i think you just answered yourself. you can make a choice between living now or guarrentee you future, i’m not lieing with my choice.
CBA stated:
First of all you can’t claim who will be dead after 100 years, you especially can’t say ‘everybody’, there are people now that live over 100 years and with new medicine coming out you never know how long we will live in the future. About 150 years ago the average life span was somewhere around 30 years old. Now it is 70+. With the fast advancement of technology it could be only a decade or two before we change the average to double that of now.
More importantly, it is a mistake to say that ‘no one’ cares about what happens after they die. If this was so, people would not make ‘wills’. Moreover, I know of many people that are only too aware of the fact that what they of working towards will not be realized till decades after they die but they do it anyway. Many historical figures were going against the societal norm at the time of their life, which usually hindered much of their life if not killed them, yet they persisted for the bettermeant of the future.
What’s your take?
obviously its wrong to say everyone all and the rest of the extreme words. but democracy doesnt work off of a few. the majority would vote down funding for space programs due to the need for say medicine to make us live past 100. unless we can fully understand genese and all the dna and junk then i dont think we will be living long enough to see space make a huge economical jump to becoming a big business. i doubt we double our life span though. not yet anyway. we arent going fast enough. also we are due for a major world wide crisis in our lifetime.
Getting back to the original question, what do you mean by industrialization Macca? Developed economies are actually displaying trends which suggest the decline of industrialization is on the cards. We are moving towards service based economies, as developing countries industrialize and pick up from where we left off. In theory similar trends should emerge in LEDCs, and eventually manufacturing will take place in just a few hyper-efficient plants dotted around the world. Perhaps it is too late and pollution will be the death of us all, but that’s not really because of increasing industrialization.
It’s more because of globalization. Market capitalism spreading throughout the world has led to an international fixation with productivity and profits, and externalities like pollution are the inevitable outcome. So it seems to me that your concern is more with globalization than industrialization (though arguably the two go hand in hand).
What do you think should be done about it?
In reference to the original question…
As the definition of ‘industrialism’ goes…the building of industry in a country/society. I must say that the industries we have chosen are leading in the wrong direction for the human race and the world in general. It doesn’t matter what we accomplish if we destroy our world doing it. Unless we find a way to live on other planets we have to settle our differences with earth and come to compromise. The world lacks purpose, aim, vision, and a collective decision to find out the exact amount of people that are most efficient for the world to sustain (we have done this, but…) and keep it at or under this threshold. There is a lack of policy to either curtail people from having many kids, or finding other ways of balancing the population. Many may argue, well how can you think to tell people not to have so many kids, it’s the whole purpose to life, it’s what we are here for. I only pity those individuals that think mating is the sole purpose in life.What good is mating when there will be 11 billion of us on the planet, and earths resources are exhausted and we die of in a matter of 50 years. This is the most optimistic outlook because many theoreticians suspect many other bad effects happening when the resources of the wild will be depleted, like plague, hunger, depression, lack of nutrition, etc.
- Sure there are a few companies out there trying to press this very view onto governments to make them aware, but it’s not working, not yet atleast.
- I think industrialism can be a ‘good’ thing, it just needs to be pointed in the right direction.
- As paradoxical as it may sound, I actually believe that innovative technologies will result in the restoration of the world to it’s original form prior to the birth of industrialization after World War One.
What’s your take?
We are consumers who have consumed the human race. We are fast forwarding our destiny as a race. We will go extinct …only sooner now 
Im not sure that, we will have technology as the savior of our race or whatever the previous post reflected. I dont think its a valid paradox…but who am i to say? only my opinion
I do think the next Epoch will be a rebirth of our present civilization. Maybe the selfishness of industrilization will be forgotten. When we think we are actually benefitting society by industrilizing and producer, Id beg to differ. But thats an American mentality.
I forgot what the stat was but it said every species goes extinct in lets say
‘x’ number of million years…maybe it was in the ballpark of 20-30 million I dont know.
