Zager & Evans

[jeff of pa]

imo One of the Most depressing Songs Ever

 

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[Jose The Goon]

imo One of the Most depressing Songs Ever

Even more depressing when you watch the film that goes along with the song. Never saw that film before now. Was a cool song back in the day though.

 

[jeff of pa]

There was also a song, Early 80's Maybe.
Of a Guy Singing he is in a Car Accident, trapped & Bleeding Out
by the End of The song He Dies ? I Can't remember The Name Of the Song and Google don't help. too many songs like "Hunny"
From the 50's 60's & 70's of Car crashes

 

[UnderMiner]

I was doing some research recently and discovered a giant flaw in humanity's longterm survival odds, at least in the context of the parabolic population growth we've experienced in the last 175 years.

I stumbled on this interesting fact while researching islands in the context of treasure hunting. As many of us historically astute are aware I'm sure, the United States acquired many islands in the mid-late 19th century as part of the Guano Islands Act. Starting in the 1850's humanity discovered the wonders of organic fertilizers and the fact that Guano (bird droppings) when put on fields increased crop yields by staggering margins. If you ever look at a global human population graph you will notice this time corresponds directly with the start of the current era of parabolic human population growth. Essentially the food supply quadrupled over night, grain became cheap and plentiful and the price of flour and bread plummeted. Of course the machines of the industrial revolution also played a pivotal roll in this, but at its core the population increase was a direct result of the introduction of organic fertilizers to the agricultural industry.

Now why is this important? Well, you see, Guano is a finite resource and after about 50 years (from the 1850's to 1900) nearly all the Guano had been exhausted from the Guano Islands and very few new sources of Guano were being found.

The leaders of the world knew that without a replacement for the rapidly depleting Guano there would soon be crop shortages, as without fertilizer the fields would only produce 1/4 their normal yields - leading to skyrocketing food prices and famine.

In steps Fritz Haber, a German scientist, who in 1909 discovers an energy intensive process to covert atmospheric nitrogen into liquid Ammonia which is used to make the first synthetic agricultural fertilizer. Haber wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Carl Bosch, another German scientist, then steps in and scales up the technology in 1913 to global industrial output - inventing the first large scale synthetic fertilizer production plant. Synthetic fertilizer is then sold globally and supplants the dwindling organic fertilizer supply.

There is only one huge problem. As stated before, the Haber-Bosch Process is extremely energy intensive. It takes alot of energy to convert atmospheric nitrogen into liquid Ammonia, and despite how much the world changed since 1909 the method for the process hasn't changed. About 5% of all the global fossil fuels produced annually are used in the production of Ammonia to make nitrogen-based fertilizers using this process. People have only just started to realise that like the Guano, the fossil fuels used to make Ammonia are also a finite resource. Unless an alternative to fossil fuels is found, then one day the global production requirements of the Haber-Bosh process will become impossible to maintain and 3/4 of the world will starve.

How serious is this? Well, in 2021 the government of Shri Lanka banned the use of synthetic fertilizers in an attempt to transition their nation to use only environmentally friendly organic fertilizers. In 2022 after just one growing season, crop failures and skyrocketing food prices lead to mass rioting and the government was violently overthrown.

Now ask yourselves, what if there was no way to reverse a poor government policy like a ban on synthetic fertilizers because synthetic fertilizers simply no longer existed? How many more years can we use fossil fuels to make them? 50 years? 100? 1,000? 2,000 years? And then what? Humanity has existed for over 200,000 years and in that time the population never rose parabolic due to the introduction of fertilizers. We may simply be living in a temporary golden age that lasts a few thosand years - a blip in our overall existence, after which our population will return to what the Earth can sustain at homeostasis, the human population declining by 3/4 or more from where it is currently, maybe as soon as the year 2525. 😏