Is there hope for a future,...
Well as I've read. if they shut down the entire planetary industrial network. Every power plant every mine every factory every carbon producing technology. If this were done it would take near 300 years for the climate to 'begin',...just begin to stabilize.
This because of the damage we've already done.
The pollutants centuries worth still in the atmosphere with take that long to begin to seriously dissipate. After that another 2 to 400 years for the Earth to return to a pristine pre-industrial level. So 500 to 700 years to heal the Earth if we shut the whole thing down,...which we will never do.
This is why for me at least it doesn't matter what we do,...we're headed certainly headed for a pre-mature extinction. Many other species will be taken along with us,...by us. Of course it's not the end of the world or life on this world.
When we're finally gone in anywhere from a few centuries to a few thousand years. The earth will heal.
That, and new species will fill the niches left by the great extinction we caused.
So yes there is Hope.
14 comments:
Oh, I think there’s hope for our species, in the sense that some humans will survive the ecological meltdown we’ve created. Humans are good generalists, adaptable like rats and cockroaches, not specialists that easily die off with a change in conditions.
But our numbers will be greatly reduced, as will the variety of species with which we share this planet, so that its life support potential is greatly diminished. And of course industrial civilization as we know it is toast. We blew it there. Most people will be desperately poor for a long time to come, with radically reduced indices of well being, including life expectancy.
But I think there will be an enduring posterity, once (some) people get through the coming dark age. However, it seems to me inevitable that we will experience a period of widespread suffering and death, which we are already entering. I don’t assume that I personally will survive it.
And as for there being hope for a free, just, prosperous and democratic USA? Fuhggedabouddit.
Z
The USA is finished as an open society. Not because of certain bad leaders. Rather because about half no longer want such a society. I think one needs a large majority for that sort of thing to survive. We're just under the wire there. We have just enough fuck heads running around loose to give us a dystopia,...which is well along it's way.
As for humanity surviving in some manner,...20% chance if everything goes well for us.
A complex civilization maybe 3%.
We devolve into post literate hunter gatherers 97%
If we survive we'll stay such to the end. Even if it's another million years.
We were thus for the vast majority of our species existence. Returning to it after a very brief era of civilization is to be expected.
"Mind near exhaustion still makes its final futile movement towards that 'way out or round or through the impasse'.
That is the utmost now that mind can do. And this, its last expiring thrust, is to demonstrate that the door closes upon us for evermore.
There is no way out, or round or through."
-H. G. Wells, "Mind at the End of Its Tether", 1945
I hate to be the one to break this news to you Z, but ALL species go extinct. Rats and cockroaches are no exception.
You are looking at the situation on too short a time scale. All planets and galaxies come and go, colliding, vanishing into black holes, et cetera. "Time" does not exist for the galaxies... it is a human fantasy. Chaos is the only order and it spares nothing. It's time to stop the pretense.
Of course I know that species go extinct, and that ours will do so in due time. Where did I say otherwise?
I’m merely rejecting the claim made by some that, just because our own historical destiny happens to be unenviable - because we’re living in one of the downturns of the usual civilizational lifecycle - therefore it’s all over for everyone everywhere. I don’t believe that. I consider it to be actually a form of wishful thinking, the idea being that if we can’t have it our way, then no one else will ever have a chance either. This is part of the emotional appeal behind apocalyptarianism, a religious fantasy with no foundation in fact. It’s supported by the notion that our particular civilization is soooo great and sooo special that no other state of human society can possibly follow it. But that’s our vanity talking. Other societies will follow, and in the fullness of time, other civilizations too. I don’t expect they’ll remember ours fondly, if at all.
Even the ecological damage we’ve wrought on the world is historically part of the same cyclic process. Think how the Tigris Euphrates region, that once supported great civilizations, is now largely desert. Agriculture is destructive. Even the ancient Greeks overgrazed, cut down great forests, and sent a great deal of their fertile topsoil into the Aegean, on whose floor it can be found to this day. The difference between between us and them is one of scale, not kind.
Mammalian species of large body size such as ourselves have the potential to endure up to ten million years or so. We may not last that long, but nowhere is it written that we’ll vanish overnight.
Of course we can assume that by the time the sun is getting old and red, our species and all it ever did will be a thin layer in the fossil record. And that’s nothing to get upset about.
Z
I wrote a little story you may remember.
It concerned an expedition by a species from a far system come to earth in about 80,000,000 years. A team of their exo-geologists found a deposit still *radio-active.
*Some of the isotopes we've come up with have half-lives of in excess of 100,000,000 years.
These exo-geologist found that the source of this radiation was artificial. Further investigations found a very thin black line in the strata 290 kilometers below the surface similarly irradiated. They postulated from this that a long ago technological species once lived on this world.
This at last will be our First Contact.
Πάντων μὲν μὴ φῦναι ἐπιχθονίοισιν ἄριστον
μηδ᾽ ἐσιδεῖν αὐγὰς ὀξέος ἠελίου,
φύντα δ᾽ ὅπως ὤκιστα πύλας Ἀΐδαο περῆσαι
καὶ κεῖσθαι πολλὴν γῆν ἐπαμησάμενον.
Best of all for mortal beings is never to have been born at all
Nor ever to have set eyes on the bright light of the sun.
But, since he is born, a man should make utmost haste through the gates of Death
And then repose, the earth piled into a mound round himself.
Theognis 425–8, cited by Douglas E. Gerber, Greek Elegiac Poetry, Loeb Classical Library (1999), page 234
When things get really unhinged my fear is that some bright young boys will reach deep into the cupboard and triumphantly pullout the small pox, and the antibiotic resistant plague et cetera.
Go for it!
Bill Burroughs summed it all up nicely in 1959:
"Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face. They open zoos, insane asylums, prisons, burst water mains with air hammers, chop the floor out of passenger plane lavatories, shoot out lighthouses, file elevator cables to one thin wire, turn sewers into the water supply, throw sharks and sting rays, electric eels and candiru into swimming pools (the candiru is a small eel-like fish or worm about one-quarter inch through and two inches long patronizing certain rivers of ill repute in the Greater Amazon Basin, will dart up you prick or your asshole or a woman's cunt faute de mieux, and hold himself there by sharp spines with precisely what motives is not known since no one has stepped forward to observe the candiru's life-cycle in situ), in nautical costumes ram the Queen Mary full speed into New York Harbor, play chicken with passenger planes and buses, rush into hospitals in white coats carrying saws and axes and scalpels three feet long, throw paralytics out of iron lungs (mimic their suffocations flopping about on the floor and rolling their eyes up), administer injections with bicycle pumps, disconnect artificial kidneys, saw a woman in half with a two-man surgical saw, they drive herds of squealing pigs into the Ka'bah, they shit on the floor of the United Nations and wipe their ass with treaties, pacts, alliances."
Pretty much.
Theognis sounds a lot like Fernando Vallejo, who has said that whenever he sees a pregnant woman he feels hatred.
I particularly like the bit about pigs in the Ka’bah. A lake of pigshit would be perfect there. They should also be cooked and eaten there too, in an animal sacrifice, and vast quantities of their guts & liquid excrement poured on the Holy of Holies, completely immersing & submerging it forever.
Z
Yes, Z, that was a good quote from Theognis. He was one of Nietzsche's favorites!
Heinrich Heine said almost the same thing:
"Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all."
Would this be a good time to mention my many attempts on my life starting at age 12.
You'd think I'd have got good at it by now.
I only stay out of curiosity as to had bad it can really get.
Post a Comment