Earlier this week, I was trying to think of ways to talk about the gap between notions about the future we’ve all absorbed from the last three hundred years of fossil-fueled progress, on the one hand, and the ways of thinking about what’s ahead that might actually help us make sense of our predicament and the postpetroleum, post-progress world ahead, on the other. While I was in the middle of these reflections, a correspondent reminded me of
a post from last year by peak oil blogger Ugo Bardi, which set out to place the crises of our time in the context of the next ten billion years.
It’s an ambitious project, and by no means badly carried out. The only criticism that comes to mind is that it only makes sense if you happen to be a true believer in the civil religion of progress, the faith whose rise and impending fall has been a central theme here in recent months. As a sermon delivered to the faithful of that religion, it’s hard to beat; it’s even got the classic structure of evangelical rhetoric—the awful fate that will soon fall upon those who won’t change their wicked ways, the glorious salvation awaiting those who get right with Progress, and all the rest of it.
Of course the implied comparison with Christianity can only be taken so far. Christians are generally expected to humble themselves before their God, while believers in progress like to imagine that humanity will become God or, as in this case, be able to pat God fondly on the head and say, “That’s my kid.” More broadly, those of my readers who were paying attention last week will notice that the horrible fate that awaits the sinful is simply that nature will be allowed to go her own way, while the salvation awaiting the righteous is more or less the ability to browbeat nature into doing what they think she ought to do—or rather, what Bardi’s hypothesized New Intelligence, whose interests are assumed to be compatible with those of humanity, thinks she ought to do.
There’s plenty that could be said about the biophobia—the stark shivering dread of life’s normal and healthy ripening toward death—that pervades this kind of thinking, but that’s a subject for another post. Here I’d like to take another path. Once the notions of perpetual progress and imminent apocalypse are seen as industrial society’s traditional folk mythologies, rather than meaningful resources for making predictions about the future, and known details about ecology, evolution, and astrophysics are used in their place to fill out the story, the next ten billion years looks very different from either of Bardi’s scenarios. Here’s my version or, if you will, my vision.
Ten years from now:
Business as usual continues; the human population peaks at 8.5 billion, liquid fuels production remains more or less level by the simple expedient of consuming an ever larger fraction of the world’s total energy output, and the annual cost of weather-related disasters continues to rise. Politicians and the media insist loudly that better times are just around the corner, as times get steadily worse. Among those who recognize that something’s wrong, one widely accepted viewpoint holds that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will shortly solve all our problems, and therefore we don’t have to change the way we live. Another, equally popular, insists that total human extinction is scarcely a decade away, and therefore we don’t have to change the way we live. Most people who worry about the future accept one or the other claim, while the last chance for meaningful systemic change slips silently away.
A hundred years from now:
It has been a difficult century. After more than a dozen major wars, three bad pandemics, widespread famines, and steep worldwide declines in public health and civil order, human population is down to 3 billion and falling. Sea level is up ten meters and rising fast as the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps disintegrate; fossil fuel production ground to a halt decades earlier as the last economically producible reserves were exhausted, and most proposed alternatives turned out to be unaffordable in the absence of the sort of cheap, abundant, highly concentrated energy only fossil fuels can provide. Cornucopians still insist that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will save us any day now, and their opponents still insist that human extinction is imminent, but most people are too busy trying to survive to listen to either group.
A thousand years from now:
The Earth is without ice caps and glaciers for the first time in twenty million years or so, and sea level has gone up more than a hundred meters worldwide; much of the world has a tropical climate, as it did 50 million years earlier. Human population is 100 million, up from half that figure at the bottom of the bitter dark age now passing into memory. Only a few scholars have any idea what the words “fusion power,” “artificial intelligence,” and “interstellar migration” once meant, and though there are still people insisting that the end of the world will arrive any day now, their arguments now generally rely more overtly on theology than before. New civilizations are rising in various corners of the world, combining legacy technologies with their own unique cultural forms. The one thing they all have in common is that the technological society of a millennium before is their idea of evil incarnate.
Ten thousand years from now:
The rise in global temperature has shut down the thermohaline circulation and launched an oceanic anoxic event, the planet’s normal negative feedback process when carbon dioxide levels get out of hand. Today’s industrial civilization is a dim memory from the mostly forgotten past, as far removed from this time as the Neolithic Revolution is from ours; believers in most traditional religions declare piously that the climate changes of the last ten millennia are the results of human misbehavior, while rationalists insist that this is all superstition and the climate changes have perfectly natural causes. As the anoxic oceans draw carbon out of the biosphere and entomb it in sediments on the sea floor, the climate begins a gradual cooling—a process which helps push humanity’s sixth global civilization into its terminal decline.
A hundred thousand years from now:
Carbon dioxide levels drop below preindustrial levels as the oceanic anoxic event finishes its work, and the complex feedback loops that govern Earth’s climate shift again: the thermohaline circulation restarts, triggering another round of climatic changes. Humanity’s seventy-ninth global civilization flourishes and begins its slow decline as the disruptions set in motion by a long-forgotten industrial age are drowned out by an older climatic cycle. The scholars of that civilization are thrilled by the notions of fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration; they have no idea that we dreamed the same dreams before them, being further in our future than the Neanderthals are in our past, but they will have no more luck achieving those dreams than we did.
A million years from now:
The Earth is in an ice age; great ice sheets cover much of the northern hemisphere and spread from mountain ranges all over the world, and sea level is 150 meters lower than today. To the people living at this time, who have never known anything else, this seems perfectly normal. Metals have become rare geological specimens—for millennia now, most human societies have used renewable ceramic-bioplastic composites instead—and the very existence of fossil fuels has long since been forgotten. The 664th global human civilization is at its peak, lofting aerostat towns into the skies and building great floating cities on the seas; its long afternoon will eventually draw to an end after scores of generations, and when it falls, other civilizations will rise in its place.
Ten million years from now:
The long glacial epoch that began in the Pleistocene has finally ended, and the Earth is returning to its more usual status as a steamy jungle planet. This latest set of changes proves to be just that little bit too much for humanity. No fewer than 8,639 global civilizations have risen and fallen over the last ten million years, each with its own unique sciences, technologies, arts, literatures, philosophies, and ways of thinking about the cosmos; the shortest-lived lasted for less than a century before blowing itself to smithereens, while the longest-lasting endured for eight millennia before finally winding down.
All that is over now. There are still relict populations of human beings in Antarctica and a few island chains, and another million years will pass before cascading climatic and ecological changes finally push the last of them over the brink into extinction. Meanwhile, in the tropical forests of what is now southern Siberia, the descendants of raccoons who crossed the Bering land bridge during the last great ice age are proliferating rapidly, expanding into empty ecological niches once filled by the larger primates. In another thirty million years or so, their descendants will come down from the trees.
One hundred million years from now:
Retro-rockets fire and fall silent as the ungainly craft settles down on the surface of the Moon. After feverish final checks, the hatch is opened, and two figures descend onto the lunar surface. They are bipeds, but not even remotely human; instead, they belong to Earth’s third intelligent species. They are distantly descended from the crows of our time, though they look no more like crows than you look like the tree shrews of the middle Cretaceous. Since you have a larynx rather than a syrinx, you can’t even begin to pronounce what they call themselves, so we’ll call them corvins.
Earth’s second intelligent species, whom we’ll call cyons after their raccoon ancestors, are long gone. They lasted a little more than eight million years before the changes of an unstable planet sent them down the long road to extinction; they never got that deeply into technology, though their political institutions made the most sophisticated human equivalents look embarrassingly crude. The corvins are another matter. Some twist of inherited psychology left them with a passion for heights and upward movement; they worked out the basic principles of the hot air balloon before they got around to inventing the wheel, and balloons, gliders, and corvin-carrying kites play much the same roles in their earliest epic literature that horses and chariots play in ours.
As corvin societies evolved more complex technologies, eyes gazed upwards from soaring tower-cities at the moon, the perch of perches set high above the world. All that was needed to make those dreams a reality was petroleum, and a hundred million years is more than enough time for the Earth to restock her petroleum reserves—especially if that period starts off with an oceanic anoxic event that stashes gigatons of carbon in marine sediments. Thus it was inevitable that, sooner or later, the strongest of the great corvin kith-assemblies would devote its talents and wealth to the task of reaching the moon.
The universe has a surprise in store for the corvins, though. Their first moon landing included among its goals the investigation of some odd surface features, too small to be seen clearly by Earth-based equipment. That first lander thus set down on a flat lunar plain that, a very long time ago, was called the Sea of Tranquillity, and so it was that the stunned corvin astronauts found themselves facing the unmistakable remains of a spacecraft that arrived on the moon in the unimaginably distant past.
A few equivocal traces buried in terrestrial sediments had suggested already to corvin loremasters that another intelligent species might have lived on the Earth before them, though the theory was dismissed by most as wild speculation. The scattered remnants on the Moon confirmed them, and made it hard for even the most optimistic corvins to embrace the notion that some providence guaranteed the survival of intelligent species. The curious markings on some of the remains, which some loremasters suggested might be a mode of visual communication, resisted all attempts at decipherment, and very little was ever learnt for certain about the enigmatic ancient species that left its mark on the Moon.
Even so, it will be suggested long afterwards that the stark warning embodied in those long-abandoned spacecraft played an important role in convincing corvin societies to rein in the extravagant use of petroleum and other nonrenewable resources, though it also inspired hugely expensive and ultimately futile attempts to achieve interstellar migration—for some reason the corbins never got into the quest for fusion power or artificial intelligence. One way or another, though, the corvins turned out to be the most enduring of Earth’s intelligent species, and more than 28 million years passed before their day finally ended.
One billion years from now:
The Earth is old and mostly desert, and a significant fraction of its total crust is made up of the remains of bygone civilizations. The increasing heat of the Sun as it proceeds through its own life cycle, and the ongoing loss of volatile molecules from the upper atmosphere into space, have reduced the seas to scattered, salty basins amid great sandy wastes. Only near the north and south poles does vegetation flourish, and with it the corbicules, Earth’s eleventh and last intelligent species. Their ancestors in our time are an invasive species of freshwater clam. (Don’t laugh; a billion years ago your ancestors were still trying to work out the details of multicellularity.)
The corbicules have the same highly practical limb structure as the rest of their subphylum: six stumpy podicles for walking, two muscular dorsal tentacles for gross manipulations and two slender buccal tentacles by the mouth for fine manipulations. They spend most of their time in sprawling underground city-complexes, venturing to the surface to harvest vegetation to feed the subterranean metafungal gardens that provide them with nourishment. By some combination of luck and a broad general tendency toward cephalization common to many evolutionary lineages, Earth’s last intelligent species is also its most intellectually gifted; hatchlings barely out of creche are given fun little logic problems such as Fermat’s last theorem for their amusement, and a large majority of adult corbicules are involved in one or another field of intellectual endeavor. Being patient, long-lived, and not greatly addicted to collective stupidities, they have gone very far indeed.
Some eight thousand years back, a circle of radical young corbicule thinkers proposed the project of working out all the physical laws of the cosmos, starting from first principles. So unprecedented a suggestion sparked countless debates, publications, ceremonial dances, and professional duels in which elderly scholars killed themselves in order to cast unbearable opprobrium on their rivals. Still, it was far too delectable an intellectual challenge to be left unanswered, and the work has proceeded ever since. In the course of their researches, without placing any great importance on the fact, the best minds among the corbicules have proved conclusively that nuclear fusion, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration were never practical options in the first place.
Being patient, long-lived, and not greatly addicted to collective stupidities, the corbicules have long since understood and accepted their eventual fate. In another six million years, as the Sun expands and the Earth’s surface temperature rises, the last surface vegetation will perish and the corbicules will go extinct; in another ninety million years, the last multicellular life forms will die out; in another two hundred million years, the last seas will boil, and Earth’s biosphere, nearing the end of its long, long life, will nestle down into the deepest crevices of its ancient, rocky world and drift into a final sleep.
Ten billion years from now:
Earth is gone. It had a splendid funeral; its body plunged into stellar fire as the Sun reached its red giant stage and expanded out to the orbit of Mars, and its ashes were flung outwards into interstellar space with the first great helium flash that marked the beginning of the Sun’s descent toward its destiny. Two billion years later, the gas- and dust-rich shockwave from that flash plowed into a mass of interstellar dust dozens of light-years away from the Sun’s pale corpse, and kickstarted one of the great transformative processes of the cosmos.
Billions more years have passed since that collision. A yellow-orange K-2 star burns cheerily in the midst of six planets and two asteroid belts. The second planet has a surface temperature between the freezing and boiling points of water, and a sufficiently rich assortment of elements to set another of the great transformative processes of the cosmos into motion. Now, in one spot on the surface of this world, rising up past bulbous purplish things that don’t look anything like trees but fill the same broad ecological function, there is a crag of black rock. On top of that crag, a creature sits looking at the stars, fanning its lunules with its sagittal crest and waving its pedipalps meditatively back and forth. It is one of the first members of its world’s first intelligent species, and it is—for the first time ever on that world—considering the stars and wondering if other beings might live out there among them.
301 comments:
9/4/13, 8:17 PM
GuRan said...
I might suggest adjusting some of the mathematics though, as 828,639 global civilisations in 10 million years is almost one every 10 years...
Cheers,
Graeme
9/4/13, 8:30 PM
Tom Bannister said...
I'm also just wondering (and please correct me if I'm off here) if your hinting at some kind of intelligent species existing on earth before humans? Cheers
9/4/13, 8:33 PM
wall0159 said...
Little nitpick, I'd doubt that any human artefacts would remain on the moon after 100 million years, due to asteroid bombardment. One never knows though!
I find the reuse of matter quite a lovely thought (ashes to ashes), but I think this kind of big-picture approach might drive some people to nihilism. That is a pity.
9/4/13, 8:35 PM
Andy Brown said...
9/4/13, 8:39 PM
Jo said...
As a student of history I see why your projected civilisations are cyclical in their stupidity for a very long time. Humans seem to find it so very hard to learn from what has gone before, or even to remember what happened a generation ago.
I have been experimenting recently with making the perfect cup of tea. In a teapot, with loose-leaf tea, just like granny did. But granny used teabags from her middle years, and now is gone, and everyone else I know uses teabags too.
I read all the tea making guides, but could not get it right, until with the help of the internet a properly brought up Brit informed me that you have to STIR THE POT before you pour. Now that tiny but significant detail was left out of all the written instructions I could find.
It's only a cup of tea, but it has only taken one and a half generations for that knowledge to be lost in my family.
It kills me to think of how much really important human knowledge has been lost over the millenia due to wars, technological 'advances', plague, famine, pestilence, genocide, and human beings just plain not paying attention.
I loved your story, and the thought of wonderful 'others' finding traces of us in the far future, but I could just kick humankind right now.
9/4/13, 8:53 PM
John Michael Greer said...
GuRan, of course you're quite correct -- should have been 8,639, of course.
Tom, thank you. In this version of the future, though, we're the first of the eleven intelligent species of Earth. Mind you, if pressed, I'd suggest that we're only the first of the technological species of Earth; there's no particular necessity for sentience always to coexist with tool use, and there's at least some evidence that dolphins are as smart as we are.
Wall, the side of the moon facing Earth has had very limited impacts for the last couple of billion years, thus the survival of very ancient features such as maria; that was the basis for my assumption that at least some human artifacts would still be around.
Andy, yes, I had Stapleton in mind while writing this! Still, I was mostly thinking of Star Maker, and this is in some ways composed in opposition to the theogenesis theme of that book.
9/4/13, 8:58 PM
Thijs Goverde said...
I sort of prefer Kurt Vonnegut's idea of an island population of humans remaining (in the Galapagos islands, no less!), and quietly evolving into a far less intelligent species (a kind of seal) because they have no further need for intelligence.
Of course, I'm aware the peculiar evolutionary coincidence we call 'intelligence' may arise more than once - I'm not arrogant enough to think we're that unique a species - but three times in a hundred million years? When we took over 60 million to get there, from a kind of squirrely little critter? Having intelligence come that thick and fast seems only possible if one postulates that evolution tends to lead to intelligence - a notion I consider rather hubristic (if that's a word(which it isn't)).
As for the choice in the closing paragraph - I'm firmly in the 'leaves me cold' camp. I'll certainly tune in next week, to find out the implications of that choice!
9/4/13, 9:04 PM
Enrique said...
Your future scenario reminds me somewhat of early 20th century pulp fiction writers like HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, who seemed to take it for granted that we are not the first intelligent species to walk (or swim) the Earth, and almost certainly not the last. In fact, I remember not all that long ago that you had commented that you strongly suspected that we are not the first sentient species to have existed on planet Earth and that we might not be the only sentient species living on Earth right now.
Likewise, it’s very likely that the early civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Peru, China, India and so on were not the first civilizations either. There is pretty good circumstantial evidence that there were lost civilizations during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, and that legends such as those about Atlantis are probably based on dim memories of such long-dead cultures. Such civilizations would have been destroyed during the global ecological crisis, seismic disasters, floods and climate shifts that accompanied the end of the last glaciation. I read your book on Atlantis and I think you made a very good case that at least one such civilization existed long before the earliest documented civilizations.
There has also been some very interesting speculation about possible pre-human civilizations as well. One of the more interesting and controversial scenarios has been sketched out by Mike Magee, a retired British civil servant. He believes there was a species of intelligent dinosaurs that existed during the late Cretaceous. I might add that he is not the first to suggest this idea either. I have some serious doubts about his arguments and the evidence that he claims to have found, but it does make for a very interesting “what if”. On the other hand, what traces will our civilization leave after 65 million years, and how will such traces be interpreted if any remain?
http://askwhy.co.uk/anthroposaurus/index.php
JR Mooneyham has also had some interesting speculations about pre-human and early human civilizations as well, although unlike Magee, he labels his strictly as speculative and makes no assertions that he believes these civilizations actually existed.
http://www.jmooneyham.com/lost-civilization-kerguelen.html#section49
http://www.jmooneyham.com/atlantis-1.html#section22
9/4/13, 9:04 PM
John Michael Greer said...
9/4/13, 9:05 PM
Andy Brown said...
9/4/13, 9:07 PM
. josé . said...
And looking forward to next week's interpretation. :)
9/4/13, 9:13 PM
GuRan said...
You must stir the pot by rotating it three times clockwise (anti-clockwise if you're in the southern hemisphere ;-)
9/4/13, 9:13 PM
. josé . said...
9/4/13, 9:18 PM
onething said...
By the way, bee balm flowers make a lovely additive to tea.
9/4/13, 9:38 PM
BrightSpark said...
I guess what way you take a revelation such as this - and yes it's a revelation, even if most people knew it already and could have worked it out given the right inspiration.
The way I take this is as a direct relevation of impermanence, but even then, there's probably a consciousness and process at the core of it, represented by that distant atom transfer. Something survives, transfers, and has a physical connection, even beyond a galaxy. That might be the only form of interstellar transfer that actually works, who knows...
What would be interesting to that is to take it further to either the heat death of the universe or any great contraction and subsequent big bang, given known physics and cosmology, and then to see what survives, or at what connects on a physical level. No doubt something as well!
