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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 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.
"...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. --
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.
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?
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