Posted by Terry on Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:12 | #

Unfortunately what you say is true and may well happen; chilling the kind of world the hippie baby boomers have created!

Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:08 | #

Svyatoslav Igorevich, I don’t think the likelihood of human extinction is comparable with the likelihood of a pandemic that leaves isolated pockets of humans alive in rural and wilderness areas.  There simply have been no pandemics in human history that have infected everyone let alone pandemics with 100% lethality to those infected.  The most an engineer can do is make the pathogen airborne with a long incubation period and high virulence.  He can’t overcome barriers to transmission to the most isolated humans.

Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:15 | #

Terry, the problem isn’t “hippy baby boomers” it is structurally built into civilization itself.  Civilization has fundamental structural problems with it that simply cannot be overcome.  To wit: Any time you let cities grow up from the countryside’s agricultural production, you create an elite that will defect against the rest of the population.  The inevitable result is horizontal transmission with virulence emerging among some population like the Jews, hence self-destruction of civilization.

Posted by Pi on Sat, 24 Mar 2007 15:56 | #

I think an artificial pandemic extinction is the number one existential threat facing humanity in the future.  The main reasons are it’s technically possible, and it will become an easy, widespread horizontal technology.  So it can be done eventually by individuals in private. Lookup the “MousePox” experiment, and this wasn’t even intentional! http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sci_tech/highlights/010117_mousepox.shtml

  Also there is natural precident in the American Chestnut.  It is functionally, if not totally, extinct in its native range, where it was the dominant tree before the 20th century (billions of individuals).

  Another possible candidate is the passenger pidgeon.  Although this extinction is widely blamed on human predation I find this hard to believe with pre-20th century technology and a species numbering in the 10s of billions.  A suspected possibility is an unrecognized pathogen introduced into the population by human migration.

-Pi

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 24 Mar 2007 17:14 | #

The “Mousepox” event verifies that virtual 100% lethality, among those infected, can be easily engineered in a highly transmissible virus. 

That’s what I said.

The American Chestnut seems to indicate extinction is feasible, except that even in the case of the American Chestnut civilization’s vectorism was unable to cause its total extinction—only extinction in the “natural” range.

The question of what is humanity’s “natural” range is central to the frontierist stance that we should be placing more emphasis on using humanity’s unique gifts to expand not only humanity’s ecological range, but the ecological range of life itself.

Posted by Pi on Sat, 24 Mar 2007 22:53 | #

“The question of what is humanity’s “natural” range is central to the frontierist stance that we should be placing more emphasis on using humanity’s unique gifts to expand not only humanity’s ecological range, but the ecological range of life itself.”

  Agreed!  That’s why I think the moon is a gift of providence, better even than Mars.  Take one of those inflatable tennis courts you see on various campuses, plop it down in a sutably sized crater, inflate slightly, and then backfill over top with regolith as you gradually inflate to 15 psi (you’ll need about ~50 feet of dirt above in lunar gravity for 15 psi) voila, cruise ship sized habitat!  Plop next to it a “nuclear submarine” with an aluminum hull and you have years of electricity, and your “construction RV”. Multiples of these communities would be separated by hard vacuum and hard solar radiation providing for much reduced risk of cross contamination.  To attack these comunites would require an organized vertical effort.  They would be immune to disguntled or disaffected loners.  Plop down enough of these and you’ll have critical mass for permanent off world civilization.

-Pi

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 24 Mar 2007 23:51 | #

Its too soon to lay down the technical details but your sentiment is correct.

The spectrum from marginal terrestrial habitat to ocean desert cultivation to space cultivation is very clear.  The means by which those frontiers are populated become less clear the further from current cultivation you get.

One thing’s for sure:  The abandonment of the progress toward space settlement that occurred during the 1960s will be seen by future historians as worthy of note and the rest of the century will be but a footnote.

Posted by zusammen on Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:49 | #

A possible end to the fossil fuel mass transit age and the ushering in of another local community era would help stifle the chaotic demographic shuffling and high tech police state apparatus used to manage the needless mess.

As it exists today, the industrial economy can best be described in ecological terms as a scheme for turning resources into pollution at the highest possible rate. Thus resource exhaustion and pollution problems aren’t accidental outcomes of industrialism, they’re hardwired into the industrial system: the faster resources turn into pollution, the more the industrial economy prospers, and vice versa. That forms the heart of our predicament. Peak oil is simply one symptom of a wider crisis – the radical unsustainability of a system that has evolved to maximize resource consumption on a finite planet – and trying to respond to it without dealing with the larger picture simply guarantees that other symptoms will surface elsewhere and take its place.

Toward An Ecotechnic Society

This guy isn’t perfect but he’s got a plan for civilization to step down by stages, rather than stupidly crash, into a less insane design. He says it can be done in stages from scarcity industry, to salvage society, to ecotechnic society.