Don't horses require quite a large acreage of land for their "fuel" (I know Vaclav Smil calculated this for his book Energetics, which I don't currently have to hand). I doubt there'd be enough land today - even for the US - to replace each car with a horse, let alone a team to draw a carriage. No doubt only the well off would ride, and only the very rich would rattle along in carriages! Interesting thoughts nonetheless.
There is a certain group that wishes for a depopulation of 7.5 billion people now rather than later. With all this complexity, how would that work out?
Is that a "wish" of a group, or what is on the Georgia Guidestones?
What I see of our "owners", our apex predators, is that they have differences of opinion, and their numbers also rise more than is sustainable, and they have threats internal to their groups, and group-rivalries, but they are still our predators, and we are still their grazing herds.
I seek Divine Guidance as a bypass to their machinations.
I'm also at ease with my own death, through no particular efforts of my own. I was just always that way.
A small group of "doomers" have been asking, "how do we rid the planet of 7.5 billion people" for the past few years. An even smaller subset of that group are disappointed that the jab didn't do the dirty deed. I may be wrong about the numbers, but the sentiment is the same. Geez, folks, nature bats last and we are not steering this ship.
i know we need renewable energy but professor ugo bardi friend and club of rome member the cinese guy say's there are enough coal oil and gas to power civilization until 2100 of course if we use all the climate will kill us so we need renewable energy but there will not by a malthusian collapse most likely in the future there is as of now food enough so i think there will by fewer babies and older people competing life i am not a big fan of william rees he hold's a grudge against humanity
Aaron, you may have been exposed to hydrocarbon propaganda. It is the extreme weather days that will ruin agriculture (a damaged enzyme involved with photosynthesis). Most people during famines will die of opportunistic disease after months of malnutrition. For reference: https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32
The ERoI of "renewables" is lower than even fossil fuels now and anyway they are better described as "rebuildables" because the infrastructure needs replacing regularly, and that is currently entirely dependent on fossil fuels. They are not a long term solution, they just offer a way for us to continue to destroy the biosphere for a bit longer.
Cars seem very fast, faster than horses etc. with an average of 50-70 km per hour. But Ivan Illich added the work time needed to buy, maintain and fuel a car to the actual transport time. Then a car becomes rather slow and it is easily beaten by a bicycle. The speed of cars - it turns out - is an optical illusion. Of course the killing efficiency of bots may be better in comparison, but Ivan Illich is not anymore here to make the calculations.
Decades ago DARPA was working at a project to remove or erase conscience so soldiers could kill without any restraint. Israeli "meat bots" were hired to train US military to kill unarmed women and children at first sight - as happens in Gaza, West-Bank, Lebanon and Syria.
From that perspective, military killer robots are a logical extension of a failed policy: my late friend the therapist had to deal with those made "unfit for life" by the barbaric training.
A lesser known saying "the cost of fast profit is faster collapse" is in full sway in the West: outsourcing production implies elimination of knowhow and the means to maintain and improve it. Whereas inevitable decline of nonrenewable resources would suggest more investment in education for science and technology to compensate for that - an obvious policy failure / absence of long term vision.
The failure of the West to do what it should inevitably leads to war, if just to cause so much misery that the culprits (oligarchic Chabad cabal) stay out of picture - as happened after WW1 and WW2: many German Nazis wound up in high functions, up to NATO chief. This is not a joke and there's still an opportunity to prevent history from rhyming / repeating:
El reemplazo de caballos por camiones ocurrió en la parte ascendente de la curva de los recursos. El de soldados por drones de guerra ocurriría en la parte descendente de la curva de los recursos. Ese aspecto es importante en el análisis ya que no se estaría cumpliendo tan fácilmente la ley de Ashby. El sistema ahora estaría siendo empujado a la simplificación no hacia la complejidad.
This assessment of the Russian-Ukrainian (NATO) drone war opens with the cartoon of a farmer telling his horse that he won't be replaced by tractors, but by horses that drive tractors. ;-)
On TV news channels, I often see humans walking or being carried in donkey carts as they travel thru cityscapes painted by Zdzisław Beksiński.
