The Haber process, responsible for almost ALL of the manufactured fertilizers used across the planet, depends upon energy to make nitrates. (It was invented during world war I, when the allies blockaded Germany from the south american saltpeter mines, so that the Germans could continue making gunpowder.)
Our current population level DEPENDS utterly upon the existence of mass energy production. If you stopped that, you'd immediately doom many people to a quick death. The whole of our civilization and population growth is teetered precariously upon energy production.
In that century, the industrialized world has been also allowed to create social isolation and we've grown accustomed to it and don't know how to go back. At least in the US, children are expected to leave the family at 18-21 and find their own life elsewhere. No longer is the grandparent, parent, and child structure in place, where the grandparents raised the grandchildren while the parents, at their most able time in life, went out to work. We are divided into the smallest viable units -- the single family -- which is also the maximally consuming model, as well. (Good for business, because the unit-size of purchase is small and therefore highly profitable as well as demanding refrigeration, freezers, etc in every small family, along with several cars and so on.) Our very land-use zoning laws enshrine this new way of life by requiring that only a "single family" dwell there.
People used to depend upon each other a great deal more, for good and bad. In winter, ice would be cut from lake surfaces and teams of people and horses would cart the ice to customers, who would pack the ice in sawdust in bermed storage units for use often into summer time. This brought people together. So did every other aspect of life. Forced or willing, people worked together to survive. The advent of fossil fuel energy meant that we could afford to construct a NEW way of living. And we don't know how to go back, even if we could (but we can't, for the reasons at the outset here.)
We are socialized, over several generations now, into a mode of thinking and existing and we no longer know what it would be like to live another way. But we can't go back because the world population depends upon the production of energy. 85% or so of which is produced through fossil fuels. There has been a social change to all this, too, as we live in profound individual isolation as compared to a century ago. There is both good to that and bad to that. But it is there.
No matter what you consider, other than wholesale slaughter, it's a new path we need to find ahead. Not an old one. It will have to incorporate the best of technology. But it will have to include population in the solution, as well. There is no possible way ahead without dealing with population control on a planetary scale. Exponential rises in population will always easily wipe out linear savings in energy consumption. So we cannot continue unabated. And that is another problem we don't know how to solve.
If we went back, we would have to wait to sit and ask questions. It was a good time, but I live and die with my A/C.
Create a Flux Capacitor.Voila ! You can go back to the old days.
We can't go back to the old days cuz none of you lazy slackers have invented a time machine yet.
people were stuck up and ignorant in days past too. overall the human race is still pretty ignorant.
Ask the Amish, Mennonites, and other such groups.
Well that would be great. So, how do we decide who gets to starve? Im assuming you're putting yourself on the list.
Because "we" don't want to.
I mean the days when everyone lived in villages and were entirely self-sufficient, with only what we NEED to live. Today the world is corrupted by life-complicating technology, rules, and entertainment at any second we demand. New generations especially are spoiled and vulgar thanks to the hundreds of ways of communication and entertainment-outlets. If electricity went away we would die. I don't even believe in global warming yet I still see what is going on all around us. So I ask, why not just go back to the simple yet happy days where everyone wasn't so stuck up or ignorant and dependent on outside sources?
