The industrial revolution and its consequences... a disaster to the human race
@nobody Plz do the math on your agricultural alternatives that are free of grain monocultures, tractors and nitrates.
@L29Ah There's been enough math and digging of the bones done to conclude that humans had been quite successful at sustaining themselves until the state had expanded to cover the entire planet:) Nor did the fertilizers magically eliminate hunger, rather our raising our standards in reaction to a bunch of social developments (incl. the red scare) did.
What fertilizers did do is increase the population size by a few billions. Living creatures are kind of like gases, occupy the available volume
@L29Ah
* "I think", "I guess", "I believe", "In my opinion", &c, &c
@nobody Enough billions to conquer your underused land and turn it into factory farms.
Still didn't occur in South America tho, so consider settling in the Amazon feral garden to get the vibe.
> Enough billions to conquer your underused land ...
Probably not so much thanks to the billions, as thanks to the improvement in communications and transportation (read: border enforcement)
> ...turn it into factory farms
...churning out misery at 1000000x rate:)
@L29Ah besides, the "industrial revolution" != "the invention of (rail, steam engine, fertilizer, &c, &c)", but rather their adoption by the (state, market, enterprise, pick your poison). I'm not saying progress is bad, I'm saying the shit we're doing negates progress
@L29Ah
Started skimming through this piece again, and ran into this anecdote about fertilizers
@L29Ah _I_ would not exist, we'd likely have a much smaller population, both of which tbh I find very welcome prospects.
However, your premise is otherwise untrue: the society would be almost surely doing just fine, nor would nutrition suddenly become a problem for humans, nor _was_ it a problem for humans except the part of humanity that happened to be captured by any one State, where humans would be forced to resort to unsustainable low-yield practices like fixed-field grain-based agriculture