by Anthrobus » Tue 06 Jun 2006, 16:31:56
hello ibon,
(very interesting thread, thanks to all),
walking on the knifes edge, thats what we do. The prospect of a possible “peak civilisation” ist the on aspect of the whole peak oil story that really really scares me. Some mentioned possible futures are reminding me of olaf stapledons “Last and first men”, in which story the fall of the (second) technical civilisation was due to an energy crisis (that was denied by the government!). The next civilisation was again built upon sailing ships (basically) and the following not before the earth has spewn out enough new minerals to mine over some millions of years.
If the breakdown goes to fast, complex things (i. e. computers) can no longer be replaced, electricity grids not maintained and the gizmos just become useless, as well as our virtualized world on the harddisks and dvd's. When will this happen? How long can a city like, lets take munich, stay a living, prosperous town, when in winter, due to some extended brownouts, there are weeks without electricity or heating? What about electronically transmitted money, taxes, day trading, tight business plans, etc. And the virtualized, just in time everything now-society is actually going to be advanced further and further, hanging on an ever thinner thread. You can nowadays meet the deadlines hardly under the most favourite circumstances. Bankruptcy may only be some days away. And the prospect of power outages in winter may not be far in the future. Last winter, the pressure in the gas pipes fell already in the middle of europe due to some gazprom muscle playing. It didn't even take a real shortage, just someone who had some itch to rise the stakes.
Imagine, what resources have to be combined, to put an giant rig like for thunder horse together and in action. At some point in a decline, building a thing like this may be no longer be possible. No more oil. What next? Digging coal from 2 miles underground with a shovel? Ship stuff around the world when piracy is becoming a common phenomenon on the oceans?
I dreamt of writing a scifi story once, about isolated pockes of (an agricultural) civilisation mainly around coastal towns, connected by large cargo ships that carried, sold and bought anything, wood, minerals carried travellers ... It should have been a happy, peaceful society with people having lots of leisure time. Technology and Astronomy would be worked on in walled monasteries. And in every direction wilderness, overgrown ruins ... Greetings from “A canticle for Leibowitz”
This was before i knew of peak oil, now is am a bit more pessimistic. Perhaps sometime in the future, there will be just no more resources to plunder and people just are forced to live sustainable? But no more large wild mammals on earth, no more rain forests, everything gnawed bare, every species brought at least to economical extinction?
Even more dangers lurk for mankind that can by principle not be avoided.
Plagues will gererally not be wiped out. Bacteria & co had ages to evolv and survived asteroid impacts, ice ages and time. In my opinion, some penecillin wont stop them for long (only keep them at arms length), as soon as there are less resources in research, they will return quickly and deadly.
All people eycept maybe the american president know, that we will not leave this planet to colonize other stars. We will live, thrive and die here and cannot move to someplace pristine and yet unplundered. Our future is here.
Culture, reason and (humanitarian) knowledge cant be tought to babarians as we generally are. I am permanently baffled (hi), how babarious, short sighted, stubborn and stupid people usually act. As if we didnt have thousands of years of civilisation, most excellent writers, thinkers, philosophers. Its all said, thougt, laid down. The books, plays, poets are crying it in everybodys face, not to mention the world religions. Read, think, recognize yourself, behave morally, dont do to others what you wont like done to you. It seems all wasted on most people most of the time. In ones life, there is hardly enough time to be occupied with the very best, mankind has brought up. And what are most people doing most of the time? Surely nothing to their advantage.
Even such a shortsighted culture as we are takes thousands of years to built and may be lost within 100 years. 100 Years of a mindless, destructive, cruel world of nort corea like states and this might just have been it, nobody remembers anymore the peaks and summits that world culture had reached. You can just forget Thukydides, Herodot, Sokrates, Marc Aurel, Ovid and their successors.
If there are safe places, you can store books in dark ages for centuries (non acidic paper), if society breaks down, you can study the language and read them again. What about our informations, stored in invisible nanomter-scale patches? No civilisation lesser than ours in technology will be able to read these devices (they are not designed to last as long also, and there may be no more civilisations more technically advanced than ours). No individual or small group of resarchers would have the time to sift through this mountain of useless informations. Everything not readable by the eye will be lost. The internet, a myth.
Nobody in a future of scare food will care for cathedrals, paintings, frescos. They will just rot away. Think about it, the next time in the sixtine chapel.
humility? Surely not our generation. Not the mass of people. Dont forget that most of the people of the world still dream of our wealth. We should try to tell them, that we found something better and they just should skip the consumerish phase.
And yet, lasting doomerism is not the answer for me. I think if you keep trying to be a moral and decent human being, your skies shall not want, even with po.
Thinking about all this, i feel like watching the movie “Silent running”.
REJOICE IN THE SUN
(written by Diane Lampert / Peter Schickele)
Joan Baez
Fields of children running wild in the sun
like a forest is your child growing wild in the sun
Doomed in his innocence in the sun.
Gather your children to your side in the sun
tell them all they love will die, tell them why, in the sun
tell them it's not too late for today one by one
tell them to harvest and rejoice --- in the sun.
The mouse, i`ve been sure for years, limps home from the site of the burning ferris wheel with a brand new, airtight plan for killing the cat.
J. D. Salinger
Luckily, none of us know whether such a stretch of time will be necesary, so the impatient can push on and the patient can contemplate soil carbon. TG there is so much agreement on general direction (proponents of space mirrors please spare your electrons).