Tom, I'd add the kea - the mountain parrot of New Zealand to that list, along with dolphins and whales too.
9/4/13, 9:46 PM
Ray Wharton said...
There are biological decedents of humanity for 102334155 years, but the larger share of that is as the rather less mindful side of a symbiosis with a decedent of the humble oyster mushroom. The massive multi-generational fungi have minds of extreme sophistication and patience, but their day to day life consists mostly of excreting protein rich mater and breeding harvest-apes to gather carbohydrate rich foods from a wide variety of regional ecosystems. War is common, but rarely lethal (to the fungi). A deep aesthetic sense of [untranslatable, but it involves the appreciation of the relationships between complex arrangements of organic chemicals, the shape of foot paths made by harvest-apes, and the songs of trees.]. This phase ends after a crisis emerges from consequences of "over domestication" of the mushroom's artisan ecosystems is exploited by a parasitic fungi-phage fern.
9/4/13, 10:02 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Enrique, fascinating -- I hadn't heard about the "anthroposaurus" hypothesis. As for high human cultures in the late Ice Age, granted, but I didn't want to get the point of the scenario tangled up with that incendiary issue...
Andy, oh, granted. I wasn't a great fan of Stapleton myself, back in the day.
Jose, stay tuned! As for tea, no argument there -- I tend toward white teas before breakfast, but after that, depends on what the very pleasant local tea shop has gotten in most recently, and never in a bag.
Onething, your husband is quite correct; I think they throw in the occasional dead cockroach to add flavor.
BrightSpark, granted! Still, I remain an agnostic when it comes to the big bang and other far-end cosmological theories. I can't shake the suspicion that five hundred years from now, they'll have about the same status that Ptolemaic epicycles have now.
9/4/13, 10:08 PM
John Michael Greer said...
9/4/13, 10:12 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
You have the knack of storytelling. I was enthralled.
By the way, your story indicates to me that we do achieve interstellar migration, but perhaps not as we know it (sorry about the really dodgy Star Trek pun).
I accept my ultimate fate and also the uncertainty about not knowing when it will occur. It motivates me to work and enjoy today, but also to keep an eye on the future.
Top work.
Chris
9/4/13, 10:19 PM
Avery said...
9/4/13, 10:34 PM
Ray Wharton said...
As for base systems, the Fibonacci sequence is a bit sacred in my thinking, if for no better reason than it is a tool I deliberately use to distinguish my thinking, though from it I have also learned alot about how picking scales for a story (of time or space) has a powerful effect on how the ideas are approached.
On another note, at first blush I thought your 10 year and 100 year time lines seemed a bit... on the uneventful side. Upon a little bit more reflection I thought that maybe it was because on a global scale the next chunk of time will not be as dramatic as it will seem from inside the perspective of some countries' decline.
9/4/13, 10:40 PM
Thomas Daulton said...
Months ago, I linked the Ugo Bardi essay in one of my comments here, but your reply indicated you were already familiar with it. I've been wondering for months if you would ever get back to responding to the Bardi article, and you didn't disappoint. I love the idea of other human civilizations that are so alien from us that they might as well be extraterrestrials, and also I love the idea of animals evolving into intelligent species (One of my favorite books is David Brin's _Startide Rising_, about intelligent spacefaring dolphins, although in that case the Uplift to intelligence was the result of human genetic engineering. Yeah, yeah, Brin's arrogance to imagine that dolphins aren't already as intelligent as they need to be, I'm sure you'll reply. I liked the book anyway, the dolphin characters were memorable.)
Reading speculations like these always makes me wonder how many human and non-human civilizations might have arisen in prehistory that we simply can't know about. 4.5 Billion years is a long time, it's impossible to prove that humans or non-humans _didn't_ have some sort of civilization before the history that we know.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out the Star Trek Voyager episode, "Distant Origin". Star Trek Voyager was probably the weakest of all the Star Trek series, but this episode was certainly one of its best. It postulates that intelligent Hadrosaurs achieved a technological civilization and managed to migrate off the Earth just before the Chicxulub meteor doomed the rest of their kin. The characters postulate that geological subduction erased all trace of the dinosaur civilization before Man even evolved. The Hadrosaurs have a basically humanlike (Star Trek type) civilization, but they're steeped in repressive religious dogma which bears some resemblance to the civil religions you've been discussing here. It's rare that Star Trek even mentions religion, so this was an interesting twist. I know you've said you don't care much for Star Trek, but if you were going to watch one episode, that'd be one you might actually like.
It opens with the wonderful conceit of watching dinosaur archaeologists excavate a _human_ skeleton which the Star Trek crew had left behind on a desert planet in a prior episode...! ;)
9/4/13, 11:00 PM
Repent said...
I've often thought that human intellegence will push other animals towards intellegence, simply to compete and adapt to survive. In fact, we ARE selecting for intellegence. There are already two compelling examples; racoons (as you suggested):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=YoVwD8ZNNyg#t=1
And octopuses, (similar to your clam statement):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9kuAiuXezIU#t=0
(Excellent post as always!
9/4/13, 11:06 PM
Stuart Jeffery said...
Thank you for a really great piece JMG.
9/4/13, 11:32 PM
Stonymeadow said...
-----
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/loren-eiseley/50983
While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. “He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.
Loren Eiseley (1907 - 1977)
-----
9/4/13, 11:56 PM
Somewhatstunned said...
:)
9/5/13, 12:10 AM
k-dog said...
You inspired me to make my own reading of the tea leaves. I enjoyed yours thouroghly.
Ten years from now:
A true doom and gloomer would take serious issue with your ten years from now business as usual continues scenario. You are close to what could happen but the nexus of fate could spin in other directions enrtirely, Black Swan style. I say close because somebody familiar with the twentieth century environmental movements has to be surprised at how little progress has been made changing attitudes and lifestyles and how committed leaders are to preventing any change in the status-quo. Extrapolating the existing scenario into the future is very reasonable except that the last chance for meaningful systemic change is slipping silently away right now.
A hundred years from now:
"Cornucopians still insist that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will save us any day now, and their opponents still insist that human extinction is imminent."
I share your despair over the lack of human social evolution but I'll disagree. Sea level up ten meters and human population down to 3 billion will leave any remaining cornucopians hanging from trees. People a hundred years from now will have entirely new ways of misperceiving the world. Perhaps looking at the condition of the American Indian or other not so lucky minorities can hint at what the future may bring.
A thousand years from now:
Men in a thousand years will not think the technological society of a millennium before is their idea of evil incarnate. If human memory were that good we'd not have the problems we do now. A thousand years in the future is impossible to predict. I fear it may come down to who has the good King and who suffers under the despot. A religion or cult may exist dedicated to the mindless unquestioned acceptance of ignorance and the rejection of all manner of intellectual activity. Science literature and learning will be blamed for man's fall and not man's misuse of them. Agriculture plantations and an aristocracy carry civilization on as if the serfdom of 17th century Russia had carried through the ages unchanged. Human population is 100 million.
Ten thousand years from now:
The complex feedback loops that govern Earth’s climate have returned the climate to normal. Humanity may have progressed to a utopia after seven thousand years of stable social evolution. Another possibility is that agriculture plantations and an aristocracy carry civilization on as if the serfdom of 17th century Russia had carried through the ages. Human population is 300 million.
9/5/13, 12:14 AM
k-dog said...
A hundred thousand years from now:
Evolution has restored some of the diversity lost by twentieth and twenty-first century species extinction. Humans have evolved into two sub-species both of whom are inferior in mental capability to that of present man. One species descends from the aristocracy and are known for exceptional cruelty. Another branch of man descendants from the serf and is exceptionally docile. Rulers all of whom are tall stand a full foot taller than slaves of whom all are short. Offspring produced from mixing the two subspecies are killed at birth.
A million years from now:
Man is extinct. Separation into two evolutionary paths ruined the ability of society to adapt to catastrophic events. Humans evolved into a society that was suitable to specific climatic conditions and like many species which seal their doom by overspecialisation so has the overspecialisation into two subspecies doomed man.
Ten million years from now:
A species of ground squirrel has learned a primitive form of agriculture and their brains are getting bigger as the generations pass.
One hundred million years from now:
The ground squirrels have evolved a stable society and are intelligent. They have literature and art but no science. They have the intelligence for science but lack the temperament. Their emotions desires and drive are nothing like what humans were like and have made a stable sustainable society possible but they have also prevented further social or intellectual development. Intellectual activity slowly evolves but never goes beyond refinement of what has already been achieved. A characteristic of this sustainability is that the social standing of the ground squirrels is based on the equality of all members in their society.
One billion years from now:
The inevitable change to a red giant has enlarged the still yellow sun so that all life on earth is in decline. Intelligent life has left. The ground squirrels became extinct but not before the decline began. The squirrels filled the earth's intelligent niche and prevented the evolution of other species into becoming sentient beings.
Life on earth never reached the stars.
And after all this how can I not put down a link to my own blog. http://chasingthesquirrel.blogspot.com/
9/5/13, 12:16 AM
kollapsnik said...
9/5/13, 1:06 AM
Robin Datta said...
There are narratives of cyclical manifesting, manifest and de-manifesting including the one about Pralaya, the longest of the cycles being 311 trillion years.
9/5/13, 1:51 AM
Matchstick Warrior said...
Nature continues to move at its own pace, cycling and recycling, and it is our fossil fuel addiction that has messed about slightly with that delicately balanced cycle, which will be to our cost.
9/5/13, 2:35 AM
Matt said...
9/5/13, 2:37 AM
Spanish fly said...
Oh my god!
I am a very tough man, but this post has made me cry...in a mood of cosmic sadness and greatness.
It's no the typical mental masturbation about apocalptical end of humans (or technological perpetuation), but it's also a thrilling topic: our own extinction and new self-conscious animals in a far future; and of course the end of this planet.
Vanity of vanities!
9/5/13, 2:40 AM
Robo said...
9/5/13, 2:54 AM
Unknown said...
The corvids will have a longer trip to the Moon one hundred million years from now. I guess once you reach escape velocity, that's of no great importance.
As the Moon's orbit enlarges, the stabilizing effect of lunar gravitation on the Earth's axial tilt will weaken. A likely result will be more frequent and more extreme climate change, which will shorten the life span of future civilizations and species.
I'm glad you left space for the cephalopods to have a go at being the smart ones. Lizards, especially crocodilians and the descendents of monitor lizards, might have one more chance in the next long warm period.
9/5/13, 3:02 AM
Matthew Lindquist said...
What interests me the most about your take on this, however, is the extinction you posited. Do you really think that we'll go the way of the wooly mammoth(or polar bear?), hopelessly hyper-adapted to a particular ecosystem and washed out with it? I had a thought recently that humanity might diverge into multiple species, as an outgrowth of cultural adaptation to regional ecologies, similar to how we evolved darker/lighter skin for hotter/cooler climates, etc. Do you think that's possible too? While I understand that no species lasts forever, I would love to hear your model for how you chose that particular scenario for extinction.
Also, sorry if I blundered through some terrible misunderstandings of ecology or evolution/extinction- I am somewhat new to this!
Great read, again. Many thanks!
9/5/13, 3:13 AM
Martin Larner said...
As I understood it, the basis for a lot of your work is that a Global Civilisation would not be possible in the absence of a cheap and abundant source of concentrated energy, so it would be unlikely that such a civilisation could exist once those sources have depleted.
I'd envisage a more medieval type of civilisation or those of earlier ones such as the Romans, Mongols or Babylonians once the memory of todays technology, along with the energy to produce it have become myths or forgotten entirely. I'd expect such civilisations to be much more localised and develop at different rates, unaware of each others existence.
During this period before petroleum sources are replenished by the Earths own processes, we would be forced to live off our energy 'income' rather than 'inheritance' as I believe you have previously stated.
9/5/13, 3:18 AM
Phil Harris said...
Even in my mother's day there were those who could make a good cup of tea, and those who couldn't. ;)
best
Phil H
PS Ugo does get our attention; mine as well as yours. His imagination recently seems to look back from a post-Dark Age point of view (as in your guess this post) Ugo: "Evil walks the Earth " http://thefrogthatjumpedout.blogspot.it/2013/08/evil-walks-earth.html
Quote "The wanton destruction of everything - human and non human - under a pervasive blanket of indifference can only be described as evil walking the Earth."
9/5/13, 3:24 AM
Unknown said...
May your New Year be round and sweet.
I've been rereading some of the comments on past chapters of Stars Reach. That led me to a few thoughts that it is late to post over there, and I didn't expect them to ever be on topic here. But this week they sort of are.
Thought number one is about the various attempts to calculate the likelihood of earthlike intelligent life evolving elsewhere in the galaxy. Usually they define "earthlike planet" as rocky, similar mass to Earth, orbiting within a similar temperature range. Sometimes they specify watery oceans.
None of these formulae take into account that life didn't evolve just on planet Earth, or by getting a start on Mars and arriving here on meteorites. Local life evolved in a binary system of Earth-plus-Moon.
The gravitational field of our unusually massive satellite produces ocean tides, which are useful. Even more important, (according to a documentary I watched on TV; correct me if I'm misinformed), the Moon's gravity keeps the Earth's axis of rotation at IIRC an angle of roughly 23 degrees to the ecliptic. The exact angle isn't important, but the stability is. Axial tilt is a major factor determining seasonal changes in temperature. Whatever temperature range an organism evolved to live in is the range it needs. Abrupt changes are lethal.
Our massive satellite was torn out of the planet by a cosmic hit-and-run. What are the odds of that happening to earthlike planets in other solar systems, and happening at the right time in the planet's geological development? With all the earth-sized planets we think are out there, it is likely to have happened more than once, but it must be fairly rare. Calculations for frequency of earthlike planets that don't take the Moon into account are orders of magnitude too large.
Some folk traditions and pagan religions see the Moon as the source or the governor of earthly fertility. Though we know it to be an airless barren rock, that may well be true.
9/5/13, 3:46 AM
Tripp said...
http://smallbatchgarden.blogspot.com/2013/09/rabbit-powered-lawn.html
Forgive me for pimping my blog so brazenly in your space, JMG. And wonderful piece this week!
Cheers.
9/5/13, 3:56 AM
ChemEng said...
Your comment reminded me of my father’s experience with tea bags. He was English of the WWII generation so had drunk tea all his life. On his first trip to the United States he came across tea bags for the first time. He tried to make a pot of tea but put the whole tea bag, paper wrapping and all, into the pot. Having said which, loose tea leaves are a nuisance. Many’s the time that I have drunk too deeply of a cup of tea and swallowed the leaves. (But I do remember by grandmother swirling the tea before pouring it — I never knew why.)
Regarding learning from previous generations, I am doing serious vegetable gardening this year. It has generally gone well (although I descend into the use of bad language when the topic of squirrels comes up). Rather than trying to learn from others this year I have followed the approach of that great American philosopher, Yogi Berra, who said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” Based on my hands-on experience I will be more ready to read books and carry out Internet research next year.
Regarding the overall post, I wonder if future intelligent species will have a sense of ethics — if they will distinguish right from wrong.
9/5/13, 4:14 AM
Yupped said...
I read it while drinking my morning cup of Tulsi/Lavender tea, with a little honey. My current favorite. A one-cup tea infuser makes it easy to brew in small quantities.
9/5/13, 4:22 AM
Ugo Bardi said...
Maybe we'll have a chance to discuss billion years long scenario more in detail at some moment
9/5/13, 4:37 AM
marlena13 said...
9/5/13, 4:57 AM
Liquid Paradigm said...
This also makes me step back from a certain desperate rage about our collective choices that I've not been able to shake loose (it's done me no good, personally). While I still feel somewhat frustrated and sad about our current state, a distinct tone of, pity?, asserts itself in the background, as if once free of the assumption that We Are The Universe's Last, Best Hope For Greatness (As We Define It), I can relax a bit and stop taking myself quite so seriously.
As to my final reaction? There's a certain small and natural dread at the prospect of death, but I mostly found myself feeling relief and a bit of excitement. The "work on myself" issue suddenly becomes a great deal more than a self-indulgent, existentially isolated and pointless exercise. This dovetails nicely with a talk on death I recently heard from Kristoffer Hughes. Appropriate to the coming of Autumn.
Which itself suddenly leads to a bunch of other realisations as I type. Okay, I'll quit blathering via keyboard and go let my mind blow some more.
Many thanks. :)
9/5/13, 5:01 AM
Simon Pieman said...
The repetitive amnesia of the cosmos - that after 10 billion years it hasn't managed to do anything other than create a few variations on humans no matter how different their central nervous systems may be. And even when this planet is over, evolution will continue to carry out the same autopilot script somewhere else with more superficial variations...until maybe this entire universe contracts and then the whole thing starts up again with more blind variations in nervous systems and deluded dreams of cold fusion and interstellar travel dreamt of by other creatures with different sets of ligaments. Occasionally one of them wises up - just around the time their entire planet is vaporised.
The total lack of any species that manages to foster intelligence beyond just fancy tool making. None that discover ways to expand into the multidimensionality of the universe (don't ask me how they'd do that or what it really means I'm just clutching at anything here..)
10 billion years and not even the hint of a fundamentally different template from marginally self aware nervous systems?? Humans are possibly the first technological intelligence to appear on the planet. No other types of unfathomable intelligences to come after that??
Yes Dolphins are a good start but they still seem to mostly use their intelligence to kill fish. I was romantically hoping for..more.
Its probably just my repressed devotion to the religion of progress manifesting in a cosmological guise though!
9/5/13, 5:12 AM
Dagnarus said...
As to your final question. I am conflicted. In the end, at this time I feel like I must answer "all of the above".
9/5/13, 5:14 AM
YJV said...
I find hints of similarity between your views and that of Hindu Cosmology (which I believe in). As I have heard you mention, you know about the large cosmological cycles of birth and death of planets and the continual creation and extinction of human (or in your view, just intelligent organism) civilisation.
This essay was a very interesting and relatable insight.
YJV
9/5/13, 5:36 AM
Daniel Banker said...
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her. Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she haw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion."
9/5/13, 5:40 AM
Kevin May said...
Your question at the end of the post, "Does it leave you cold?"... yes it does. And I would suggest it leaves many people cold because it's such a reasonable narrative. In fact it's riddled with reason. And reason is a cold faculty. Here it allows us to project far into the future, to imagine not only future generations of us but future intelligent species. What a ride! But how can we possibly have an emotional relationship with these future kin?
How strange that we are both emotional and reasonable beings. The two don't always work very well together do they?
I'm not saying I want a warm fuzzy story next (although I do enjoy those too), but I am interested on how we can go from nihilism to caring.
9/5/13, 6:43 AM
William Hunter Duncan said...
WHD
9/5/13, 6:52 AM
Renaissance Man said...
I wonder how reincarnation would work with this scenario?
9/5/13, 7:04 AM
Justin Patrick Moore said...
What forms of magic do you think these future species will be involved in? I know that's not the main theme of this blog... but sometimes I wish it were.
9/5/13, 7:04 AM
Joy said...
