heads and powerful ones of course youll pick the powerful ones

You have a choice between a 80 hp hybrid car that requires additional means and upkeep or a choice between a car with 120 horsepower car that requires only the ususal filling. Almost all people will choose that gas powered one.

You have a choice to run out of oil for your economy or pick an oil rich country give a bullshit excuse and invade. Which would you pick. You know this might lead to the use of bio or chem or even nuclear weapons but you invade anyways possibly ruining the earth and causing nuclear dawn. Its not so out of the picture anymore.

[Short Hand]

technology and science are our saviors. Until it comes I am pretty sure the earth can take a little bit more of a beating from us.

[Jamos]

[quote="Recycled Spooge":b868e]Frist world nations, meaning the U.S., Canada, E.U., and all that other crap I missed, claim that their systems are the best and that they are the countries that know the right way to live. Well do they? These countries ways of life lead to...
Overpopulation
Depletion of natural resources
Bigger holes in the ozone layer
Increase in heat from greenhouse gasses
Basically, if us, the first world nations, keep on living the "right way", we will be fucked by one of those factor, or some of them, or all of them. Also, the earth cannot support our ways of life forever, we will run out of petroleum, and then what? The American way of life doesn't excist anymore. No more electricity, just like in August. Call the middle east medieval, but we're the ones fucked in the end, because we only think of now and not the future. Also don't call me some tree hugger, I'm just looking at facts. Whoever believes that we will someday have a world where everyone lives like people in the first world countries is a moron since that is impossible, because there isn't enough fuel in the world to do that and the planet earth can't support that. Anyway, cold fusion is only fifty years away just like it was fifty years away fifty years ago. Hydrogen requires natural gas. Anyway, back to the neolithic age! Time to find a new way of life.[/quote:b868e]

disagree tottally with all your points..Forget the rest of the 1st world nations, there really is only one now it's America. And if it wasnt for America there wouldnt be a world worth living in..remember what game your playing and what it really represents..just think what would happen if the axis won WW2..i shudder to think how many more jews or others would be exterminated..

as far as the environment America has done more for it than any third world country has..for god sakes look at what Brazil is doing to thier own rainforests..pollution controls?? go to India to see what they are doing. Actually since 1975 pollution has gotten alot better in the United States and the ozone layer while it does have a small hole in it is actually getting better..take cleveland in the 70s for example, hell back then thier River caught on fire for gosh sakes!

as far as third and second world countries they will always be poor its just the way the world is built..geography my man! the reason the northen countries are better off is because of the cold weather..we have to work harder to survive thus kicking off the industrial revolution etc.

thats all i got to say bout this.. biggrin:

[Rannoch]

I DO NOT CARE

Wait, what was the question?

Basically, we need to get more efficient. We are incredibly wastefull right now, and that has to STOP within the next, oh, 20-50 years, or the planet will never be able to heal itself within a conceivable amount of time. Then what?

Who the fuck knows?