Technocrat

Peak P

zogger
Sat Oct 11 19:37:00 -0700 2008
The+Gentleman+Farmer.
manage

There's a money crisis, an energy crisis, a confidence crisis, a water crisis, and more than a little concern over food. There really should be more of a concern over food,(for a variety of more or less obvious reasons) because what's on your dinner plate today depends on three things, N, P and K, and...we are going to run out of the P-phosphorus part. Not tomorrow, but it is coming soon to a planet near you.

Few observers hold out hope of a discovery of phosphorus large enough to meet the continued growth in demand. The ore itself takes millions of years to form, and the prospect of extracting phosphorus from the sea bed presents massive technological and financial challenges. And here is the website dedicated to this problem Phosphorusfutures.net ed.z.: Another reason to just not willy nilly burn down forests or let "natural" forest fires go unchecked, we need that biomatter. All of it. We need to grow more in advance, mega forests. Because large scale, HUGE scale composting is going to be "it" within two generations now, or *no eats*. maybe algae ration pills..maybe. mmmm..delicious algae pills**.. Even getting close to "no eats" for this or that large heavily military equipped nation that doesn't have their own phosphorus stash means "war", that is inevitable. 700% rise in price in one year, and this is 30 years out from peak, think about that figure, then contemplate population growth, we should be hitting around 8 billion and change hungry mouths by then maybe..

**with that said, I was only half joking, blue green algae, chlorella, are excellent long range (or eat today) survival food supplements to have on hand. Maybe not as tasty as your favorite chow today.. but dang nutritious and already in handy single cell size for easy and efficient digestion. I think home production kits might be a nice growth business there for some entrepreneurial folks..

EVERYBODY PANIC

Timothy Brownawell
Sat Oct 11 22:02:32 -0700 2008
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Yeah... it doesn't go away when it's used, it just gets diluted and moved elsewhere where sufficient energy input can recover and un-dilute it. If it gets expensive enough city wastewater plants could probably do pretty well extracting and selling it, farming methods that need less become more economical, etc. As long as the easy supplies taper off gradually (like the early price rise here would seem to suggest) instead of just disappearing all at once, I'd think we should be fine.

phosphorous cycle

rubycodez
Sun Oct 12 10:11:33 -0700 2008
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phosphorus is needed for the way we do high-yield per acre agriculture, do ag (and our cities) another way and need for artificial phosphorous goes to zero.    It is also needed for destroying rainforests to make farmland, getting rid of a heavy-recycling system of nutrients for an open system needed huge resource input.

 

Really, the core issue here is we either have to engineer our way out of coming resource pinches or have a lot less concentration of humans in large cities.  Recent history shows we'll take the painful route, death and misery, over using our brains.  Sad it looks like the only large civilizations that will survive are those that have means of recognizing and forcing implementation of large projects with benefit decades down the road, Roman empire style.

Peak P
ssclift
Sun Oct 12 05:41:37 -0700 2008
 manage

Isaac Asimov, "Fact and Fancy", 1962.  Essays

  • Life's Bottleneck (April 1959) on phosphorous, and just for yuks
  • No More Ice Ages? (January 1959) on global warming from coal and how we need to build out more nuclear.

I just looked that up again.  I knew there was a reason I'd heard of these issues before. :)

Peak P
phred14
Sun Oct 12 10:57:04 -0700 2008
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Why don't we worry about something like "Peak Helium?"

As someone else said, the phosphorus has stayed on Earth.  There isn't a problem with disappearing phosphorus, there's a problem with disappearing easy phosphorus.

Now helium is another matter.  Comes out of the ground, a produce of alpha decay.  When it gets loose, it drifts into the upper atmosphere, and likely at some rate is boiling off into interplanetary space.  When helium is gone, it's really gone.  (At least until we get our gas-giant ramscoop mining operations set up.)

Peak Everything

zogger
Sun Oct 12 11:18:28 -0700 2008
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Seems I put up an article on the helium problem before, or I sure meant to, because I am aware of that issue as well. As in party balloons need to be banned. Basically..we have a peak everything problem. I think as human history goes, the 20th century will be a real oddball one from a future historian's viewpoint. We still had a very low planetary population, and still had a lot of cheap and easy to exploit resources, energy and the full range of otherwise, plus, not much concern at all over the environment because the effects weren't understood clearly enough or really cared about that much, so there was this huge explosion in apparent "wealth" based on just rampant natural resource exploitation, never taking into account how finite/rare a lot of those things are. It was the century of picking all the low hanging fruit, taking one bite out of each piece, then tossing it aside to grab another piece. Those days are rapidly ending.

Maintaining even parity and advancing true wealth for everyone on tyhe planet from now on is going to be hard fought and complicated and we have no guarantees at all that the brains will meet the politics in order to pull this off.

And that is another reason I recommend people go to their own plan b for living, because waiting for the vast bulk of humanity to recognize and act on problems is...near futile. You'll wait a long time for this "them" or "they" guy to "do something" about various problems that might be coming or are for sure coming. and no telling how many people think if "their team" gets "voted in" that that will be the big fix. Serious mythological fantasy land cult beliefs there.

One big psychological issue that appears common I see in a lot of folks is an apparent real disconnect people have between necessities and luxuries. A lot of people apparently equate the two once they are used to them based on old 20th century living models, and think this sort of standard way of how things are is a perpetual motion scheme. Well, it ain't, and the ones who wait the longest to see the difference will suffer the most once they finally find out there is a difference.

delicious algae pills

Adam Hazzlebank
Sun Oct 12 11:45:36 -0700 2008
 manage

Yep that Soylent Green sure is tasty!

 

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