Also...(this isn't directly related to this week's topic, but it fits in with your thoughts on the Myth of Progress, and I'd best post it before I forget about it or lose the link); in 1978 eight "respected intellectuals", including Isaac Asimov, Ram Dass, James Michener, and Ashley Montegu, were asked for their ideas on a Utopian society.
The People’s Almanac’s Symposium on Utopias: Eight Respected Intellectuals Describe Their Ultimate Utopias, and Sound Like Humiliating Caricatures of Themselves.
http://tinyurl.com/my6w6ot
9/5/13, 7:09 AM
jim said...
9/5/13, 7:19 AM
Maria said...
In answer to your question, I found the idea of bits of my brain matter making up part of the brain matter of a creature on a distant planet utterly consoling. As if the cells that at the moment make up "me" are on some grand adventure that I can' begin to comprehend and that isn't even halfway through yet. I'm picturing the creature saying "I have been a drop in a shower; I have been a sword in the hand; I have been a middle-aged woman with and encyclopedic knowledge of show tunes..." ;)
Of course, I'm a dreamy, myth- and literature-loving sort, so I don't know how representative a sample I am.
9/5/13, 7:32 AM
Ian said...
Science fiction is well-used for this sort of intellectual magnification. This is definitely one of the more cheerful go rounds the prickly pear I have read :-).
9/5/13, 7:32 AM
con-science said...
I just have one piece of criticism - in your story, you equate human with civilization, intelligence with civilization. Don't forget that humans inhabited this planet for 3 million years before they started reaching for the stars and building pyramids. The story of their lives is reduced by our cultural mythology (what you describe as the religion of progress) to nothing happening. Maybe they were enacting a different story, not one about conquest, but one about belonging to the world.
Another point about civilization is that most civilizations on this planet have been simply abandoned by its people. We will be the first that will end because we run out of resources (one was destroyed by us) So the societal organization of a future intelligent species may be nothing like a civilization.
9/5/13, 7:36 AM
trippticket said...
I'm just curious as to whether you've perhaps gotten any first-hand glimpses of the future, maybe even the distant future, through dreams, revelation, vision quest, etc?
You could answer this (and not post it) offline if you prefer! Especially if the answer is juicy... I'm open to some pretty off-beat knowledge gathering techniques these days.
To reach me you can go to my blog link that I included in my first comment and scroll down to my contact information.
Best,
Tripp
9/5/13, 7:46 AM
david k said...
9/5/13, 7:53 AM
William Church said...
But as to sapience? Maybe I read Brin's Startide Rising and Uplift War at too tender of an age. I am open to the thought of other species attaining intelligence and sapience but am far from sure that evolution can do so with regularity. We may very well be the only self aware and intelligent species in the universe. We may be the only one that has ever existed. Anywhere.
Humbling and ironic at the same time considering the issues we now face.
Will
9/5/13, 7:55 AM
ganv said...
This is a wonderful, creative, and thought provoking essay. One of the great mysteries is how 'progressive' evolution really is. It is very hard to know if intelligence with any similarity to ours is somehow nearly as much complexity as our environmental niche (solar system) can support. Or whether the development of the first (known) intelligence capable of figuring out the basic principles of how the universe works will lead to much more powerful intelligence. The question of whether we ever figure out intelligence to the level of being able to significantly modify or 'improve' it is really one of the great unknowns of the future. I suspect the evolution of new kinds of intelligence from our machines is more likely than your predictions suggest. It is easy to debunk 'singularity' eschatological ideas, but the possibility of machines becoming able to do practical problem solving is harder to dismiss. I fully agree that Bardi's intelligence is unreasonably attached to utopian human values. The future of intelligence is fraught with unpredictable peril.
9/5/13, 7:58 AM
Nano said...
It's such a wonderful dance.
Forever and ever been part of whatever.
Because there is no end of time.
Dance the dance of Maya chacha CHA!
I wonder what their magick will look like
9/5/13, 8:07 AM
peacegarden said...
The question leaves me halfway between intrigued and consoled.
Gail
9/5/13, 8:10 AM
Mike R said...
What are your beliefs (or lack thereof) about reincarnation, if you're willing to share them with your audience? I'm agnostic about it myself, but this post got me thinking about the concept.
9/5/13, 8:11 AM
Zach said...
I won't contribute to the continuing abuse of the word "epic," so I'll instead say that that was lyrical. :) Nicely done.
It seems to me this is what a scientific account of the future minus "Grand Destiny of Mankind" myth should look like.
As for the dinosaurs, I confess to having similar thoughts myself. If there had been high-energy, technological civilization 65 million years ago, how could we tell? And what will the paleontologists of the deep future conclude about our age? Given the way we use fossils to document continental drift, the Columbian Exchange ought to give some future scholars quite the headache!
peace,
Zach
9/5/13, 8:35 AM
Richard Larson said...
Impressive!
Now that is worth considering; a tiny part of my brain matter will exsist in a creature 10 Billion Years from now.
9/5/13, 9:02 AM
Eduard Florinescu said...
9/5/13, 9:04 AM
Garden Lady said...
9/5/13, 9:05 AM
Tyler August said...
Excellent as always, but I must comment on your comment. Why do you think we will have made great progress in Cosmology in the next 500 years? The 500 years after Ptolemy were relatively static, after all; refined observations added more epicycles, at best. I don't see the Long Decline as being terribly conductive to that sort of Science, especially when you need such astoundingly expensive instruments to make observations of what the current model considers the Early Universe.
That said, regardless the larger cosmological model... well, stellar nucleosynthesis is a one-way street. Someday, the hydrogen will be gone, and the last dwarfs will burn out. Helium burning? I wouldn't rule it out. Then lithium, and so on and so on... but eventually, it has to end. The skies will go dark, and leave a graveyard of cold iron. (iron, too, is not forever: eventually, every mass finds itself in a black hole, and the black holes evaporate for want of food. Nothing remains but a uniform soup of photons. This is the modern version of Victorian Heat Death.) I cannot see any cosmology that obeys simple conservation laws going any other way.
Telling that to just about anyone, however, is akin to telling a medieval peasant that God and all His angels have absconded from Heaven. I wrote a post on my own blog: http://tmaugust.com/blog/how-does-the-world-end/
The oddest response I got was that someone told me I was not a poet after reading that. I'd have quoted the appropriate line of Keats, but what the devil does it say that we must think of a momento mori as the opposite of poetry?
9/5/13, 9:19 AM
stevenstrange said...
9/5/13, 9:47 AM
Twilight said...
A net population loss of 5.5billion in 90 years would be a horror on a scale orders of magnitude beyond anything the human race has ever experienced. This illustrates that the long decent and catabolic collapse need not mean some sort of easy, painless future, as it sometimes seems to be painted by the proponents of near term extinction.
9/5/13, 9:52 AM
SLClaire said...
At this point, it's the near-term, 10 to 100 year scale, that gives me nightmares if anything does. Or at least keeps me up some nights. All along in reading your blog I have been challenging myself to get the emotional, social, political, and cultural aspects of decline while doing what I can in the physical world to prepare for it. Seeing it laid out this way builds on that process and reminds me of the need to do psychological preparation as well as physical preparation.
As I age and start to really get tragedy, seeing it affect people I'm close to and seeing my own decline and death sometime in the near-term of this civilization's decline, thinking of the larger-scale tragedies in store for human civilizations that you've laid out is especially poignant. At the same time, though, pulling myself out of my human-centrism for a moment, it's fascinating to think of intelligent descendants of raccoons, crows, clams, and whatever other species manage it. The example of the corbicules is particularly intriguing as they are wise enough to both know and fully accept their fate. And in contrast with the heat-death idea, I prefer the idea that the universe goes on, the great cycle endlessly turning. So call me a combination of unsettled and intrigued. That's been true of this whole series of posts. Looking forward to the weeks to come!
9/5/13, 10:10 AM
Ursachi Alexandru said...
But.. 10 meters of sea level rise in just 100 years?
9/5/13, 10:20 AM
ChemEng said...
I very much enjoyed your vignette, and the final paragraphs were vivid. I do have one area of pushback. All of your future is confined to Plant Earth and the Moon (and eventually the new Earth). Yet it was only in 1887 that Michelson-Morley discovered that the speed of light is fixed. Hence space travel, at least outside the solar system, becomes impractical (if we want to return in our own lifetimes, if you know what I mean).
But you are talking millions and billions of years. You state, “In the course of their researches . . . the best minds among the corbicules have proved conclusively that nuclear fusion, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration were never practical options in the first place.” I love the gentle irony of that statement. But isn’t it likely that someone, whatever their genetic heritage, will do an end run around the speed of light limitation and that inter-stellar travel or time-travel or some other type of travel will happen? Indeed, the New York Times recently reported that NASA scientists are developing experiments to do this. Will they succeed? Probably not, but we’re talking only a hundred years from the starting point. Indeed, in the time frames you are talking about I expect that someone will successfully tackle a much more difficult challenge: how to get around the Second Law.
I am currently struggling through a book that “explains” modern physics. It does seem that information at the quantum level can travel instantaneously. It’s fascinating, if puzzling. In the words of J.B.S. Haldance, “My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we cansuppose”.
Your recent discussions to do with the ending of “progress” in the sense of material advance such as we experienced in the last two generations do not, in my view, prohibit a much different kind of progress — or maybe “understanding” is a better word. Maybe not in the next few hundred years, but eventually.
9/5/13, 10:22 AM
Ken Boak said...
Another excellent, thought provoking post. I always look forward to Wednesdays, for your unique interpretation of the world we currently live in.
It reminded me of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Woodstock",
"We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon...."
Whilst I enjoyed your narrative, looking ahead into the far future, where biologically anything is possible, I felt that it is crucial that we get the next 10 - 100 years correct. At least that will provide a stable footing for our children and grandchildren.
As a UK citizen, I was pleased to hear that we are not going to blindly drift into another surgical air-strike of the Middle East. Perhaps rather than letting off $1million Tomahawks like fireworks over Damascus, we could offer some real humanitarian aid to the 2 million+ Syrian refugees, living in tents and camps in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and all.
Obama and Putin & Co need to talk this one through, over a meal in St Petersburg, and spare us all from yet another pointless resource war.
9/5/13, 10:55 AM
Marcello said...
We will leave behind some deposit which are currently in warzones or otherwise escaped notice, a few waste heaps that could be combed for leftovers and probably some lignite and such whose exploitation was not completed. That might be enough to help footing the heating bill and perhaps a handful of steam engines to pump water out of some mines, military drydocks and similar select tasks. But nowhere near enough to propel a civilization to the point when things like fusion power can be entertained. And whoever comes after those guys will have even less to work with.
While water and wind will remain available modern wind turbines and dams rely on stack of technologies and industrial infrastructures that will not be available. Most likely our descendents will go no further than harnessing them to perform mechanical work (mills, bellows, hammers etc.) as it has been done in the past.
Perhaps some future species, many millions of years from now, might get a shot at a high tech society on the back of regenerated fossil fuels reserves. But for humans there will not be an other ride.
9/5/13, 11:09 AM
sgage said...
"Evolution works tit for tat. A faster lion leads to a swifter gazelle. The swifter gazelle leads to a more cunning lion. Ect, forever."
Not so much tit for tat, but utterly continuously. As an ecologist who has done some work in population genetics, I don't think about lions and gazelles, rather, lion/gazelle. Deer/wolf. They have shaped and continually reshape each other.
It's called coevolution.
On another, but related note, a tiger in a cage at the zoo isn't really a tiger. Sure, it has all the right DNA, but it's not out there 'tigering'.
Species are verbs more than nouns. What we identify as 'species' are really snapshots...
9/5/13, 11:23 AM
Joseph Nemeth said...
9/5/13, 11:28 AM
Somewhatstunned said...
9/5/13, 11:59 AM
Myriad said...
My understanding of what I am -- a transient phenomenon generated moment by moment by the operation of a complex machine (via a process of narrative construction, out of memory patterns in my brain created in the course of interaction with the world; that machine and its mode of operation themselves having been generated by the operation of a vastly larger complex machine, the earth's biosphere, via the algorithm of evolution) -- also tells me that there's nothing supernatural about intelligence or self-awareness, nothing that is impossible or impractical to re-create, either in a future earth species, in an alien species, or artificially.
(Just imagine a hyper-intelligent AI saying, "after a thorough analysis, I conclude that we're screwed" as a way of reconciling AI as a real possibility with the absurdity of the Singularitarian idea that it can "save us" from anything.)
A few of my atoms becoming parts of new patterns in the distant future is better than any alternatives, but of no great importance. There's greater comfort elsewhere. What's important is the patterns themselves. My nature is to want to preserve and pass along the patterns that created me and the patterns I create -- whether that's a reasonable expectation or not. (Of course those atoms are themselves patterns, as is the mathematical structure of the vacuum upon which they assert themselves, but those patterns existed long before me; they're not "mine" in the same sense as my genes or my memories or my letters in the sand are.)
The good news is, many of those patterns I cherish came from the world around me, which includes crows and clams and stars and crags of black rock. So I don't think I'd find that pedipalped creature as alien as JMG suggests. Different, yes, but not incomprehensibly so. It may contain some of my atoms, but it matters more that it will contemplate the same kinds of atoms and stars that I do.
9/5/13, 12:28 PM
. josé . said...
He starts out with a deus ex machina in the form of a pandemic that kills 99% of the planet's population, and then moves on to tell the story of the next few years, decades, centuries, ending about 20,000 years from now. The "Great Bay" in the title is the California Central Valley, which becomes a wonderful sheltered bay for most of that period.
It's a novel-length book, written as a series of time frames. Each begins with a narrative, not unlike your text here, and then proceeds to a short story, with some limited character development to give you a sense of the times. Here's a short quote from the narrative for the period of 5,000 to 10,000 years from now: "As the green belt in the Sahara expanded and the lakes filled, a dynasty of matrilineal kings emerged in Chad and Libya ... For three hundred years there were great bazaars on the Yenisey River in Siberia, caravans coming from as far as the rich uplands of Tibet. Cities seemed to rise and fall in Mexico on a thousand-year cycle."
His projections differ from yours in detail, but it's interesting and an easy read.
It's funny: I've learned to steel myself before reading the week's episode of TAR, usually waiting until Thursday morning to avoid messing up my sleep. Your posts always trigger a lot of thinking. This one did too, but I'm glad I read it Wednesday night, because overall it left me much calmer, like an intellectual version of the SoP effect.
9/5/13, 12:30 PM
Brian Bundy said...
9/5/13, 12:32 PM
trippticket said...
Now JMG is not known for his deep love of permaculture, but allow me if you will to offer up a game-changer for the climate change scenario. For a few decades now, permacultural ranchers have been employing a grazing tactic known as "mob grazing," or "MIG grazing," or "mob-stocking." It's designed to mimic the once-great herds of grazing hooved animals moving around open rangeland, pushed by predators and self-soiled salad bars. And the results are nothing short of astounding.
Where ecologists talk about 1000 years to build one inch of topsoil, mob-grazers are doing it in one year. In fact it's not unheard of to increase soil organic carbon by 3% in one season! Do you have any idea how much atmospheric carbon that represents, now safely sequestered in the soil where it's useful?
I do. There's a white African biologist named Allan Savory who tells the story better than I do, and he's now the editor of Stockman Grass Farmer (among other things).
Check out his TED talk if you don't mind feeling incredibly hopeful for a shot at reversing climate change.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI
"If we could get half of the grassland acreage on Earth switched to mob-grazing management we could return atmospheric carbon to pre-industrial levels in a decade."
9/5/13, 12:33 PM
Glenn said...
I am most interested in the next decade and century, since I and my children will be dealing with them. Of course, that is the place one might expect the least accuracy, given the nature of the variables. Still, the over all pattern seems quite reasonable.
Since we're in the middle of the current interglacial period, the possibility of the next glaciation coming on schedule depends on how soon the current crop of CO2 can be flushed from the atmosphere. Your essay seems to indicate either complete burning of all the remaining coal, or a very long lag time of atmospheric CO2.
Glenn
Marrowstone Island
9/5/13, 1:13 PM
Steve in Colorado said...
"Does that fact horrify you, intrigue you, console you, leave you cold?"
I'm going to go with "console."
If we suppose materialism, then I'm matter, and that's all. And that's not so bad, because it means that I am immortal, that I've been every sort of life on the Earth, and that one day I'll be that strange creature on a remote world a billion years hence.
It also means that, five or ten billion years ago or so, I ("I") may have been floating around in the brain of an equally strange being on an equally remote world, a world which was destroyed long ago.
I wonder if it might be a useful exercise to spend time visualizing the creatures, terrestrial and otherwise, that we each may have "been" in both the past and the future, extending outward in either direction 10, 100, 1,000, onward to a billion years. That's of course what you have done here very effectively. But I mean, I wonder if just this sort of exercise adopted as a regular personal practice might not be a very useful component for a spiritual system that's able to deal with the future. As a variation, one could meditate on being each of the creatures (chickens, cows, apple trees, carrots, streams, rivers, worms) that make up one's material body in the present. I think this whole thing might help cultivate the kind of temporal and ecological awareness that we need right about now.
Something to think about.
Also, I find it odd that a number of folks here seem to think that "intelligence" and "self-awareness" are so extraordinarily rare across time and space, when there are a number of very intelligent and obviously self-aware creatures sharing this planet with us right now.
9/5/13, 1:13 PM
Juhana said...
It is funny that someone mentioned Atlantis in this thread. I used to attribute that branch of "knowledge" to tin hat brigade without hesitation, but south of Malta, Haqar Qim and all that stuff... It is quite impressive feat in Western part of Mediterranean, supposed to have been practically empty during so early time period. No hunter-gatherer or small-scale farmer gives that much energy to such a grandiose project, it takes logistics for food and shelter... Advanced logistics.
As prevailing current, inflow, from Straits follows the coast of Africa all the way to Aegean, floating INTO Great Sea roughly between Maltese islands in the north and Libyan coast in the south has been no problem, if you are positioned just outside the Straits... The getting out part has been the hard one with old school rigging... Especially because mistral of winter is nasty in that region, before blessings of diesel freighters took victory over seasonal winds :).
Advanced sailing skills during that period are maybe unlikely, but not infeasible. If old shellbacks (of course not literally sailing, sails are obsolete technology right now) have many unspoken tricks of the trade even in this world of GPS, who knows, maybe there has been some way... Trade from Western to Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea has always been lucrative, even during TRUE Dark Ages, as that hilarious geographer Cosmas illustrates... Maybe it was lucrative enough for Neolithic "nations" also. And maybe there was island with impractically low topography.
9/5/13, 1:51 PM
David Brin said...
Moreover it is wholly in keeping with the mood of today's American public: sourpuss, grouchy, complaining-gloomy ingrates who think they invented dystopias and apocalypses. (Amateurs!) In other words… same-old, same-old. Put it down to boomers who are all-cranky about impending senior-senility. The nation and world will be better off when the Boomers go away.
Seriously, is "arch-druid" for real? Has he even looked at the curves for solar power? Which have been arcing toward competitive with fossil fuels at a spectacular rate? Even if the curve slows, our ability to make vast acreage of solar collectors will only expand through every up-or-down phase of civilization. If they are durable, one generation adds to the acreage and how long before Druid's scenario looks laughable?
