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The NYT Imagines Life After Earth
An anonymous reader writes to mention a New York Times article entitled Life After Earth. The article looks at 'bio-vaults,' be they in the frozen north or on the moon, which might allow the human race to continue on after a globally catastrophic event. From the article: "The trouble with doomsday, Dr. Shapiro argues, is that it is almost always rendered in popular culture as grandiose, though in reality, many minor incidents present substantial everyday threats. In 1918, an influenza strain killed some 30 million people; a possible new bird flu strain spurs contemporary panic. In January 2003, a computer virus shut down airlines, banks and governments. That same year, a tree fell on power lines outside Cleveland, resulting in a blackout for much of the Northeast. Doomsday can be understated."
"By God! Yes!"
I am rolling on the ground laughing and eagerly anticipating of what is sure to come. Slashdotters, this article is for you!
Please include any of the following:
- George Bush jokes
- Edwin "Buzz The Boxer" Aldrin jokes
- Futurama references
- Dr. Strangelove references
- 12 Monkeys references
- Something about Bill Gates (just because)
Please avoid the following:--
"A man is asked if he is wise or not. He replies that he is otherwise" ~Mao Zedong
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
I've always hated doomsday scenarios because they completely ignore what the market (that's billions of individuals looking to better themselves regardless of what government says is good and evil) has provided us over the years. Everything that doomsdayers say is evil is part of the market giving us better lives -- engines, industrialization replacing human labor, commoditization of common goods and needs, etc.
They say "CO2 will kill us all" and I say the market may provide us a better life because of a rougher environment. We've seen science fiction talk about living in bubble/dome cities, but why would this be bad? Can you imagine what life would be like if we did have better control over our local environments? Would a bubbled city offer a better life for millions in the upper north, people who deal with more winter than summer? Would we see better air scrubbers providing better air? Would we see better control over irrigation and drought?
Who knows. I know that I trust that out of the billions of humans today we'll find a few who can find the utility and invention needed to create tomorrow's world. I don't like to think of us living in vaults because that "invention" is based on yesterday's technology. Yesterday's technology came out of need created by the time before yesterday. Tomorrow's technology will come out of need we face today. Don't sell the future short, especially considering how far we've come in the past 1000 years, 200 years, 100 years, 50 years and 10 years. Humanity is not going to go away, it will just find ways to make life better no matter what seems to happen to the world around us.
Does that mean we should ignore "the environment" or "the poor" or the other big words? Absolutely not. What we need to do is consider the local system rather than the global system -- the local system that we can make better. We also need to consider who is the worst polluter, the worst destroyer of human ingenuity and invention, the worst murderer of future geniuses and the worst controller/waster of our resources and expansion -- that would be the State in each case. The State wastes a huge portion of oil on warmongering and control; it wastes a huge portion of useful labor in maintaining that control; it wastes opportunities by overregulating industries based on yesterday's problems rather than tomorrow's needs; it wastes a huge portion of resources by attempting to prevent change and by creating weapons and items to instill fear in the residents and "the enemy."
It is those who are against what the State does that are giving us the most opportunity; the anti-State inventor who finds ways around the controls and regulations that actually make our lives worse in the future. The State has no desire to make your life better -- it only wants to maintain and increase control over your life. Yet there are billions of people out there, and it is the individuals who look to meet current and future needs that make your life better. They have to, because if they don't, you won't buy from them -- you won't sustain their attempt to make their lives better by providing for what you want and need. No regulation and no use of force can do that.
I think a good effort should be made to avoid disaster in the first place. Tracking asteroids, studying diseases, and just getting along so we don't nuke ourselves would be a good start.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Earth imagines life after "The New York Times" and its annoying pointless login.
Where were you when the voynix came?
There was a paper published detailing how to enhance the smallpox virus by adding a cancer gene - it increased the projected mortality rate of the virus, and made the existing vaccine useless.
So, yeah. Doomsday is a relatively trivial exercise.
Eat, drink. Be merry.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
"Doomsday can be understated."
Of course not! He killed Superman!
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
A piece of fiction that won't even make their own Best Seller List...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
It's tough to deal with a prediction that results in your own demise. Sure, we can all guess what it would be like, but there's one problem: in all likelyhood, a disaster that kills all but a select few is probably killing YOU too! Boy, that sucks! The trick is, how to remain one of the survivors without knowing in advance which doomsday scenario is gonna be the one to decimate the majority of the population.
stuff |
"...This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper."
-TS Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925
"Doomsday can be understated"
What kind of quack is this guy? How does he plan to sell papers with his newfangled theories on logic and rationality? You've got to make outrageous claims to get the people's attention! Stop boring people with actual science!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to get tested for bird flu.
