I was reading another thread in here and thinking about Malthusian catastrophe, which often comes in the form of a disease ripping through a population that is too dense for it's own good, like ours. Be it a terrorist popping off a biological weapon in an airport, a tourist getting a little too friendly with a monkey in deepest darkest Africa and coming back to civilization to share his prize, or just a flu that shows up with just the right (or just the wrong rather...) combination of antigens eventually (next 500 years) something is going to wipe out a lot of people. If you found out tomorrow that some nasty bug was coming your way would you be able to pull anchor and wait it out on the high seas? If It took 8 weeks for you to be assured of safety would you be able to sit out in the ocean with a line in the water and still be able to come back in under power at the end of it? How much notice do you think you would need to get underway? How about with the grocery store packed with panicking people? I'm curious to hear what everyone's plans are, if you have them. Feel free to stay vague. I'm sure a lot of people would love to have boats at their disposal in an emergency of this type.
So you think that man will still be around in 500 years and that he'll still be locked to this planet. Optimistic and pessimistic. Me, I'm pessimistic and optimistic. I figure man will have long before ceased to exist, but I hope there's something left for the cockroaches, horseshoe crabs.
I call it realistic. We aren't teraforming anything in a short 500 years unless we have the kind of know how to fix any possible problem with this planet. Additionally humans are amazing survivors, and even if something horrible happens the human ability to hold on to memetic information in written form will ensure that we never loose our iron tools and our ability to farm.
You might want to look at what has happened to the world's forrests, and population in the past 150 years. Then look into to garbage and weapons of mass destruction created in the past 50 years. BTW, very few people know how to farm anymore without high tech equipement and chemicals. Besides, farming requires uncontaminated land. Oh, enough of this depression. Back to boats.
Nope, more depression. If you look at the growth of bacteria in a culture waste products build up and resources run out. In a complex system with autotrophic and heterotrphic organisms (like life on earth) you can handle some serious changes and not have all life extinguished. Sure in America maybe a tiny fraction of the people know how to farm, but if 1 in 10000 can farm and most of them farm to survive doom and all but 100K people die suddenly your population is 30% farmers, which is sustainable, especially considering the advances that we have made in crop rotation and the like. Anyone who looks into evolution really hard eventually stumbles across Orgel's Second Rule, specifically
Energy is the main issue for our world, compact and portable energy is the issue to go to other worlds. The hope I have currently lies with CERN. If they can figure out how to make anti-matter at a reasonable scale. We already have very, very, very minute-minuscule bits of it in storage, so we know how to make it and how to store it. Next step is to make in quantities large enough to be able to experiment and engineer systems for harnessing that energy. That ability will revolutionize mankind, if we live that long and/or don't kill ourselves in the process (I doubt we kill ourselves in the process, other events, who knows.).
Farming Fish in Homer? I don't think so. Hatcheries are legal in Alaska but not fish farming, some of the trout they release in Anchorage push the line in my opinion but the prevailing opinion was that farmed fish (especially salmon) would ruin the waters and the image of Alaskan Salmon and that we would all suffer for it. They do farm shellfish though. To tell the truth there isn't much impressive farming going on around homer, there are a good number of farm steads, people with a handful of cows or sheep or a flock of chickens, or geese, but not enough to stock a super market. There is a farmers market here while I'm out of town, and a few nurseries and potagers at various places along the Kenai Peninsula that keep it going. I suppose someone must be harvesting the fireweed honey too, but I'm never in town for that. If I had to guess I'd say that Honey and maybe some wild berries are the best potential agriculture exports for Homer, but that's just a guess. If you want farming you have to go up to the Delta Junction/Fairbanks area or the Mat-Su Valley north of Anchorage (where Palin lives). Because the Kenai is so mountainous you get strong convection currents over the mountains and draw off heat, and you have to deal with all the shadows, which are more substantial at this latitude because the sun never strays far from the horizon.
Mostly Northern Lights, Skunky II and Dutch Hope, never seen anyone farm fish up there, just catch from nature.
I'm afraid I've always been terribly uncool for not partaking in that. However Matinuska thunder**** Is the state tree.
