Over population derail from "Humans as non-animals"

[Elixir]

The max sustainable population with known technology is in the million range. Anything above that and we will in time need new answers. And that's a million living as cavemen.

Are you talking about planet earth, or Puerto Rico?
Perhaps you meant minimum.

No. I mean Earth and I meant maximum. Early stone age, no flint or obsidian.

Did you graduate from MSU? (Making Stuff Up)
Flint and obsidian are stones. The era you indicate is literally named for them. And I assure you that igneous “stones” pre-date humans.
Out of curiosity, to what do you attribute the survival of the species after being reduced to far fewer than a million about 70,000 y.a.?

AI:

The global human population approximately 70,000 years ago is estimated to have dropped to a critically low level, possibly between 2,000 and 10,000 individuals. This event is known as a population bottleneck. Some studies suggest the population may have fallen as low as 1,000 breeding pairs. However, it’s important to note that these figures are educated guesses based on genetic analysis, and there is ongoing debate about the exact numbers

Do you think those “educated guesses” are off by 2-3 orders of magnitude? I’d be very interested in how you came to that conclusion.

Flint and obsidian are limited resources that will get mined out. Just like everything more advanced.

You're assuming we'd have to go back to knapping. You need special kinds of rock for that, kinds that don't fracture in unexpected directions when you bang the rocks together. But Neolithic technology is based on grinding, not knapping. You can use basalt. There's no way we're running out of that. Neolithic population estimates are in the hundred million range. Is there some other reason besides lack of rocks for why that level isn't sustainable?

Most things were based on grinding. Not blades, though.

There's no shortage of flint. In parts of England, buildings and walls are commonly built from the stuff. You can buy it for ~£600 a tonne, delivered.

Sure, flint supplies are not infinite. But 'not infinite' is a long way short of 'scarce'.

There’s enough volcanic glass on one Hawaiian lava flow to keep the world in blades for centuries. The problem in Neolithic times was that delivery costs and lead times from Hawaii were somewhat prohibitive.

 

[Bomb#20]

Did you graduate from MSU? (Making Stuff Up)
Flint and obsidian are stones. The era you indicate is literally named for them. And I assure you that igneous “stones” pre-date humans.
Out of curiosity, to what do you attribute the survival of the species after being reduced to far fewer than a million about 70,000 y.a.?
...
Do you think those “educated guesses” are off by 2-3 orders of magnitude? I’d be very interested in how you came to that conclusion.

Flint and obsidian are limited resources that will get mined out. Just like everything more advanced.

You're assuming we'd have to go back to knapping. You need special kinds of rock for that, kinds that don't fracture in unexpected directions when you bang the rocks together. But Neolithic technology is based on grinding, not knapping. You can use basalt. There's no way we're running out of that. Neolithic population estimates are in the hundred million range. Is there some other reason besides lack of rocks for why that level isn't sustainable?

Most things were based on grinding. Not blades, though.

There's no shortage of flint. In parts of England, buildings and walls are commonly built from the stuff. You can buy it for ~£600 a tonne, delivered.

Sure, flint supplies are not infinite. But 'not infinite' is a long way short of 'scarce'.

I don't know how the arithmetic on flint works out, so just checking here... You guys know that when Loren says "sustainable" he means sustainable until the oceans boil away in a billion years, right?

 

[Bomb#20]

Flint and obsidian are limited resources that will get mined out. Just like everything more advanced.

You're assuming we'd have to go back to knapping. You need special kinds of rock for that, kinds that don't fracture in unexpected directions when you bang the rocks together. But Neolithic technology is based on grinding, not knapping. You can use basalt. There's no way we're running out of that. Neolithic population estimates are in the hundred million range. Is there some other reason besides lack of rocks for why that level isn't sustainable?

Most things were based on grinding. Not blades, though.

There are blades and then there are blades. I know Neolithic people had axes made by grinding. If we're talking about a scenario where the remaining humans have blades adequate for farming but will have to try to get long without blades suitable for warfare and for hunting mastodons, I'm not sure that implies the world won't sustain a hundred million Neolithic farmers.

 

[Elixir]

There is PLENTY of flint and volcanic glass.
I can even walk out my door and find flint scrapers, arrowheads and scraps from less than ten miles distant. And there is poorer quality igneous rock just sitting around that could be worked into serviceable points.
This was right outside my door just now:

 

[DBT]

It looks like it's business as usual until radical change is forced upon us.