Thats an intresting tid bit…
anyways
If technology persists the way it has…specifically medicine, the world will definatley be different in 100 years. Life will be different.
Will we have Utopian characteristics?
will we become A brave New World?
Will their be an apocolypse?
nobody knows
Am I the only one that doesn’t think we are progressing fast enough?
i can hear the sarcasm
sorry i haven’t posted here for quite abit, but by industrialisation i meant the way countries become ‘developed’ by comming through a mini-inudstrial revolution. and the aim of this topic wasn’t consumerism, but thinking of an alternative.
What is the use of industrialisation if the cost of our becoming develop or civilised is the destruction of tyhe peace in the whole world or the domination of the first worlod countries.
No. In the long run, industrialization does not work.
(1) By 2007-13, the demand for world oil will begin to exceed supply (Hubbert’s peak).
(2) The shortfall of supply to demand will increase by about 3% a year.
(3) The rising cost of oil will trigger a permanent worldwide depression by 2020-25.
(4) The world will run out of oil by 2040-50.
If you’ve eaten:
Even worse, thanks to the globalization of industry (read: exploitation of cheap labor), 10 of the 15 largest metropolitan areas are in the Third World.
A farmer has a chance of surving a prolonged economic downturn, but what chance does a factory worker in Beijing have?
Industry has led the Third World down the primrose path of urbanization.
In my opinion, industrialization is a business that doesn’t cover expenses.
I keep reading this thread, but I admit I don’t really ‘get’ it. What exactly are people talking about except a general attitude of “Things are going to change for the worse.” At the same time, many, not all, but many seem to be arguing that in order to avoid this change we have to change in precisely the same direction that we want to avoid. It seems that industrialization is a kind of demonic monster that gives short term pleasure at the expense of long term pain – the party’s over and now we have to pay the bill and deal with the hangover.
But what party are we talking about? The America of the '30’s and the 50’s, the America of the '70’s and the '90’s are pretty different places if you look at them. It’s never been a steady state. That things will change seems a truism not really worth talking about. People seem to adjust to change without scare tactics and prophets, they adjust and adjust quickly. So, the only thing this discussion gives you is the right to say, “I told you so.” But are people arguing a path to avoid “A Canticle for Leibowitz” future by offering a “Soylent Green” one or is it the other way around?
I guess what bothers me here is I’m hardpressed to understand what it is we gain by an assault on industrialization. Industrialization creates war? What was the Thirty Years War? Industrialization creates plague and famine? Ever heard of the Black Death? Pre-industrial societies are not inherently more stable than Industrial ones, there is no garden of Eden that we can go back to.
If anyone can explain this to me more clearly, I’d love to hear it but I really can only read this as yet one more mistaken belief that we human beings are somehow out of balance with ourselves and Nature and we need to get back to something that never existed.
Things never were in balance.
I see your point.
Technology certainly increases the consequences of our foolishness. In the 80s, the American Petroleum Institute warned of the coming oil depletion. No one listened. The accuracy of that warning was corroborated by a consortium of scientists in 2000. Again, no one listened. I guess we are going to ignore this problem until it swims up and bites us on the ***.
You are asking, Is industry qualitatively different from previous modes of work, namely, agriculture and mercantilism? For two reasons, I believe that it is.
(1) Industry grows by increasing the entropy around it. For example, 50,000 species disappear every year. Even President Bush, hardly a supporter of environmental causes, admits that global warming is real.
That was a concession that was a long time in coming.
(2) There is a war going on between technology and morality; in a sense, between science and religion. As Aldous Huxley pointed out, "Brave New World is about a society in which man’s machines have become more important than man himself."
As our machines get better, we get worse. That is because we love machines more than we love people.
In the words of Thoreau: “Technology is an improved means to unimproved ends…We have become the tools of our tools.”
Yes, industry creates entropy (What doesn’t?). But the destruction of species, the number comes from estimates in the Amazon rain forest primarily, from agricultural practices, not industrial ones.
