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Comment by vijayr02 | Hacker News Reader

> When floods did kill off mice, it usually happened quickly. “Farmers talk about the mice disappearing virtually overnight,” the research officer said. “They get to such high numbers they become quite stressed … they start to run out of food, which facilitates the spread of disease, they start eating the sick ones, they turn on the babies, and then it’s all over. It’s quite a grizzly story.”

The lasting question of our time: how do we humans ensure we don't end up like the mice...

I'm reminded of Yuval Harari's quote that civilization is 3 meals away from barbarism.

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Also three meals away from: revolution, anarchy, collapse. One of many great quotes that are regularly attributed to everyone's favorite, recent source. It's also been attributed to Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Lenin, Robert Heinlein. Earliest print paraphrasing Alfred Henry Lewis (nine meals).

It must have the ring of truth to it, to survive so long and offered as wisdom from so many sources.

You're right. We need to figure out how to do better than the mice.

Hah. Posted that I remember it from Larry Nivens before I read your comment :D

I recommend reading about the famous Mouse Utopia Experiment, you may be interested in it

For those curious here is a wikipedia article on Behavior Sink [1] related to the findings from the mentioned experiment.

To summarize: Even in a society where all the basic needs of survival are met overpopulation will cause the society to devolve and collapse from overcrowding and psychopathy.

If you find this interesting you may want to search for the strong correlation between urban population density and increased levels of mental illness.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

Interesting stuff but I would question how much you can infer about our society based on rodent behavior.

I wonder if the rodents in the experiment had access to birth control.

Probably not too much but definitely not none.

Mouse utopia was basically a prison. I don't think the fact that people get depression when in prison is a revelation.

I recall a very similar quote from Larry Niven’s “Lucifer’s Hammer”. Something about no society being more than a few missed meals from a revolution. (Paraphrasing)

Are we in danger of becoming like mice right now?

I think the point is, we might end up having to resort eating each other as food production collapses due to climate change.

And the preppers are doing it wrong. They're storing bulk goods (and not enough of them) rather than the means of producing food. Say I need 80 million calories for the rest of my life, comprising macros and micros, how am I going to store anything to last 50 years or more? Two adults would need half a million pounds of corn. Are they going to hide that under their mattress? What would any kids be born eat?

It's totally fatalistic, irrational nonsense.

Well, real peppers do both.

But, if you’re not in a rural situation, you’re basically screwed. Either there’s no space for your crops, and/or you won’t be able to defend them.

I like red bell peppers because they're smarter than the green ones. ;)

It's completely untenable without a massive, underground vertical farm, a water source, and an energy source. No one but billionaires could afford that. You'd need an armed commune to defend a massive greenhouse area. It's the only way a self-sufficient group could survive in isolation.

I think some form of feudalism would likely end up re-emerging, and feudalism can scale just fine so long as you expect most people on an estate to take a massive quality of life hit.

Yeap. It doesn't sound pleasant. I'll take "fixing man-made issues so they're not so horrible" for $300, Alex.

Doubtful, hence my request for clarification.

Doubtful? Famine due to unusual climate circumstances is not unusual, and we are entering a new era of historically "unusual" climate circumstances (not to mention the many other faucets of human-caused environmental collapse). Far from doubtful.

Without a time horizon you can say anything about anything in the future. In the next two thousand years maybe we face several famines; but we’ll do what we have always done when food runs scarce; adapt, explore and kill. Cosmopolitan virtues will likely wither in that time.

Even with climate change as a factor, we can lose a lot of our current yearly harvest and still have enough to eat. We can change our diets to match what is available to us to eat, and for all we know, even with the loss of some arable land, we gain access to land that was previously unusable due to the local climate being inhospitable to our crops.

So, are we, or are we not, facing in the near term the pressures that these mice are facing that drive them to desperate action? Are we all members of the Donner Party in the future? Or is it just an interesting thought exercise to ask what we would do if we were faced with the same pressure?

Yeah. Cosmopolitan values are pretty fragile they might as well be a lie. For one thing they need an absurd level of wealth to maintain without which they disappear and leave a vacuum that can only be filled with base instincts.

Greenhouses, climate-controlled vertical farming, and desalination. Easily doable.

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