Several of this blog’s posts have been on maximizing humanity’s happiness in the long run, and by long run is meant 12,000 years, because that assumes civilization has run halfway through its life span. I avoid politicians’ terms like a sustainable environment because that just means solving a problem until the next election. Also, top oil executives saying we have plenty of oil and gas just means to the end of their particular expected stay in the corporate office they presently occupy. Civilization has been around since about 10,000 BCE, and when I approach politicians or corporate executives with that time frame in reference they treat me like I am crazy. But their spending of the world’s resources will consume them all in their own children’s lifetimes and then there will be a world with vastly poorer resources than those supporting the world’s population back at 1AD. That population was approximately one hundred million compared to the present seven billion one hundred million. If population was in balance with the resources back then and our “sane” politicians and corporate heads consume all available resources, the population must drop to a much lower level. I sometimes think it might drop to ten million to reachieve a balance with the then available resources. Even with an atomic war I don’t think humans will go extinct, but the population will be minute compared to now.

After that repetitive summation of what this blog often considers, what can be done to maximize humanity’s happiness? Clearly exploding the population for another decade or two to double what it presently is will only result in a sooner arrival of a catastrophic lack of some essential. Perhaps that will be something now considered almost common, like copper, but the problem will get critical when it comes to lack of food, because the distribution system is imperiled and frozen. When no fertilizer can be transported, no water can be moved across state boundaries, no information can be transmitted to enable transactions there will be problems.

When I look around my beautiful city of Bend, Oregon, I see the incredible wealth of natural resources being consumed at the maximum rate that money can be borrowed from lending institutions. I love these people, but they seem to have little concept that wasting one-time-use resources means the time will come when they can’t keep living the consumptive lifestyle they have become accustomed to.