There is a lot of evidence to believe that the mega-fauna (mammoths, giant sloths etc.) in the Americas were killed off by the introduction of man, there is also evidence that the buffalo in North America were going extinct before the arrival of Columbus – extrapolating from the practice of stampeding them from cliffs. The Mediterranean sea was fished out in, this is from memory, the seventeenth century (anybody want to check on that for me.).
Yes, we will run out of oil eventually (This is a truism.), but the problem is that the time tables are continually pushed back. In the early seventies, it was 1982. It always seems to run out about ten or fifteen years from now. The beauty of the prediction of course is that if you keep saying it, one day it will be correct.
Are we tooled by tools? In a certain sense, yes, I think you are correct, but I see this statement as descriptive of certain practices and in no way prescriptive, no or at least very little predictive value comes from this. But it does seem that once this statement is accepted it becomes another monolith, it overwhelms people with a sense of futility. This is really nothing more than nostalgia, a remembering of a golden past that never existed (And most cultures, past and present, do seem to have this golden past). And we seem to forget that we still use tools for our purposes as well. Futility avoids talk of solution, the future is already decided, there ain’t nothing you can do about it, but that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Futility and Faith are really just two sides of the same coin, they are an abrogation of responsibility to something other than ourselves.
I think this is a mistake.
A war between technology and morality? Both of these are tools and so I fail to see any war between them. Could you be more specific here? I don’t want to assume too much, but this kind of phrasing is precisely what leads to futility, we disappear from the equation, we are as to the Gods (or Tools, Ideas, Economic Forces) as flies to men, they play us for their sport (That’s a paraphrase, I didn’t check 
)
As I tried to point out earlier the American Way of Life is a myth based on a stable, balanced society. There is/was none. But is it precisely the fear of losing a myth, a myth that many already agree is just that, that creates such a sense of, of complacent futility?
(1) Spinning the environment went out with Reagan and his polluting trees. This side of Dow Chemical, nobody doubts that industry does significant – and ultimately catastrophic – damage to the environment. The question is, what, if anything, are we going to do about it?
(2) The oil depletion figures I quote were first adduced (at least to my knowledge) by the American Petroleum Institute in the 80s. They were corroborated independently by a consortium of scientists in 2000. They have not changed in 20 years. The link I cite is one of 50,000 on the subject.
(3) I agree that futility and religiosity are dodges for responsibility.
(4) I agree that faith and reason are not mutual exclusives – at the level of the individual. At the level of the group, they tend to be.
In the Middle Ages, faith had its foot on the neck of reason. Today, we have gone to the opposite extreme.
Well, once we have gotten out from under this overwhelming sense of catastrophe just around the corner feeling, I think we can break it down to some specific examples:
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Global Warming: While I certainly think it was a mistake to withdraw from the Kyoto protocols, I could never honestly see what they were going to do. Nevertheless, let’s consider the next hundred years in terms of reaction if it’s already too late for prevention. Let’s coordinate and construct emergency services on an international scale to save as many people as we can. Let’s consider infrastructures around the coasts of countries and in other areas of possible damage and attempt to change them. Venice is sinking, New Orleans is already below sea level (neither do to global warming necessarily.) This is the advantage of making good sense even if Global Warming is overblown. There will be disasters in the hundred years, no way around it.
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If we assume the peak will happen around 2010, the price of oil will begin to rise, and everything will become more expensive. But if we concentrate on transportation, we can see that the American infrastructure is rather poorly designed for conservation. Why not change it? Few people seem to realize that, while mobility does seem to be a part of the American character, the current freeway system wasn’t built until the 1950’s (for military purposes). This would lead to increased urbanization (again). There are some signs that people are already moving in this direction.
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I’m not as worried as many concerning a shift from an oil economy to something else (probably a mistake to put so many eggs in one basket. If we have fifty years or so, we can make the shift. It may be painful but not catastrophic.
