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How Technology Might Avert an Apocalypse
First time accepted submitter deapbluesea writes "Matt Ridley recounts the many predictions of catastrophe that have been made by prominent figures in the past. 'The classic apocalypse has four horsemen, and our modern version follows that pattern, with the four riders being chemicals (DDT, CFCs, acid rain), diseases (bird flu, swine flu, SARS, AIDS, Ebola, mad cow disease), people (population, famine), and resources (oil, metals).' From over population, to pandemics, peak oil to climate change, Ridley provides examples of human innovation that have averted the disasters, real or imagined. He does not declare the doomsayers to be wrong, merely hyperbolic in their predictions. 'We hear a lot from those who think disaster is inexorable if not inevitable, and a lot from those who think it is all a hoax. We hardly ever allow the moderate "lukewarmers."' Given the current discussions on rich vs poor, conservative vs liberal, religious versus non-religious, maybe a little moderation should be in order. After all, there are a lot of examples of 'experts' who got it completely wrong in the past."
Sorry, but that's the oddest set of "Apocalypse" categories I've ever seen.
"Population"?
No war? No giant asteroid? No gamma ray pulse from a nearby star going nova?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
"After all, there are a lot of examples of 'experts' who got it completely wrong in the past."
That's a good example of survivor bias.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
[PSA] Ken Starks of HeliOS fame has 2-3 weeks left
This is one of those put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is situations. From his partner's blog at http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2012/08/this-is-where-we-are.html
Ken's cancer has just recently begun to spread to his right lymph node but his Oncologist has assured us that this is 80 percent curative if he gets the needed surgery in time.
Unfortunately, his 1100 dollar a month SSI disability disqualifies him for Medicaid care and the local county low-income insurance he was receiving. This leaves us with about 2 weeks to either raise enough money for at least the OR for the surgery (we are hopeful of finding a surgeon to do the work pro bono) or raise enough money for the entire procedure. We've spent hours upon hours researching and contacting the links some of you have provided but they are so limited in scope that 90 percent of them are not helpful at all.
We are looking at two weeks, maybe three before the cancer spreads past the point of surgery being an option. After that, we've been told just to make him as comfortable as possible until he passes. I'm not ready to accept that.
Stupid, this Medicare exclusion. More about the guy, by Steven Vaughan-Nichols of ZDnet fame:
+Ken Starks is a Linux and open-source supporter. He also runs a non-profit that's donated thousands of PCs to low-income households. Now, he needs help to fight cancer. For more on what's happening with him see:
http://thomasaknight.com/blog.php?id=71
https://plus.google.com/app/plus/mp/374/#~loop:view=activity&aid=z132y3njjzjei5iic04cjds4ztnpef1pjb0
Pitch in if you can.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Or at least, humans using that technology? From nuclear winter to idiocracy there is a whole range of apocalypses where technology have a major role.
Yeah, pretty ridiculous, we arent even near of apocalypse by population... War and weapon technology on the other hand...
Oh, my, I must have been sleeping a lot lately.
To think that I believed that we were still in 2012...
Seriously, the author of these "articles" should disclose how to find his drug dealer. Must be some serious stuff.
Why can't
Seems poorly researched
In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a Shell geophysicist, forecast that gas production in the US would peak at about 14 trillion cubic feet per year sometime around 1970.
Oil production not gas
All these predictions failed to come true. Oil and gas production have continued to rise during the past 50 years.
Sorry, blatantly false. Try to find a US oil production graph showing this, LOL. Prediction dead accurate.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I was about to give up donating since you can't view a Plus link without a Plus account.
Then I tried the thomasknight link, a donate button was there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, pretty ridiculous, we arent even near of apocalypse by population... War and weapon technology on the other hand...
Depends on your time frame. 10 years no, 50 years, perhaps (note that the slope of the rise is dropping fast - whether it's fast enough remains to be seen).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
we hardly ever hear from the moderate voices who say the sun comes from somewhere inbetween. Sometimes halfway between the truth and bullshit is just as bullshitty.
