Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

As a successful physics professor at a top institution in academia, Tom Murphy broke ranks in one of the hardest possible ways at the peak of his career. One reason this is so difficult, and it came to mind when writing this, is he knows he can only credibly discuss collapse in physics terms to cer...

It's been said that Jared Diamond is a polymath. If someone is a polymath and in demand, that's a difficult role in today's world. The last days of the polymath – The Economist Edward Carr | Autumn 2009 Mindful of that sort of promiscuity, I asked my colleagues to suggest living polymaths of the po...

The basic reasons why Europeans became dominant were summed up in Jared Diamond’s book Guns Germs and Steel . With these, they were able to implement colonial imperialism and thus gain advantage over other cultures. It is not due to superior culture, religion or genes. (He also wrote a book called ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFrxgMFbN8c The transcript of the first 15 minutes of this video is copied below. Some long term themes: Giant sucking sound of the US dollar system US economy is too inefficient The cost structure of the US is too high Utilities such as education, health care and fi...

World per capita energy use has been stagnant for several years. If the developed economies were getting huge gains in efficiency to offset the decline in their per capita energy use, that would be one thing but they aren't. Instead, the FIRE economy is filling in the gaps to keep GDP floating high...

The narrative is that we are leading the charge to a better tomorrow at net zero without fossil fuels. The reality is that the US and other developed economies are no longer competitive enough to take the lion's share of the world's fossil fuels. The narrative helps to keep perceptions from catchin...

If you want to continue the discussion at length, we should probably reopen the abortion thread. Doesn't particularly belong in the Hovel. Some aspects of the discussion belong here. One would be a discussion of the narratives that are created around various topics as the new dark age tightens its ...

The Industrial and Information Ages don't leave a lot of room for such collapses. They leave a lot more room. In the Industrial Age, the excess extraction rate over the steady state sustainable extraction rate is at least 10 fold what it was in the Agricultural Age. See the below link for a recent ...

'BB will ride the atom bomb all the way to the ground.' That's still my favorite line of the past year. It's the superiority complex of that group, their tightly closed bubble and strictly regulated information sources together with unrelenting bigotry... It's just FUBAR as many people wake up to i...

Tom Murphy is a professor emeritus of the departments of Physics and Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and PhD student in physics at Caltech, Murphy spent decades reveling in the study of astroph...