A major problem facing the millennials and generation-Z is the increasingly difficulties and cost of keeping them in a modern high technology society.
James Lyman BSAE, BSEE, MSSM
People of all ages never think about what it takes to keep an individual in a modern high technology society, assuming that the world they live in has always been there and so therefore must always be there. But the reality is, with a growing world population and diminishing resources, it’s becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to keep individuals in advance technology societies as resources become more difficult and therefore more expensive to procure.
The land area of Earth is 57,308,738 square miles, of this 33% is desert and 24% is mountainous. Subtracting this uninhabitable land leaves 24,642,757 square miles of habitable land, land where a human can gather food to live. Looking on the internet, I found that land requirements to feed a single hunter-gatherer human ranges from 150 to 14,000 hectares with the average being about 250 hectares or not quite one square mile. This gives a maximum world population of about 25 million humans in our natural environment, a long way from our present population of 7.53 billion people. That means, through technology, we have about 300 times the number of people that our natural environment can sustain.
The pre-mechanized agriculture of horse drawn plow produced about 10 bushels of grain per acre compared with the 300 bushels for a modern techno-petrol chemically based industrial farm of today. I just recently read that half the large mammals in the world are human, and the other half are the domestic animals used to sustained the human population. This leaves just a 5% sliver for all the other mammals in the world- the zebras, elephants, whales, dolphins, tigers and etcetera, etcetera and etcetera.
The human race as it is today, can only be fed and sustained by the massive use of high technology, and that means having the resources, with the principle one being the oil. One third of the oil we use each year goes to feeding ourselves. Another very important resource needed is fresh water, a resource that like oil, is becoming scarcer across the world. Other needed resources required to keep a person in an advance society (1) is natural minerals and resources such as metals, wood, sand, rock as well as foods such as ocean fish. Also energy, oil and the petrol chemicals for virtually everything in our lives, in particular the plastics, as well as all the infrastructure and negative resources. The negative resources is the pollution, trash and climate change that will always be a part of a modern society.
Articles and news stories abound about the problems of diminishing resources, from the looming oil shortages to global warming. In view of the problems of resources, it’s easy to see why it’s becoming more difficult and expensive to keep individuals in our advance societies. It’s all about those needed and must have resources! Human conflict is based on getting and holding resources (see chapter V, America’s Slide into Domestic Terrorism (2), Amazon.com), that’s how war came about in humanity long, long before any recorded history, probably before our species. The first epoch of war was the hunter-gatherers getting and holding their territory to feed themselves, their children and sustain their lives (3), much as any other animal species does. Histories of the American plains Indians provide ample evidence of this, such as when the Sioux migrated out of the forest lands of Minnesota down into the open plains of North and South Dakota and adopted the horse culture. In the process, they pushed the Cheyenne, Crow, Pawnee and other tribes out of their territories to take them over- just as the white man did a century later . . . and sent the Sioux packing off to the reservations.
What people don’t get, is that competition for resources is a major factor in the precipitation of human conflict . . . WAR! Be it a married couple squabbling over spending the family money or nations and superpowers vying for oil, competition for resources, of one sorts or another, is the source of friction leading to human conflict. We see that everyday on the news with groups such as ANTIFA railing against various small right wing groups, as they lash out against each other, sometimes physically. They are being pushed out of the social economic system just as surely as the Indians were pushed out of their lands by a more technologically advance people . . . and they’re mad as hell about that. In this case, the competition for resources is having a place under the sun in the coming years, but not having any understanding of what’s happening to them, they blindly strike out at each other as convenient targets to vent their frustration and anger on.
While the news media focuses on the supposed political differences between groups like ANTIFA, in actuality they’re one and the same.
Indirectly, they are competing for basic resources such as the oil, natural resources, water and the negative resources, by virtue of the high cost of keeping individuals in a high technology society. That high cost coupled with their being to far behind, at a time when technology is providing the means to do their jobs, is what is really pushing them out. The fact that none of these groups understands the reality of their situation means nothing in their conflict. Like two cats in the above picture, tied together by a short leash, the cats blame each other for their restraint and just as blindly lash out at each other. Indeed, one may actually kill the other, simply because neither cat understands their real problem.
The same holds true for those who we have elect to govern us. They too lack the ability to understand the problems, blindly applying the invalid linear singularity principle to those problems faced by the people. The simplistic concept that problems are caused by one and only one thing, and that the world is proportional or linear, while in fact the real world is anything but that.
Although they can’t really articulate it, the young people’s real struggle is to keep a place in the sun of the American social-economic system as technology displacement slowly pushes them out. Already, we are seeing open conflict, the prelude to domestic terrorism as lines are drawn, as process of social mitosis continues pulling society apart. While social mitosis has been on going since I was a boy in the sixties, it nevertheless continues to strain the social fabric with no attempts of restrain it.
Social mitosis has two possible conclusions- the people come back together as one or there’s a rupture and seperation. And that rupture is almost always the open conflict of revolution . . .
WAR!
Corollary of War:
A technologically advance people will displace a lesser people. (4)
1) “America’s Slide into Domestic Terrorism, A Technology Monogram for Law Enforcement”, James C. Lyman, Compass Rose Publications, San Antonio, TX, 2010, pp1-4. Available Amazon.com.
2) ibid ‘Basic Theory of War’ pp72-124.
3) ibid p86.
3) ibid p119.