 

[bilby]

There is PLENTY of flint and volcanic glass.
I can even walk out my door and find flint scrapers, arrowheads and scraps from less than ten miles distant. And there is poorer quality igneous rock just sitting around that could be worked into serviceable points.
This was right outside my door just now:
View attachment 49376

So, you wouldn't come to the mountain, but the mountain came to you?

 

[Elixir]

There is PLENTY of flint and volcanic glass.
I can even walk out my door and find flint scrapers, arrowheads and scraps from less than ten miles distant. And there is poorer quality igneous rock just sitting around that could be worked into serviceable points.
This was right outside my door just now:
View attachment 49376

So, you wouldn't come to the mountain, but the mountain came to you?

The Ute Indians who lived here until a couple hundred years ago, brought a lot of flint from a caldera not far away. I can see it from here. Their “workshop was a few feet from where my bedroom door is now, and is luteered with chips of flint. So, they brought that mountain here, but this land is on an alluvium and bordered by a moraine. So there’s a little bit of everything in the ground.

 

[Swammerdami]

Without taking sides in this sub-debate, I find it interesting that there were extensive flint mines during the Neolithic. This Google hit speaks of flint mines in Stone Age Britain but I'd heard first of such mines in the North German Plain. IIRC one group would extract flint until they had plenty; then they left. A few years later another group would show up to work the mine.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Most things were based on grinding. Not blades, though.

There's no shortage of flint. In parts of England, buildings and walls are commonly built from the stuff. You can buy it for ~£600 a tonne, delivered.

Sure, flint supplies are not infinite. But 'not infinite' is a long way short of 'scarce'.

There’s enough volcanic glass on one Hawaiian lava flow to keep the world in blades for centuries. The problem in Neolithic times was that delivery costs and lead times from Hawaii were somewhat prohibitive.

And therein lies part of the problem. The lower the tech level the less ability will exist to move resources to where they are needed. Obsidian blades from Hawaii would be extremely expensive elsewhere. Just because they exist somewhere doesn't make them useful.

And the lower the tech level the less of any given resource will be available, period.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

There's no shortage of flint. In parts of England, buildings and walls are commonly built from the stuff. You can buy it for ~£600 a tonne, delivered.

Sure, flint supplies are not infinite. But 'not infinite' is a long way short of 'scarce'.

Sure, if you can dig them up. You're not doing a lot of digging with neolithic tech!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't know how the arithmetic on flint works out, so just checking here... You guys know that when Loren says "sustainable" he means sustainable until the oceans boil away in a billion years, right?

No. I mean "sustainable" as in not going to be the cause of our downfall. Earth will be uninhabitable to humanity long before the oceans boil.

 

[Elixir]

Most things were based on grinding. Not blades, though.

There's no shortage of flint. In parts of England, buildings and walls are commonly built from the stuff. You can buy it for ~£600 a tonne, delivered.

Sure, flint supplies are not infinite. But 'not infinite' is a long way short of 'scarce'.

There’s enough volcanic glass on one Hawaiian lava flow to keep the world in blades for centuries. The problem in Neolithic times was that delivery costs and lead times from Hawaii were somewhat prohibitive.

And therein lies part of the problem. The lower the tech level the less ability will exist to move resources to where they are needed. Obsidian blades from Hawaii would be extremely expensive elsewhere. Just because they exist somewhere doesn't make them useful.

And the lower the tech level the less of any given resource will be available, period.

That’s why local flint has dominated the market here for centuries - and there’s lots more where that came from. In the parts of North America that are far from volcanic deposits, trade in quality flint has always been robust. But the supply has never been a problem. Really, only FL, GA and the Carolinas lack good deposits. It’s a bit scant in the lower Mississippi, but because of that river, transporting raw flint wasnt a big problem.

 

[Bomb#20]

I don't know how the arithmetic on flint works out, so just checking here... You guys know that when Loren says "sustainable" he means sustainable until the oceans boil away in a billion years, right?

No. I mean "sustainable" as in not going to be the cause of our downfall. Earth will be uninhabitable to humanity long before the oceans boil.

Same diff -- my point was to check whether, when your critics talk about how plentiful deposits are, they understand they need to be mentally multiplying the consumption rate by millions of years, not thousands.

 

[bilby]

There's no shortage of flint. In parts of England, buildings and walls are commonly built from the stuff. You can buy it for ~£600 a tonne, delivered.

