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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."
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/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
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. --
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.
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.
WORLD TO END
Women and minorities hardest hit.
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.
You make some good points, for sure, but I think you have to look at human history to realize that we've had hundreds of cases of massive doom situations already -- droughts, wars, plagues and environmentally caused destruction. Why did we make it past these situations? Someone came up with a solution.
Of course, often times that solution is just waiting the disaster out, hoping to be one of the lucky survivors, and then replacing the drastic drop in population with a new generation after the smoke has cleared.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
"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.
I think you and the article writer are talking about a different kind of doomsday than the biobank-on-the-moon people.
A blackout in Cleveland is an inconvenience. A few people might die, but in the big picture survial-of-the-species it's not even a blip. Actually, it's probably good for people to be reminded that electricity isn't necessarily always available.
Computer viruses, ditto. If you die because of a computer virus you've done something VERY wrong.
As for real viruses, whether it's bird flu, 1918 flu or cancer-gene containing smallpox, those things can't destroy the species by themselves. Remember, the world lived through 1918 just fine, even with a world war exacerbating things. Smallpox was a fact of life for centuries and we didn't all die. Modifying diseases to make them more virulent makes them into better weapons but actually decreases the total damage they might do. The more virulent a disease the faster the epidemic tends to burn itself out.
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.