Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Pessimism ... and Optimism
Over at Yahoo Answers, Dr. Stephen Hawking asks, and I answer:
"In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?"
To me, the answer is contained in the concept of “follow-through.”
If you want to hit a baseball farthest and most accurately, you swing your bat not just AT the baseball, but through it. You swing THROUGH the ball, aiming for a point far beyond it.
Every beginner baseball player learns that if you aim your swing only at the baseball, with no thought of anything beyond it, the hit is powerless, inaccurate and ineffective – if you hit it at all.
If you want to have good health, you don’t focus just on good health. You aim THROUGH good health, to outdoor activities, adventures and fun. If you obsess about your health, you end up sitting at home taking vitamins, feeling fragile and worrying about every little cough and twitch (I know this from my own experience).
Likewise, if humans want to survive another 100 years, the exact wrong thing to do is focus exclusively on human survival. If we do that, we end up designing our surroundings with only ourselves in mind. (We’re also probably innately motivated, in obsessing about our own survival, to produce ever more offspring – which is the exact WRONG thing to do.)
The hit is powerless, inaccurate and ineffective – if we hit it at all.
Instead, we have to aim our swing beyond immediate human interests. We have to aim at the survival of our planet itself. The cradle we came from, the house we live in, the garden from which we eat.
The health of the planet we live on is the source of the health of the human species.
We have to stop focusing exclusively on human survival, and think more of the follow-through that’s necessary to achieve that goal. (In light of that, it seems to me that aiming for some few of us to “expand into space” is hitting at the ball, rather than through it.)
Okay, having said that, I have to say that the asking of a question such as yours almost always elicits happy, optimistic responses. That’s the way we’re built. We want happy endings, heroic rescues, larger-than-life stories. The very wording of your question puts a positive spin on the answers.
And certainly, of the answers I’ve read so far, there’s a fair bit of brainless optimism. “Oh, something will turn up, if we just pray that things get better.”
But not all questions HAVE happy answers. Sometimes – for instance, if you and your tribe-mates are stuck way off there on Easter Island, and have bred beyond your resources and gotten finally into desperate fighting and killing for individual survival – you really are screwed.
As much as we all might wish it, it appears to me that the happy answers, dear Dr. Hawking, are very likely not going to happen.
Because there’s this other problem, hinted at by the very fact that you came to ask the question: we’re IN a survival situation right now, and we’re right on the razor edge of life and death. We’re stressed, threatened, endangered by all the things we’ve done so far.
And the really kinky fact related to that is something I realized not long ago:
HUMANS UNDER EXTREME STRESS BECOME LESS INTELLIGENT.
When we’re scared, when we’re threatened, we react from our purely animal repertoire – we scream, we fight, we run, we hide.
In the next 30 years (I wonder, as you do, if we’ll even make it through the next 100), look for the increased incidence of blatant political demagogues, reactionary religious and political conservatism, and a whole lot more violence – on scales ranging from our own neighborhoods to the entire world.
In the U.S., those of us who think about our situation in any broad sense like to think that the deliberate distortions of mean-spirited radio bobbleheads like Rush Limbaugh and the hate and lies spread by vicious, selfish media monsters like Ann Coulter are temporary. We like to hope that the political system that put an absolute fool, George W. Bush, in the most powerful office in the world is just experiencing some sort of temporary aberration, and will come back to some sensible center in a very short time.
But ... what if this is only the first visible signs of a slow-moving, unstoppable island-wide panic? What if the hate and lies and fighting are rather permanent, and will only get worse?
The brilliance that you yourself shine on the rest of us, dear Dr. Hawking, is one example of the best traits of humanity. We’re capable of calm reasoning, of studied compassion, of scientific research.
I like to believe that every person is capable – in some measure, and at any time – of these things. But it’s only when we have the wealth of time and social stability that we can do these things AS A PEOPLE.
In the current circumstance, I think most of us are well and truly screwed. I think what we’re going through now is only the first visible wave of the real ugliness to come. I’m optimistic enough to want to believe that some few of us will survive, and that out the other side of all the deadly turbulence to come is a golden age populated by those of us who remake ourselves into the compassionate, bright people we like to imagine we already are.
Meanwhile, I’m really afraid, billions of us will die. Clawing to survive, we’ll take with us most of the things we love in the natural world. The gorillas. The lions. The beautiful coral reefs. The amber waves of grain. The leisure time and full bellies that allow us to appreciate art and sunsets and knowledge for its own sake.
