[1004] Peak Boy
└ posted on Monday, 16 July 2018, by Novil
There is a new poll in the voting widget in the left sidebar:
- What is your all-time favorite story arc?
- Caption: A Look Back – “A look back” is a new feature on Sandra and Woo. In irregular intervals, we will take a look back at funny scenes that took place before the current events in Sandra and Woo. (Besides, I need more time to come up with the next strips of current story arc.)
- Sandra: The Limits to Growth.
- Larisa: Excuse me?
- Sandra: That’s the title of a famous study from the 1970s. In essence, it postulates that Earth will no longer be able to meet humanity’s resource requirements at some point.
- Larisa: And what’s that got to do with me?
- Sandra: You consume boys faster than they’re produced by the couples in our town. Sooner or later, you’ll be left high and dry.
- Larisa: !!
- Larisa: Handholding is not enough! Have you never heard of sustainability?!
- Man and woman: ???
![[1004] Peak Boy](/comics/2018-07-16-1004-peak-boy.png "[1004] Peak Boy")
Limits to Growth didn’t take into account necessary improvements in farming methods which made it possible to produce more using less space, thus increasing the planetwide growth limit. In a similar way, Sandra does not consider that Larisa could diversify into feeding off the other 50% of the population.
Or get a car. Surely she’ll be of driving age before she’s consumed the entire male populace.
Whoa that was long before… Before she new that Landon is where it is at…
…I guess that explains why she was so down on Luna doing it.
Larissa’s facial expression in panel four is priceless.
This is simply BRILLIANT!!!!!
Novil you are THE genius!!!!
and Powree…
That is cutest Larisa face I have seen so far…
What’s the original number of this strip?
@ MaxArt:
Original number?
AnotherBear wrote:
And it shows she is a smart girl: instead of getting angry with Sandra for pointing the obvious, she accepts the fact and decides to do something about it (Russian-style of course!).
Damn this is way back. Back before Justin. Speaking of which, the first strip Justin was in had to do with the world cup, which just ended today/yesterday. Coincidence?
And here I thought the swimsuit arc has ended abruptly.
Has Larisa ever heard of moderation? (yes, that’s a meant as rhetorical question)
@ CaptXpendable:
“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” Oscar Wilde
@ MaxArt:
@ DaB.:
I think the original number of this strip is 1004. 😉
The caption says it’s a »look back« to a »scene« that happened before the current story arc. I think it’s just a trick to come up with something else and not having to interrupt the current story arc.
Larissa: “Moderation? Isn’t that something that’s done by Internet volunteers?”
@ Jesse:
So true. So very true.
[inwardly screaming “YES! YES! SOMEONE MENTIONED OSCAR WILDES! YES! YES!]
And Sandra uses the word consume so innocently… A limited number of people means a limited number of souls at any given present-moment. Sort of like coupons or bitcoins.
@ DaB.:
@ Moatl:
I think he means where does it fit in the continuity
Larisa… did you know that, for internet, handholding is the lewdest thing couples can do?
MidoriLuna wrote:
This worked for a while. Hunters / Gathers wouldn’t be able to support 7-8 billion people.
But since “growth” isn’t only about food your reasoning is flawed anyways.
Think about all that plastic that’s floating around in the oceans and killing animals who never saw a human being.
Think about conventional resources like coal which took millions of years to form. And we’re burning them within centuries.
All those improvements just mean nothing more then buying a bit more time before we crash. At the cost of making the final crash even harder.
By the way: your initial thesis sounds much like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_and_the_tortoise (which is obviously false too)
@ clickbait:
Think about it like this; we already have 8 billion people on this planet, and produce more than enough food for all of them. This is not to say we necessarily do it all sustainably, or that just because we produce enough for all, that all are then fed; as we know this isn’t the case. But already we know by the numbers that we can easily support our current worldwide population. Moreover, a lot of what we currently go to produce goes towards livestock and pets; worst case scenario, we would direct those resources towards human consumption, rather than animal consumption.
But I digress. The point is that catastrophizing does absolutely nothing positive, especially when trying to construct some pseudoscientific scenario of doom. Yes global warming is happening, it’s effects are generally more subtle than humans can normally understand so when it’s catastrophized and then the catastrophe doesn’t happen instantly, people tend to start denying the evidence it even exists. The same with a growth limit; there’s no hard limit that magically begins offing people once it’s hit; the effects are far more gradual. You’re never going to crash into a growth limit as, for better or worse, humans are generally too tenacious to simply wither and die when met with an obstacle.
@ Frank:
In the German forum someone pointed out this happenes before she got in the relationship with Landon – so it’s before strip 319, maybe.