In the end we almost survived - but the solution had been copyrighted. The Establishment had opted to uphold the patents rather than avert our final demise and anger Emperor Troll. Though Emperor Troll was the last beast on Earth, there was nothing for him to live for and he soon followed. However, much of the planet's other species began to thrive once again. Dolphins eventually took to land and continued to evolve. Uninhibited by the manacles of a silly tongue, their communication was pure and intentions toward the stars, though never neglectful of home. Their endeavors were neither cannibal or competitive; they were of joy and free expression. They were not without their troubles, and many years passed before they ironed out the vestiges of a primitive past, but they grew and quickly so, as they did not hold each other down for the elevation of another. Reality was a goal and not a nightmare. To them, life was not a crime, nor was it something to be suffered, but something to embrace with the entirely of their potential. They eventually left Earth after some time. After traversing space for aeons, they conquered the limitation of will imposed by Universe. Form became optional and distance irrelevant. But from 'time' to 'time' they did visit Earth. Strangely, they never did bother to teach the history of humanity - it was self-implied. But they did build, leave and maintain a monument to Emperor Troll, which a strange and suspiciously human-like species would gaze at from great distance in wonder, but remained afraid to discuss.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Unfortunately, he fails to mention the often forgotten fifth horseman, who brings about a decline in innovation. From what I see in the news today, he may already be here. Doom is certainly upon us!
FTFY: There's nothing sufficiently large to destroy civilization and also on a near collision path; that we know about.
Assuming things, can get you killed, that's why we generalize. Obligatory car analogy. If I cross the street at a crosswalk (zebra crossing for almost everyone else outside of North America), I might assume that all drivers will stop to let me cross since it is the law. Always making that assumption will get definitely get me killed or seriously injured someday (hell, when I was young I was almost killed by a police car on an emergency run, lights no siren, while legally crossing the street one time... to be fair a bus on the outside lane blocked both our views, but thank goodness he was paying better attention than me... it's what made me not trust blind faith in traffic lights and crosswalk laws when crossing the street any more). Thinking we will always have sufficient advance knowledge of an extinction event asteroid will eventually kill us all. Precedent has already been set, not only in actual extinctions, but the fact that those size asteroids hit all planets now and then, including earth. I'm not paranoid about it. But I would be if I thought everyone thought like you. While it's not a big possibility in my life, it has a high impact if, well, it impacts. But on the upside, if it does happen, the outcome won't matter to humans after that.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
The median UN projection is for our population to top out just below 10 billion at around 2070, and then decline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_population_growth_rate
it's in my head
Could you please explain how an extinction level asteroid impact can be ruled out? I believe we're getting to the stage where we might actually get some warning (a big improvement over the last few decades), but I don't believe we're in a position to divert one. Technically, yes, but politically, no chance.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
US oil production not only peaked in 1970, it's about half of what it was then. Texas (!) is a net oil importer. World oil production has been more or less flat since 2005, despite a price increase from $20/bbl to $100/bbl.
World natural gas production is up, and US natural gas production is way up. Not clear how long that can continue. Gas wells can be pumped out faster than oil wells, and production drops off rapidly towards the end. Oil wells slow down more gradually, ending up as "stripper wells", producing less than 10 bbl/day each. The US has about 400,000 of those; it adds up.
It's true, of course, that there are many more apparent imminent catastrophes (AICs) than actual catastrophes, especially as we are still here to argue about it.
Some AICs arise from incomplete understanding, some from politically motivated woolly thinking and will go away if ignored. Some are real risks and we just get lucky. Others are partially mitigated by actions taken in response to the apparent threat (Y2K for instance). Some may be fully genuine threats averted by prompt action. Nuclear war between NATO and Warsaw pact in the 60s or 70s might be argued to fall into this category. CND and others successfully undermined the notion of "winnable nuclear war" and made sure that no Western politicians would risk nuclear war.