Algae farming will suck in industrial CO2 and put out food and fuel. Vatgrown meat will eliminate the 70% of agricultural land used for grazing. Does he seriously plan to coax you all into ignoring this, and a myriad other trends? Great! He is part of the reason these things have been slowed down, during the Cynical Decade.
Moreover, if even once humans set up space industry (as Planetary Resources now intends to attempt) every arch-druid "calculation" goes into the trash. The amount of available power in just near Earth orbit makes Saudi Arabia seem like a finger nail clipping.
I am not claiming all is roses. So long as grouches of both left and right have hijacked the national and international discussion of the future, hobbling pragmatists and problem-solvers while mocking every hint of a can-do spirit, we certainly do face critical times. Tellingly, in their grouchy nostalgia, the trogs of the left are in many ways almost identical to those on the right. A similar meanness of spirit and cynicism that boils down to one thing --
"Don't try to get me to lift a finger to actually help solve problems. My laziness is sheltered and armored by cynicism. My torpor is protected by shrugs of disdain toward those who try. I am the playground bully who mocked and sneered at your enthusiasms in elementary school. And when you vigorous folks save the world, I will have a win-win. I will wallow in tech pleasures while continuing to call you do-ers fools."
David Bri, author of the (very post-apocalyptic) novel THE POSTMAN. Also the future eco-challenge novel EARTH. http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/
9/5/13, 1:59 PM
Nano said...
A vorticitating hypersphere takes care of all the issue a big bang theory creates in regards to the "end" of the universe.
A fun read here http://tinyurl.com/n47vvvp
9/5/13, 2:40 PM
Ben said...
One question though, in 10,000 years you speculate that the 6th global civilization will be passing into it's 'Winter' stage (in the Spengler-ian sense). Do you envision that civilization as being global in the current sense? ie; literally being a globe-spanning civilization as the West is today?
By Toynbee's count Earth has hosted some 23 (or 27) civilizations in the last 10,000 years but only the West became a 'global' civilization. Do you think there will be a similar ratio of 'global' civilizations to 'regional' civilizations moving forward?
Again, enjoyed this post!
9/5/13, 2:44 PM
Enrique said...
http://www.informationdissemination.net/2013/09/if-its-not-war-it-sounds-like-checkers.html
9/5/13, 3:13 PM
Kyoto Motors said...
I too, enjoyed this post immensely, and am enjoying this thread of comments (though as usual, am having little time to spend on it). My first reaction is that, well, the time frame is sufficiently enormous that it almost feels moot - but for a sense of wonder, like gazing into the stars on a dark country night. It brings me squarely back to the here and now, again, with a sense of awe... And the reminder, that for all its enormity, every one of us reading this (and all those who are not) alive today, will be dead and gone after the second "chapter" you've outlined has even begun -okay, with a few babies excepted... it makes the present somehow particular, to say the least.
9/5/13, 3:44 PM
Jim R said...
Let me be the first, or perhaps only the most recent, to wave my pedipalps in approval.
I was looking through old posts the other day, trying to figure out when I first commented on the ADR. I think it was something about H. Floresiensis, in an essay on the future of humanity. I was posting under a different moniker then. Of course, that would merely cover the tens- or hundreds- of thousand years category.
Good one about the clams. Molluscan intelligence already exists, in the cuttlefish, and it is indeed an alien intelligence.
9/5/13, 4:25 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Cherokee, well, at least our component atoms will...
Avery, thanks for the tip! I'll put in on the to-read list.
Ray, one of the characters in Aldiss' novel is an intelligent morel; you might enjoy it. As for the "uneventful" next century, er, I think a cascading series of catastrophes that wipe out 5.5 billion people is eventful enough for one century!
Thomas, funny. I'll pass on the Star Trek -- I found the original series so-so, and was less impressed by each spinoff -- but enjoyed Brin's novels, too (which makes it all the more funny that Brin himself posted a denunciatory diatribe further down the comments.)
Repent, that probably has a fair amount to do with the broad general trend toward cephalization I mentioned!
Stonymeadow, excellent! Eiseley is always worth quoting.
K-dog, your squirrels were remarkably long-lived as a species -- very few large species on this planet make it for more than a few tens of millions of years at most. Still, your future history, your call...
Dmitry, that's high praise!
Robin, the Hindus are pretty much the only people I know of before modern times to have gotten the concept of deep time down cold. I suspect you could map a lot of this material onto traditional Hindu cosmology and get a decent fit...
Matchstick, that's the thing about the laws of nature: you can't break them. You can use them to your advantage, or you can get clobbered by them, but either way, they win.
Unknown Deborah, there are seven other intelligent species I didn't name, so there's room for the cuttlefish and the lizards both.
9/5/13, 4:26 PM
josh keiler said...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPZ6-Po-SyE&feature=player_embedded
Professor Falken bet on bees rather than clams...
9/5/13, 4:42 PM
Unknown said...
Credit Joni Mitchell for the Woodstock song quote.
I'd like to dispute the assumption that nonhuman advanced technological civilizations are likely to be interested in space travel. This idea shows the pitfalls of extrapolating from a sample of one.
A species is unlikely to develop advanced tech unless it is a social species and its members are curious and given to manipulating their environment. Marine mammals are social and curious but interact with their environment without manipulating it much. So, no dolphin tech. Human beings wander around. However, an intelligent species can do a good deal of local exploration without traveling.
One adaptive strategy for a social species or one with a group mind is to stay put, modify its immediate environment intensively and propagate itself by releasing genetic material to spread on the winds or the air, carried as seeds or pollen by other species that do travel, or be borne by individual species members who are in an unintelligent larval phase of development. The resulting colonies would not possess the cultural information of their progenitors and would have to develop their own culture and tech from scratch. Little or no communication between groups; no common language beyond instinctive signaling; no travel; no intraspecies warfare. Such a species would be intensely inward looking, but could still be technologically sophisticated in some of its colonies.
(continued next post)
9/5/13, 5:00 PM
MawKernewek said...
Though I believe the Sumerians made agricultural tools out of clay, and perhaps there are other examples of settled agriculture existing without much access to metals?
There is no reason why intelligence cannot persist long term, knowledge of landscape, language, tool making and use for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle are all things conferring advantages even without settled agriculture and urbanised civilisation.
As far as the really long term goes:
there are stars that do fuse Helium-4 into carbon and oxygen, in fact the majority of stars do at some phase of their life cycle, including the Sun. The thing to remember is that helium burning requires much higher temperatures and pressures than hydrogen burning, and when it does happen, it goes quickly and for a shorter time, and produces less energy per unit mass of fusion fuel than hydrogen-->helium. There are certain massive stars more than 8 solar masses, that can go further and produce elements up to iron in a series of reactions.
It is not possible to release more binding energy after iron, since further fusion would actually absorb energy. So what happens is that the iron core starts to collapse, then rebounds due to neutron degeneracy pressure (a quantum effect) and blows the star apart in a supernova. This burst of energy can actually perform the fusion reactions beyond iron.
In fact when the sun reaches the end of its life, most of the material that is expelled is still hydrogen, that is the outer layers of the Sun, with some extra helium that had been produced in the Sun, because only in the core, and in the red giant phase, in a shell surrounding it, did fusion actually take place.
Very long term, what will happen to the Galaxy, is that an increasing fraction of mass becomes tied up in stellar remnants such as white dwarves (the core of a Sun-like star), neutron stars and black holes (collapsed cores of very massive stars), so eventually less and less is available to make new stars.
The odd thing about stars, is that the more massive they are, the shorter they live. This is because the core temperature and pressure is higher the more massive the star. The physics works out with the luminosity being proportional to the cube of the mass. So a 10 solar mass star shines 1000 times brighter, but has 10 times as much material, so instead of lasting 10 billion years like the sun does, it lives for only 100 million years, before exploding as a supernova.
It's a cosmic irony that the stars that live fast, die young, and are profligate with resources are the important ones for creating terrestrial planets and complex chemistry.
The galaxy has been around for about 12 billion years. Since the massive stars that perform the heavy element enrichment die young, several generations of these could have created enough heavy elements for terrestrial planets early on enough in solar systems born say, 10 billion years ago, giving them a 5 billion year headstart on us.
9/5/13, 5:02 PM
Unknown said...
Another part of this widespread assumption is that many or most intelligent species with advanced technology will be deeply interested in the stars. I doubt it.
Almost any species with advanced tech will know that stars exist, but for many extraterrestrial species and some on Earth, it will be the kind of awareness that human beings have of the existence of atoms and subatomic particles.
The human race evolved for hundreds of thousands of years looking up at the night sky in wonder. Until a couple of centuries ago when industrial air pollution and outdoor lighting dimmed the stars, people in most places had many opportunities to gaze at that magnificent sea of lights.
In order to look up at the night sky in wonder, you have to have a night sky (no binary washing them out most of the time); clear or partly clear skies; nothing opaque overhead like a jungle canopy, roof of your burrow or den, or thirty meters of water; and you must be equipped with a sense organ capable of receiving some portion of the spectrum which stars radiate. The conditions that allow this are specific to this planet and the sort of animal we are.
The use of stars for navigation and keeping a calendar requires regular observation. The stars have been very important in the development of human religions and sciences, but this is largely an accident of circumstance and would not necessarily be true for other intelligent species.
As to how I feel about the long view, I'm with Myriad.
Captcha tacedur = be quiet about the hardness/difficulty
9/5/13, 5:06 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Martin, I've argued at some length in my book The Ecotechnic Future that industrial society is merely the first, and the most cluelessly wasteful, of a potential range of technic societies, defined as societies that use a significant amount of energy from sources other than human and animal muscle. There are plenty of things that can still be done with the more modest energy flows that can be obtained from renewable sources, and I expect that a future society that plays its cards right could certainly manage aerostats and a global civilization without having to waste energy as freely as we have.
Phil, of course. You might be amused to know that one of the old British Druid orders whose rituals I've inherited had an official position for the person who was supposed to make tea after each ritual!
Unknown Deborah, I tend to be suspicious of any claim that makes some detail of our terrestrial environment an unavoidable necessity for life. My guess is that on other worlds with other conditions, other kinds of life have found things perfectly satisfactory for them, thanks.
Tripp, not a problem -- anything that encourages people to get part of their food supply under their own control is welcome here.
ChemEng, I suspect any social species will have some distinction between those actions that are considered appropriate and those that aren't. How exactly that gets expressed, and what those actions are, is another matter -- there isn't even much consensus across different cultural traditions of humanity about what's moral and what's not -- consider sexual customs just for starters. With entirely different species, I'd guess, all bets are off.
Yupped, it's our destiny to become compost!
Ugo, thank you for taking this little jeu d'esprit in the spirit it was meant! Of course our visions are different -- start from different presuppositions, you're going to have different results. As for talking about billions of years, perhaps over a couple of beers? I'd welcome that.
Liquid, excellent! It's exactly this notion that humanity is the last best hope of the universe that I plan to discuss, and dissect, as we proceed.
Simon, thanks for responding. The differences between people who react as you do, seeing the scenario as depressing, and those who see it as enticing, comforting and consoling, is central to the theme I'll be developing over the next few posts. The question I'd like to encourage you to reflect on is this: what is this "more" that you're wanting, and why do you want it?
9/5/13, 5:26 PM
sgage said...
"Algae farming will suck in industrial CO2 and put out food and fuel. Vatgrown meat will eliminate the 70% of agricultural land used for grazing. Does he seriously plan to coax you all into ignoring this, and a myriad other trends? "
Trends my a@@. If you are the real David Brin, I am shocked that you can't do math. Algae farming? That's going to "suck in" the result of burning millions of years' worth of organic production? Listen, you can grow one year's worth of algae in one year. Capiche?
Vatgrown meat? Where does that come from?
Etc., etc. I have to believe the comment was a fake.
9/5/13, 5:26 PM
latheChuck said...
"Oh, but that's the research program." someone is bound to say. To which I ask: "then what, ultimately, do you imagine stocking the meat-growing vat with instead?" Sand? That's cheap, but absurd. Nuclear waste? It would be good to find something to do with it, but no. Grass clippings, maybe? Hmmm. It has approximately the right chemical composition, and we could gather it from a million suburban lawns with soot-spewing trucks to carry it to the vat-works, where (nuclear-powered) electric choppers and mixers blend it with a variety of "digestive" chemicals...
OK, seriously. What's the thermodynamic argument that says there could ever be a better way to grow meat than mob-grazing on marginal crop land?
9/5/13, 5:27 PM
Shining Hector said...
And a sense of wonder is fun and all, but pretty easy if you let your imagination wander. Right now, I can visualize a chunk of rock out there in interstellar space, and for 10 billion years it's not done anything. I mean absolutely nothing. It's exactly the same rock it was 10 billion years ago. It's just sat there, chilling, untouched by entropy. Maybe some cosmic rays dented the surface a little, but we'll ignore that. The sheer lack of significance to anything anywhere of this rock borders on the sublime. Woohoo. This rock probably represents the ideal of the ascended zebra mussel society. It just sits there being all smugly wise in its utter lack of purpose or utility.
And somewhere right now in my left toe is an atom from a steak Hitler ate in 1933. I get chills thinking about it. Another atom residing in the gut flora of a crow that feasted on a Gaul whose head was hoisted on a stake by the orders of Julius Caesar now resides in the drive belt of my Toyota, ain't the cycle of life grand? I guess we can get ourselves worked up and excited about just about anything, but pretty much all that I would consider the significant stuff about my identity can't be reduced to CHNOPS and trace elements.
9/5/13, 5:33 PM
John Michael Greer said...
YJV, well, yes -- cyclical cosmologies do tend to resemble one another!
Daniel, is that yours, or somebody else's? Either way it's good.
Kevin, notice the number of other readers who feel consoled and comforted by the story. The gap between their reaction and yours bids fair to become of central importance in the decades ahead of us.
William, well, I've got a new book out that has plenty of ideas to get you started. ;-)
Renaissance, depends on the details of your theory of reincarnation. I see no reason why you might not be eligible for rebirth as a cyon, a corvin, or a corbicule, though!
Justin, heck of a good question, to which only the cyons, corvins, corbicules, etc. know the answers!
Joy, last I heard the current estimate for the age of the universe is around 13 billion, so its close. Thanks for the link, also -- a good example of how utopian notions bring out the idiot even in very bright people.
Jim, thank you. I'll be talking about that perception at some length as we proceed.
Maria, excellent! You get tonight's gold star for teaching an alien life form ten billion years in the future to quote Taliesin.
Con-science, er, I'd be interested in your sources for the claim that the people of most previous civilizations just walked away. That conflicts flatly with what I've learned about the subject.
Trippticket, like most people who practice the sort of stuff I do, I've had various visionary experiences about the future. Some of them were sufficiently near-term that I had the chance to test them, and they turned out to be false, as visionary material often does when applied directly to the material world. That's why I base my predictions these days on less chancy sources!
9/5/13, 5:40 PM
Doctor Westchester said...
Unfortunately, another issue that faces us is not only that most people only think in the utopia/catastrophe binary, but they can see things in those terms. I don't think a large percentage of population can distinguish between Bardi's first scenario and yours. The differences don't matter to them, it is still catastrophe/extinction.
9/5/13, 5:50 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Ganv, granted! I'll be talking a bit in a future post about why I doubt the claims of the artificial-intelligence types -- well, other than the fact that they've been wrong about as often as fusion power promoters.
Nano and Peacegarden, thanks for stating your positions!
Mike, that's a much bigger question than I'm prepared to discuss in a brief comment. I'll consider a post down the road, though it may leave everybody more or less baffled!
Zach, thank you! That's exactly what I was trying to do.
Eduard, I'd be amazed if dolphins weren't already fully intelligent, but they don't have the capacity to make or use tools, thus belong in a different category (not a lesser one, to be sure, but different). I suspect there may have been anything up to dozens of fully sentient species already that just didn't happen to have the body structure, or the drive, to get into toolmaking, and so we've missed them entirely.
Garden Lady, stay tuned!
Tyler, I didn't say I thought we would make great progress; I said I thought people would dismiss the Big Bang the way they now dismiss Ptolemaic epicycles. Have you read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions? If not, might be worth a look.
Steven, one more for the awed and intrigued category.
Twilight,
Thank. You. For. Getting. It.
I end up pulling what's left of my hair out sometimes when true believers in imminent apocalypse insist that the only alternative to total cataclysm is Utopia. Life can get very, very, very hard without getting anywhere close to the end of life on earth.
SLClaire, I remember that book! The thing that I disliked about it, once I got some perspective on it, is that it made 50 billion years sound like a fairly short time...and it isn't. It's not only more than we can imagine, it's unimaginably more than we can imagine -- and there's plenty of room in that unthinkable vastness for any number of wonders.
Ursachi, I wondered how many people would catch that! I was assuming, for the sake of the story, a black swan event -- the complete collapse of either the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets over the course of the century. That's less unlikely than it seems, given the evidence of paleoclimatology.
9/5/13, 5:56 PM
Darren Urquhart said...
@Ken Boak "Woodstock" by Joni Mitchell actually...
JMG - what is the criteria for a "fully sentient being"?
David Brin - more please. It is useful to have a vocal counter on here. Sometimes I feel I am falling under the Archdruid's spell and don't trust myself to be smart enough to recognize it.
9/5/13, 6:10 PM
trippticket said...
This comment is from Matthew Lindquist, but I'm not responding to him, just using it to jump off on a comment of my own.
The interesting thing about human polymorphism is that there ISN'T much rhyme or reason to it. There are fair complexions at high latitudes, yes, but dark ones at even higher. And body hair coverage shows no climatic reason whatsoever. Jared Diamond proposes the idea that our highly variable traits are due almost exclusively to sexual selection, which helps to explain why people have "types" that they are attracted to.
Me? I like slim women with reddish-brown hair, fair skin, light freckling, small to moderate breasts, and, oh yeah, a great brain. (With the latter not being nearly the afterthought I suggest with my list!)
In a relocalizing future - and with energy descent how could it not be? - I imagine our population, now thoroughly braced by hybrid vigor, will take sexual selection to new extremes. Green hair and red eyes perhaps, yes; pot-bellied like the chick in Pulp Fiction suggests is sexy; naturally-occurring tattoos; and so forth, may all be highly prized by certain human populations.
The idea that our species might become two, three, or even several seems to me like a foregone conclusion. Which would just be a reverse of the run-up to the present, as Homo sapiens emerged from Africa to swallow up Neanderthal populations, and now, according to National Geographic, the eastern offshoot of Homo habilis's offspring, the Devisovans.
During their time, which really wasn't that long ago, resource availability was almost always on the rise. From now on, ours will probably be in decline. Seems silly to think that those trends might not work in reverse.
9/5/13, 7:03 PM
Carl said...
I have a question concerning your ten year time frame. I'm planning on moving from California for all the various reasons you've discussed in past posts, but at the earliest it would be eight years away mostly because of kids in school. I'm thinking of moving to a rust belt state and in to a town like yours. Do you think this will still be a possibility in eight years from now, or am I pushing it with trying to get across the country, buying a house, etc.? I don't think I could convince my family to move with me now, but maybe in eight years, and if they don't want to go, at least they'd be out of high school, and I could set-up home in a more stable region and if CA becomes unlivable they'd have a fall-back region to move to.