In January 2003, a computer virus shut down airlines, banks and governments. That same year, a tree fell on power lines outside Cleveland, resulting in a blackout for much of the Northeast. Doomsday can be understated.
Little did I know that those words in that seemingly ordinary Slashdot article would bring about the end in seven months' time.
Goo goo g'joob.
We already know what life after Earth will be like, just watch Titan A.E.
Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
Eventually our star, the sun, will exceed it's life and reach the fifth stage of it's aging process. Red Giant is the name, and I believe it was estimated that the sun would expand out to somewhere near Jupiter, hence, engulfing the Earth. What are our plans for this? Not to mention Earth is slowly spinning into the sun, so either way a race far down the timeline is doomed and I doubt we'll have a backup plan for that since as soon as the sun collapses we'll get sucked into a blackhole (and possible rip a dimension line sending us back to day one of Earth and the process starts all over, it could happen) Either way, I hope for the best.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay
You mean the future will be a badly-animated cartoon?
Where were you when the voynix came?
and this is how the world ends
;) (IMHO)
and this is how the world ends
not with a bang, but with a wimper
(showdowlands T.S. Elliot).
read it it is cool
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
A message from our sponsor
...except the T-Shirts will be much wittier:
"I'd be with stupid, but he was drowned in the global catastrophe of 2020."
"My parents visited the cities of the great plague, but all I got was this shitty fatal infection."
Will doomsday affect my server uptime?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
of the whole "genetic seed bank" concept is that the two most suggested locations are near one of earth's poles or somewhere in space/on the moon. Brilliant! Because as we all know, when a doomsday scenario kills off a huge percentage of the population, the specialized skillsets required to retrieve those samples are possesed by all, right?
Survivor 1: "Wow, that asteroid destroyed 95% of life here on Earth, but now that the dust has settled we can open the genetic vault and start anew! Now just where did we stick those samples?"
Survivor 2: "Uh, on the moon I think."
Survivor 1: "Oh, how convenient." [cries]
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
don't forget about global warming. its real, so do your part.
For example, the moon gets massive exposure to cosmic rays. Storing DNA up there on the surface is a joke. Their DNA would turn into useless goo within a few years.
If you have to shield from meteor impact and radiation, that should take care of two of the disasters mentioned in the article (meteor impact and nuclear war).
If a catastrophic event occurs that wipes out the human race, how are DNA samples going to restore humanity? It's not like we have the technology to start popping out species with just a sample of old DNA. And if we did, a doomsday disaster most likely wouldn't spare that technology.
Unless those DNA samples can build themselves, it's not very useful for a post-doomsday world.
globally catastrophic event?
like george bush getting elected?
Don't worry, we'll get to keep our slug-throwers, even centuries after we leave earth. In fact, aside from the spaceships and hovercars, it'll seem a lot like the Wild West.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
We've seen science fiction talk about living in bubble/dome cities, but why would this be bad? Can you imagine what life would be like if we did have better control over our local environments? Would a bubbled city offer a better life for millions in the upper north, people who deal with more winter than summer? Would we see better air scrubbers providing better air? Would we see better control over irrigation and drought?
I confess that I'm not 100% sure I understand what the overall point of your post was, so forgive me if I'm taking something out of context. But this was the one paragraph that I did understand enough to reply to.
You're giving human beings a hell of a lot of credit by assuming that we would be able to construct an environment that is "better" than what nature has provided. There's so tremendously many variables and effects that would need to be considered, I have to believe that anything we would come up with -- however impressive it might appear at first glance -- would eventually be found to be seriously lacking. Maybe it would be something as simple as out domed cities not getting enough water now that we can't rely on rainfall. It could be something as insidious as accidently leaving out some species of animal, insect, or plant in our little bio-dome that turns out to be really damn important. I wouldn't want to trust our future to our ability to engineer an environment.
Who knows. I know that I trust that out of the billions of humans today we'll find a few who can find the utility and invention needed to create tomorrow's world. I don't like to think of us living in vaults because that "invention" is based on yesterday's technology. Yesterday's technology came out of need created by the time before yesterday. Tomorrow's technology will come out of need we face today. Don't sell the future short, especially considering how far we've come in the past 1000 years, 200 years, 100 years, 50 years and 10 years. Humanity is not going to go away, it will just find ways to make life better no matter what seems to happen to the world around us.