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The loss of species: We should be in the rain forests now collecting as many specimens as possible but more importantly a sample of their DNA. Not only does it indeed have medicinal possibilities (not miracle cures but possibilities), but we do have rudimentary cloning technology now. Perhaps we might someday bring the species’ back.
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Sea viability: It does indeed seem that we are fishing out the oceans, but they aren’t dead yet. We can, I think, with sensible fishing practices reverse the trend of the last twenty years and create a sensible fishing industry. We did this with the buffalo.
These ideas are just off the top of my head, but my basic point is that doing something requires a certain kind of ‘muddling through’. No doubt solutions like the above will create other problems but that means we continue to ‘muddle through’. While they might not be very Romantic, they do seem doable (in that they’ve all been done before).
What do you think?
You make several excellent points.
Energy and pollution are not glamor issues, and, like most people, I know little about them. Off the top of my head:
(1) To me, the only viable non-renewable energy alternative to oil is natural gas. There is enough natural gas in Utah to meet America’s energy needs almost indefinitely.
The case against natural gas is that it contributes to global warming (about 80% of the damage of oil), and it is less efficient than gasoline as a propellant.
Advances in NG techology are ongoing in the US and Europe. In Utah, a company called Questar services 3,500 NGVs (natural gas vehicles) that are environmentally friendly (comparatively) and powerful (comparatively).
(2) We should significantly increase the tax on gasoline and rebate the surplus to the poor.
(3) There have been marked improvements in renewable energy technology (wind farms, sea turbines, solar power, and so on). Currently, Denmark gets 10% of its electricity from wind farms. Germany is moving in that direction. A study by AEA Technology estimates that 25% of the energy needs of the UK can be met by renewables.
A few years ago, Japan announced the development of a silicon that is 70 times more efficient than conventional solar panels.
(4) You are right. We need better public transportation.
(5) Holland recycles 60% of its household waste. The rest of us should succeed even half so well.
(6) We should redefine the good life as “better,” not “more.” A successful person is an educated person. A materialist is a vulgarian. He wants money because he doesn’t know what he wants.
(7) Your proposal of cloning is interesting. The problem is, most of these species are disappearing because the environment that made them feasible no longer exists. Frankly, I would favor a moratorium on deforestation until we know what we are doing.
(8) We should redefine pollution as a species (pun intended) of treason. It is.
No one thing will make a difference. But a combination of factors can: (A) meet our reasonable energy demands; and (B) save the planet.
Maybe.
I can say that industrialization plays a big role in everyones life now a days. From the Eastern Hemisphere up to the West, multinational corporations has sparked a global revolution of ideas and technology. The monopolization of the computer market by the giant software companies and the technopolization of internet programs, somehow influences coporate culture and the world.
The question however I can say lies in the ethics of social responsibility from human environment to human labor to personal well being. We need to be more aware of consequences bought about by corporations. The sweat shops that are rapidly spreading in Asia and Asia-pacific, from Laos to China, I can say is drastically disappointing when comapared to the salaries and wages earned by big time CEOs. A quest for morality lies at hand, and as I see it may as well lead to political and economic arguments.
Factors of production must also be taken seriously, as well as market factors that affect decision making made by those big time CEOs, of course, in order to minimize coroprate bias. Must we stay silent or must we be activists? Decision making, based on recent readings of business books, are affected by site location, telecommunications and the rapid change of the Information Technology “department” (like that we are using as of the moment to communicate). In addition, the resource planning between the industries involved in the global supply chain.
Lastly, to sum it all up, industrialization does not necessarily mean the capitalism is tolerable and the others are not. It is, I can say, a relative concept which is part of world history. Our kids would look back in decades to come and see the glory of our age, but what lies next I can say relies on the hands of those computer engineers and programmers.
‘so do you t hink we (the west) are correct to drag the rest of the world through industrialisation, so we can trade, and ultimately get richer.’
we? ‘we’ would only ‘ultimately get richer’ if the posters to this forum have names like ‘Rockefeller’, ‘Ford’, ‘Gates’…