Thanks for you thoughts and time, Carl
9/5/13, 7:38 PM
Heretic Physicist said...
Very nice post! I've never thought of the next intelligent species emerging of human extinction, but of course that makes sense.
The succession of human civilization reminds me of a not very well known novel written by Jules Verne in his last years, titled "Le Nouvel Adam". I was quite shocked the first time I read it when I was a teenager, and I understand much better now why. It describes the discovery by a scientist from a future global civilization of a text telling the disaster (sudden sea level rise) which, 8000 years ago erases most of our own civilization, and the life of the few people remaining, reverting quite fast to hunter-gatherer way of life...
There is probably an english translation; here is the original French text:
http://jules-verne.servhome.org/Oeuvres/EternelAdam.pdf
So Jules Verne himself thought and wrote, during his last years, that "progress" was just temporary and that each human technical civilization will believe that progress is eternal until it collapses and disappears...
9/5/13, 7:45 PM
Ray Wharton said...
Picturing a hundred years where events as destructive as the first two world wars combined average out as yearly occurrences makes it hard to imagine there being cornucopians insisting "that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will save us any day now" would exist outside the inner worlds of a few mentally ill slum dwellers. Various promises of Salvation of some breed will be earning bread for any number of preachers of such things I have little doubt. But the particular stories salvation stories of our people I don't think will have much traction in a world where very few people have seen a computer; lived during a space launch of anything other than a couple experimental late 21st century weapons systems; or seen the power of the Atom-on-Earth manifest in anything but a few mid century nuclear skirmishes and a sizable number of no mans lands dotting the landscape.
9/5/13, 8:23 PM
kleymo said...
9/5/13, 8:37 PM
LL Pete said...
9/5/13, 8:49 PM
k-dog said...
Very long lived indeed and essentially unchanged once they became tool using agrarians with culture. I mentioned two things about their society which caused them to be as long lived and as unchanged as a species as our crocodile or coelacanth are now. My human scenario presented one of the opposite of these two traits which sealed their doom.
I suggest the relationships between humans absolutely must change for humans to have any hope of a sustainable future that is not a horrible black dystopia. The changes needed are social and are already part of the human repertoire.
Our society is but one of many possible and it is not one to get through the rough times which are ahead. We are sick puppies. But I won't go further into those weeds now. It is a bone which requires much thought to chew.
Your choice of Raccoons was excellent. I saw Raccoon Nation several weeks ago. I recall it saying that humans have caused more genetic changes in Raccoon behavior in just seventy years than nature did in ten thousand. Something to that effect was said in the documentary.
There have been Raccoons in Germany since the 1930's and the Raccoon Nation showed the German population clearly adapting more successfully to city life as each generation passes. City Raccoons in Toronto have learned to consider cars as predators and control their movements appropriately to avoid them. So far they are not waiting for red robots to change, they tend instead to avoid danger altogether. With enough time they may learn to press walk buttons but city Raccoons shall become country Raccoons again very soon if cities fall apart.
That is, until they take over.
9/5/13, 8:56 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...
Far outside our galaxy, immaterial beings formed on a vast scale judge a promising mid-level student's project for a local science-fair:
"You made good use of gravity-wells combined with well-scaled distance to contain the various organisms within the apparatus you designed for your experiment on the limits of the rare and puzzling phenomenon called "biological intelligence." None of the biological forms that you used escaped and contaminated the outside world. This was not a light accomplishment.
We particularly like two additional safety features that you invented and built into the design of your experiment, namely, a speed-of-light limit on possible motion within the apparatus so as to reinforce the constraint of distance, and an effective self-destruct cycle built into each of your galaxy's internal energy-sources [stars] to sterilize and recycle each successive part of your apparatus as soon as that part of your experiment was completed.
On the other hand, biological intelligence is itself nothing more than a minor scientific curiosity. It might have been better had you spent the hundred billion years of this semester on a more productive project.
We award your science-fair project an Honorable Mention. Congratulations."
9/5/13, 9:20 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Ken, of course the next decade to century are the critical ones for you and me. The point of the scenario wasn't to fret about events ten billion years in the future; it was specifically to point out a difference in attitudes that we'll be discussing next week.
Marcello, you might want to look up bog iron sometime -- iron concentrated into usable ores by chemosynthetic bacteria; it's very common. Of course an industrial society along present lines won't be an option again for many millions of years, but I'd like to suggest that industrialism is not the only way to have a technologically advanced society -- in fact, that it's a remarkably crude and wasteful way to do the thing, and that the potential for less clumsy ways exist.
Somewhatstunned, that's one of the things that inspired my corvins. I've seen crows who acted as though they know who's going to be landing on the Moon in a hundred million years.
Myriad, I'm certainly not claiming that there's necessarily something supernatural about intelligence. My guess here is based on Stephen Wolfram's principle of computational equivalence, which suggests that the computations necessary to figure out how to build an intelligent mind would be of the same order of complexity as the two billion year long evolutionary process that created the ones we've got now. Strictly speaking, it's not impossible, but I don't recommend trying to do it, much less betting the farm on it!
Jose, I'd heard of it, but haven't read that. Clearly I'll want to remedy that at some point.
Brian, I've discussed that repeatedly here. For the next quarter of a million years, unless a lot of money is invested very soon in nuclear waste storage, there are going to be dead zones surrounded by cow skulls on stakes or something similar, and the locals will warn you solemnly that if you go there, you die. They'll be right, too, because each of those zones will have a dead nuclear reactor and/or abandoned fuel rod storage pools toward the center, and a zone surrounding it in which radionuclides with varying half-lives have been spread by a variety of processes. Just one of those little gifts we're saving up for our descendants...
Trippticket, sure, and if half the people who own cars on the planet were to discard them, we could accomplish a lot, too. Are you, personally, doing anything to make either of these grand plans happen? If not, it's just a lullaby -- a way not to think about the future our own actions are creating for us.
Glenn, my scenario assumes that all economically extractable fossil fuels will be extracted and burnt, and that methane releases triggered by the resulting warming will add to the mess and prolong the process of recovery. That's a hypothesis, of course, but it seemed like a fairly reasonable one.
Steve, that would be a very solid series of meditations. I may write that up sometime for Druid use -- if so, I'll credit you with the idea!
Juhana, there's evidence that high-quality stone for tools was traded all over the Mediterranean basin in the Neolithic, quite probably by water, thus your suggestion stands.
9/5/13, 10:03 PM
John Michael Greer said...
I appreciate your contribution, though, because the difference between your reaction to the scenario I sketched out and the reaction of many of my other readers points up the issue I want to discuss in the next few posts. You dismissed the scenario as pure gloomy negativity; quite a few other readers found it intriguing and even consoling. That gap shows the emergence of a sensibility that is likely to have a significant impact on events in the decades and centuries to come. More on this in upcoming posts.
Nano, "vorticitating hypersphere" is one of those phrases that ought to be repeated three times very fast while drunk.
Ben, I'm guessing that global civilizations will be more common in the future, as certain technologies -- notably sailing ships and radio communication -- that are quite workable under nonindustrial conditions, will make it much easier for civilizations to spread. Still, it's a guess.
Enrique, I've been watching that. It'll be interesting to see what happens if Obama gets even more clueless than usual.
Kyoto, excellent! The sense of wonder was something I was shooting for -- though I did my best to write it so that people with one set of beliefs would get that, and those with another definitely wouldn't.
Jim, waving pedipalps noted!
Josh, I wouldn't put it past social insects to make a shot at it someday.
Unknown Deborah, you'll notice that I only had one of my other intelligent species, the corvins, get into space travel. It may well be a minority interest at best.
MawKernewek, please look up bog iron, and also keep in mind how long people will be able to mine metals out of our ruins.
Sgage, have you seen his blog? It's full of exactly that sort of cheerleading about vaporware of various kinds. The whole thing reminded me of the harsh but not inaccurate comment of a professor I know: "Expecting science fiction writers to predict the future we'll actually inhabit is like expecting romance novel writers to be good at marriage counseling."
LatheChuck, good. I've noticed in general that the laws of thermodynamics seem to be very unpopular with cornucopians.
9/5/13, 10:24 PM
Kutamun said...
Yes,
i am a bright ,quick thinking being,
quite capable of allowing itself
to be changed while a
new set of conditions
is hammered out,
gradually circling into view.
Cheers Mate
9/5/13, 10:27 PM
John Michael Greer said...
With regard to your dead planet, I'd like to take that example and reframe it. Here are two empty beds. One of them has never had anyone in it. In the other one, you spent an hour and a half last night having the best sex of your life with a partner you care about profoundly. Does the fact that the beds are currently empty mean that what happened in each of them over the last twenty-four hours has equal value?
Doctor W., I wonder if they'd notice the difference between dying tonight of gunshot and dying of old age at the end of their normal lifespans...
Darren, I don't have a strict definition, purely an ostensive one -- a fully sentient being is one that can do the same kinds of things human beings can, in terms of thinking, manipulation of the environment, etc.
Trippticket, to my mind a great deal depends on whether long-distance transport remains an option. Long-distance sailing vessels can be maintained on wholly renewable resources, you know.
Carl, heck of a good question, to which I don't claim to know the answer. I'd encourage you to take whatever steps you can to prepare to survive in place, and later on, if an opportunity to relocate presents itself, make that judgment call based on what's happening at the time.
Heretic, thanks for the tip and the link! That's not one that I've read, and I'll want to fix that.
Ray, of course you may be right. I simply chose to arrange my scenario otherwise, to make a point.
Kleymo, funny! The answer, of course, is to do what you can with what you have, where you are, right now.
LL Pete, I'll have to look that one up. Thanks for the tip.
K-dog, no argument about the raccoons. They're extraordinarily intelligent already, and given a few tens of millions of years to expand into new ecological niches and develop even more complex nervous systems and social structures, they've got as good a shot as anything does.
Robert, funny! Thank you.
9/5/13, 10:34 PM
John Michael Greer said...
9/5/13, 10:35 PM
John Michael Greer said...
9/5/13, 10:35 PM
team10tim said...
RE: Does that fact horrify you, intrigue you, console you, leave you cold?
Meh. (pop culture lingo from The Simpsons cartoons: expressing a lack of interest or enthusiasm)
Explaining what might appear as a rather trite dismissal of your whole post requires a somewhat lengthy digression.
First, Daniel Banker's Total Perspective Vortex is from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But he does have a point. Total perspective is a crippling liability. Limited perspective is required for meaningful existence. More on this below.
Second, my favorite line (of all time), from one of my favorite songs, from one of my favorite bands:
What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all round the sun
What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Soft and sweet
Let me hold it close and keep it here with me
And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see...
...And when we meet on a cloud
I'll be laughing out loud
I'll be laughing with everyone I see
Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all
Third, I once had a limited perspective that I felt was solid. I had a working relationship with the universe. I knew what it was all about. I had a good bead on things. I was happy. A friend of mine broke it for me. The jist of it is that he required an infallible proof for every little thing, and every argument or bit of evidence I wished to enter required its own subordinate proofs. I realized later that this argument was an infinite regress that basically amounted to 'I refuse to take anything seriously' which is both infallible and useless. He was quite right but he also had nothing to say.
Of course, that line of thought leaves one nowhere; adrift on an aerostat home with the tether cut. But life goes on even when one's foundations are ripped away. Which brings us back to the present narrative.
There are two things to consider. One, one's belief's and two, the serious consideration of our present circumstances. The problem is the interplay between serious and belief.
Not done... But bed calls to me
9/5/13, 11:11 PM
Thomas Daulton said...
Mr. Brin, I've greatly enjoyed a lot of your books, and attended a couple of your lectures in person. But I think the polite way to phrase our disagreement here would be, we are not seeing eye-to-eye about the definition of the problem(s). I won't go into more detail because I'm up too late as it is and no doubt plenty of other people here want to get your attention too. But I'd encourage you to consider whether the practical problems about how to get the common people-on-the-ground through the hard times we're obviously facing, with efficiency and grace -- which is what Mr. Greer typically writes about -- are or are not as legitimate a way to ponder our future challenges, as the grandiose technological projects you describe. The sorts of technologies that you and other sci-fi writers envision (by the way I consider myself an amateur sci-fi writer, I'm not exempting myself) will always have side effects, risks and unintended consequences. The consequences of trying to live in harmony with the Earth and to take care of hearth and home with minimal demands, are well known.
Despite having read Mr. Brin's blog for several years, I'm still a bit taken aback by the vehemence of the response to what I consider a rather innocuous science fantasy piece. Why the ad-hominems about everyone else's "laziness" and the "ingrates" from a simple spec-fic piece about the evolution of life thousands and billions of years from now? Would you Mr. Brin expect people to impugn your personal character by twisting the best qualities of your futuristic novels into some sort of invective in return? It brings to mind Jim Hightower's remark that "If you're taking a lot of flak, you must be right over the target." I think the target here is indeed mankind's competence at replacing the natural environment with something ersatz. Underneath the shrill denunciations that techno-utopians make about Peak Oil people, is a gut-level understanding that mankind has already irretrievably wrecked the environment that sustains us -- so if we _can't_ replace the natural environment with controlled technology that will provide for our needs instead, then we're all well and truly f*****. In such dire circumstances, it's a pretty common reaction to denounce as a traitor anyone whose strategy differs even slightly from yours. I'd also encourage everyone to remember something which during the second Iraq war was dubbed "The Tinkerbell Strategy".
I'm further reminded of Mr. Freeman Dyson -- gawd, I'm almost afraid to mention his name here, for fear he's gonna show up and lambaste us too -- another groundbreaking intellectual, who was a vociferous opponent of climate change. Not that he denied for an instant that burning carbon was changing the Earth's weather, oh no, that was a given. Mr. Dyson, however, insisted that any tiny efforts to curb carbon or mitigate climate change were a foolish waste of time and money. Why? Because, he said, "within twenty years" [from 2008] we will have "genetically engineered carbon-eating trees," his words, that will presumably drop piles of diamonds instead of leaves for you to rake up from your yard. OK Mr. Dyson, if you're watching, the hurricanes, the heat waves, and the melting ice caps have arrived. Where are your trees?
9/6/13, 12:23 AM
billhicksmostfunny said...
Good questions all around, tough too answer though. As good questions should be......
9/6/13, 12:46 AM
roland said...
On the off chance that you read this and assuming that you are THE David Brin indeed, i'd like to express my deep disappointment.
It would have been lovely to see an intelligent cornucopian lock horns with the archdruid, and i was just about ready to get the popcorn out and watch the show and then this poignant let down.
Locking horns you certainly did not.
Somebody once said "Criticism is the only known antidote to error".
And that was what i was hoping for. Well thought out criticism. In the absence of that, not well thought out criticism would have been acceptable, but what we got was a random rambling rant.
Do try to be a bit to the point, will you?
Your technical errors have been eloquently addressed by previous posters. No need to revisit.
Of course it is a just-so-story. Why do you consider this worth mentioning?
If you would have read a few of the replies, you might have noticed that a lot of the readers of this blog are not americans.
@John Michel Greer
Daniel Baker's quote was from "The hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.
I am sure you would have read it at some stage, if not, it is well worth doing so.
The first three books of the series anyway. The wheels started to come loose a bit in the fourth, and fell off well and truly after that.
9/6/13, 1:09 AM
Marlow Charles said...
A kind of concertinaing of time and space. Read, in what felt like, a single breath...
Your short story would move most anyone with an open mind. Give pause to reflect. To question our specialness.
9/6/13, 3:15 AM
trippticket said...
As a matter of fact, we just moved from our "campstead" 7 miles out of town to an 88 acre farm half that far away to develop just such an operation for the farm owners. My "rabbit-powered lawn" blog post that I dropped a link to (thank you btw), our pastured chicken operation getting off (on?) the ground this month, and then mob-grazing as many cattle as we can stock on our pasture, and probably leasing the pasture land adjacent to us as well. I'm very excited about that part!
We should be selling 6 species of gourmet mushrooms by this fall, all of which are speeding up carbon cycling on both properties and fetching respectable prices. Our first small primocane raspberry crop is ripening as I type, and in the process of expanding by 15 fold. A Celeste fig crop just went in the ground, with half a dozen more varieties to be added soon. A big blueberry patch and unusual superfruit hugelkultur are on the short list.
The electrician who wired the farmhouse has offered his services to our cause pro-bono, for setting up micro-hydro systems on the creek adjacent to the house and barn. We're in the research stages of an aquaponics setup (not sold on that one yet). Most of the materials for a passive solar batch water heater are lying around waiting for me to find some time (and waiting for the sun to come back out!), as well as a solar oven for the back deck. We hang our laundry out and don't use HVAC, haven't for 5 years now actually, even in the south Georgia heat 2 summers ago. I sat up last night watching YouTube videos on rocket mass heaters until I had to force myself to get some sleep, and then right back at it by 6:00 this morning.
The new farm is on a busy road that leads from our little Appalachian town to a grass-based farm several miles farther out than we are, so an on-farm sales customer base almost seems like a foregone conclusion. Dumping the car (a 1996 Toyota Camry with 250k+ on the odometer) is a big dream of mine, but for the moment we still make the bulk of our income from selling herbal health and household products of our own invention on the farmers market circuit.
www.smallbatchgarden.com
more to follow...
9/6/13, 4:11 AM
trippticket said...
In our spare time;) we'll continue developing our little forest plot farther out of town for chestnuts and pecans (as perennial staples), apples, blueberries, tea, herbs, and mushrooms. A modest cob cottage is on the drawingboard, as well as converting our old wall tent (where the 4 of us spent the last 16 months living without electricity or running water) to a hard-topped workshop with roundwood poles from onsite. Not sure whether we'll "retire" there or stay here near town in the action and sell the other place as a turnkey permaculture operation. I guess we'll just have to see how things look at that point.
But there are no billion dollar ecovillages anywhere on our list, and I don't personally think that removing half the cars on the road is anything like sequestering all the excess carbon from our atmosphere back into the topsoil. It helps, yes, but what we're talking about feeds humans in the process of healing the planet. And, just like rising interest in your blog and books might indicate, humans ARE capable of making radical changes in their lives. Your blog title's off-putting, your posts are too long, and yet, here we are. Six years ago I was just another ecologist sitting in a cubicle (in one of those weird mazes made of flimsy metal, foam and cloth) feeling pious about the Florida wetlands I was protecting.
So no, my posts aren't just pleasant lullabies, and I think they have a much better chance of reaching a proactive audience here than they ever did in the 3 years I wasted at Jim Kunstler's place.
9/6/13, 4:12 AM
Thijs Goverde said...
For 'hilarious', please do not read 'superficial'. (Not that I thought you were going to...)
9/6/13, 4:40 AM
trippticket said...
I liked your Dr. Who reference! And it kind of supports the closing paragraph in my argument above.
9/6/13, 5:57 AM
Joshua said...
9/6/13, 6:27 AM
Phil Knight said...
i.e. it's not a genuine set of predictions.