I think the point (I didn't RTFA due to the registration) is probably that a doomsday catastrophe would cause such a rapid shift in the world that humanity wouldn't be able to adapt in time. Even if I were to agree with your concept that "given enough time, humans will think their way out of any maze" -- which I'm not sure I do -- the timescales of these things need to be considered. A serious reduction in available food supplies would hit the poor first. Since it's largely the rich who are in positions to make policy changes, by the time the problem started affecting them enough to take action, it might be too late for all of us.
Again, if I'm misunderstanding your post, please accept my apology. But it sounds like you have an awfully optimistic view of the capabilities of humans to adapt.
GMD
watch this
General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
You saw the headline on /. first!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
- Robert Frost
John McCarthy has posted a list of menaces and why they are relatively unthreatening.
The guy lost me when he said doomsday can be understated. He gives examples of non-doomsday scenarios to back up his claim. Unless you consider it personally (in which case falling down the stairs can be doomsday) nothing he mentioned comes close to doomsday. Sure, they were bad, but to me doomsday should at least involve the total breakdown of structure in society. 30 million dead from influenza in 1918?
By its nature doomsday isn't understated. Look it up on m-w.com. judgement day. Catastophic destruction and death. Want to tell me how that can be understated?
"The trouble with doomsday, Dr. Shapiro argues, is that it is almost always rendered in popular culture as grandiose, though in reality, many minor incidents present substantial everyday threats."
a substantial threat does not equate to doomsday. We've never had a doomsday. It will be grandiose, for the survivors if nothing else. This is just a modern day televangelist. Armageddon is coming, and the day of the lord cometh like a thief in the night, so send money now.
Doomsday is unpredictable.
...
Yes, we can take care of scenarios like - a huge asteriod hitting earth or a doomsday bomb or so on and so forth, by having bio-freezers in earth or moon or something.
But what about other scenarios, for example a magnetar spewing out gamma-rays in all its glory.
You can be anywhere in the solar system and you will be fried in a minute or 2.
Or due to some natural/un-natural process, a virus/bacteria gets created which splits water to its elemental components..
Even if that species did not live for long, you can be pretty sure you are going to get screwed proper, since there is no mother earth to come back to, after being in the bio-freezer for say 100 years.
But I guess, considering the probabilities, we at least need to keep the bio-freezer etc as an open option.
Who knows, an asteroid might be hurtling towards us right now
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
When the sun goes nova the test tubes on the Moon will be rattled too. We need to put this stuff on something like Voyager. If an asteroid hits it's damage to life is mostly climate-driven. That would have very little effect on the Scandinavian "doomsday vault." Ditto for nukes. Who would waste a nuke on some out of the way Arctic research station? Ever read On the Beach?
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Whether or not this is rational or irrational fear-mongering is unimportant. Let's stop inciting fear in the public in either case. There are thousands of things that could go dreadfully wrong, but most of them cannot be prevented by the general public. Humanity will continue to prosper so long as we are not afraid to leave our homes and extend our long history of creative solutions to daunting problems. Have faith in humanity; we will make our own fate to the extent that we control it. Beyond that is anyone's guess and the New York Times is doing nothing to help.
Yeah, right a tree falls on a power line so we better move to the friggin moon? Live in a bio-vault? What's he smoking?
WORLD TO END
Women and minorities hardest hit.
Oh my god, a blackout... it's doomsday.
What did we do before we discovered electricity? I can understand a virus of some sort killing us all but most of the other issues they list would mostly cause an inconvinience. I mean, look at what happened when the NE lost power a while ago... people were without power and a lot of people were inconvinienced. Must be doomsday though...
Thanks to Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern, we already know how to deal with Doomsday.
Underground vaults...ten women to every man. Where do I sign up?
a possible new bird flu strain spurs contemporary panic
Only because the media keeps telling us we should be worried. Personally, I'm not worrying, and neither is anybody that I know in meatspace.
Same old, same old.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
It seems quite egotistical for the NYT to run the same ground that countless science fiction authors have-- and many of them did a better job, IMHO.
Forget the Times. Instead, go read Azimov, Niven, Heinlein, or a thousand others that did a better job. Maybe the NYT is getting closer to using that odd "World War III" phrase that the orthodox Christians are trying to sell.
Ok, I'm likely to get modded as a troll. Please consider before you do that: somebody actually paid good money to put this into print in the Times, and Sci Fi authors at best, got about a nickel a word.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Think about this. Picture the technology, world population, education and energy usage levels of 1906. Primitive times, compared to now.
Consider what another century or two of progress could bring. Allow for the idea that we can duplicate what happens in every one of our 6 billion skulls with electronic circuitry at least 10 million times faster. This is why AI or some other form of enhanced intelligence is so powerful...if we could replicate the processes going on in the heads of the brightest among us, but faster. 10 million times faster at least.
