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The machines started when fossil fuels came into general use. First coal in the early to mid 1800s, then oil driven machines in the early 1900s, increasing, and with the petrochemical industry. >>>People should have known that something so black and dirty or gooey was evil<<<. They overlooked its bad characteristics and saw only the "good" of cheap power. They found more useful things to do with it----plastics, fertilizers, chemicals; again overlooking the heavy metal contamination of the fertilizers, the long term toxicity of the plastics, and the pollution of chemicals. >> They looked only at the short term, forgetting to look ahead the consequences of the pollution buildup.<< They thought the Earth was so big it would absorb it all. Their greed and the demands of a population that could now have more food and other products, and thus >>>grow exponentially<<<, became a resource destroying machine. Like a locust plague of humanity.
More and more crowded, leading to more anxiety, hostility, and depression. More and more polluted until waters were unsafe to drink and the oceans' fish laden with toxic metals, the oceans themselves with huge estuary dead zones and millions of square miles of floating plastic trash. Species dying off at an extinction event rate, while the atmospheric pollution causes malevolent climate change at an accelerating rate and rains down mercury nearly everywhere. Overpopulation's cooking fires in India causing soot on Arctic ice and increased melting, more climate change, and global dimming over the Maldives, decreasing their crop yields. Power sucking out ancient aquifers of pure water until they are gone, before they can burn the last of the oil and coal. Crops fail, thirst is rampant with hunger, as the machines try to make more water and food while still polluting.
>>>>First the world economy failing as resources are used up, the ecological collapse from the over-burden, area by area.<< Desperate people running to where there still are jobs, still is pure water, still is more food--and collapsing those areas with a fight(2011). Insane cannibal gangs roaming, stealing and killing(2035?). The seas devoid of edible life, roamed by pirates with no one to rob anymore, and relying on sails again(2045). Floods, incredible storms, and the stench of rot, and increasing methane. >>All caused by this >>greed<<, fossil fueled, and >>ignorance<< of looking ahead.
Man, on average, a very dumb/smart creature, and one that took down most other life and a planetary biosphere, for a very long time of recovery, the Anthropocene Epoch of geology started 10,000BC. 2040s to 60s---population crash(deaths over 300 million per year); by 2300--thermageddon, ELE of 87% of life including humans. 190,000AD the Anthropocene Epoch ends(or maybe 2 million AD), recovery and a return to the way it was, with fewer species and no humans. >>The bad greedy people who developed industrial society without forethought to the consequences, and the dumb over-breeders who also could not think ahead, >>>took down the good people who could live sustainably, for a very long time, on Earth. The Horsemen rode, and they were water depletion, soil depletion, malevolent climate change, mercury pollution, oceanic fisheries collapse, oil depletion, and surface water pollution. They carried the swords of disease, war, malnutrition, starvation, black tongued thirst, and poisons. Riding first to Africa, then to India, then to China, then to Central America, then to South America, then to Europe, then the rest of Asia, then to North America, and finally to Australia. Collapsing quicker than thought, with remnants moaning for years, as it got hotter and hotter, and more life died, then more.
50,000 years for plastics to degrade into other toxics, and another 100,000 years or more for nuclear waste and the toxics to become harmless. Another million years for all the CO2 to finally be re-sequestered as semi-stable methane hydrates as the oceans cool, and permafrost comes back. Finally conditions are right for more species to develop, and life to flourish. Then the return of the ice ages, with interglacial periods like this used to be. No intelligent life to study the human fossils and the other little remains of a civilization that destroyed itself through ignorant overpopulation, and selfish greed.
Goodbye to what could have been.
Gypsy of a strange and distant time, traveling in panic all direction blind, fleeing through the shadow of a million years, darkness is the only sound that reaches ears, screaming for a future that will never be. Left without a hope of coming home.........

Did you quote this(above) from somewhere? as having problems sinking in.