Kurt Vonnegut's "Galapagos" is quite an amusing take on the future of mankind under ecological stress. We evolve into seals that are endlessly amused by our own farts.
9/6/13, 7:41 AM
ando said...
"William, well, I've got a new book out that has plenty of ideas to get you started."
I just finished it and I can recommend it!
mac
9/6/13, 8:35 AM
Hal said...
I'm just checking in here for the record with my reaction, as requested. While I thought the telling was masterful, and was thoroughly entertained and informed by the whole narrative, my emotional reaction was pretty close to Hector's. Basically... Meh.
It's like my reaction to reincarnation. I really don't care if some entity is going to survive my life that isn't in any useful sense, me. As a practicing, but I hope, rationally-based Christian, I feel the same way about the hereafter, though I won't go into that here.
It doesn't mean that I'm going to throw up my hands on this life, now. How I live and what I leave to others is of great importance to me. And though I struggle with a certain amount of depression over the whole thing, it's just an indulgence I allow myself sometimes when the whole thing gets overwhelming.
I'm much more interested in the first two chapters, especially the first and following years, as I'll be far down my own slope (as long as I'm not hit by a truck first) and my children and other loved ones will be living through those hard times. I'd love for something more significant to survive further along, but have pretty much reconciled myself to the facts of temporal existence.
9/6/13, 8:44 AM
onething said...
Seems to me Americans have become addicted to extreme levels of convenience. If one does not like tea leaves in one's mouth, a strainer can be used, but I just eat them.
**************
My answer to the last question I suppose is that it is comforting and fascinating, but I am more concerned with my consciousness than my molecules.
9/6/13, 8:53 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
I've always felt that one of the prime motivations for technoutopian thinking (and other transcendent religions promising an escape from our earthly prisons) is a strong distaste for one's own physical being. Which I find very sad.
9/6/13, 9:09 AM
LewisLucanBooks said...
What does catch my interest is the ten year and 100 year time frame. I think there was a similar speculation in you're "The Long Descent" with a shorter time frame. That I find interesting.
Thunderstorms and rain yesterday and last night. So fierce the cat hid in the bathtub all afternoon. Lost my power and my water. Not a problem. Plenty of stored water to make my tea. Read by candlelight and called it an early night. But, I can see much room for improvement for longer outages.
If I can leave something behind for any who come after me (a plant, a method of doing something, a useful book) I'll be happy. Speaking of books, you're latest should arrive, today. Looking forward to it.
9/6/13, 9:34 AM
simon.dc3 said...
This one is close to my heart by way of very different childhood programming.
Pls follow me for a bit if you have the time, it'll be lengthy: I was raised Pentecostal (of the fundamentalist strain maybe?), the first book I remember reading is --the only one at the ready for many childhood yrs was-- the KJV Bible. One habit was reading it together on a yearly basis as a family.
Of course, being a product of my kiith and, like all, with a need to belong, I soon was doing it on my own.
This is when the cognitive dissonance started.
The more I assembled my thoughts into coherent logical patterns, the more I questioned the biblical mythology. The answers I got sent me on tautological loops that discouraged me from critical and systems thinking for far too long.
But gave me a strong "doubting-Thomas" streak and apprehensiveness about anything I don't understand or can't follow logically to its origins on my own terms. This makes me suspicious of anything posing as unquestionable truth and forces me to read a lot.
Anyways, one of the passages that always stayed with me since about 8yrs old is Ecclesiastes 1:9-11, "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after."
Read that passage a few times, take away the supernatural, with the idea the bible is a compilation of ancient lore & understandings of ancients --who generation after generation, collapse after collapse, re-applied their own Scientific Method to surviving lore until only essential truths remained-- and is perplexing that it could be true.
You then naturally ask, what of fossil-fuel-guzzling jet engines, have they been invented before? What of Saturn V rockets able to take 45tons of payload to Trans-Lunar Injection?
So, for some years now I've created my own version of "The Next 3.5Million Million Years" that follows very much the one you describe here. It goes like this (of course these are very much rounded figures which I haven't taken the time to update in a while):
A) 3.5 Million Million Years ago --oldest signs of bio signs on Terra.
B) 20MY yrs --taking hominid evolution as a yardstick, avg time for a phylum to evolve to enough sentience to cause global changes.
C) 1MY --avg time for evolution to neutralize/recycle the longest-lasting radioactive waste.
D) 2MY --after C above, avg time for evolution to bring ecological balance + fill every nook and cranny with myriad fauna.
E) 25MY total --sum of B+C+D which I take as avg time for a sentient species to evolve, grow/dominate/overshoot/decline/collapse, then evolution to clean up + replenish for the next one to come around.
F) 5 Cataclysms --verified times Terra's fauna has been nearly wiped out, double it to 10 for ones we're not sure of nor have a record of.
A/E is 3.5MMY / 25MY = 140.
140 / 10 = 14.
14 times: likelihood that in the distant past creatures evolved with similar attributes to us capable of global impact, capable of vicious cycles of exponential growth + use of finite resources + pollution creation on the environs it depends for survival.
As we are not evolution's end product, and that Terra will likely go on for another 3.5MMYs before Sol expands and engulfs it, it is likely that another 14 species will to come to sentience with capability of global impact to their own detriment.
Somehow, of the things that give me fitful sleep worry and restlessness, that one gives me a sense of…tranquility (?) …calmness (?). For some reason, it steadies my perspectives.
9/6/13, 9:57 AM
Martin said...
As for my brain-bits ultimately ending up in the brain-bits of some faraway future creature, it has always been so....
9/6/13, 10:21 AM
simon.dc3 said...
Is that some may yet...break the cycle (?) and choose with live within limits? And we don't have to wait for the next phylum to evolve. We can choose it here and now individually, knowing it won't change one iota of where we're headed or save us from the bottleneck but as individual gives us a connection to Terra that all species and the longest lived ones seem to collectively grasp: live, at ease, comfortably and contented whenever possible, doing no wantonly (?) harm, Shangri-La is a journey, however brief, however ephemeral, is worth acquiescing (?) to get a glimpse of it.
9/6/13, 10:24 AM
Hal said...
Those poor investors out there are just so eager to put their capital into all of these wonderful technologies, and get rich in the process, but are overwhelmed with the negativity of such as YOU, Mr. Unreal Arch-Druid.
And oh, we owe so much to our pragmatists and problem-solvers who gave us cheap, safe, reliable nuclear energy and are just now only 50 years away from limitless fusion power!
Seriously, the point about the curves on solar is real, and a bright thread in the whole unfolding of our times. With some luck, they just might help keep some vital core capabilities going for another generation or so, and who's to knock that? But one or two promising developments don't happen in a vacuum, and the sheer massive scale of the transition needed must give us to caution.
Maybe I'll change my handle to "Cautious Grouch."
Note: Again, may be a dup. I seem to be having technical problems, but I'm sure THEY will solve it.
9/6/13, 10:48 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Thomas, oh man. Don't even get me started about Dyson.
Bill, the fact that you feel consolation from the story is the relevant point; we'll talk next week about the quake of which that's one of the foreshocks.
Roland, thanks for the details! I did read the first three books, but it was a very long while ago.
Marlow, and yet you'll notice that a significant number of people found it horribly depressing, or just responded "Meh." That's the division that fascinates me.
Trippticket, fair enough; you have every right to talk about mob-grazing here, since you're doing it. I just get so tired of the many people who want to talk about exciting new blah blah blah that they aren't doing anything about themselves!
Thijs, many thanks.
Joshua, well, I was trying to match the structure of Bardi's post, thus the decimal time divisions.
Phil, I don't think anybody has the smarts to predict what's actually going to happen over the course of the next ten billion years -- but I tried my level best to make it the sort of thing that could happen.
Ando, thank you!
9/6/13, 10:49 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Bill, I'm with you -- it sounded like a hideous future, especially when you factor in the gap between the shiny image from a distance and what things would actually likely be like on the ground. Of course the alternative had to be exaggerated -- the myth demands Heaven and Hell, and nothing in between. As for the body-directed biophobia, square i' the clout; I'll be talking about that as we proceed.
Lewis, so noted -- and I hope you enjoy the book!
Simon, that sense of tranquility and calmness is the thing I was hoping to evoke, among the fraction of readers who see things in a certain way. As you've no doubt noticed, you're not alone in that; more on this next week.
Martin, agreed about crows and clams -- though I wonder if some distant, predatory relative of the corbicules, a hundred million years earlier, might have spent its time catching the last distant descendants of hominids, steaming them, and dipping them in melted butter...
9/6/13, 10:56 AM
sgage said...
"I've always felt that one of the prime motivations for technoutopian thinking (and other transcendent religions promising an escape from our earthly prisons) is a strong distaste for one's own physical being. Which I find very sad. "
Excellent post. Distaste, indeed resentment for one's biological physicality, with a side of rank control-freakery.
9/6/13, 11:13 AM
onething said...
The reason I think this is important is because I see a lot of hand wringing laments that "we" have got to improve as a species. Sure, it is really true that we do, but if we are looking at the wrong target we might miss the predator at our tails. Yes, "we" are not saints and it causes many problems, but if we ignore the well heeled predators that are taking advantage of us and care not for the future of life itself, well, it might be compared to (as JMG laments) the way apocalypse and utopian scenarios promote laziness and a do-nothing attitude.
For example, it is certainly known that the great majority of all burglaries, muggings, murders and rapes are committed by a very small number of repeat offenders. But what about the well-heeled, the non personally violent who merely foment wars and despoil the earth while lying and manipulating to get what they want?
I found it very interesting when I once read of at least one Native American tribe that they think in terms of 7 generations when making decisions. Because in small populations I think it would be rare for people to allow the unfit to be their leaders and decision makers.
9/6/13, 11:23 AM
Marcello said...
Try as I can I am unable to guess how such technology would be developed and powered however. Several societies came up with fairly sophisticated technologies in the past but they were either instruments such as Antikythera mechanism and others chinese devices or moderate practical improvements, like a lot of roman technologies (say, using concrete instead of stone for a lot of applications).
That is not surprising, an agricultural society relying on renewable resources (and liable to find itself with its back to the resource wall on short notice) will yield only so much surplus: some scholars toying with a mechanical computer may be affordable but how do you go much beyond that?
High technology requires advanced tools which in turn require advanced tools to be made and so on. It is a substantial investment that must be justified.
Industrialism may be wasteful but it provided obvious near term benefits that compelled people to funnel scarce resources into it and technological development: cheaper cloth, more/better cannons, mass production of warships parts and so on.
Do you have some historical example that might provide a clue for what you propose?
9/6/13, 11:42 AM
JP said...
What's fascinating to me is that the technotopians always seem to steer clear of what I call the dark sciences.
They seem to play around the edges, but they completely miss the point.
Consciousness uploading and whatnot.
It's kind of funny when I watch them do their tricks, like the recent body control with someone else's mind.
9/6/13, 11:50 AM
JP said...
"It's like my reaction to reincarnation. I really don't care if some entity is going to survive my life that isn't in any useful sense, me. As a practicing, but I hope, rationally-based Christian, I feel the same way about the hereafter, though I won't go into that here."
I've essentially died and been reborn many times within my own life of a mere 40 years.
This is, in fact, what i like least about modern civilization.
The discontinuity.
The fascinating thing about identity is that it's partially stored in the environment.
So in a sense, memories are stored both within and without.
The question is how you access your memories.
The river Lethe is quite valuable if you want or need to forget.
@JMG:
What's funny about your mini-story here is that the same thing happens with each high culture.
Winter and the waves of unknowing always come, the present is buried, and forgotten until all that is left of the living culture of the past is only left in the pages of books.
9/6/13, 12:08 PM
Iuval Clejan said...
Which ties into what DeAnander said a while back about contrasting the veneer economy with a real economy, but he didn't mention writers among the contributors to the real economy as far as I can recall. Or other providers of "soul" food, like priests or druids, or musicians, dancers, storytellers, artists. Man does not live by bread alone. It is great when we are able to contribute our gifts to our community. Someday maybe I can trade you some General Relativity computation ;-). Or maybe a screen or a beer. I wish I had some extra money though in case you don't want any of those other gifts. Which is a long-winded way of saying: thanks!
9/6/13, 12:23 PM
Jeff BKLYN said...
9/6/13, 1:06 PM
Mark Luterra said...
As for the next few hundred years, I can imagine a couple of scenarios that would bring an ecotechnic future into being sooner with less of a global collapse. One is that particular regions - Scandinavia seems like one good bet - with a stable population and a relative abundance of resources will manage to get enough of their loops closed with renewables (e.g. using wind, solar, and biomass power to build more wind turbines) that their technological culture will survive the end of fossil fuels. These regions could then act as a seed to build out into the rest of the world.
The second possibility is that one catastrophe (e.g. plague-level pandemic on a global scale) will be large enough in terms of population destruction that it creates a temporary surplus of resources (metals in uninhabited buildings, surplus electrical generation capacity, unused land) that can be applied to ecotechnic technologies. The assumption being that by that point we will be convinced that a lower-energy, renewable-based world is the better choice, if only we had enough resources to move in that direction.
Perhaps these scenarios are less probable than your vision of slow global collapse, but I do see them as possibilities.
9/6/13, 1:16 PM
Ing said...
9/6/13, 1:53 PM
k-dog said...
9/6/13, 2:02 PM
wall0159 said...
Also, I find your vision of human extinction resulting from gradual climatic change a bit forced. It made humans sound (to me, I don't know if this was your intention) like an old worn-out machine that had run out of puff -- clearly not an accurate way to view things. This contrasts your repeated insistence that humanity will not be extinct in the near term, despite (in your tale) our population plummeting to 50M. In my opinion, such an event would be much more likely to cause human extinction. (for the record, I don't think NTE likely)
Having said that, I realise the world's a big place, and we're talking a lot of time here, and anything's possible. I also understand that you're writing this as an "educational piece". But that just didn't ring true for me. Having said this, I completely accept your point that humans are just another animal.
Elections in Australia today -- looks like we'll be scrapping our carbon pricing scheme.
@trippticket, I watched your video and thought it was amazing. It doesn't make me feel complacent, but does give me some hope.
9/6/13, 2:19 PM
wall0159 said...
I think your comment about people hating their physicality is really true -- particularly when it comes to the more "animal" aspects of ourselves.
I think it relates to the conversation about other sentient creatures and that we're looking at it the wrong way around:
It's not that a few other creatures have reached the great intellectual heights that we have. It's just that we're just not that much smarter than (eg.) other primates. What I think has happened is that we got smart enough to develop language, which allowed the network-effects of our collective intelligence and imagination to kick-in. Couple this with tool-use and writing, and I think a lot can be explained with only a modest increase in inherent intelligence.
9/6/13, 2:26 PM
MawKernewek said...
9/6/13, 2:59 PM
zedinhisbigflyinghead said...
No matter how bad things get, "artificial intelligence", could still save us from ourselves. ;)
http://bitly.com/19qV2Qf
9/6/13, 3:09 PM
trippticket said...
I would too.
9/6/13, 3:47 PM
trippticket said...
"@trippticket, I watched your video and thought it was amazing. It doesn't make me feel complacent, but does give me some hope."
It shouldn't make you feel complacent. Mob-grazing requires daily involvement with your animals and a whole lot of thought. And it's going to require a LOT of people doing it. Turning cows out to pasture is much simpler, but it damages land. That's obviously not what we're after here.
This is maybe the most exciting technology for a shot at a better future that we have, perhaps because it's less of a technology than a biomimicry. Energy descent will continue with or without mob-grazing, and our civilization will still probably come to an end, but this is for humanity, not for civilization.
And I'm glad that it makes you feel hopeful. We could all use a shot of genuine hopeful.
9/6/13, 3:59 PM
Myriad said...
All right, I'm impressed. I've been pointing out the computational nature of evolution, sometimes with very smart people, for years ("evolution is intelligent design, dammit!") and you're the first to entertain the idea sufficiently to respond in kind.
As for Wolfram's principles of computational equivalence and computational irreducibility (both could apply here), that's a worst case boundary. I can't rule out the hypothesis that replication of evolution's computation is the only way to arrive at AI. (Would it even still be "artificial" if it were achieved that way?) However, we didn't have to recompute the evolution of insects or birds in order to achieve powered flight, nor the evolution of aerobic metabolic pathways to achieve motive power from the oxidation of cellulose. Also, we have the present results of evolution's computations to work from. (Analogously, rule 110 being computationally irreducible doesn't stop me from looking on page 38 of Wolfram's book to see the 3200th generation starting from a single black cell already computed.)
Progress in the field also appears genuine. A computer science course on AI programming that I took 30 years ago started with a list of the field's characteristic problems on the blackboard (speech recognition, route planning, scene recognition, text recognition, language translation, etc.), some of which were considered pipe dreams at the time. All of them now have commercially and socially useful, if imperfect, realizations.
If progress towards "real intelligence" seems slow, it's partly because "intelligence" or "sentience" per se is never, outside of some corners of academia, the goal at hand, while the actual immediate goals keep advancing. In other words, if HAL is a few decades late, it may be because most cyberneticists have focused on developing features like "able to steer the spacecraft and keep the antenna pointed the right way" instead of "able to re-evaluate the mission and decide to murder the crew."
The visual perception puzzle I'll soon have to solve to "prove I'm not a robot" to submit this post will likely give me some difficulty. We no longer think playing good chess is one of the most amazing accomplishments of human intelligence, largely because AI found the problem so tractable. Other capabilities that we take for granted have proven far more challenging to imitate, a finding whose philosophical implications alone are worth the price of admission. (Who would have thought, back when TV newscasters were still calling computers "electronic brains," that playing chess would be orders of magnitude easier to encompass than identifying the chess board in a picture of a room? Who, even today, appreciates that in terms of demand for raw neural data processing power, an athlete exceeds a mathematician and a talented socialite probably exceeds them both?)
In any case, I didn't go into that field, so I won't be trying to do it. And I don't pin any great hope on AIs fixing anything, any more than I'd expect better weather from having a better weather forecaster. My interest is that, succeed or fail, there's a lot to be learned from the attempt.
9/6/13, 4:40 PM
Jim R said...
Cephalopods are probably worth a little more discussion here.
Just the name of the group means "head-foot" ... we know them from the fossil record. Four or five hundred million years is a pretty respectable history (I had to look it up just now).
Modern cephalopods include the nautilus (which Wikipedia says is not closely related), the octopus, the squid, and the cuttlefish.
If you've seen the nature show footage of cuttlefish, you'll know that they are remarkably intelligent. And they aren't too far removed from your clams, you know. Have you seen a cuttlefish putting on a visual show to dazzle its prey?
Another interesting fact about them is that many species are quite short-lived for such smart critters. (They don't have a written language, although they are capable of making ink.) Sex is fatal for many of the short-lived species (there are some species, including the nautiloids, that breed multiple times). They never get to know their offspring, so no grandmothers and no storytelling.
But in spite of the lack of a cephalopod kindergarten, these little shell-less critters do pretty well around the reef. If not for their brains, they'd be a delicious snack for most of the other phyla there. Whether it amounts to a 'civilization' depends on your definition of civilization, I suppose.