We have nothing to worry about. The human race will just have to last another couple centuries, tops, and it'll all be over.
False Vacuum
In just one moment the laws of physics will change dramatically, rendering all chemical processes (which are needed to support life) useless. This may happen faster than you could think "Oh crap".
Check out the Crypt of Civilization at Oglethorpe University...serious preserveation of civilization in that effort.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
That same year, a tree fell on power lines outside Cleveland, resulting in a blackout for much of the Northeast. Doomsday can be understated.
And this year, a car ran over a cat.
Since when does "doomsday" mean "mild inconvenience"? Don't you need, like, at least one dead person before you can start putting it on the List of Things That Will Destroy the Earth?
sic transit gloria mundi
If say the earth is smacked by a rather large asteroid, as is slightly knocked off course, how will this affect the moons obrit of it? Would this cause then the moon to go flying off into space or come crashing into earth with a large enough asteroid? Wouldn't then this be a bad idea because of that particular reason?
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
A number of belief systems put the blame of the world's problems squarely on the human race. I suspect a number of people would welcome a catastrophe that would wipe out mankind and allow the earth to emerge much as it is today but without us meddling humans.
What they don't realize is that the dominant species that follows us may be much worse.
Is it just our egos that compells us to attempt some means of preservation? What if fate or some other power has deigned that we should be extinct? Shouldn't we obey our master(s)?
"Insanity is doing the same thing over again expecting a different result."
Personally, I'm not worrying, and neither is anybody that I know in meatspace.
The people wearing masks around major Chinese cities a few years back were almost a direct throwback to the 1918 flu panic -- in which entire populations put on porous, ineffectual masks in order to protect against a pathogen much too small to be hindered by the fabric. There are pictures of streets in Philadelphia on which everyone, everyone, is wearing a mask. Whole towns closed their gates; "Keep on driving, we don't want visitors here" signs showed up on the outskirts of little rural villages.
Major pandemics figured in lots of major, major upheavals in human history. We aren't panicked right now, and yeah the media furor makes everything into a crisis -- but panic over a pandemic wouldn't be new to modern levels of media saturation. Not at all. If H15N crosses the species barrier we're not going to be perfectly calm about it. Human nature hasn't changed, and you're probably not above it.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
"Doomsday can be understated"
No it can't.
None of those things listed are even close to Doomsday. They're barely even little blips on the radar screen of history. Out of 6 billion people, the computer virus and the blackout killed how many? These things were moderate inconveniences for thousands, not inescapable death for billions.
Even the flu killed 30 million out of almost 2,000 million, or 1.5%. Yeah, sucks to be them, but killing 1.5% of the population didn't exactly move homo sapiens to the endangered species list.
A modern super-bug could be terrible. No one knows if the worst case scenario is the death of millions or into the billions, but I bet you'll have a hard time finding biologists who think a bug could show up that kills ALL humans. It not only would have to spread like mad, have a long incubation period, be untreatable, and not have any people with any natural immunity, it would also have to be able to get through gas-masks and biohazard suits, infiltrate our best air filters, cross oceans to desert islands people had isolated themselves on (and shoot anyone who tries to get near). And with all that going on, I wouldn't call in understated anymore.
The real Doomsday fears list is pretty short- Nuclear War, Meteor, other improbable astronomical events like supernova. Global warming is NOT a doomsday scenario. It might be a "things are really going to suck" scenario, and I'm not saying we shouldn't be trying to stop it, but it's not going to KILL everybody, it just might make it unbearably hot, ruin crops, cause flooding, worsen natural disasters, etc. But Earth's spent many millions of years being hotter than our global warming forecasts, and life goes on. The real doomsday scenarios ARE NOT understated things that creep up on us- pretty much by definition, little gradual changes are things we adapt too, anticipate, measure, study, and, if they're really getting serous, do something about before we all die. We aren't going to suddenly switch from a negative feedback cycle to an unstoppable positive feedback cycle that destroys everything. If that were in the cards, it would have happened in the past 5 billion years. Our systems (biological and social) are much more robust and stable than that. Realistic doomsday scenarios are big, colossal, horrific events that are anything but understated.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
But, unlike the moon, the arctic is reachable with stone-age technology. The trick would be controls on release of the materials. We wouldn't want them released to a starving, freezing lost person who would eat the seeds and burn the books. A space station with landing vehicle could be OK, also.
...as soon as the sun collapses we'll get sucked into a blackhole...
