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."

Comments

War isn't one of the classic causes of Apocalypse?

[popo]

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?

Survivor Bias

[dcollins]

"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.

Seems poorly researched

[vlm]

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.

Re:Classic Causes

[MightyMartian]

War is still very possible for two major reasons: Religions don't like democracy, and autocracies don't like democracy. As long as there are Religions with political power, war is possible. As long as there are nations in which the People are not the masters of their Government, war is possible.

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.