The "gypsy" part is from Justin Hayward, the rest is from my own research spanning 44+ years. More, from another site;
The "Horsemen" and the blame. 1.) Aquifer depletion is to be blamed on the people who are over the aquifers, not on outsiders. 2.) Soil depletion can only be blamed on the countries where they are or have depleted their own soils(by not adding organics/composts, salinization by over-irrigation with river waters high in salts, citification by uncontrolled population growth and sprawl, and by not fallowing the land), not on outsiders. 3.) Oil depletion can only be blamed on the countries with oil who have sold it for their own wealth to outsiders. 4.) AGW has a number of sources of blame; the countries burning oil, the countries burning coal, the countries using slash and burn agriculture, the countries cutting down their forests--not outsiders. 5.) overpopulation beyond sustainable is the fault of the countries involved. It may be their culture. It may be their average stupidity. It may be religions. It may be their immigration policies. It may be the greed of some. It may be a combination of factors. 6.) world fisheries collapse can be blamed on drift netters, shark finners, and 3 billion people who get 60% of their protein from fish/seafood. 7.) Surface water pollution/depletion can be blamed on the people in the areas it is occurring and the people upstream who over-use and pollute with everything from agricultural chemicals, industrial waste, excrement, and pharmaceuticals.
http://dieoff.org/page14.htm

"If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale. That means moving to emergency footing. War footing. "Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake" footing. That simply won't be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It's not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally."

This song was originally from 1970. What has really been done since then to mitigate overpopulation, AGW, and other depletions and pollution??? Not anywhere near enough.....the Apocalypse is still on schedule for the 2030s to 60s.

The insane rush to use up the last of our resources, dam the pollution effects, full speed ahead toward catastrophes---
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic ... l_T._Klare

Nothing like visuals to show the rapidity of change.
http://blog.nwf.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/11/files/2012/01/Plant-hardiness-comparison.png
These reflect a 5*F increase in average US temperature in 22 years, with the previous having a +1/2*F rise. My friends, that is a geometric progression. All from HGHGs.
The present just over 395ppm of CO2 is surpassed in recent Arctic measurements of 400ppm, where it is already at least 10*F warmer than it would normally be, and causing geometric tundra methane releases, exacerbating the warming. Faster and faster, as countries of greed vie for newly exposed oil and mineral wealth.
Folks, we just can't burn any more without dire consequences to future generations.
http://www.blindspotdoc.com

Nothing like visuals to tell the sad story....
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/rooted/2012/ ... -accurate/

Nothing like relentless logic:
"By Peter Goodchild

30 August, 2011
Countercurrents.org

A time frame for systemic collapse can be extrapolated easily from the on-line document The Coming Chaos, an abridgement of a larger text (see link below). The most significant page is at the start of the text, the chart of estimated past and future oil production. Most of the other time frames will parallel that curve. Then one can look at the chapter on electricity, which as Richard Duncan says will be the first really distinct, “on-off” type of indicator. The next parallel can be found in the chapter on economics, which mentions two "phases," divided by the point at which money as such is no longer an important means of exchange; past examples occurred with the crash of the USSR, and in Weimar Germany.

In the chapter on famine, the fall of population appears as a parallel to the fall in fossil fuels. Some critics have said that the two do not necessarily go together -- or, rather, “fall” together. But they do, for a very simple mathematical reason. Fossil fuels are the source of more than 90 percent of the energy -- in the strict "physics" sense of the word -- in modern industrial society. If we take away 90 percent of the energy, we necessarily take away 90 percent of the population. (If we take away 100 percent of the energy, we necessarily take away 100 percent of the population.) No, we cannot replace that 90 percent with some "alternative" form of energy, as is explained in chapter one, because there isn't enough of any “alternative” to make much difference.

The same first chapter also illustrates why a voluntary reduction in population cannot work. (For that matter, neither would a mandatory reduction in population, and for the same reason.) Again, it's simple arithmetic. Oil production will fall, over the next few decades, by about 3 percent annually, and if instead we say 2 percent or 4 percent the final result isn't much different. But even if every woman on earth stopped having children from this day forward, there would still not be a 3 or 2 or 4 percent annual reduction in population.

It can be seen, therefore, that the curve of estimated past and future global oil production is not merely one of a myriad of problems with which mankind will have to deal. It is the time scale with which most other problems can be measured, and it is the cause of most other problems.

But if anyone really needs a magic number, a good choice would be 2030. That's the date at which, with a 3 percent annual decline in oil production, the year's production will be half of that in the peak year. And half of peak oil means half of everything else in human society. A very important “half” will be population, because the other half will have died of famine. And that's the one item that very few people can mentally assimilate."