Just a nitpick, but that's not how collapsing stars work. For one, our sun is too small to form a black hole upon it's death. For that to happen, a star must first collapse to a white dwarf, which then fades out to a brown dwarf, as fusion brings the elementary make-up of the star toward iron. Then, the mass of the star must still be great enough to overcome the fact that iron (and heavier elements) don't fuse, at least not in the normal sense: but if crushed together hard enough, it can fuse into neutronium, releasing massive amount of energy in a supernova and ejecting a lot of heavy elements with it. Then, if what's left over (a neutron star) is still massive enough, it will continue to collapse on itself into a black hole.
Our sun probably won't get past the brown dwarf stage. It'll just fizzle out.
But even if it did collapse to a black hole (and the Earth etc weren't destroyed by the red giant stage, much less the later supernova), things in orbit around it wouldn't suddenly spiral into the hole, because it still has the same mass as the original star (less actually, since the supernova ejects a lot of matter). If you could somehow forcibly crush the sun into a black hole right now, containing any subsequent novae and keeping all the mass that would normally be lost in the process, then Earth and all the other planets would keep orbiting just like they do now. It'd just be very dark.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
the Dark Ages was helped started by an exceptionally bad plague during which many people ran to the church for reassurace.
Oooh, bad spelling, too: The Trifecta! Anyways, Dr. Hawking, the Dark Ages ran from 476 to about 1000 AD. They were brought about by the fall of the Roman Empire. Oh, and the "light of civilization," if you will (and even if you won't) was kept alive by those e-e-e-evil Christian monks cloistered away in far off monasteries in North West Europe.
Yer basic Black Death-Plague-thingie struck circa 1347.
But hey, don't let little things like facts get in the way of your Bush/Christian bashing. Lord knows nobody else does...
"Man dies alone during blackout"/ 2003/ts703h17.phtml
t icle.html
n
http://www.ontariotenants.ca/electricity/articles
"Toronto Star article: Power of life or death"
http://www.fsatoronto.com/programs/options/starar
More links
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lewis+wheela
He was a good friend of mine. Happy now, asshole?
Yes the Black Death was the only plague ever!
I, for one, welcome our tin foil hat wearing, bubble city dwelling /. subscribing overlords!
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Yeah, but an "understated" doomsday won't make for a good hollywood blockbuster.
Not that they pay attention to science, anyway.
Happens about every million years
That would be the ancestor of algae. Wiped out almost everything back in the day, but led to green plants and us.
Those magnatars sound pretty scary, but life would survive them too.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
These doomsday initiatives are most interesting, to my mind, for the insight they give us into the way people currently think about life and human identity. It's a question C.S. Lewis took up way back in the '60s, actually. For most people, the idea of "preserving the human race" or even "preserving life" has a purely visceral or emotional attractiveness-- ask someone why it's right to preserve humanity after a disaster, and they'll find it hard to explain in rational terms, beyond saying that it seems like a pretty fundamental human duty.
But what exactly is it that we feel it's our duty to preserve? It's not our own lives, since most of us won't be here by doomsday anyway. It's not our children or our descendants-- the chances of any given person's bloodline surviving a doomsday scenario are virtually nil. It's not any physical organism, since many of the projects discussed aim only to store DNA. The evolutionary imperative-- preserve your species!-- seems like a good explanation until you consider that an organism's traits are only valuable insofar as they fit it for a particular environment. With Earth gone, the new environment would likely require so many modifications as to make surviving H.sapiens virtually (if not actually) different species.
As far as I can see, then, our sense of fealty and protectiveness in this case is attaching to what's essentially just information-- when we say that humanity should be preserved, we mean that it'd be good if part of our genetic code were still around, say, ten thousand years hence. Why on earth would I want to spend my tax dollars for that?
I love how we all equate the end of the world with the end of humanity; Except for catastrophes that destroy the entire biosphere the end of humanity would just be another tick on earths timeline and life would continue. If life continues, another sentient race can always rise.
However i still feel that comets, radiation, etc are the not key dangers to humanity, neither is war between humans. The biggest danger I can see is that we're slowly making our most advanced populations weaker and weaker. The more we try to protect everyone from everything, the less likely it is or people to have to deal with protecting themselves. Imagine 5-6 generations down the line where people grow up never having to take responsibility for themselves as its always 'someone elses fault'. How do we expect THEM to deal with life threatening emergencies when they arise? Or rebuild in the case of a humanity destroying event?
If we werent so damned arrogant we wouldnt think that we're somehow exempt from the theoretical but highly probable rules of natural selection. Look at the traits that make up the most 'successful' individuals. By darwins reasoning, these traits will become more and more dominant as those considered less successful have a poorer chance of procreating. Sure the more robust and well rounded genes will still be around, but they will be the minority. In the society we're creating we all know how much power a small minority of rational individuals will have...