Sure, flint supplies are not infinite. But 'not infinite' is a long way short of 'scarce'.

Sure, if you can dig them up. You're not doing a lot of digging with neolithic tech!

Tell that to the neolithic (and earlier) guys who were mining flint in the South Downs.

Where there is still plenty left...

The scale of excavations in chalk done by stone age people with nothing more than antler picks is quite astonishing - until you recall that these are the same guys who brought bluestones from Wales to Wiltshire just to build a big sundial.

 

[WAB]

There's no shortage of flint. In parts of England, buildings and walls are commonly built from the stuff. You can buy it for ~£600 a tonne, delivered.

Sure, flint supplies are not infinite. But 'not infinite' is a long way short of 'scarce'.

Sure, if you can dig them up. You're not doing a lot of digging with neolithic tech!

Tell that to the neolithic (and earlier) guys who were mining flint in the South Downs.

Where there is still plenty left...

The scale of excavations in chalk done by stone age people with nothing more than antler picks is quite astonishing - until you recall that these are the same guys who brought bluestones from Wales to Wiltshire just to build a big sundial.

It was aliens. /Tsoukalous

 

[Elixir]

Same diff -- my point was to check whether, when your critics talk about how plentiful deposits are, they understand they need to be mentally multiplying the consumption rate by millions of years, not thousands.

Presumably the consumption rate chugged right along with the production rate. And consumption before the Toba eruption was certainly not on the scale of the most recent millennium.
Over millions of years, vast “new” lava flows have emerged and cooled.
When I was a kid fascinated by dinosaurs, every picture I saw of dinosaurs had 2-3 volcanoes in the background. And photos don’t lie!
The last eruption of the Yellowstone caldera was less than 700kya, and it likely blew a scattering of flint over much of North America. Even the Mt St Helens eruption that happened about ten geological seconds ago, produced enough volcanic glass to keep a fair number of knappers busy for life. The idea of human consumption causing a scarcity of flint, other than very locally, is kinda ludicrous.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't know how the arithmetic on flint works out, so just checking here... You guys know that when Loren says "sustainable" he means sustainable until the oceans boil away in a billion years, right?

No. I mean "sustainable" as in not going to be the cause of our downfall. Earth will be uninhabitable to humanity long before the oceans boil.

Same diff -- my point was to check whether, when your critics talk about how plentiful deposits are, they understand they need to be mentally multiplying the consumption rate by millions of years, not thousands.

Yeah, the standard "green" approach envisions humanity on a decline out to the end of their predictions. And with no reason to think the decline will do anything but continue to accelerate. I do not consider that sustainable, just prolonging things.

 

[Elixir]

Yeah, the standard "green" approach envisions humanity on a decline out to the end of their predictions. And with no reason to think the decline will do anything but continue to accelerate. I do not consider that sustainable, just prolonging things.

What does this have to do with the price of flint?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Yeah, the standard "green" approach envisions humanity on a decline out to the end of their predictions. And with no reason to think the decline will do anything but continue to accelerate. I do not consider that sustainable, just prolonging things.

What does this have to do with the price of flint?

It has to do with the flaw in the green projections.

 

[Elixir]

I don't know how the arithmetic on flint works out, so just checking here... You guys know that when Loren says "sustainable" he means sustainable until the oceans boil away in a billion years, right?

No. I mean "sustainable" as in not going to be the cause of our downfall. Earth will be uninhabitable to humanity long before the oceans boil.

Same diff -- my point was to check whether, when your critics talk about how plentiful deposits are, they understand they need to be mentally multiplying the consumption rate by millions of years, not thousands.

Yeah, the standard "green" approach envisions humanity on a decline out to the end of their predictions. And with no reason to think the decline will do anything but continue to accelerate. I do not consider that sustainable, just prolonging things.

Why does green mean continual decline, and of what? What do greenies envision declining indefinitely? Numbers of humans? We will be lucky if we reach a static global population soon; high percentage declines globally usually have to do with natural events like volcanoes and impacts, pestilences and nasty stuff like that. Wars kill a lot but they’re usually mostly men. Men are replaceable. In fact that’s a big reason they (we) try to wipe each other out.

But back to prolonging things, Loren.
I see predictions that oceans will evaporate over the 500 million years following the demise of humans, which is expected in about 500 my from today.

If the species makes it another 500 THOUSAND years it will defy the odds for a mammalian species. If it’s gone in 500 years I won’t be surprised (I’ll be dead).