Over the next 30 years, I think the chances are good that deadly fools like George Bush and Karl Rove (and Tony Blair) will prosper, feeding off the fears of the rest of us. Dividing. Using. Wantonly wrecking the freedoms and wealth of knowledge we’ve so laboriously gained over the past several thousand years. They will grow powerful on lies and confusion, get fat on the death of reason and compassion, make money on division and hate, build lives of personal comfort by billing the rest of us for our own funerals.
Mindless, hate-spewing fundamentalist religion will blanket all our lives like poisonous fog – killing medicine, killing science, killing art, killing freedom.
And ... this is not some vague future, I don’t think. It appears to me that it has already begun happening. Now.
Am I a bad person for seeing things in this extreme pessimistic light?
I don’t think so. Yes, I’m saying I can see these things happening all too easily. But I think when you wake up to find yourself surrounded by hyenas, you don’t close your eyes and imagine them as cuddly bunny rabbits. You admit the possibility of hyenas. You do your best to see the hyenas as they are. And you figure out how to survive – not bunny rabbits – but hyenas.
Optimist that I really am, I think it’s possible for us to survive this Golden Age of Hyenas which we’re already in, and make it through to the Golden Age of Man.
But, oh my, it’s going to be tough.
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Familiar thoughts
Because they run through my brain pretty much each day. Like you I think the things we are seeing now are simply the sounds of distant thunder and when the storm truly breaks the rivers will run red with blood (which might be a good thing since there will be no more water left in them). I do not think that it is a matter of human survival however. People are clever and they like to have sex. So unless they stop be clever (and adaptive) or stop liking sex I'd say they will persist long into the future. Civilisation though, now that is a more iffy proposition. Civilisation requires all sorts of components whose continuing presence are by no means guaranteed. So I'd say that civilisation is in danger, but the human species really isn't. That is it isn't unless...
Unless there is a sufficiently large enough rock floating around out there in space with 'Earth or bust' written on it. That could kill us all in one fell swoop (and that to my mind is the very best and incontrovertible need for space travel. The rock can't get all of us if there are some of us elsewhere). Or the killer bug. The bug which has a high lethality and a long latency period during which it is highly contagious and easily transmissable through water and/or air. That could also get all of us although it would be a better option for the other life forms on the planet.
As for survival I have an illustrative story. One day when I was driving home on the back road where I used to live I saw a young deer lying dead under a tree. Doubtless it had been hit by a car. No one came to remove it so I watched day after day over a period of months as it gradually decayed and you know what? After a while it was completely gone. Bones and all. As if it had never lived. Compare this to our species and the marks we leave on the earth and the problems of waste. Our species needs to adopt an organic model. We need to reach a point of 100% recycling so that we are not drowning in our own sewage and other assorted toxic wastes. Only by doing this and by living within our energy budget can we hope to survive long term. Just imagine the day when the things of everyday use around you are not manufactured, but are grown.
As for the cyclic nature of human interaction, well the politics may be cyclic, but the technology sure isn't and therein lies the problem. The Romans for all their power could not do what we have been doing i.e. changing the climate. Nor could they have made the surface of our planet essentially uninhabitable, which is also within the capability of the United States and several other nations with large arsenals of nuclear weapons. I am afraid the situation is dangerously new even if the thinking is woefully outdated.
Yes BUT
those things happened at a time when physical resources were easily exploited and the earth could still carry added population growth. Now, we have come to a time where technology is bringing dimishing returns to our ability to exploit our world. In our biosphere, resources are becoming more and more scarce. We are wasting and pissing on them at an accelearting pace. Not everything grows on trees.
There will be a recovery, well, most likely, but an awful lot of people are going to go down in the meantime.
Historical tests
I think your point that "Over the next 30 years, I think the chances are good that deadly fools like George Bush and Karl Rove (and Tony Blair) will prosper, wantonly wrecking the freedoms and wealth of knowledge we’ve so laboriously gained over the past several thousand years" fails the historical test. Namely, such a thing has occurred several times in the recent past, with only minor fundamental changes at the end of the day.
First, Tony Blair isn't Britain's Bush, but its Clinton. He happens to be a neocon, but, let's face it, Clinton was a charismatic Republican-lite President. And the idea that Bush represents a dangerous break from the past flies in the face of American history. The corruption and repression accompanying the War on Terror are no different from these accompanying the World Wars or the Civil War or the Cold War.
Second, there were in fact historical watershed moments, but after a suitably long crisis, things return to how they used to be. The sociological theory of generations says that this is inherently cyclical, with a crisis of about 20 years every 80 years. The current crisis began on 9/11 and is ongoing; the last one began in 1929 with the Depression and ended after World War Two; the previous one was, I think, the Civil War and Reconstruction. There's certainly nothing you say about the current period of time that couldn't be said - indeed, wasn't said - about Hitler and Stalin.
