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Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction
wiredog sends in a study from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Center For Biosecurity, assessing risks of human extinction and the costs of preventing it. "In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives."
I honestly don't give two figs if humanity goes extinct (I certainly won't after the event).
Sure, if it happens while I'm alive, there maybe some un-avoidable pain and suffering for myself, but if it happens after I'm dead, well, I'll be dead.
Dead people can't suffer.
Anyway, extinction is a natural part of evolution, adapt or die motherfuckers, adapt and die. Yes, change from or to and is deliberate, because we are all going to die.
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Anyway, onto the actual scenarios. From the introduction:
None of these things is going to wipe out each and every human, nor even enough humans to make the population enviable. Unless climate change is really, really dramatic (in which case, there is nothing we can do about it anyway). And to talk about flu... Viruses have never killed more than 70% of a given population (number pulled from the air, probably less, Wikipedia says The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population.). Oh, and terrorism. Scary shit that.
Then we get onto astronomical events, comets, solar flares and stuff, and the paper goes on and on.
Basically, we are all going to die, humanity is going to go extinct (if nothing else, the heat death of the universe will get us), and to think about the issue with any great thought is probably a waste of time.
I wank in the shower.
Depending on how you want to define complexity, it took between one and two billion years to go from complex multicellular life to an intelligent species. Even if we assume you need a fairly high power metabolism for it, there have certainly been plenty of candidates for technological intelligence over the last 300 million years, but only one species actually managed it. Given that we've got about 500 million years of useful life left in this planet, the chances of another civilisation rising on Earth before the sun swells up and kills us is pretty slim.
OK. Let's assume that everything that's been worked on for 50 years and still doesn't work isn't going to work. This includes fusion and space travel.
Industrial civilization is only about 200 years old. It's convenient to start at 1808, the first year somebody bought a train ticket. That was when the industrial revolution started affecting large numbers of people. Does industrial civilization have another 200 years left?
We're running out of oil. The optimistic position is that peak oil is 20 years away. The pessimistic position is that peak oil was two years ago. Few think there's 50 years of oil left. There's really nothing on the energy horizon big enough to replace oil. All the alternatives are considerably more expensive, and have a lower return on energy invested vs. energy out.
We're running out of some other minerals. There are substitutes, and recycling, but using a substitute is usually more energy intensive.
It's quite possible that industrial civilization will just run down. This has already happened in a number of Third World countries. A few countries, such as Argentina, have already gone from rich to poor. The usual pattern is devolution into rich central cities surrounded by an ocean of poverty. Mexico City and Rio are classic examples.
That may be the future.
I don't know the Dick story, but Sean Williams and Shane Dix wrote their Orphans of Earth trilogy about a similar concept.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
They've (science fiction writers, newspaper reporters, even the people building them who should know better) been calling computers "thinking machines" and "electronic brains" since the existance of electronic computers.
Computers still don't think and I don't forsee them thinking; not digital computers, in any case. Thought and feeling are chemical processes, not binary arithemetic with NAND and NOR gates.
If we are controlled by computers, the computers will be controlled by men; the same rich, powerful, and evil men who control us now and who have always controlled us in the past.
The real Matrix will have a human archetecht. The real termnators will be controlled by humans. "Gray goo" is a fanciful concept that came out of someone's pipe, much like Von Daniken's aliens in the '70s.
Note that I'm a cyborg; the device does not control me, I control it.
There is very little that will be able to make us extinct in the next hundred years. We are in less danger of extinction than we ever were (and some fifty to a hundred thousand years ago humans almost did become extinct).
No need to worry about extinction, as the risk is infinitessimal and besides, you won't be around to see it anyway.
I, on the other hand, am certain to become extinct in the next fifty years.
Free Martian Whores!
Carbon based life has little use for the silicon in dirt. Silicon based goo can convert it into solar panels...
The "grey goo" apocalypse presumes exactly what it name stands for : that the surface of earth will be covered with an amorphous mass comprising an almost infinite number of the same nano machine.
What you advocate instead, requires specialisation, organisation, etc...
Basically, you're just re-inventing evolution, but this time with silicon-based life forms organising into a complete eco-system (including plant-like solar-pannel-nanobots whose purpose is to serve as energy entry point for the rest of the food chain including the carnivore-like nanobots which lack access to light).
It's not extinction by grey goo, it will be extinction by grey life instead.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Might actually be easier on the Mars colonists than it was on the American colonists - North American Indians weren't exactly 100% hospitable. Mars colonists will (should) have tremendous backing from the mother country, communication takes hours instead of months, and challenges like solar flares and dust storms are a bit more predictable than treaties forged with a society you don't understand.