Comments by "Luis Aldamiz" (@LuisAldamiz) on "Iran's Alarming Water Crisis" video.

  1. Indeed: wars, revolutions, mass migrations... collapse of all semblance of social order and prosperity. We're collectively living on borrowed time: the ecological damage is massive already, I fear something at least as bad as the Late Bronze Age Collapse, which destroyed civilizations and erased whole nations from the face of Earth. Take Egypt for example: before it was a superpower, after it could barely stand independent anymore and soon it became nothing but a coveted province for others to conquer. And it wasn't the unluckiest one, what happened to the Ausones, the Trojans, the Hittites or the once prosperous Syrian city of Ugarit?
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  2. Iran seems only a point example of what overpopulation and irreflexive developism can do. The problems of Iran seem to be almost everywhere, at least in the semiarid regions: you mentioned the USA but you could have said Spain, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine/Israel, Libya's once famous "artificial river" and a very long etcetera. We're all living on borrowed time, time borrowed from Earth's sustainability (the ecological debt is a real thing) and this looks even worse than the Late Bronze Age Collapse, which is the closest that history can illustrate us with an example as far as I know.
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  3.  @hikashia.halfiah3582  - To your second comment, I can only add that I hope it's much better than just this fake democracy intact, we need much better democracy, one that is also economic democracy. What happens now is that the owners of wealth control all the system (via media, banks, bribes and even murderers), rendering the rest of us essentially powerless, even ignorant and definitely disorganized. In order to have true democracy, we need economic democracy (socialism or communism) first of all. Also technology should suffer from such a massive loss of people: people are the ones who know how to make tech. It's well studied that more people means more rapid progress (because there are more minds and more interactions). More so, such a massive drop in population would render existing infrastructure unoperative: the Internet would collapse, nuclear power plants would go into meltdown, it'd be almost impossible to find spare parts for your car, etc. People work every day to keep this technology thing running. I once worked as teleco technician and you have to be there (on turns) 24hrs every day and night: your router goes to another router and that one to another, the computer that controls the communications has to be restarted and sometimes repaired or reprogrammed, pieces fail all the time and have to be replaced, if electricity goes out (as it will in such scenario), the giant petrol generator has to be activated... and a very long etc.: those technicians need to eat, take a shower, someone has to clean the building, etc. Maybe some jobs are totally pointless, "BS jobs" that the late Graeber found often, but oter jobs are absolutely imprescindible and teleco technicians and engineers are surely one of them, as are farmers, cleaners, water system operators, firefighters, trash collectors, nurses and physicians, teachers and professors, etc. Technology runs on people and is taught by people.
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  4.  @gengar1187  - I fear the worst, really. Even the Pope spoke yesterday of the world going to a total disaster (I'm not Christian but when you're right, you're damn right).
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  5.  @NoNameAtAll2  - Maybe. But after researching you get to know.
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  6.  @hikashia.halfiah3582  - IDK, I want to be optimistic but the logical outcome of such a massive eco-catastrophe in our reality seems to be total nuclear war, after things spiral out of control. When the choice is dying of thirst or playing nuclear Russian roulette, most will choose the latter... and when you play nuclear Russian roulette often enough, nuclear armaggedon ensues. And the chances of 1% surviving that are very slim. Some want to imagine that remote areas may survive nuclear winter but they ignore radioactivity... Would it "only" be conventional war... then yes, some would survive and rebuild, but would it not be for nuclear deterrence, I'm sure we would have suffered several world wars already, each more catastrophic than the previous one. Without nukes the many horrors of the Ukraine War would be the much worse horrors of total global war... but the price paid is the risk of total extinction, something unthinkable 80 years ago. Capitalism has unleashed the "productive forces" of Humanity but can it control them before such superpowers destroy the planet one way or another? Clearly not, because its driven by greed and short-term gain, it is competitive and not cooperative, it is predatory (growth = destruction) and not caring ward of the precious substrate we live on. We stand at the red line of such unprecedented civilizational challenge that we can barely wrap our minds around it un understand what's happening. Yet we must, and not just understand but also something much more difficult: reign on the many troubles that our socio-economic misbehavior has caused, and we must do all that very fast, and we don't even know where to start even. And yet most people, incl. the powerful, live day to day without such concerns because it's all so mindbogglingly scary that we feel powerless and adrift, ruled by socio-economic (and political) forces well beyond our capacity. Probably our best hope is that the collapse is so fast and furious that there's not even chance of starting a nuclear war. Then the survivors will somehow rebuild from the ashes, hopefully having learned something.
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  7.  @volkerengels5298  - Hopefully the technicians will bring them to full stop before that happens but some may get out of control for various reasons, incl. wars or terrorist attacks. Or also, as you say, because of poor maintenance, which is already a serious issue in old NPPs (France had to intervene its nuclear energy monopoly EDF because maintenance costs have become so high that it was going bankrupt and also was providing less than half of the electricity that it used to, reports suggest that serious nuclear accident was barely avoided in some cases). In the worst case scenarios, they don't usually "explode" anyhow, they go into meltdown, which is nearly as bad. When explosions do happen (Fukushima for example) it's for indirect reasons like hydrogen accumulation and not a true nuclear explosion. However contamination of water and atmosphere is a huge danger: if Japan would have applied the Chernoblyl exclusion areas, all nothern Honsu, Tokyo included, should have been evacuated. Instead they lowered the threshold and only evacuated a small brutally polluted area, leaving the rest of the region's inhabitants exposed to serious radioactive harm.
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  8.  @fleetingfacet  - Not sure why you need to disqualify my elaboration so harshly ("incongruous effluvium of off topic assertions"). I'm coincident with your claim of "when that ground water is gone, much of society will likely collapse". But I think of alternative management like the old qanats mentioned in the video or the fact that irrigation farming itself can't be the basis of the economy. I am just learning on te Iran case but I'm much more familiar with that of Spain and it is the same: demagogic water mismanagement, areas that do not have enough water from rainfall and sustainable river use are allowed to overextend their irrigation economy well beyond what is acceptable (even without global warming), not just "farms" (which export overpriced strawberries to England and Germany, for example, and barely contribute to local feeding) but also golf courses and other developist idiocies. That's how the national parks of southern Spain are being devastated and people living in cities barely even know about that (it's discussed now and then but not much considering the extreme severity of the issue). So yes: society will collapse and nuclear war will ensue and Humanity will be self-annihilated. We may try to do something about it instead of just crying, just saying.
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  9.  @ariaspes3842  - Fair enough. Plus the supposed "let's invade Mexico" discourse that some presidential candidates are using as electoral prop should definitely de-stabilize the US southwest, which was not just in the past part of Mexico but also host most of the Mexican-American population (plus that row of steel beams they call "wall" is perfectly penetrable or destructible: you need a policy and not just a wall).
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  10.  @ariaspes3842 - Regardless, my opinion on the issue of SW US stands. It was you who first mentioned that region, I just expanded on that. I'm rather thinking of war forces crossing northwards after the USA happy-triggering invades Mexico out of arrogant imperialism and ends up being counter-invaded instead. I was not talking of migrants but of what I imagine as the self-provoked end of the USA by nonsensical invasion of a friendly neighbor, as two US presidential candidates have proposed in recent weeks (namely De Santis and Vivayek or whatever the surname of the Indian ancestry guy, Indian names are definitely the hardest to recall).
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