However, NONE OF THIS MEANS THAT THE NEXT ONE WILL NOT BE REAL. Probably it won't, but we can't just assume it isn't a real threat because the last one wasn't. We have to study each plausible threat, do our best to estimate the risk and where the risk appears significant, do what we can to mitigate it. The universe does not owe us continued existence, let alone continued civilization.
Man is more populous than the rat ...
Do you actually have reliable data on this? If so, a lot of people who study such things might be very interested in how the numbers can be verified.
I recently ran across a typical example showing how little is known of rat populations, in the form of a list of "expert" estimates for New York City that ranged from 1/4 million to 100 million rats. This is a 400:1 range, and most actual experts on the topic will openly admit that the estimates aren't much more reliable than this. New York may be one of the best-studied cities.
The conventional estimate is that most human urban areas have on the order of 10 rats per human. This estimate has only one significant digit, though, and probably less than one digit for a lot of the world's cities. (Do you really think we know how many rats there are in Calcutta or Lagos or Mexico city or Shanghai or ...? ;-)
Of course, it's common for us humans to base our policies on numbers that were just made up by self-proclaimed experts, often for PR purposes.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
There are loads of "candidate" stars that could do the job. Fortunately it's an exceedingly rare event.
And a giant asteroid can absolutely not be ruled out.
One should note that both of the above extinction events have most likely already occurred on Earth at one time or another.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Even the beginner student of history understands that wars are almost inevitably economic in nature. Religion is a useful tool, but I doubt there are more than a handful of wars throughout history whose underlying causes were religious. Even the Crusades, whatever the high flying religious rhetoric used to justify them, were more about Western and Central European Princes getting a piece of the action in one of the most important trade corridors in the world.
As to the claim about religions not liking democracy, that is pretty absurd. Modern democracy first began to grow in Protestant states, and that has economic underpinnings as well, as Protestantism was a useful tool for many European princes to break the political bonds with the autocratic Catholic Church. The growing mercantile classes, particularly in England, Scotland and the Low Countries, espoused forms of Protestantism very friendly to the notion of a thrifty sober working class, and it is this class that battled against the autocratic leanings of Absolute Monarchy (with all its Medieval and unspoken Medieval Catholic underpinnings), ultimately, in Britain at least, leading to one of the great revolutions in history; the Glorious Revolution which saw the Bill of Rights, 1689 enacted into law (and in one fashion or another inherited by pretty much all of Britain's former colonial holdings). This had solid Protestant underpinnings, so I would hardly say religion is an anathema to democracy.
In the end even the Catholic Church ended up heavily liberalizing, though it has a far uneasier alliance with democracy than Protestantism generally does.
As to autocratic states, well, they have little trouble doing business with democracies providing said democracies stay out of their internal affairs. China has no problem with Western democracy, since both have found a path by which everyone can make lots of money. Again, economics rules everything.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
TFA was poorly done. It can be broken down as Global war, pandemics, wide-scale crop failure (Famine), and Global Catastrophe (extrasolar non-cometary impacts, Krakatoa+ volcanic eruptions, etc. Overpopulation by itself isn't a problem; it makes the first three worse: War over land disputes, pandemics spreading faster due to population density and air travel, and more mouths to feed leaves less margin in world-wide crop reserves.
As a side note, I find it funny that religion is commented on as a possible cause of world-wide war. China is, by many measures, one of the least religious countries in the world. Their saber rattling over disputed land ownership, at least to me, makes them the most likely catalysis of the next major conflict.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
I recall an experiment that was done about 40 years ago, I think in NYC. It involved a typical dilapidated tenement building that (I think) was due to be torn down. First the scientists interviewed the tenants, who were about to leave. Then they did their own survey, to determine how many rats were seen. Then (somehow?) they isolated the building and killed all the rats, and counted them. The result was that for every rat reported to have been seen, there were ten actual rats. If that is a reasonable ratio (and I think it is), then take the number of rats that the typical New Yorker sees in a year - let's say six, just to put a number on it - there are ten times that many. Human population of NYC is 8.5 million, so multiply by 60 to get 510 imllion rats. I wouldn't be surprised if that was close (1/2 order of magnitude) to the actual number.