I am inclined to speculate that the short-lived species have a sort of 'racial memory', in which things that are learned by an individual can be somehow encoded into genomic imprinting and passed to the next generation. Something like "watch out for those fish with the big purple spots"...
9/6/13, 4:58 PM
Iuval Clejan said...
9/6/13, 5:08 PM
sgage said...
"Remember, only 120 years ago people were saying that human flight was impossible."
Please try to think critically, try some logic. Here's what you are essentially saying: People once said that something was impossible, but it turned out to be possible. Therefore, anything is possible.
They laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
9/6/13, 5:23 PM
sgage said...
"When it comes right down to it, once the food is on the table, the animals tended and the roof is strong, what else have we to do with our time on earth but learn to make music and talk with plants? And look up into the stars and out into the future? And express our love in awe and wonder for the matter and spirit and time that surround us and are us?"
Well said.
Thanks for that - as a music maker and keeper of animals it rang so right and true. I would only add "and the loft is full of hay, and the woodshed full of wood as we head into another Winter".
As I get older, it seems to me that the key word is "love".
9/6/13, 5:41 PM
Richard Larson said...
9/6/13, 6:01 PM
team10tim said...
I was wondering if you had any thoughts about interstellar communication? I understand that you probably left it out because it doesn't help your narrative in this post the way it does in Star's Reach. Speaking of communication between intelligent tool users, I was kinda surprised that the corvins didn't leave some archives on the surface of the moon for their successors to find.
Thanks,
Tim
9/6/13, 6:17 PM
jean-vivien said...
I can see that a lot of people commenting on this blog have come to terms with the religion of progress.
This is probably a good thing if it helps people focus on pragmatic actions.
You are the one to insist that the scientific method should not be thrown away along with that civil religion, and therefore adapted to fit into
some more viable spiritual belief systems in order to preserve it.
But don't you think that the scientific method is just a natural derivative of the will to understand ?
And that for some people, that very will is in itself a spiritual response to the existential paradoxes of the human condition ?
I see that you put a lot of emphasis on understanding the world on its own terms, even in your spiritual vision of Druidism.
What do you think of the possibility of a form of spirituality based upon the Quest for understanding ?
Of course that is pretty meaningless since it leaves one with the burden of defining what to try to understand.
And I guess many forms of spirituality do emphasize understanding God(s) and the other mystic phenomenae. Pure love of understanding for its own sake might be a myth of the religion of progress.
On another topic, you quote Artificial Intelligence as an example of the pursuits which might be regarded as useless in the future.
My personal belief is that in that area, just as in the search for ET life, we tend to be very anthropocentric.
Just as we tend to seek life on other planets based upon what we know of life on Earth, I believe we also tend to look for an artificial recreation of intelligence as we know it in the physical world, and expect to recreate a physical phenomenon using algorithms.
I think the emphasis on practical results is one of the reasons behind the failure of the AI pursuers. I've never read of experiments trying to create algorithms acting in total freedom and random innovations, for example, in order to study the myriads of ways information can exist in a system designed to create complexity... Probably because this would be redundant with Systems Theory, which didn't need algorithms to understand the basics of complex systems ? But it could lead to new philosophical, if not practical, insights.
And usually great discoveries happen because some people act on pure desire of understanding for itself, the practical results coming as side effects of the conceptual discoveries...
I still do believe that we have a lot of discoveries to be born out of pure love of understanding, for example in animal behaviour or natural science.
You are still right that we need to integrate the pure, unrewarded love of understanding into a broader, more rewarding, spiritual system ! We are humans, we do need our rewards (even spiritual rewards...).
9/6/13, 6:18 PM
onething said...
JP-
What recent body control with someone else's mind? Did I miss something?
Bill Pulliam -
I fully agree with you. Savor it!
9/6/13, 7:40 PM
Space Seeder said...
That being said, I've thought about deep time in both directions for some years now, and the fact that there's been no confirmation of extraterrestrial life makes me uneasy in view of the fact that interstellar migration is impossible. (Sliding down Hubbart's curve, just starting to see potential planets now, no idea how to get there.) The idea that the Earth could possibly be the only life bearing world is just awful to me, seeing as it is of finite duration.
A few years ago I wrote (and, uh, promptly forgot about) a piece advocating an attempt to seed other worlds with life. I was going to put it in this comment, but I found it to be way too wordy when I dug it out of it's well-buried backup. So I posted it here:
http://www.spaceseeder.blogspot.ca/2013/09/on-long-term-preservation-of-life.html
I didn't understand peak oil when I wrote that, and I'm not sure I still wish to see resources used towards that given how few are left, but it sure points to how I feel about post-Earth life elsewhere in the universe: Very much in favor of it. I think the actual question, though, was "how would we feel?". For me, if I could know that there would still be life after the end of the Earth, regardless of where it's atoms came from, a place inside me would feel extra warmth and happiness for the rest of my days.
9/6/13, 9:32 PM
Andrew said...
To quote Dawkins, "some people find that thought disturbing, I find the reality thrilling"
http://www.symphonyofscience.com/videos.html
Quote is in the video titled 'Our Place in the Cosmos'-third from the bottom. The other videos are great too.
Thanks,
Andrew
9/6/13, 9:58 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Hal, well, of course there's that. It's always amusing to hear somebody who's spouting the conventional wisdom trying to portraying himself as the lone visionary heroically contending against the conventional wisdom.
Onething, and I'll reiterate that it's very convenient and comforting to insist that the world's problems are the product of some minority of bad people, but it's not helpful. The people whose decisions concern me are the ordinary, everyday people who are dragging the world to ruin because they don't grasp the implications of their choices.
Marcello, I've spent a good fraction of the last seven years discussing exactly these points, and covered them in some detail in the book of mine I cited in response to your last comment. The short form is that there are plenty of ways to generate modest amounts of electricity and heat using renewable sources, and many of them would have been well within the reach of an ordinarily enterprising medieval alchemist if somebody had given him the plans. Add those to an agricultural society using the improved organic methods that have been devised over the last century, and you've got the basis for something that isn't an industrial society, but isn't medieval either -- and that likely has potentials for further development that nobody raised in a more wasteful society, such as ours, is likely to be able to spot.
JP, good -- and if that suggests to you that an intelligent species, a high civilization, and (say) an artistic or intellectual movement can be seen as parallel systems that follow similar patterns on different time scales, why, yes, that's what it suggests to me, too.
Iuval, poets do remarkably well during dark ages, and so do literate monks and nuns; crafts such as theirs may not belong to the veneer after all. If I ever need some relativity calculations, I'll take you up on that, thanks! ;-)
Jeff, well, in a sense...
Mark, it's certainly possible to imagine scenarios that would bring about an ecotechnic society more quickly than will otherwise happen; it's equally possible to imagine scenarios that would delay things substantially. I'd be more interested by your scenarios if they involved you, personally, doing something to make things happen, and if you then went out and pursued that goal, rather than daydreaming about circumstances handing you the outcome you'd prefer.
Ing, to my mind, it's less a matter of "what is there to do?" and more one of "what do you, yourself, choose to do?" Choosing to play the pipes, to learn the ways of herbs, or (to bring in one of the things that's getting a chunk of my spare time these days) to get some basic working knowledge of amateur radio, is an exercise of that most challenging of human attributes, freedom.
K-dog, on the other hand, there's a sense in which stardust is simply an intermediate stage between a corbicule and a nameless critter on a black crag, waving its pedipalps...
Wall0159, 120 years ago balloons were commonplace, so no, nobody was saying that human flight was impossible. (Heavier-than-air flight is a different matter.) I'd remind you, though, that 120 years ago people said that perpetual motion machines were impossible, and they were right. Believers in the mythology of progress constantly forget that many of the laws of nature tell you "no, you can't do that."
As for extinction, I modeled the fate of humanity on the fate of a great many other species. Large animals like us are highly vulnerable to ecological shifts, and a cascade of changes caused by a million years or so of changes in climate and ecology is very often the kind of thing that does in large land vertebrate species like ours.
9/6/13, 10:38 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Myriad, if I may borrow another of Wolfram's points, there are some things that can be simplified to the point that they can be modeled mathematically or logically -- for example, flight and fire -- and other things that don't seem to be susceptible to that treatment. It's always possible that intelligence might be able to be understood by means of a simplified model, but so far the results don't look good -- and it's worth noting that the brute force methods used by current computers to do quasi-intelligent tasks (such as playing chess) are radically different from the methods used by actual intelligent beings. That said, of course, my story is a story, and the discoveries of the corbicules are purely a work of fiction; what actually happens over the next billion years is quite a different matter.
Jim, I suspect that the vast octopi civilizations of the future will have to wait for evolutionary incentives toward longer lifespans!
Richard, well, the corbicules are evolving as fast as they can... ;-)
Tim, the corvins did, but no one ever went to the Moon after them. It didn't happen to be of interest to the Earth's other intelligent beings. As for interstellar communication, I consider that quite possible, but -- to borrow one of the themes from Star's Reach -- I suspect that if we ever do hear from other intelligent species, we'll be in for a massive shock, when we discover that a lot of what we think we know about the cosmos is simply a reflection of our own senses and nervous systems...
Jean-Vivien, that's a huge issue, and one that I was planning on discussing as we go. There are immense possibilities in the intersection between science and the new religious sensibility that's beginning to take shape, but understanding those possibilities is going to take a lot of careful discussion. More on this as we proceed!
Space Seeder, we have no reason to think that life is unique to Earth -- especially given how common planets are turning out to be in the nearby star systems. I'd be more interested in letting the universe come up with its own infinitely diverse varieties of life than in imposing our own notions of life on the rest of space!
9/6/13, 11:03 PM
John Michael Greer said...
9/6/13, 11:04 PM
wall0159 said...
As I wrote before, 'It may indeed be impossible ... but I wouldn't be so hasty.'
I'm saying, maybe, maybe not, we're not in a position to know. But, I'm not one of those people who thinks that nothing is beyond the reach of human ingenuity.
9/6/13, 11:24 PM
Paul said...
9/7/13, 12:46 AM
Sleisz Ádám said...
Perhaps it's just me, I have a little crush on math and numbers. :) Thanks for the story again!
9/7/13, 2:54 AM
Ing said...
JMG, freedom is a challenging attribute! That's not really how it's marketed today though. Some choices seem to be less of a choice than a requirement of a sort, in that not pursuing them is painful. Whether that's longing or calling it seems to me that to answer is an act of love in the broader sense. I suppose at the end of the day, it's still a matter of our choosing how and if we respond. I've long thought that while you have your own reasons for writing this blog, that the backdrop is love. And while there are a lot of other things that are true about your blog and the quality of your writing, I think that's a part of why you have the readership you do.
9/7/13, 4:10 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
I'm basically disappointed in your comment.
Why? Well, because no good cornucopian rant should end without mentioning the singularity (whatever that is).
Seriously, I expect better next time.
PS: I'm only kidding around, he can say whatever he likes as long as it doesn't offend people. However, his rant still doesn't change the facts on the ground in the here and now of the real world.
PPS: He should also try living with solar PV energy 100% off the grid for a year before commenting on the future of solar. It's good, but it's not that good. I'm at 37.5 degrees latitude south and he's (I'm assuming San Diego) at about 33 degrees north. He ain't getting that much more sunlight on average over winter than here.
PPPS: Also he may want to consider the impacts of a good ol fashioned Martian dust storm on solar PV panels before heading off into space. Good for publicity, but generally considered bad for your health.
Regards
Chris
9/7/13, 6:37 AM
Lord of the Barnyard said...
I enjoyed Brin's (I hope it was him) appearance.
One request: I'm fairly new to excitedly waiting for the next installment.
I don't know if I will ever have the time to wade through the entire backlog (esp with the comment threads as long as they can get).
JMG, you often chastise someone for missing the point that wasn't spelled out in your current missive (Brin) because it was spelled out and hashed out long ago on this very blog.
I'm taking a roundabout way to ask for a post that sums up the most basic tenants. Maybe a meta-post with links to the appropriate post in the backlog, maybe a wiki.
Is that viable? Appealing at all? Clearly I'm making a wish to make my life as convenient for me as possible, but I'm a slow reader and if I try to catch completely up most of your timeline here will have taken place before I do.
9/7/13, 6:46 AM
Andrew Butt said...
9/7/13, 7:12 AM
Yuri Kuzyk said...
I think it is quite interesting how closely you first 100 years match the output of the "Limits to Growth: a 30 Year Update" scenario of "more abundant resources".
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3551#comment-314024
The odd comments from Brin as well as your lead-up regarding attitudes raises a very interesting tangent.
Living beings are 'anticipatory systems' to borrow a term from Robert Rosen's work. To use his definition:
"A system containing a predictive model of itself and/or its environment, which allows it to change state at an instant in accord with the model's predictions pertaining to a later instant."
The reactions and comments to many of your posts indicate serious troubles with current predictive models the majority of folks are relying on for making decisions.
One would theorize that creatures with faulty models are eliminated from the biosphere. So the question is whether H. sapiens "OS 1.0" is really optimal?
I think the evidence implies a resounding "No!" this question...So how many here are actively working on upgrading their OS?
take care...
9/7/13, 7:20 AM
onething said...
"
Onething, and I'll reiterate that it's very convenient and comforting to insist that the world's problems are the product of some minority of bad people, but it's not helpful. The people whose decisions concern me are the ordinary, everyday people who are dragging the world to ruin because they don't grasp the implications of their choices. "
How about a both/and. I would never say that the world's problems are caused by a certain group, and I fully concur that the majority are a contributing cause in their own manipulation, but I think it also makes sense to be a little wiser, to be on guard against criminals who do not behave in blunt and obvious ways like grabbing you in a back alley. Most people are quite careful about that type.
As to your specific example of the way people are dragging the world to ruin, doesn't that show how very used we are to lousy leaders who do their best to keep situations from being understood, from being openly discussed?
You see, I don't really disagree with you that the leaders are a reflection of the developmental level of the people, but if the people are to improve, losing some naivete is a necessary step. It is a matter of being gullible or not gullible.
If we had halfway decent leaders, most people would understand the implications of their choices and be willing to make changes as a society. Is it a chicken and egg problem?
9/7/13, 9:01 AM
peacegarden said...
That was beautiful! As well as talking with the plants and learning their ways, I hope to pass on the knowledge and experiences to those "coming up".
The simplest task can be transcendental...much depends on your point of view.
Gail
9/7/13, 9:20 AM
LewisLucanBooks said...
"We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devil's bargain, And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."
There's also another couple of lines referring to us as "billion year old carbon."
It's a beautiful day. Out to the garden I go!
9/7/13, 1:06 PM
MawKernewek said...
The truth is a little more complex with several different phases, the first Red Giant Branch being the burning of hydrogen in a shell around the core, after the central core is depleted.
Then comes helium core burning, after that an inert C/O core and helium and hydrogen burning shells. This is actually quite an unstable configuration (due to the different fusion reactions having different temperature dependencies) and the star loses most of its mass in strong stellar winds resulting in loss of outer layers.
There is some additional complexities in more massive stars. Generally what is going on is the star maintaining equilbrium somehow. What happens is the outer layers do the opposite of what is happening at the core. The core contracts after its energy from hydrogen burning runs out, at the same time, as a result, the energy from the loss of gravitational potential enery has to go somewhere, leading the outer layers to become enormously inflated.
A nova is typically the result in mass transfer in a binary system, perhaps from an inflated giant star towards a compact white dwarf, the layer of hydrogen accreted onto the white dwarf eventually igniting in a thermonuclear explosion.
9/7/13, 1:09 PM
jeffinwa said...
Life goes on.
A few atoms of my brain....I am honored.
Consoles me.
9/7/13, 1:10 PM
Unknown said...
The second is that you make no mention of the decay of the geological cycle as the earth's core loses heat and the magma slows down. I don't know what the effect might be in a billion years, but I'm guessing it will not be zero. That too will have an effect on the renewal of mineral resources on which the descendants of our life forms will depend.
9/7/13, 1:19 PM
Myriad said...
Regarding Dr. David Brin's post: since no one else seems to be bothering to, allow me to put on record my vehement objection to Dr. Brin's presumptuous characterization of Archdruid Greer as an "amateur." Archdruid Greer makes his living deriving and evaluating future scenarios, to at least a comparable extent to Dr. Brin. Even if that were not the case, and even if Archdruid Greer were somehow demonstrably wrong in his vision of the future, his scholarship and reasoning ability, as well as his literary accomplishments, are worthy of far more professional respect than Dr. Brin showed.
Dr. Brin, when Archdruid Greer starts doing astrophysics, then you can call him an amateur without looking a bit silly.
(Sorry if all the titles above read awkwardly; just using them to help make a point.)
9/7/13, 1:52 PM
Brother Nihil said...
My question for you is very broad, and is suggested by your comment to Mark about letting the universe come up with its own infinitely diverse varieties of life than in imposing our own notions of life on the rest of space.
Why must we be so deferential to nature, when our minds clearly have the power to imagine and invent things which nature hasn’t? Much of the modern world is the product of human invention, yet people seem to like it. It seems to me that the essence of your disagreement with people like David Brin is their willingness to “disturb the universe” (as Freeman Dyson put it), and their lack of any sense of the sacred. In occult terms, it sounds like you are a white magician who follows a druidic right hand path, while people like Brin and Dyson are more like black magicians who follow a scientific left hand path. Indeed, I think of you and David Brin as archmages of opposing magical schools, and have long wanted to see you clash.
Anyway, I would be interested to hear more about how you think about this matter. Thank you.
9/7/13, 1:54 PM
Joel said...
It's been fun to make my own tea from scratch. Even though the leaves are not bred for it, I can be very choosy when picking from a whole plant worth of young shoots, and of course there's a lot of value in brewing immediately after roasting. In some ways it's a mediocre tea, but in other ways it's the best I've tasted.
It makes me feel a lot more confident about continued supply of caffeine, and it really makes me appreciate how much work goes into tea. Well worth trying next spring, for those of you who already have appropriate plants growing in your neighborhood.
9/7/13, 2:02 PM
mallow said...
Maybe that's one reason why a story about what happens, however fascinating it is, rather than why it happens, leaves some of us feeling a bit 'meh'. The Stoics had beliefs about the soul and an eventual moving on from physical existence to get them through their bad days. I don't know how anyone really deals with the concept of eternal cycles without some faith like that.
About artificial intelligence, coincidentally a friend of mine just published a piece on his blog about it that people may find interesting:
http://www.chekov.org/blog/brain-beast
Lord of the Barnyard, a quick google of whatever you're about to comment on plus "Archdruid Report" solves that problem easily enough.
9/7/13, 2:07 PM
Ing said...
9/7/13, 4:02 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Sleisz, that's one of those basic science fiction and fantasy tricks -- the illusion of reality is easiest to catch with plain, ordinary-seeming details.
Ing, precisely -- whether and how we choose to respond isn't random; it reflects the whole self, or (to use an old-fashioned and crashingly unpopular word) the whole character of the one who chooses.
