“I suggest we figure out how to get those Nano-bots to turn out garbage into oil, then we are goldy’ ”

Its called thermal depolyerization (TDP) and doesn’t use nanobots but temperature and pressure to do in hours what takes geological ages in nature.

There is a small plant in the US which was processing turkey guts using this method. It was recently closed down due to the smell it was creating. I think the cost of processing worked out to be about US $80/barrel. And it has about an 85% efficiency (ie the processing uses about 15% of the energy produced)

This is using one of the ‘richest’ forms of garbage so the conversion rates would be less for many other forms of garbage.

Now I would hate to have people seeing me as someone having blind faith in technology - that’s not me at all. My ideas of solutions lay firmly in the camp of reduced consumption. Nevertheless, it is technologies like these which may be able to soften the blow enough to be able to make a relatively civilised (but undoubtedly still painful)transition.

Cheers,

Dust

Too bad there was not a concise “transitional handbook” which covered work, skills, psychology, foodstuff, environmental considerations etc. I suppose it would be amazingly difficult to do so, since we all have so many varied economic/geographic and family situations.

Some feel alone out there, being the only person they know who actually considers this stuff in their real life.

Others have a very small group. Maybe some have a large group, but these must be pretty rare at this point.

Tough decisions, faced humanity since the beginning, hard choices will have to be made, but perhaps you can
soften the landing if we can all decondition ourselves, and pursue simplification/frugality–while attaining skills. But a time frame remains an issue, if you think you have 20years, you will take your good old time, or put it off, but if you think you have 4years, you may kick things into gear?

Some will say hell with it, too much trouble, enjoy life while you can, and let the gods sort it out.
But most who post on this sort of site, are not that sort.

Not to overly pimp my site, nor to diss Anthropik, but that’s the idea over at GettingPrimitive

I love Anthropik and I find it a tremendous resource in terms of academic analysis applied to issues of anthropology and collapse. I’m jealous of Jason’s writings. But I’m a suburbanite with kids. Very few of my kind will be running out to start their own tribes. We’ll be scrambling for survival strategies while the slippery slope gets steeper every year. No one really needs theories and graphs to tell them that things are bad and getting worse. Look up. Smell the desperation. The die-off has already begun.

In the harsh light of day, my interests are less on collapse itself, and more on surviving *now* in a physically toxic and psychologically unbalanced environment, simplifying, purifying, powering down, learning the skills necessary to be more self-sufficient, and preparing to handle even more radical shifts in the future.

You are welcome to come check us out, hopefully you will find some things useful, or maybe contribute some tips for others.

- S.

He calls his model the basic perinatal matrix, based on 4 stages of birth. People’s psychological development can often correspond to a page through the 4 states, and sometimes people are arrested or spend long periods being heavily influenced by a particular state. BPM 1 is the blissful state of the developing fetus. BPM 2 is after uterine contractions begin but before the cervix dilates. Grof says,

Thus people who re-experience the stage of birth where they were stuck in the womb before the cervix opened, might identify with different people throughout history who were in a prison, or who were abused and tortured, such as the victims of the Inquisition and people who were in Nazi concentration camps. Similarly, the reliving of the desperate struggle to free oneself from the clutches of the birth canal after the cervix dilated [BPM3] can be associated with images of revolutions and with experiential identification with freedom fighters of all ages.

These experiences of one’s birth can also open into archetypal visions of the collective unconscious. People who feel stuck in the womb [BPM2] can experience themselves as being in hell, with actual experiences of the demonic figures or of infernal landscapes as we know them from mythology and from religious art. Similarly, individuals who re-experience the difficult propulsion through the birth canal at the stage of birth when the cervix is open [BPM3] often describe archetypal visions of various deities who represent death and re-birth such as Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Persephone, and Dionysus. They might also have the visions of crucifixion or actually experience death and resurrection in full identification with Jesus Christ.

A good example of BPM3 is the art of H.R. Giger. The final state, BPM4, is a transcendant one, that of leaving the mother and entering a new world.

I believe this culture, and perhaps civilization, is in the later stages of BPM 3. (I must credit my wife, Kiel, a Grof-trained therapist, with this idea.) Witness our obsession with sex, violence, speed, aggression, and all the other hallmarks of individuals who are stuck in that birth phase. It’s not just the death, the “put me out of my miseryâ€? we hunger for. We unconsciously understand and crave what will follow, the rebirth that is at the end of the struggle. I suspect that is why so many people are captivated by the doomer idea. This is not to discount Anthropik’s work on collapse; just to bring in another aspect. It’s also why I suspect the cultural rebirth will not be a return to foraging; it will be something new.

On a personal note, I have done a good deal of work with Grof-trained therapists in non-ordinary states, and have had one major, and several minor, death-rebirth experiences. The big one was more terrifying than any “real� experience I’ve ever had, but one result is that I am far less afraid of death than I was. Death/rebirth is also the natural way of things. People disconnected from natural cycles, as Devin says, will be more terrified of death and will prefer to “live on their knees rather than die on their feet.� I’m in complete agreement that when we talk about the end of the world, we’re really speaking of our own personal story.

Pick from a list of 3rd world military dictatorships, with limited access to food & water for the majority (or religious/ethnic minority) of its inhabitants.

Argentina is a good example, ultimately sectarian violence in Iraq still represents power plays, based upon a relative ability to get food & water.

