General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: We should have been colonizing the solar system by now. [View all]tama
(9,137 posts)1) meaningless crack pottery
2) I am not ignoring the growth nor die-offs of cities (such as Athens and Rome etc.) back to small villages, as seen in history. Cities are self-sufficient but dependent from external resources and when they lose access and control of external resources, they die-off back to small villages if they survive at all. The current scale of urbanization is consequence of and dependent from one time external resource of fossil exergy. The bigger the city grows, the more it destroys the carrying capacity of the ecosystem it depends from in the long run. Athens had population of half a million during the peak of Athenian empire of classical era, in Bysantine and Ottoman era it was a village of few hundred. After the puny vill was made the capital of new Greek state, it's population grew to five million where it peaked, now as consequence of global Peak Oil and global depression, people are leaving Athens in growing numbers and returning to rural ways of life or moving to other cities in other countries where effects of global depression are not yet felt so directly.
Lets remember that so far no city has been self-sufficient but always dependent from control of primary production of rural areas for feeding its needs. Rural areas on the other hand are not dependent from parasitical cities for basic survival, so in terms of hierarchy of dependence, rural areas are not dependent from cities but cities are dependent from controlling rural areas for their survival. This has been always the biggest political and class divide since the birth of civilizations and urban cultures, and remains unsolved to this day.