Aerial combat was more aptly represented in paintint via "Guérnica" by Pablo Picasso than "Command of the Air" by Giulio Douhet. It reminds me of the observation by Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Poets are “the unacknowledged legislators (¿futurologists?) of the world”
Humans fight each other and cause "collateral damage" everywhere and all the time. I see no reason to expect robots (at least originally) designed and programmed by humans to be significantly better. In fact, absent any real conscience, focus on mission priority would probably result in more, not less, collateral damage, including humans and all our stuff.
Of course, before we get to robots fighting each other we have to somehow survive robots designed specifically to destroy humans and their (currently human-manned) machines. Frankly, this is not really looking so that promising.
As I would rather picture a scenario in which a relatively small areas would continue to enjoy abundant energy (from whatever remains of oil and coal or, who knows, perhaps from renewable energy sources), while much larger areas would suffer from severe shortages. This would lead to high-tech robots tracking down rebels and raiders or waging asymmetric wars against “old-fashioned” humans.
Furthermore, energy might not be the main limiting factor. After all, robotic weapons and drones could run on a diesel generator. But they will need state-of-the-art semiconductors, the production of which is very energy-intensive and for which there are only a handful of factories on Earth.
In "The Diamond Age", as increasingly smaller defensive drones were being developed to destroy enemy drones, Neal Stephenson imagine swarms of nanorobots, much like an immune system, protecting cities from swarms of microrobots sent by rival ones.
Don't horses require quite a large acreage of land for their "fuel" (I know Vaclav Smil calculated this for his book Energetics, which I don't currently have to hand). I doubt there'd be enough land today - even for the US - to replace each car with a horse, let alone a team to draw a carriage. No doubt only the well off would ride, and only the very rich would rattle along in carriages! Interesting thoughts nonetheless.
For the current population, yes. But we will be going down rapidly in the near future.
dear professor ugo bardi how rapidly will we go down because less fertillity and fewer birth's of mass die off ?
It hasn't happened yet.
This is a problem that all humans are working together in our world now.
Our "owners" (Carlin) intend to covertly cull us, in such ways as to not break industrial economy, which benefits their wealth and power.
They pretend that they don't do this.
Secrecy protects them.
There is a certain group that wishes for a depopulation of 7.5 billion people now rather than later. With all this complexity, how would that work out?
Is that a "wish" of a group, or what is on the Georgia Guidestones?
What I see of our "owners", our apex predators, is that they have differences of opinion, and their numbers also rise more than is sustainable, and they have threats internal to their groups, and group-rivalries, but they are still our predators, and we are still their grazing herds.
I seek Divine Guidance as a bypass to their machinations.
I'm also at ease with my own death, through no particular efforts of my own. I was just always that way.
A small group of "doomers" have been asking, "how do we rid the planet of 7.5 billion people" for the past few years. An even smaller subset of that group are disappointed that the jab didn't do the dirty deed. I may be wrong about the numbers, but the sentiment is the same. Geez, folks, nature bats last and we are not steering this ship.
Aaron, as Dr. William Rees (StandsToReeson channel on Substack) has said several times, "Civilization is three square meals away from Anarchy."
i know we need renewable energy but professor ugo bardi friend and club of rome member the cinese guy say's there are enough coal oil and gas to power civilization until 2100 of course if we use all the climate will kill us so we need renewable energy but there will not by a malthusian collapse most likely in the future there is as of now food enough so i think there will by fewer babies and older people competing life i am not a big fan of william rees he hold's a grudge against humanity
Aaron, you may have been exposed to hydrocarbon propaganda. It is the extreme weather days that will ruin agriculture (a damaged enzyme involved with photosynthesis). Most people during famines will die of opportunistic disease after months of malnutrition. For reference: https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32
The ERoI of "renewables" is lower than even fossil fuels now and anyway they are better described as "rebuildables" because the infrastructure needs replacing regularly, and that is currently entirely dependent on fossil fuels. They are not a long term solution, they just offer a way for us to continue to destroy the biosphere for a bit longer.
Very false, usual fossil propaganda.