A masive disaster may be just what we need to ensure we can survive future disasters, or at least regain the will to do so, assuming of course that the first isnt insurmountable.
Ice Cream has no bones.
"World Ends Saturday - Read about it in expanded Sunday coverage!"
After the NY Times spent years pimping every Bush "immediate threat", like Iraq, moving papers and policy on their fearmongering, they finally start to tell people that "it's not the end of the world". Except now they're downplaying the real risks, like climate catastrophes, refugee disasters, Constitutional crises.
It's impossible to get info exactly right in life, so there's a tightwalk between paranoia and denial. The NY Times pulls off the acrobatic feat of falling over both sides of the tightrope, without a net.
--
make install -not war
How does a blackout in most of the northeast of the US come even close to a Doomsday scenario?
I live in Argentina, so maybe I'm biased.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
Anyone have the text for this article for those of us without NYT logins?
2 Peter 3:3 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, 4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. 5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: 6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: 7 But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
Unfortunately, you *likely* read it here first!
Wonder if T.S. Eliot's opinion changed on say about January 4, 1965....
I have left a note for the cockroaches in my apartment with a map to the genetic vault. I'm pretty sure they'll survive "doomsday," so all we need to do is wait for them to evolve enough to use the information to help recreate the human race. Problem solved.
The concept of "doomsday" is so outmoded, I don't even know where to begin. IIRC, the concept comes from the Book of Revelations, and honestly, how many rational people actually believe in that? Granted, a nuclear war can be over in hours, an asteroid strike could wipe out all life in a few hours, a nearby supernova could fry us all within a day, so yeah, a "Doomsday" could occur, but it has such a low probability. More likely are plagues, famines, wars, a general collapse of civilization due to resource shortage, global warming, etc. And you know what? Life will keep on keepin' on, even if it's radically changed. As long as there are people, there will be some urge to create and something new will rise from the ashes. And if our species does die out, it will probably be over millennia, not days.
Back when I was in college I took both an environmental Biology class and an environmental Geography class. The term unsustainable lifestyle was used frequently in these classes to talk about the wasteful way that the western world lives. Much of what the classes indicated was that this view indicates that for the maximum carrying capacity of the Earth (how many people can be kept simultaneously alive and healthy at a given time) to be reasonable, we would all have to live in grass huts and eat rice. There aren't enough resources to go around and that is not a changeable fact. But these discussions were primarily limited to the domain of ecology.
It occurred to me the other day just how fragile our lifestyle is. Take, for example, the 2003 blackout mentioned in the blurb. That blackout lasted about two days where I lived and longer in some of the outlying suburbs. Just in those two days, I personally lost food in my fridge/freezer, got an XP (no SPs) laptop infected with a virus while trying to access the internet without my Linux firewall using a UPS to power the DSL modem, and had neighbors "wilding" in the nearby city neiborhoods since they didn't have to work the next day. On a larger scale, my neighborhood grocer lost a lot of their stock and prices went up to account for the loss (and oddly never went back down again), my employer lost a few Cisco routers due to unstable power when the power did come back online in spite of the UPS systems, and I'm certain there were people who had far more serious problems due to the blackout. Just two days and everything was starting to go to hell in hours.
Then I thought about this... for those of you who use less reliable OSes like Windows, do you remember how much of a pain it was to restore back to the EXACT state you were in before a hard drive crash? It's nearly impossible pre-Windows NT. You can get real close, but you're never back to exactly where you were before. Things that you've built up over time and come to rely on but also taken for granted are gone or don't work right. Or if they were downloads, then you might wind up having to use a newer version that loses functionality compared to the older one which you no longer have. Now apply that to a city. A state. An entire country. The way our societies are built are unsustainable. We are on very shaky ground and there is damn little we can do about it.
Also consider the "little things" that aren't so little when they regard you personally. Take breast implants. They require periodic checkups to make sure everything is going just right (ie. you're not about to be killed or made deathly ill byt them). If you happen to be coming up on a checkup and the hospitals are full of bomb blast victims, do you think anyone is going to see you anytime soon to check them out? Not likely. At least not until it's life threatening. That's no way to live.
I propose that people should try to find ways to live that can be easily carried on after most disasters (barring complete catastrophies or nuclear holocusts). For example, hydroponic gardens that are operated by wind up mechanisms with cisterns to collect rain water for the irrigation of the gardens. Or, alternative modes of mass transportation that don't rely on centralized power sources or centrally distributed fuels. Pretty much all of these systems should be self contained and rely on nature. Solar, wind, hydro, bio power sources are all essential.