Response
There are MANY factors which are unique to today, and which any consideration of cyclical history has to consider as completely novel elements.
First, there are 6-plus billion people on the planet today, a LOT more than at any time in history. More than twice the number there were when I was born. Even the current number is likely well over sustainability, and there are (may be) a billion more to come by 2010, a billion more by 2019, a billion more by 2027, a billion more by 2034. In less than 30 years, 10 billion total people on earth.
Second, related to population, we really are killing off earth's species at a rapid pace. At some point, we can kiss goodbye just about everything I care about on earth (bears, wolves, whales, etc.). And possibly, probably, a sustainable ecosystem.
Third, also related, the climate really is changing. No matter what, there is no way climate change can be beneficial for humans. For some obvious reasons, the effect can only be negative.
Fourth, also related, the era of cheap energy is OVER. We use petroleum because it is MUCH less expensive than the next best thing, and we really are over the peak, and on the downhill slide. Take away cheap energy, and it appears to me that every expense of civilization rockets upward, due to a multiplier effect that comes into play at every point of transfer.
Fifth, for the first time ever, we have the technology to really create Orwell's Big Brother. Satellites. GPS-enabled phones. Cameras on streets, on buildings, in buildings, in vehicles, in homes (webcams), in handheld phones, everywhere -- and more every year. Computerized grocery checkouts. (Computers themselves count as a factor which did not exist in any previous cycle.) And every record ever assembled about you available via computer without hassle to some government cheesedick. As ever, it will probably be true that you can stay below the radar and not be noticed. But if you DO get noticed, say by simply pissing off someone with a tiny amount of power, there's virtually nothing they can't know about you.
Bearing all this in mind, I think it's simply silly to believe that this moment in history is equivalent to any other.
Cheap energy
It's disturbingly easy to neglect the fact that there's a trillion barrels' worth of oil trapped in Colorado's oil shale that can be extracted at 40 dollars a barrel using current technology. The only reason oil corporations don't start tapping into it now is that the last time they did, the oil crisis was soon over, shale oil became uneconomic, and they lost a lot of money.
Now, my main concern with your post is not the environmental part, but the political implication. Right now, there are exactly two environmental problems with global political implications: climate change and peak oil. Not coincidentally, these are the two problems people outside the environmental movement are most likely to be concerned about. Habitat loss and erosion matter locally, at worst; and estimating species extinction is futile given that we don't know the number of extant species even to an order of magnitude.
So your five points become a lot weaker. The environment itself is less fragile than it sometimes seems, and current political mechanics ensure that big, urgent problems receive due attention. Environmentalists succeeded in using political pressure to bring the ozone hole under control; give it a few years and they'll do the same to climate change.
As for state surveillance, in itself it doesn't increse the chance of totalitarianism to prevail. Technology helps both sides - just think how the Internet revolutionized protesting. And evidently, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did fairly well at controlling their populations without recent technology. The ultimate big brother technologies of dystopian science fiction - tracking chips, telescreens, integrated databases, massive drugging - are all several decades away.
Dystopia is closer than you think
They have tracking chips now. You can get them for your pet (http://www.pet-tracking.com/) if you want or for an elderly person who has cognitive dysfunctions (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f02/web2/ddimuro.html) and who might be prone to wandering off not knowing who they are. That is today not dystopian science fiction. Do they plant them in people without their awareness or consent? I don't know, but I certainly don't believe that it would be impossible. It seems to me that all the news stories about them monitoring communication is about dragnetting databases, but I am not a computer guy so I don't know if that qualifies. Perhaps we don't have telescreens, but we do have picture taking cell phones. Any bets on whether the government can monitor those if they so choose? As to massive drugging two questions - 1) Are you a chemist? and 2) Do you regularly check the public water supplies or test your well? And if you did would you know what to test for? And these are just the things that are public knowledge, just imagine all the scary stuff we don't know about.
Sure, it's possible
It's possible for all this to happen, in the same manner that it's possible that 9/11 was staged, Al Qaida is a black ops division of the CIA, Kim Jong Il is on the CIA payroll, and we all live in the Matrix anyway.
Government bureaucracies are incredibly inefficient and corrupt; what Orwell got wrong is that totalitarianism only exacerbates the inefficiency. The way I know the US isn't drugging everyone is that a) there are no discernable behavioral differences between people living in the US and people living outside the US, and b) if it were, there's no way it could hide it for long.