Argue it out with Dr Tim Morgan:
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2026/07/01/327-surplus-energy-economics/
And to be clear: I am not arguing for business as usual. Degrowth has already started and it is happening whether we plan for it or not.
Cars seem very fast, faster than horses etc. with an average of 50-70 km per hour. But Ivan Illich added the work time needed to buy, maintain and fuel a car to the actual transport time. Then a car becomes rather slow and it is easily beaten by a bicycle. The speed of cars - it turns out - is an optical illusion. Of course the killing efficiency of bots may be better in comparison, but Ivan Illich is not anymore here to make the calculations.
A bicycle, well suited to one's body, and ridden regularly is an unusually good machine.
Decades ago DARPA was working at a project to remove or erase conscience so soldiers could kill without any restraint. Israeli "meat bots" were hired to train US military to kill unarmed women and children at first sight - as happens in Gaza, West-Bank, Lebanon and Syria.
From that perspective, military killer robots are a logical extension of a failed policy: my late friend the therapist had to deal with those made "unfit for life" by the barbaric training.
A lesser known saying "the cost of fast profit is faster collapse" is in full sway in the West: outsourcing production implies elimination of knowhow and the means to maintain and improve it. Whereas inevitable decline of nonrenewable resources would suggest more investment in education for science and technology to compensate for that - an obvious policy failure / absence of long term vision.
The failure of the West to do what it should inevitably leads to war, if just to cause so much misery that the culprits (oligarchic Chabad cabal) stay out of picture - as happened after WW1 and WW2: many German Nazis wound up in high functions, up to NATO chief. This is not a joke and there's still an opportunity to prevent history from rhyming / repeating:
https://postscriptus.substack.com/p/nazi-war-criminals-became-high-ranking
El reemplazo de caballos por camiones ocurrió en la parte ascendente de la curva de los recursos. El de soldados por drones de guerra ocurriría en la parte descendente de la curva de los recursos. Ese aspecto es importante en el análisis ya que no se estaría cumpliendo tan fácilmente la ley de Ashby. El sistema ahora estaría siendo empujado a la simplificación no hacia la complejidad.
This assessment of the Russian-Ukrainian (NATO) drone war opens with the cartoon of a farmer telling his horse that he won't be replaced by tractors, but by horses that drive tractors. ;-)
https://johnhelmer.net/how-not-to-lose-job-election-war/#more-94582
On TV news channels, I often see humans walking or being carried in donkey carts as they travel thru cityscapes painted by Zdzisław Beksiński.
Aerial combat was more aptly represented in paintint via "Guérnica" by Pablo Picasso than "Command of the Air" by Giulio Douhet. It reminds me of the observation by Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Poets are “the unacknowledged legislators (¿futurologists?) of the world”
Humans fight each other and cause "collateral damage" everywhere and all the time. I see no reason to expect robots (at least originally) designed and programmed by humans to be significantly better. In fact, absent any real conscience, focus on mission priority would probably result in more, not less, collateral damage, including humans and all our stuff.
Of course, before we get to robots fighting each other we have to somehow survive robots designed specifically to destroy humans and their (currently human-manned) machines. Frankly, this is not really looking so that promising.
As I would rather picture a scenario in which a relatively small areas would continue to enjoy abundant energy (from whatever remains of oil and coal or, who knows, perhaps from renewable energy sources), while much larger areas would suffer from severe shortages. This would lead to high-tech robots tracking down rebels and raiders or waging asymmetric wars against “old-fashioned” humans.
Furthermore, energy might not be the main limiting factor. After all, robotic weapons and drones could run on a diesel generator. But they will need state-of-the-art semiconductors, the production of which is very energy-intensive and for which there are only a handful of factories on Earth.
" It wouldn’t be a bad idea if drones were to decide to fight each other, leaving us, humans, in peace."
Its a nice thought but we know that uncontrollable humans will never be truly at peace with each other.
In "The Diamond Age", as increasingly smaller defensive drones were being developed to destroy enemy drones, Neal Stephenson imagine swarms of nanorobots, much like an immune system, protecting cities from swarms of microrobots sent by rival ones.
I am confident that we-in the global we sense-have people working on that technology even as we imag.