At the very least, know how to get yourself out of a sticky situation using bleach, aluminum foil, paper towels or napkins, baking soda, a simple container and lots of copper wire... Those of you who know what I'm talking about will smile.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I think it's called "Cleveland."
What?
Ditch the "bio" part and give me brahmin!!!
Do you have yours?
As is science, nothing humans make will ever be truly "good" or "bad". it's a echo of opinions i have seen although i now believe it in my own manner, as the previous poster pointed out, the nuclear bomb isnt the only result of that technology, perhaps the results are impossible to track completly,(inspiration is just as important, what have people imagined from those bad technologies?) but if we try to stop advancing technology it wont work, its our beliefs on how we use it, with good judgement, or bad, that we will produce the use of these technologies.
Power going out to the Northeast US isn't exactly Armageddon, now is it?
Even if the global economy collapsed due to some mass power outage, life would go on. It's incredibly shortsighted to compare such things to "The End Of The World(tm)". Get some perspective.
That's pretty serious. I mean that. If that's true, that's quite a weapon.
I did a quick Google search but I can't find anything even close. Do you have a source?
You forgot the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. Constantinople, Cordoba, and Baghdad were very weathly cities with centers of learning while London and Paris were puny in comparison and Rome was in ruins.
Yes, the Monks should be given their due, but they weren't the only ones who kept the light of civilization burning in the West.
That picture of a moon habitat is a crayon copy from an image in a National Geografic from 1970. A concept drawing that is like, what, 36 years old?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
http://qntm.org/destroy
Always good for some yuks!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So two rival superpowers armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons aren't dangerous unless one of them has a communist economy? How do you figure? I'd imagine that it would have more to do with the political and military realities of the two nations.
Ah damn, you beat me to it. Anyway, the BBC had a pretty interesting documantary a while back that I thought I should mention:
An Islamic History of Europe
Now, explain to me how we reliably hit "restore", post-apocalypse?
That's the real trick. The Noah's Ark scenario creates a very weak gene pool because you don't have the genetic variation to filter out the bad mutations, let alone adapt well to the environment. That said, it's still a wonderful project, and not just for apocalyptic scenarios, and I applaud their long-term thinking.
It's yet another dude who thinks 'freedom of religion' means 'freedom of all religion, everywhere, all the time'. I say it's discrimination NOT to consider faith-based organizations who have a proven track record.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
..a tree fell on power lines outside Cleveland, resulting in a blackout for much of the Northeast. Doomsday can be understated.
Yes, and so can the calamity of having an entire national power network at the mercy of a shrubbery.
757s caused steel reinforced skyscrapers to burn to the ground in less than two hours...
Listen, as long as we aren't looking for the real cause to these problems its highly unlikely our solutions will have any effect.
We only care about placing blame and seeking reveng.. i mean, justice.
If there is life after Earth I just hope they don't have to deal with our Holy democratic and capitalist society bringing them what we call freedom. Let them live in pieces, after we're done doing whatever it is we're doing..
Tacokill: hunt down Ken Alibek's "Biohazard". There he was talking about an engineered smallpox virus (which carries a pecuiliar form of double-stranded DNA) that spins off an Ebola virus (which is an RNA virus) when transcribed. Different route, same general idea, said to bump lethality of smallpox to close to a 100% (normally only a few % in a vaccinated population). Now, _that's_ scary shit: something that spreads easily, like smallpox (through respiratory route) and kills effectively, like Ebola.
I know what I am talking about. I taught that stuff for the DoD.
Yes, I am too lazy to create a nickname - so here I am, Anonymous Coward. Take everything I say with an appropriate grain of salt.
Reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's short story The Big Space Fuck, about "a serious effort to make sure that human life would continue to exist somewhere in the Universe, since it certainly couldn't continue much longer on Earth."
Cold, I'd imagine...
*runs*
Trying to save an ecosystem in this manner is like trying to save a burning library by randomly grabbing a few books out of each section and letting the rest go up in flames. Populations restarted after such rescue will have almost no genetic diversity and therefore severely compromised resilience to respond to environmental changes.
To properly save an ecosystem, you need the save the whole ecosystem, not just a few things that are cute or judged to be "more important" than others.
Assuming FTL drive is a crock, the setup necessary to beam power to even a small intersteller ship going about .6 light speed is hard to imagine. We'll probably have well-colonized the asteroid belt by the time we figure it out. And then it is likely we'd send no more than a small "council of elders" (female?) and a lot of "snowflake babies" and "snowflake cats" and "snowflake chickens", etc. etc. in current U.S. speak and a way to gestate them.
