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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."
"...This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper."
-TS Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925
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.
Erm, yeah.. If global warming were the only conceivable doomsdayscenario..
Nuclear weaponry isn't quite enhancing my life, nor are worldwide influenza pandemics, direct meteor hits, global overexposure to radiation as a result of a freakishly excessive sunspot or near-by exploding supernova, or even, in fact, global alien invasion bent on genocide.
As for wanting to live in a bubble city; no-one's stopping you. You can just move into the basement and hook up the airco. I for one like having some forrest on hand to walk about in, with fresh air too.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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. --
As for wanting to live in a bubble city; no-one's stopping you. You can just move into the basement and hook up the airco. I for one like having some forrest on hand to walk about in, with fresh air too.
And that's the problem with relying on force to try to keep those trees -- we just don't know what is out there that would provide for your tree-love. I also love trees, in fact I own a few acres of property that is currently heavily forested. I love visiting it (there is NOTHING nearby).
Why wouldn't a bubble-city have more trees that we currently do? Who is to say that some inventor won't come up with an interesting way to divert CO2 emissions from factories within the bubble city straight into the ground so the trees can use it to create oxygen for the city? We just don't know. We didn't know about plasma TVs a few decades ago, but that invention will greatly cut down on the garbage created from large CRT TVs that get thrown into the dumps (and plasma TVs far outlive the life-span of a CRT). Thank the market for that "pro-environment" creation, and we'll thank the market when they find cleaner ways to create those plasmas or flat panels. Remember, every ounce of waste that is created by industry is WASTE -- it means something goes into the mix that is a loss for the company. Companies would likely try to find ways to cut that waste or find productive uses for it rather than tossing it.
I'm not sure that the future will look anything like what our lives look like today. I know that my life is significantly better than that of my ancestors, who had to deal with smelly and polluted cities. It wasn't government that cut pollutions, it was industries striving to reduce waste and increase efficiency that did it. I was in communist Russia before the USSR fell, and I was in the DDR before the wall fell, and those "heavily regulated" societies stank and were incredibly dirty.
All I know is that mankind has always found ways to better themselves, and it is always an individual that does it because of the desire to increase their own wealth. I don't see why we wouldn't at least give a consideration to the future from a market perspective rather than just give the doom-and-gloom people the only opinion. They've been wrong each and every time before it seems.
WORLD TO END
Women and minorities hardest hit.
It wasn't government that cut pollutions, it was industries striving to reduce waste and increase efficiency that did it.
Untrue, or at least highly selective. Much (most?) pollution is not a consequence of inefficiency, and industry has no inherent incentive to reduce it. This is the standard example given to illustrate negative externalities.
Government is the only instrument I'm aware of by which people can push these externalized costs back onto the polluters. And claiming that it hasn't done so is flat wrong. All the way back to Edward I in 1361 banning the burning of sea-coal to reduce London smog.
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.
Well, nuclear weaponry (rather, its existence and the credibly threat of its use) did slow the spread of communism.
I understand when in 60-80s US public was affraid of the communists as some boogeymen. But now?
Oh wait, they scare children with terrorists now.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
"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?
>While both events take place they are indenpendant of each other.
Bush gives government funding to churches because he's a hardcore christian.
Bush denies government funding for stem cell research because he's a hardcore christian.
nice definition of independent you've got there. go ask him yourself - it's not like he's afraid of admitting he's acting on his religious beliefs.