The NYT Imagines Life After Earth 271
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."
My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Let's try to avoid a catastrophe too. (Score:3, Insightful)
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/ [religiousfreaks.com]The trouble with doomsday predictions (Score:3, Insightful)
Hollow Men (Score:5, Insightful)
Not with a bang, but a whimper."
-TS Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925
Re:Let's try to avoid a catastrophe too. (Score:2, Insightful)
Just out of curiosity, is anybody PAYING you to spam that stupid link in inane comments like this, or do you just not have anything better to do with your time?
Re:My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Let's try to avoid a catastrophe too. (Score:1, Insightful)
actually he has a point. the Dark Ages was helped started by an exceptionally bad plague during which many people ran to the church for reassurace. the church got so much power they were able to ban secular medicine with the argument that since it didn't already have a cure for the plague it was clearly useless and only prayer would help. the same thing is happening today on a smaller scale with Bush giving money to churches but cutting off funding for medical research.
My favorite part... (Score:5, Insightful)
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]
Re:My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Doomsday understated? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
Know anyone who has benefitted from radiation cancer treatment? Or do you like the power that comes out of your wall socket (varies % nuke generated by location)? Claiming that nukes are good for nothing but destruction is shortsighted at best. There's a whole host of related technologies that are very beneficial that came hand in hand with them.
Not to mention the only possible way you could deal with an asteriod right now would be lobbing nukes at it and who knows if that'd even work. You certainly aren't going to deflect it with conventional chemical explosives.
Great Idea Contained Here: (Score:2, Insightful)
NY Times Doomsday (Score:4, Insightful)
Women and minorities hardest hit.
Re:My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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.
Sheez-- get a library card and read some SciFi (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:You're giving us a lot of credit (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, often times that solution is just waiting the disaster out, hoping to be one of the lucky survivors, and then replacing the drastic drop in population with a new generation after the smoke has cleared.
Oxy Moron (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Yours is the only intelligent comment so far... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Let's try to avoid a catastrophe too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bush gives government funding to churches because he's a hardcore christian.
Bush denies government funding for stem cell research because he's a hardcore christian.
nice definition of independent you've got there. go ask him yourself - it's not like he's afraid of admitting he's acting on his religious beliefs.
Re:My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Lol, plasma TVs were create as a waste reduction measure by TV manufacturers? I am sure it was that and not that they knew consumers would prefer a large screen TV that wasn't four feet deep. Sure there is less waste in the finished product, but for all we know there is more waste in the production process. They will only produce things more cleanly if it is economically beneficial and often the most economical way is not the cleanest.
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.
Obviously if they were dirty and polluted it was not because they were "heavily regulated" in terms of the environment. Undoubtedly, some reduction in pollution does come from increased efficiency but again sometimes the most efficient thing to do is pollute. For example, I am sure there are plenty of coal power plant owners that would be happy to get rid of their NOx reducing SCR's, SO2 scrubbers and filter baghouses in favor of dumping all their waste into the air. So far no one has devised a profitable way to use those "resources". How long are we supposed to put up with the smog, acid rain, and soot hoping that they do?
Re:My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:1, Insightful)
A free society has no military advantages over a totalitarian one, except for one: freedom breeds innovation, in weapons as well as everything else. Nukes are the culmination of that trend, and they're the reason the free world runs the rest of the world. That's allright by me.
Re:Like... (Score:3, Insightful)
A blackout in Cleveland is an inconvenience. A few people might die, but in the big picture survial-of-the-species it's not even a blip. Actually, it's probably good for people to be reminded that electricity isn't necessarily always available.
Computer viruses, ditto. If you die because of a computer virus you've done something VERY wrong.
As for real viruses, whether it's bird flu, 1918 flu or cancer-gene containing smallpox, those things can't destroy the species by themselves. Remember, the world lived through 1918 just fine, even with a world war exacerbating things. Smallpox was a fact of life for centuries and we didn't all die. Modifying diseases to make them more virulent makes them into better weapons but actually decreases the total damage they might do. The more virulent a disease the faster the epidemic tends to burn itself out.
Re:My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:1, Insightful)
Communist != Soviet (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
So no, the post I replied to didn't show a proof. It merely stated basic Econ 101 knowledge, which is also knowledge that anyone browsing through basic newspaper stories could acquire on their own. Negative externalities are neither difficult to grasp, nor are they difficult to see in action.
Re:My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
Unfortuantely no. The issue is energy. The kinetic energy of the impactor has to go somewhere, and since it's hitting the Earth, all the energy is transfered to the Earth. With large impactors this will cause enough heating to bring about the conflagration of the biomass of the planet, or a large percentage thereof.
The other issue is that these damn things are so huge, our nuclear arsenels don't have enough umph to break up the solid ones, not to mention that the numerious "rubble pile" astreriods and comets are fantastically resistent (read completely immune) to this sort of effect.
Nukes are not the answer to cosmic impactors, not because tree hugging nuts don't like them, but because they won't work. Taking ones science from Hollywood is a mistake.
Re:My take on Doomsday from a market perspective (Score:1, Insightful)