War is Peace
I won't go so far as to say that 9-11 was staged by the government, but I do believe they knew that something was coming and chose to look the other way and let it happen. I also think that all of the PNAC members raised their wine glasses and cheered when those buildings went down. I can see them laughing in the fastnesses of their mansions or from the decks of their yachts as the hapless workers lept to their deaths on the pavement far below their windows. I can see them raising their glasses and smiling cheeky smiles at each other as they inhale deeply, taking the heady aroma of unbridled power and money into their lungs. Perhaps they even splurged on prostitutes that night to celebrate. I'll bet they secretly thank Osama (or whoever was responsible) each time they go to the bank or check their portfolio.
9-11 aside you said that the technologies for totalitarianism were decades away. In the main they are not. Will it come here? I don't know. I am kind of hoping that I'll die before it gets to that, but you never know. It's a race now between absolute totalitarianism (complete with religio-patriotic symbols) and absolute chaos with the country on fire and the streets running red with blood. Perhaps I will miss that too. We shall see. Two things are certain though. I am glad I don't have children and I am glad I am not 20.
These are all points that
These are all points that Alon is overly well aware of, just...to point that out. I've had the "the earth is dying!" conversation with him more times than I can count. However, I just want to address a few of the things you said.
First is that the population growth for up to the year 2030 is so debateable that it's not entirely fair to flat out say that there will be 10 billion people on earth in 30 years. For example the U.S Census Bureau says that in 30 years there will be 8.5 billion, not 10, and the UN's number is not far from that and on Wikipedia the number is slightly lower.
When speaking about the amount of animals that we're killing you focused primarily on mega fauna, which is completely the wrong thing to do. The chances of a key stone species being a megafauna that we're killing off is slim. The real issue lies in the destruction of bacteria and the like. The chances of us collapsing an ecosystem by taking out large animals, is far less than the chances of us doing it with little things that we think nothing of.
Next your point about energy - this is why I've been screaming at the top of my lungs for there to be more research put into sustainable energy sources. But I'm just one girl, who has an extremely quiet voice in the world of energy sources. (and GPS is cool.)
Having said all that, I don't think you fully got what Alon was saying - we are stuck in a cyclical history, and really environmental degredatoin is not anything new, just humans are doing it a different way. The earth has replenished itself after total wipe outs before, no reason to think that it won't happen again after humans are long gone. In regards to the political aspect with prospects for 2008 like Rudy Giuliani (who is a total Bush wannabe) its hard to say we're not stuck in a cycle.
Well, jeez.
Just addressing (for reasons of time only, because much of what you said was interesting) a single point of your comment:
I'm always at a loss to answer the argument that "after the mass extinctions, the earth will go on just fine without us."
Well, granted. Sheesh. But ... every living thing I value, everything *I* care about, is alive NOW.
OF COURSE the earth, and life, will go on. But saying that is like ... you lose your life's savings and are tossed penniless out onto the streets, and your neighbor dismisses your anguish with "Well, ho hum. There’s plenty of money out there in other people’s accounts.” Or your baby daughter dies, and your friends say “Oh, well, you can always have another.” As if the point was the existence of money or children-in-the-abstract, and not the dire PERSONAL impact of your situation.
I have a hard time imagining being so broadminded that the death of every living thing I know of or care about could be blithely passed off with "Eh. No biggie."
I recognize that something like blue-green algae is probably more important to the planet’s ecosystem than bears, but – bloody hell! – I can’t imagine a human perspective in which a future world full of hardy microorganisms is anything other than extremely cold comfort. To me, the point may be undeniable, but it is so wildly un-germane to my subjective human values it’s not worth making.
BTW, environmental degradation on the scale at which we humans are doing it today is not just some recycling of history. I say again: The argument is just plain silly. What we’re doing today is FUNDAMENTALLY different from that of any past time.
This time, it's the entire world.
This time, it's us and everything we love that's going down the toilet.
And just a reminder of how immediate this all is, how much it transcends cool intellectual contemplation:
Much of what I’m talking about is going to happen in your own precious lifetime.
Then by that argument after
Then by that argument after you die the entire world can go to shit and it wont matter...
And what we're doing is different on one level - but all the same on another. I've spent the majority of the past 5 years of my life advocating and fighting for the environment - don't get me wrong, I know where you're coming from and any sort of thing I can do, or I can tell people in order to save it, I will.
But I'm not going to stress and get all worked up over it because in the end *something* whether it be humans, or whatever, is going to end a lot of the life on earth anyway.
I do know what you're saying, we should be preserving what we can now, I totally agree wtih you, but I need to keep the idea in my head that the wrold will go on fine post-humans.
(Oh and...I don't consider my life to be overly precious.)