@ MidoriLuna:
While I do agree that panicking doesn’t help anybody and of course there isn’t any hard limit some of your statements aren’t entirely true.
For one we’re not easily supporting our current population. We barely do so.
If the whole population of this planet would live they way us Europeans and Americans are doing we’d need about 2 more Earths to satisfy there needs.
Another aspect that you keep ignoring is that it’s not only about food. In many places basics like fresh water is scarce. Then there’s energy Countless other resources like all those fancy metals in our smartphones, cars and computers. All that waste we’re dumping all over our planet. All that place we need for our housing, roads, farms, waste dumps.
Yes humans have been able to adopt do anything – that’s why we’re that successful. Yes we humans can react to almost anything.
But the time to do so is now.
Finally your “reallocating” resources spend on supporting animal life won’t work for very much longer. The rate at which we’ve been wiping out wild life species for the last few decades is high enough to call this time period a “mass extinction event” (yes Earth has survived a few of these already …).
One day soon we’ll wipe out one species too many and start a process we might be able to survive at only too high a price – if at all.
The main problem is that people expect “catastrophes” to be sudden and easily visible.
The way we’re killing ourselves is far too subtle too slow to notice as the catastrophe it already IS.
Someone visiting Earth in a few million years might say “hey look! something killed almost every living being on this world in less then 3 thousand years! What happened?”
@ MidoriLuna:
I’ll just add that while the human population is still growing, the rate of growth has slowed dramatically. In many parts of the world, fertility has fallen to or below the replacement rate. Barring some manor reversal, the total human population will peak and start to decline within a century or less. Add in the fact that we continue to discover new resources and more efficient ways to exploit existing resources, and catastrophic over population is really low on my list of worries.
Friggin’ succubus-predator consuming too much, too soon!
haha she doesn’t realize the boys being created now will be way too young. what she should be doing is getting new couples to move there with their kids. ORRRR to create a time machine and get couples in the past to start doing it more.
Nah we’re a renewable resource.
Maybe she should stop being so wasteful. Or try recycling?
@ clickbait:
@ MidoriLuna:
No offence, but, don’t you think this is taking the joke in the strip a bit toooooooo seriously?
@ clickbait:
See the issue with this particular line of thought it not that we dont produce enough materia its just that we distribute it incredibly inefficiently. I wouldn’t say its that humans in general are destroying the world, i’d say its a small elite class with the aid of a large number of humans beings doing their jobs, because the world dies in a slow degredation via monotony.
@ oledakaajel:
Wait.
Who is Justin? Larisa dated a Justin?
I have no memory of this! (Did she drug me?)
communism and capitalism both suck wrote:
I wouldn’t use the word “class” here. It’s us: the people who live in a developed, reach country, who don’t worry if they have something to eat. Rather we worry that our new SUV might have the wrong color or that we don’t work out hard enough and thus are going to get fat.
@ Brijeka Vervix:
Yeah sorry. I got carried away.
I’ll refrain from trying to make the heathens see the light in the future. 😉
Brijeka Vervix wrote:
They’re discussing something referenced in the strip, I don’t believe it means they’re taking the joke any more seriously than you or me.
Number of humans is not the only – or most important – limit to growth. The Malthusian population bomb has been debunked long ago. But our economic model only works through constant growth, increased productivity and increased consumption. While energy resources offer a solvable problem (though whether we can solve it in time, including problems like global warming is another matter entirely), mineral resources don’t quite work that way.
One interesting example is sand – a material people rarely think about possibly running out but it does. Sand is not equal to sand and high quality stuff suitable for building doesn’t just lie around in deserts. There are islands where entire beaches have been removed by unregulated or illegal mining businesses (often no more than a person with a bucket) in order to feed the construction industry in e.g. Arabia. Sure, sand regenerates in time but we are using it faster than it does – and there’s no reason to think that demand will fall any time soon. Other mineral resources regenerate much slower and some not at all.
There is, of course, no easy fix (short of a global nuclear war which has its own problems). But as long as politics become more short-sighted and divisive every year we also can’t really work on a long-term global solution. Paraphrasing a wise man: I’m not alarmed by global warming or resource scarcity but by politics denying problems and postponing solutions.
The old Malthusian con … even Dr. Thomas Malthus, the first to suggest this hypothesis, concluded he was wrong. But if he’s wrong, that means the Elites have far less justification for choosing who lives and who dies, and we can’t have THAT!! So his error gets lots of play, and the corrections don’t.
@ Ephesus:
Well now, discussion of The Limits to Growth, its criticisms and how they relate to Larisa’s impending apocalypse in which she runs out of fresh boys was abandoned after MidoriLuna’s first comment as the rest of the conversation devolved into an argument over something far removed from the original comic.