Even most religious zealots, if hungry & thirsty will take a break in blowing eachother up, to acquire the basics. I don’t hear of violence in Iraq for food, but more for terror, destroy any national political movement, b/c they hate USA, hate ethnic majority/minority etc.

Once Iraq has no American military presence, and No means to sell oil for food etc., then it will be truly collapsed. Right now just add it to the long list of FAILED/FAILING nation states.

IF You consider Sustainable living>>you can pretty much add every Nation State to the list, that’s essentially the problem, and our current economic system is inherently unsustainable.

Even Feudal lords need to cover the basic needs of living, or try and raid those that have food/water.

Oh well, I’m getting tired of pondering about the future…it will be here soon enough, how about more info/insights on skills, sustainable lifestyles, balancing working in civilization–while trying to prepare for collapse (based upon your own personal view of collapse, fear, urgency etc.–clearly everyone will work at a different pace).

?

When you describe collapse as different regions of the world becoming less organized (less global or continental) and returning more to tribal or feudal war lord camp structures. that is not too far off from my own thoughts.

But perhaps even those words *look* different to each of us. For example, when you say collapse of the ‘global capitalist system’ I see that as barely the tip of the iceberg. Economics being just a small fraction of the entire system based upon agriculture and hierarchy.

Likewise, when I look at Iraq I can see where one might point to it as having collapsed, but I also see the resources pouring into Iraq from around the world (both from the ‘international community’ and the US in ‘aid’ AND resources brought to bear by the terrorist/freedom fighter factions). So long as those resources are being applied, Iraq will be unable to collapse… it will simply continue to stand in a limbo where nothing works and nothing CAN work until the resource influx gets high enough to fix it OR the resource influx gets low enough to allow the economizing functions of collapse to ‘do thier thang’. If we ever see recovery, then Iraq simply becomes one of the many states facing long term sustainability issues. But so long as it is ‘propped up’ but not ‘recovered’ they will remain in the worst of possible conditions.

Looking at other parts of the world, we see many of the same issues… famine almost always includes international groups getting aid packages together to try and alleviate the problem. And in most cases, those aid pacakges are ‘just enough’ to promote maximum suffering on the population involved. Lucky for these populations, most often the famine is caused by climactic conditions that will, in time, revert and allow the crisis to pass. But in doing so, the stage has been set to create another crisis down the road as varying waether patterns continue to vary.

Anyway, my comments previously meant to illustrate that whether you look at our world as a single, global civilization (which I don’t, but I have seen reasonable arguments for this), or if you see it as a peer-polity system (see Jasons We All Fall Down), the collapse scenario is fundamentally the same and based upon a significant lack of redundancy or adaptabilty to changing circumstances.

Janene

I suggest we figure out how to get those Nano-bots to turn out garbage into oil, then we are goldy’

I was thinking more of collapse in terms of the global capitalist system collapsing, similar to the way communism collapsed in the USSR. I was thinking of different regions of the world becoming less organized (less global or continental) and returning more to tribal or feudal war lord camp structures. More specifically, perhaps we can think of Iraq (for example) not as a “backward” country but rather as a “forward in time” region that has been around so long they have gone through all the stages of build-up and collapse, the final stage being that they are so weakened that outsiders can now easily invade and take over their resources (oil). Iraq may be viewed as a region in the end stages of collapse and not as a place where “Freedom” is miraculously “on the march”. Now, after invasion, the various tribal factions are consolidating power for themselves and battling with each other for what little will be left. That’s how it ends, not with a bang but with inter-factional kill off.

I suppose my bias comes from the fact that I live in the US. The US is a huge country, and has limited mass transit, most products travel via Semi-Trucks, and to a lesser degree trains.

The US as the largest consumer of oil & the most complex society, will likely fall the hardest/the quickest. Thus, my comments on this site, and some of my doomsday thought pattern is flavored by not only statistics but what I see. The lifestyle’s people live, the overly clunky political machinery that does not appear oriented to much more the corporate profits & power grabs at this point.

Although as it stands if the US, UK, much of Europe have an economic collapse>>this will have a major ripple effect across the global economy. The level of interdepedence not only oil, but based on economic involvement and production with so many countries will certainly effect nearly all areas of the globe. From South American coffee bean farmers, to heinous African regimes.

If things fall hard enough, quick enough (say within 5years) paper money, will hyperinflate, and maybe even deflate as people lose all faith in economic activity in its present form.

My hope is that more people will distinguis between “needs” and “wants” in the next few years, and follow a path to rationale simplicity, not only for economic reasons, but to immprove the quality of their lives/emotional well-being/time with loved one’s etc.

It seems that most here believe that a certain level of simplication would be prudent for self/environment–regardless if a collapse is soon, or 30years from now.

But most people only change through dissonance, often times the more severe the dissonance–the more likely people will change. But regardless we are still bound by the biosphere, but most of us have forgotten this…

For a really comprehensive understanding of ‘collapse’ as it is discussed here, I’m afraid you’re going to have to do some significant reading — because the argument for collapse, including descriptions of the different factors, historical precedents and the current peer-polity system have been the primary topics of discussion for some months. Jason has written his Thirty Theses to develop these arguments, plus you may want to look at We all Fall Down for a discussion of Russia and other instances of modern collapse, and Timeline of Collapse for an analysis of the current state of affairs worldwide. There’s more, but I don’t want to totally overwhelm you

Janene