| | Interesting comments on this movie, I havent seen it myself yet but have found the discussion valuable.
From what I've read, and the pictures advertised, the concept of the earth being over run by mountains of 'trash' is completely absurd. As Robert Malcolm pointed out earlier, waste is merely not very useful resources at that time. If the earth ended up with skyscrapers of piles of metal, these would certainly NOT be abandoned, as this movie suggests. They would be melted and re-processed into something people find more useful than a very tall stack.
In fact, all resource utilization is a balance between the economic efficiencies of mining raw resources compared to the economic efficiency of collecting and re-processing all ready mined and used resources. Recycling saves RESOURCES, but takes MORE ENERGY. For most things, it is not economically beneficial to collect, separate, and re-process used resources at this time. Aluminum is probably the only thing this is worthwhile with, and even then it is questionable. And since resources from the ground are less expensive, recycling must be forced through government coercion. But as landfills accumulate more resources, they themselves become resources pools. Technologies like thermodepolymerization
and Plasma Arc waste disposal will turn landfills into gold mines well before we are over run by skyscrapers of trash.
The environmentalist movement has latched 'resource exploitation' on board with deadly pollution, and the two are generally synonymous now, where mining the earth for steel is as viciously evil as dumping arsenic into your neighbors well. Modern economic professors insist that resources are 'getting more scarce' because there are more people than ever before. But this is of course countered by the very obvious fact that more people of the world have access to more resources than ever before in the history of humanity. The notion that resources are getting 'more scarce' come from the silly idea of comparing total number of humans against total potential resources of the planet, and not total utilized resources made available for production. While the latter is finite and is indeed getting 'scarcer' the numbers are so incredibly large as to make the comparison absurd. The former, resources which have been made available for use, on the other hand, has grown faster and greater than ever before.
As a metal worker, I like to use aluminum as an example, consider that 10% of the Earth's crust is aluminum. Is Aluminum actually more scarce now because there are 6 billion people instead of 1 billion people because as a population of 1 billion people we each had as a potential of 12 hundred billion tons of aluminum, but now as a population of 6 billion we only each could potentially use 2 hundred billion tones? I don't know the actual figures, but the point is the numbers are so incredible large that it is absurd to consider, who could ever use 2 hundred billion tones of aluminum? That's enough to build an entire city, out of aluminum, for EVERY SINGLE PERSON on the planet.
Never mind the fact that there are hundreds of millions of asteroids in our solar system, each of which can cover the whole of the earths surface in miles of nickel and steel.
Brett wrote
* People like nature (walking, biking, camping, exploring the beauties of various geographies and ecosystems). People like to feel connected to the web of life and stimulated by its beauty and diversity.
This is very true, and yet for some reason it is humans that are presented as the greatest threat to nature. But in fact humans, and their technological progress, are the ONLY HOPE for nature. The earth is routinely pummeled by massive asteroids which have wiped out almost all life on Earth, the largest killed some 98% of life on the planet. The next may extinguish ALL LIFE. The earth is a murderously hostile place when viewed from geological time scales. Super volcano eruptions, nearby supernovae, rogue planets, etc etc, Life on Earth faces many threats and a cursory look at the starry night should leave one with a deep concern. Our galaxy is some 10 billion years old, and contains 400 billion stars. If even a small percentage of these developed intelligent life, and they took 10,000 years to spread to two other star systems, they would have covered the whole galaxy a hundred times over so far. So either intelligent life is extremely rare (it evolves once or twice in an entire galaxy) or civilizations are routinely destroyed by great cataclysmic events. Given the hostile nature of the cosmos, and our own geological record, the evidence to me is leaning toward the latter.
The greatest hope for humanity, and ALL LIFE on earth, Every plant, mollusk, coral reef, Polar bear, horn billed swallow, slime mold and fungi, is for humans to become space faring as quickly as possible, and that requires massive technological and industrial growth, again, as quickly as possible. While this technological growth poses it's own threat to species on the planet, in the long run it is the ONLY way to prevent these greater cataclysms. Every existential threat humanity, and all life on the planet, now face, needs rapid economic and industrial growth to resolve. The ONLY thing people are concerned about, however, is global warming and pollution, the solutions to which will curtail the very thing we need to overcome every other existential threat civilization faces, and the consequences of which are neither existential nor certain. That giant asteroid hurtling toward earth won't give a damn what your carbon foot print is.
Humanity needs to move into space, colonize other planets, and other star systems. When it does, the Earth, instead of a giant waste heap, will likely be turned into a giant natural preserve with a few scattered gleaming cities, maintained and visited in reverent homage to our birthplace.
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