If global warming kicks in, wouldn't a laboratory at either of the poles be useless? (I can image this would be the equivilant of having a fridge containing rotting food after three days without power x 10000).
If it's on the moon, doesn't that mean we have to have a nucleus of humans up there for extended periods of time? As a lot of you have said before, nobody can really predict doomsday scenarios. Something could happen tomorrow that could suddenly wipe out mankind. We'd have to have a sizable force of women on the moon to start rebuilding mankind immediatly, to hell with the scimitar-horned oryx! (Try saying the last sentance with a Zapf Brannigan style voice)
On the other hand, I think I saw a movie where neanderthal cave-men where able to train in military equipment and successfully fought against aliens (Damn mananimals), so maybe we should just bury NASA and let the cavemen fly to the moon when everything settles down a bit.
Me, I'd rather go for some huge underground vaults (ala Dr Strangelove or Fallout. Everything here on earth, easy access to everything. Problem is, I don't know how an asteriod would affect Earths magma. An earthquake barren zone could suddenly start rocking and rolling if the two poles shift.
This space for rent
...wait'll you see the content *cringe*
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
There is no imaginable catastrophe for which this kind of "backup" makes sense. There are events that could wipe out all human life on earth, but no off-world colony would be able to survive sufficiently long without support from earth to be useful. Any other catastrophes are going to leave more diversity on earth than anything we can store in an off-world colony.
Maybe things will be different in a few centuries, but for now, talk of off-world colonies is irrational escapism. For now, either we make it here on earth, or we die out as a species.
Surely any rational person would see an economy based on gifts from Santa Claus as being 'good' for society, right? In theory, yes. In practice, of course not.
Only children and simpletons believe in Santa Claus or collectivist economic theory. It takes far more intellectual sophistication to realize the inherent superiority and inevitable supremacy of free-market capitalism than it does to hold on to the phantasmic dream of socialism.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Hear, hear. I'm on board with Pax Americana too.
My old man was a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force. He spent the summer of 1945 training for the Battle of Japan. They knew that there would be casualties of 80% or more. He's alive today because of Fat Man and Little Boy. Multiply that by millions and millions of soldiers and civilians on both sides, and it's clear that blasting Hiroshima and Nagazaki to green glass and ashes was the most humane thing Truman could have done at that juncture.
A lesson in there for modern Western civilization, as it slowly comes to grips with the greatest threat it has ever faced.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Well we saw it in 'End of the World' (in Doctor Who) after all! We even got to see New Earth!
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Whatever survival-stuff we can build in space we can build on earth too. A catastrophy may poison everything, but if be build a space-station on earth, its independend of air and water. A meteor hits only one side of the earth. But an earth-station can be far bigger (or more numerous). And a space-station can be killed by a homeless screw-drewer (or meteor else of that size), while an earth-station survives the biggest meteors we know, That space-thingy will doomsday much earlier than earth.
R. J. Jackson et al., J. Virol. 75, 1205 (2001). (http://jvi.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/75/3/1205 )
Abstract is as follows:
"Genetic resistance to clinical mousepox (ectromelia virus) varies among inbred laboratory mice and is characterized by an effective natural killer (NK) response and the early onset of a strong CD8+ cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) response in resistant mice. We have investigated the influence of virus-expressed mouse interleukin-4 (IL-4) on the cell-mediated response during infection. It was observed that expression of IL-4 by a thymidine kinase-positive ectromelia virus suppressed cytolytic responses of NK and CTL and the expression of gamma interferon by the latter. Genetically resistant mice infected with the IL-4-expressing virus developed symptoms of acute mousepox accompanied by high mortality, similar to the disease seen when genetically sensitive mice are infected with the virulent Moscow strain. Strikingly, infection of recently immunized genetically resistant mice with the virus expressing IL-4 also resulted in significant mortality due to fulminant mousepox. These data therefore suggest that virus-encoded IL-4 not only suppresses primary antiviral cell-mediated immune responses but also can inhibit the expression of immune memory responses."
Only children and simpletons believe in Santa Claus or collectivist economic theory. It takes far more intellectual sophistication to realize the inherent superiority and inevitable supremacy of free-market capitalism than it does to hold on to the phantasmic dream of socialism.
It's not so black and white. The USA has elements of socialism - and it is not truely free market capitalism. Meanwhile, socialism isn't the same as communism.
Anyhow, you miss the point: I think communism is a bad economic system, but that doesn't make it evil, not does it mean we should be dropping nuclear weapons on countries that choose such a system.
Glad someone else has noticed this...
Thanks for the references you all. Greatly appreciated!!!!
I'll be damned. I guess I learn something new everyday... thanks for pointing that out.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.