Yes, it's not good science to extrapolate from one old study on one building to the much different environs of an entire city, my memory is vague so I probably have everything wrong (except the 10:1 - I'm sure of that), etc., etc. But it's a reasonable hypothetical number to use as a starting point.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Religions don't like democracy, and autocracies don't like democracy.
Actually, as was pointed out 200 years ago regarding the establishment of the USA, to that time no democracy has ever survived more than about 200 years. Athens was the first democracy I can think of where bread, circuses and the threat of war were used by the leaders to stay elected (See Pericles). The result was a series of wars and the eventual demise of Athens. IMHO the peoples' virtue or lack thereof is the primary risk, and religion is just a convenient excuse or cause celebre'.
As someone else once put it (more or less), democracies last until the people realise they can vote themselves bread and circuses. First the people are virtuous and hardworking, then they become wealthy as a result of that hard work, then they become complacent, then they become greedy/needy/decadent, then (since most people are no longer working their ass off), their system collapses, people start to starve, and revolution, war or takeover by the neighbors is next.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
We have one billion chronically hungry people today and it's going to get far far worse in the coming decades. Man is more populous than the rat and is consuming the earth like a swarm of locusts consuming a crop field.
Your first sentence does not follow for your second.
There is more then enough food in the world today to feed the entire human race, plus some extra ones. Instead, most of it is wasted - not overconsumed - but wasted, because it's not possible to distribute it in an effective way.
Population crises are never going to be a problem because we straight up don't have to feed all the people in the world. We don't now, and that's not going to change in the forseeable future. And, it's not like starving people are able to swim across oceans or defeat a modern army, so the wealthy nations aren't going to be overwhelmed by the poor.
Additionally, let's suppose we did decide to feed everyone - which is a difficult endeavor. The infrastructure and education you need to make that a viable long term solution, empirically seems to have the side-effect of reducing population growth - if you succeed in preventing famine in an effective way, and start teaching farmers and educating women and children, then in every single place it's been tried, population growth levels off and then declines.
"the problem is that you describe a world that is totally dependent on the actions of man to 'keep turning'. "
And you don't think that's the way it is now? Where do you think your power, food, fuel, and water come from today? Elves?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
So 200 years ago, people conveniently ignored Iceland (the Althing was the parliament of Iceland for more than 300 years), the Isle of Man (the Tynwald is the parliament of the island since 979, more than 1000 years of democracy!), San Marino (republic since 366 - more than 1600 years ago!) and Switzerland (democracy since 1291), just to make a point.
your post and your sig are amusingly at odds with each other :)
The problem isn't the people so much as the conditions. You pack poor folks like rats and diseases have a perfect breeding ground. You have serious sanitation, health care, and potable drinking water problems compounded by humans simply being packed too tightly into too small a space and get ready for the nasty bugs. Hell look at how many drugs end up in the rivers thanks to sewage being filled with them which also helps the bugs by breeding resistance which again made worse by too many in too small a space.
It might be different if you were putting them into clean skyscrapers or some other form of affordable safe clean housing but as we see all over the third world and sadly more and more in the first world what you get is shanty towns with all of the above problems and disease carrying bugs like mosquitoes, rats, fleas, roaches, we could easily have a drug resistant plague or superflu come out of one of those and with worldwide travel it'd spread like wildfire.
This is of course not figuring in the risk of some crazy terrorist group or nation state actually cooking up a nasty bug for a weapon, or a nice long war in an overpopulated region accelerating the squalor and leaving lots of wounded open to infection. 1917 flu anyone?
Not saying any of this is 100% guaranteed to happen, just pointing out as the numbers get higher so too does the risk. After all its not the people in the nice places having 8 to 10 kids, its those living in hellholes without access to birth control and who need as many hands for manual labor as possible and to insure some live without having access to decent medical care.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.