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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/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.
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
Good news everyone! We've gotta catapult our precious bodily fluids to the moon. And on behalf of my boss, we're gonna fucking kill anyone who says the moon landings were faked because WE DID IT!
Six out of six, and zero out of six, respectively. Done and done.
...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."
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. --
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
2nd time George Bush was elected was relatively harmless.
It's this third time around where things have really gone in the crapper.
I sure hope they don't come up with a GB for the next election.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
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
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.