@ Arkanabar T’verrick Ilarsadin:
Exactly. You understand.
And clickbait, the alarmist “its our fault” tends to result in stuff like the denial of the huge corporate structure. The issue is in the system we are trapped into, not our own actions except as they interact with this system, and it is *very hard* to escape the system. Most waste occurs on a corperate stage, and exists very directly to help profit the companies controlled by the “elite class” I mean elite class like. Billionares and those who are near billions of worth. The small group of people who have control over 90+% of the earths resources. 627235 is correct, mostly. It’s possible that through unified action the system could be shed or altered, but it would take *complete unity* and absolutely no picket line crossing. We can change this, but only by a unified boycott of essentially capitalism, or through reform within the system (nearly impossible.) We might be able to fix the problem, but only through legal and extralegal action unified, and even then theres very little way to ensure it doesn’t just happen again in a hundred years.
@ clickbait:
Don’t make me break out the “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” sanic man ::3
clickbait wrote:
… yes. Very important resource. We need to collect it and make food from it.
Bible appeals to people to be nicer to each other for over two thousand years. Doesn’t really seem to work. Now, compare it to what science did in last century. I think the chance we science our way from any of coming catastrophes is WAY bigger than chance majority of people will stop being selfish and shortsighted.
@ Brijeka Vervix:
If I had a nickel for every time I’d been accused of devolving a comics commentary section into a sprawling mass of incoherent chaos… 😉
@ MidoriLuna:
We’re only producing enough food because we’re using petroleum-based fertilizers and farming equipment. We’re only able to distribute it even as well as we do now because of oil-based transportation (never mind all the problems with electricity for refrigeration and metals for electronics). We are far beyond sustainability as it is, and are banking on technology being able to catch up with the population, by increasing our carrying capacity, even as the population grows due to extending lifespans and per capita consumption of resources continues to increase.
So… we kinda are headed to catastrophe and need to panic a little bit. Like, not panic-panic, but conserve electricity by wasting less heat and light, use less land and energy to produce the food we eat, waste less food in general, and so on, otherwise we are totally doomed. The scary part is, if we do too much we’ll fail to compete economically with those who are more careless, so we also need to stop letting people buy energy by selling us useless crap that won’t save anyone, too…
The world’s in crisis and ‘meh we have enough food’ is an extremely myopia way of looking at it. But setting things on fire isn’t a good idea either, because we can’t get out of this without advanced technology and we can’t have advanced technology if we set everything on fire.
@ MidoriLuna:
I think you performed admirably this time 😛
Namaphry wrote:
Disagree, and I’m sure Larissa would back me in this – you can use nonflammable materials to build advanced technology. That’d leave plenty of flammable materials to use around said technology without much risk of damaging it. 😀
I think, at this point, our best option is to convince the higher-ups to listen to scientific advisors more than rich and powerful lobbyists, which will prove very trying. There’s got to be a way to change the system for one where things are produced at roughly the rate of their consumption (or significantly higher) and recycled as much as possible.
Someone mentioned sand, probably for concrete powder, can we recycle debris from demolished buildings for that? I imagine the chemistry is obviously not the same anymore, but there are plenty of uses for rocks and pebbles, like tidal barriers and such.
Also Brijeka, you just admitted the discussion veered off from the comic’s joke. I guess you agree with my previous statement, that nobody’s taking the joke too seriously? 😉
@ Ephesus:
I don’t understand. They were clearly fixating upon one tiny little part of the strip way more than is necessary.
clickbait wrote:
Funny that you should mention that one, because a study done in 2010 tracked more than 50% of that to China and Indonesia. Just two countries (and not even the biggest ones) are contributing to more than half of the problem. Meanwhile, the entirety of the US contributed less than 2%. Even if you consider China having 4 times the population, it does not account for contributing nearly 30 times the oceanic plastic pollution.
So it’s not that humanity as a colloquial has an issue. The fact that some humans manage to get at least 7 times closer to equilibrium than others, while enjoying at least equal (if not greater) quality of life and resource consumption rate, demonstrates that. It’s not even so much about technology, as merely about human behavior.
I still feel like my comment earlier has some value…
Greater value than a book from the 70’s and how it relates to today
Conservation is good, do it
Waste is bad, stop it
^^^^^^at heart everyone agrees with those two statements^^^^^
clickbait wrote:
you are very, very, wrong and possibly quite sheltered if you believe this@ clickbait:
@ MidoriLuna:
Beware what you say, she easily turn in “Challenge is accepted” mode!
But they’re not a single use resource. It’s not consumed after use. You wouldn’t toss away a knife or fork after using it once.