Barnyard, no, I criticized Brin because he jumped to a bunch of inaccurate and ill-tempered conclusions in his bit of drive-by trolling. As for putting the whole thing into a single post, if I could have done that I'd only have made one post, ever! The closest equivalent is probably to be found in my books -- I'd recommend The Ecotechnic Future as the best one-volume guide; even a slow reader should be able to get through it in well under ten billion years. ;-)
Andrew, I'd be very interested in their reaction to it.
Yuri, yes, that was basically the model I was using! You get today's gold star for paying attention. As for upgrading our OS, well, that's what I was talking about back a while in my posts about theurgy and thaumaturgy.
Onething, I tend to think that people get exactly the government they deserve; the actions of those in power in the US, for example, are simply the actions of the average American projected onto the larger screen of world power. Still, I've discussed that here many times and I don't expect to get any more agreement this time.
Lewis, I spent a chunk of today in mine, so by all means.
MawKernewek, I may be out of date, but last I read the Sun was expected to let loose with a series of helium flashes in its post-red giant phase; while those aren't novas, they're pretty spectacular explosions nonetheless. Do you happen to know if this is current science, or have those rascally astrophysicists changed their minds again?
Jeffinwa, thank you!
9/7/13, 5:13 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Myriad, nah, it's standard for people on Brin's side of our current culture wars to insist that nobody on my side can have any valid credentials at all. I got used to that a long time ago.
Brother Nihil, that's one way of putting it, I suppose.
Joel, fascinating -- I'd be very interested in learning more about this, as tea is one of my favorite vices.
Mallow, that's an interesting response -- thank you!
9/7/13, 5:24 PM
jeffinwa said...
mmmm long pig
Now to clean off my monitor; you sir have a wonderful way with words, full of surprises:)
9/7/13, 5:33 PM
geovermont said...
There's only so much that science can really tell us about the future (and I'm thinking that JMG used most of that in the current post). In the end, science is hopelessly inadequate for this particular task as science deals with the analysis of testable facts and ideas. Instead of hard science, we need imagination, and where better to find that than in a poet--someone who can take the facts of daily existence, come up with new insights, and who can then express them in a compact and memorable form. I suggest Robinson Jeffers, once a rising start in the literary pantheon of the 1920s and 30s, now almost forgotten and barely in print.
I was re-introduced to Jeffers through JMG's essay "An Inhumanist Vision" at the Dark Mountain Project. I'm finding that Jeffers' remarkable poems are indeed powerful tools to use to understand our real place in this vast cosmos. Go to a library, dig out an old copy of The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers from the stacks, and dig into poems such as "Rock and Hawk", "Rearmament", "The Purse-Seine", "Flight of Swans", or "The Answer". As a start, try this one on for size:
Return
A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
I will go down to the lovely Sur Rivers
And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,
That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,
The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks
So that they cannot strike, hardly can fly.
Things are the hawk's food and noble is the mountain, Oh noble
Pico Blanco, steep sea wave of marble.
Originally Published in "Solstice", 1938
Jeffers is trying to set us on a path to see that this world is beautiful even in the death throes of an animal or in the fall of a civilization or even in the extinction of humanity or of all life on the whole planet. He steps out beyond the anthropocentrism that Aldo Leopold helped to wean us from and keeps right on marching, on out past even the biocentrism of seeing the living parts of the world as the most important. It's a scary journey that very few people in any place and any time seem to attempt.
Jeffords clearly saw that something was seriously wrong about the way our civilization was trending. He saw us moving toward decline, and not just because of the rise of Fascism and the Great Depression. Now it appears that we have wasted decades without making much progress toward a more sustainable life on the planet and that the decades ahead will see the unraveling of much that we had once thought was permanent and secure.
It's a great "what if" to ask if Jeffers could have written a poem that would have envisioned the next 10 billion years. If his poems The Beaks of Eagles and Shiva are any indication, then I'd say he could have done it masterfully.
P.S. Thank you JMG for getting me to read or re-read authors such as Hesiod, Homer, De Tocqueville, and now Jeffers. I will admit that I found E.P. Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" (discussed in the comments a while back) pretty tedious, but even in that overly long work there were gems.
9/7/13, 6:06 PM
Joseph Nemeth said...
I found the exchange between you and David Brin amusing, since both of you are full-time authors bickering about people getting off their duffs as "doing" something. I'm one of the guys out here "doing" something, more in Brin's high-tech model than your post-peak model, and I think BOTH of you are working at something far more important than what I do. Pen mightier than the sword and all that.
I just read your book The Ecotechnic Future (Kindle). It put in one place a lot of material I had to search around on the Archdruid Report to figure out, and resolved most of my disagreements with your point of view, which were based on an incomplete understanding. Seeing it all in one place made a huge difference. Thanks!
For anyone who wants to quibble with JMG, I'd recommend reading this book first.
9/7/13, 6:35 PM
Twilight said...
9/7/13, 6:59 PM
Stacy said...
9/7/13, 9:07 PM
Dagnarus said...
Your comment brought to mind some of the rhetoric which came out of the anti-theist movement. Namely people who suggested that even if they knew with absolute certainty that God existed they wouldn't worship him (To be clear I do not believe in the Christian god), based upon the fact that his behaviour ran counter to their sensibilities. Personally I can't help but feel that the idea that it would be better to burn in hell for all eternity rather than to engage with the universe on its own terms in this hypothetical scenario, is very much related to the idea that people would rather strip mine the planet to the point where even even a decent standard of life is difficult to come by rather than accept that the current levels of extravagance are impossible to maintain.
@onething
As to the matter of our leadership leading people astray. One of the things which I noticed in the left wing alternative media was that it was possible to hear about things like water depletion, the horrible effects of hydraulic fracturing, global warming, and the fact that currently the world's population consumes something like 2 planets a year, even while the majority of the world's population lives in poverty. What I wouldn't hear was things like, we really need to consume less, we have to have a lower standard of living. No in terms of economics they would always be advocating that standards of living had to increase and that we had to get back to "growth". These were not people who were lap dogs of the democratic party. They didn't particularly like Obama. To the best of my knowledge they weren't being financed by shadowy oligarchs. They had all the information they needed to see the direness of the worlds situation, but they still weren't willing to face up to it.
9/7/13, 10:28 PM
Jim R said...
Your comments on the Big Bang and its relationship with epicycles has inspired me to offer another bit of idle
speculation here. The notion of a Big Bang was simply extrapolated from the notion of an 'expanding' universe,
derived from the reddening of spectral lines in distant objects. So epicycles are a good analogy -- ancient
astronomers observed cycles in the sky and imagined a kind of celestial orrery. 20th century astronomers observed
the reddening of spectral lines, and ran the clock backwards to arrive at a point source, which must have exploded
quite violently to get us where we are now. The two explanations are similar in their simplicity.
Suppose our universe, the one we know, with its four-dimensional fabric of spacetime, is merely a point embedded
in an indescribably complex multiverse?
In this multiverse, every possible state of each particle is represented, so that the probabilities of quantum
mechanics are all covered. This would explain the quantum principle that the observation of a particle makes its
wave function collapse -- you are merely establishing which branch of the multiverse you are in.
At a greater distance from our point in the multiverse, are other universes in which the fundamental properties of
matter and energy are different. So, for example, you have a universe in which beta decay does not occur. That one
suffers a failure to exist, as all its matter collapses in a useless clot of neutrons. It never launches. Or
another universe over there, where thermodynamics work differently and would allow for a perpetual motion machine.
Unfortunately that universe also fails in an early heat death. Sort of a Darwinian winnowing of the unsupportable
branches of the multiverse.
... just speculatin' ...
9/7/13, 10:35 PM
Gauk said...
Other notable selection pressures: Humans at higher elevations get less of Earth's atmosphere to protect them against solar radiation, which selects towards darker skin than lower elevations. The closer to the equator you get the darker the skin due to greater concentration of solar radiation.
Sexual selection does play a part - in many(but not all) societies the powerful classes tend to be slightly lighter than less powerful classes since powerful men tend to marry less powerful women on their physical attractiveness - which in many cases includes lighter skin. Women's skin lightens at puberty to produce extra vitamin D during fetal development and lactation; This dimorphism is often seen as a desirable trait.
9/7/13, 10:42 PM
Tony said...
On the subject of consolation versus other reactions: the idea of my PARTICULAR atoms being recycled doesn't really add much for me above and beyond the idea that things still can recur. Matter itself seems much less important to me than our effects on events into the future; nothing I can do can make one of my neural carbon atoms influence the thoughts of anyone else who eats it and uses it to build a memory, but things I do now to OTHER groups of atoms (including other humans) can ripple forward in time even after I am long forgotten from any living memory...
9/7/13, 10:48 PM
KL Cooke said...
It'll be more surprising if they're not. If someone thinks there's oil under the Lincoln Memorial, you can color old Honest Abe gone.
9/7/13, 11:47 PM
Clarence said...
a quote from someone i use to follow several years ago. in response to a reader's lament about the possible end of the human struggle.
clarence
9/8/13, 12:03 AM
Marcello said...
Try as hard as they can to pretend otherwise leftists, environmentalists and so on are by and large part and parcel of the system. The cake getting smaller is a VERY unwelcomed development to fit in their worldview. Even those who nominally embrace degrowth still consider a lot stuff underwritten by "The Glorious Thirty" as absolutely "non negotiable". Good luck with that...
9/8/13, 1:32 AM
MawKernewek said...
When it happens, the layer in which it is taking place expands as a result of the energy release meaning it's less dense and cooler, so the fusion stops again. So yes, it is a series of explosive releases of energy.
However as Tony pointed out, astronomical observers are located on the outside of stars, and the energy is absorbed by the outer layers which are driven off through stellar winds.
I did comment before on the Drake equation, either on one of these posts or on Star's Reach. It does depend strongly on the lifetime of a technological (radio transmitting) civilisation.
9/8/13, 1:59 AM
MawKernewek said...
My conclusion was that the time delays in interstellar radio communication were more likely to be hundreds rather than tens of Earth years.
9/8/13, 2:17 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
You may have heard that we held a Federal election here yesterday (Saturday) and that there is now a change of government in the country.
The outcome of the election, reminds me of the comment that I've received from quite a few small traders in Asia, "Yes, same, same, but different".
Anyway, politics aside, out of sheer curiosity but also for some small financial gain, I sought out employment as a general dogs body at the local polling station. For obvious reasons, I can’t provide specific details, but…
I was really impressed with the systems in place as they were - shock, horror! - completely manual and paper based. To say I was in my element is an understatement! There was not even a single computer in sight. Members from some of the political parties came in during the count to provide oversight for the final vote count (again it was 100% manual) and everyone at the end of the day seemed satisfied with the processes.
It was a long (about 15 hours of continuous work) and hard day (even by my standards) but by the end I took satisfaction that such a complex task could be undertaken in a truly robust manual paper based system chock full of integrity.
To have never been involved in such a system is to underestimate the integrity that the system has.
Readers may not know it, but voting is compulsory in Australia and you are fined if you do not vote. This requirement arose in the early 20th century after federation because of the high level of general apathy from most of the population here and I can attest now that most people take the process pretty seriously.
PS: I think you've hit the motherlode with this essay!
Regards
Chris
9/8/13, 3:15 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
There are no rabbits at this point in the mountain range because of 24/7 predation and lack of appropriate feed and shelter. However, the flood plain below is a different story and they seem to be quite plentiful.
I remember reading about people eating rabbits here during the Depression era who were also starving because the rabbits themselves were also doing very poorly due to prolonged drought (I think the US was in drought at the same time).
The film footage of rabbits at that time was quite disturbing in a zombie sort of way.
Dunno, about rabbits. I have eaten them and they are quite tasty (a bit gamey though). I've eaten guinea pig too and it was quite good and some people recommend raising them in preference. Dunno really as I don't raise either.
Chris
9/8/13, 3:42 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
On the topic of tea.
I put the dried tea leaves into a metal mesh strainer which sits in the water and can diffuse as much or as little according to your taste. When the metal mesh is removed from the water, the tea leaves are also removed. Very simple and also very elegant.
Why would someone put milk into tea? That seems wrong to me... Just like frying tomatoes which end up looking exactly like a blood clot. Not right.
On the other hand, it is just that little bit too cold for the tea camellia plant to grow here. As it hasn't snowed for about 5 years though, it may be just warm enough for a coffee plant to survive and fruit. Mmmm coffee.
Hi ChemEng,
Respect and welcome to the journey.
Regards
Chris
9/8/13, 4:01 AM
Les said...
Eg. when I just went out and looked up at epsilon crucis, I was seeing it as it was over 200 years ago. And if anyone on a planet circling that star was looking my way, they were seeing us as we were over 200 years ago.
Then the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that I only saw that star because the electrons that emitted the photons I caught only did so because the electrons in my retina were there to catch them.
The electrons in my eyes sent out retarded waves, traveling back in time until they hit those emmiting electrons over two hundred years ago, letting them know that it's ok to send out those photons, to be caught over here two hundred years later.
Or when I look at my wife, I'm only ever seeing her as she was a fraction of a second ago.
So, ten billion years? Pah! I can't even figure out what "now" is...
Cheers,
Les
9/8/13, 5:10 AM
Roger Ebert said...
One can speculate on these things though quite extensively and dream up all sorts of possibilities.
RE
9/8/13, 5:27 AM
trippticket said...
"Recently a number of reports have shed light on an impending carbon bubble. Fossil fuel companies are valued in the market based on their reserves of unburned fuel still in the ground. If international regulations are put in place to prevent atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from rising above 450 ppm (the estimated cap to avoid irreversible climate change), much of the listed reserves couldn't be used."
This one actually cracked me up a little bit, since the "magic number" was 350 ppm just a few years ago...no one's going to stop burning fossil fuels until they're gone or economically non-viable, which thankfully, may not be as far off as most people think, and no global regulatory committee is going to convince people, particularly Americans, otherwise. I believe we can reverse climate change, but not without behavioral innovation. Substituting one technology for another is just a sweet lullaby that makes people feel better about not making real changes in their lives (thanks JMG!).
It's like claiming that there's this new condom on the market that takes the immorality out of adultery.
9/8/13, 6:02 AM
trippticket said...
"Women's skin lightens at puberty to produce extra vitamin D during fetal development and lactation; This dimorphism is often seen as a desirable trait."
I assume you mean "at conception."
Thanks for the additional info. Although I still believe that sexual selection plays a very big role in our looks.
9/8/13, 6:08 AM
trippticket said...
"It makes me feel a lot more confident about continued supply of caffeine, and it really makes me appreciate how much work goes into tea. Well worth trying next spring, for those of you who already have appropriate plants growing in your neighborhood."
This is an interesting topic and highly relative to the project of this blog I think. JMG's love of tea aside.
Chocolate, coffee, sugar, and tea were actually the perfect drugs for the industrial revolution. We were getting busier, more "efficient," working longer days in less familiar environments, giving naps a miss, and so forth. It made sense in that pattern, and the timing of their arrival on the world stage couldn't have been better.
Today, there's even more to be done in my opinion, though very few people outside of a few of these blogs seems to understand what those things are. And ultimately it all boils down to work that is a lot more...human, and done by hand. Pushing on through siesta won't be as big a deal I don't think because the work will be more cyclical and less, how should we say, retirement-driven. It'll always be there. There won't be as much getting "that couch thing taken care of," to quote the movie Fight Club.
So my question is, will the perfect storm of industrial drugs be as important in a de-industrializing future as it has been throughout our lives and careers? I have 10 tea camellias growing in my forest garden, and intend to expand that crop radically over the coming decade, but I don't really drink caffeinated tea. This is purely a cash crop issue, and because I love my wife, who does drink black tea.
I also carry considerable concern about a demographic of young people growing up in the mountains with fewer job prospects, rampant methamphetamines about, and fillers of their in-between hours like Monster energy drinks, Red Bull, Amp, etc. This seems like a lighter/match scenario to me. Care to comment?
9/8/13, 8:01 AM
trippticket said...
I'd say that 5 out of 6 people prefer the rantings of John Michael Greer to David Brin!
Ding, ding, ding! If you follow the archdruid report, you win the prize!!
9/8/13, 8:15 AM
SLClaire said...
http://livinglowinthelou.blogspot.com/2013/05/tea-for-two-in-lou.html
Those of you in USDA zones 6 and 7 in particular might want to check out the post. Since I planted this spring I don't know if they will survive winter, but next spring I will let you know!
Re Robinson Jeffers: in college I took a course on 20th century American poetry and wrote the required term paper on one of his long poems. If that paper weren't in a cedar chest with a lot of stuff displaced from a painting project piled on it, I'd dig the paper out and tell you which poem it was. Initially I chose the poem because the professor mentioned he liked Jeffers' poetry and hoped someone would write their paper on it. But I ended up liking the poem for itself. Now that he's been brought up again, I'll put rereading some of his poetry on my reading stack.
Also, thanks to the reader who recommended Lee Smolin's book The Trouble with Physics. It's fascinating and I highly recommend it, especially since it discusses some of the things that have been brought up in the comments.
9/8/13, 9:58 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Geovermont, oddly enough, we'll be talking about Jeffers at some length in an upcoming post. Doesn't hurt that he's one of my faves, up there with Yeats and Eliot.
Joseph, glad you liked the book. It took the process of writing The Long Descent, my first peak oil book, to really get me thinking about the foundational ideas that structure my approach to the future, and The Ecotechnic Future was what came out of the resulting brooding (and blog posts).
Stacy, I may just have to look into that. We're up in the mountains here -- well, as close as the eastern half of the continent has to mountains -- and I'm thinking of some of the delectable mountain-grown green teas I enjoy...
Dagnarus, that's a fascinating comparison; I think you're onto something.
9/8/13, 12:13 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Tony, thanks for the updated info -- and also for your position on the depressed-to-consoled spectrum!
KL, I've been saying for years now that before this is over, the Sierra Club will be advocating stripmining the national parks -- in (ahem) an ecologically sensitive way, to be sure.
Clarence, good. In fact, it can be generalized -- large animals don't tend to last long, and why should we be any exception?
Marcello, bingo. The dependence of contemporary liberalism on the fantasy of an endlessly expanding economy is that movement's most lethal weakness.
MawKernewek, and of course that may be true. I took an average lifespan for communicative civilizations toward the upper end of the probability curve in order to make the plot work better, but I'd be far from surprised if that didn't turn out to be accurate.
Cherokee, I'm delighted to hear it. Here in the US elections involve easily hacked electronic devices, and since electoral fraud is a grand American tradition, I'm sure you can imagine the results. Asfor milk in tea, I have no idea -- my stepfamily is Japanese, so I grew up drinking tea Asian style, straight, no milk, no sugar, and light by British standards.
Les, the aliens on Epsilon Crucis III doubtless waved back!
Roger, a good bit of the petroleum you're burning today was laid down less than 100 million years ago. Please do look up the underlying science before deciding what is and isn't plausible!
Trippticket, the condom metaphor just won you today's gold star. More generally, yes, the number will keep creeping upwards; it's a consistent bad habit of environmental activists to forget that other people keep track of shifts in their rhetoric. As for the popularity of the two opinions, well, I bet if you'd asked on Brin's blog, you'd have gotten a very different answer!
SLClaire, I'll definitely check that out. Thank you.
9/8/13, 12:27 PM
dragonfly said...
I'll take intrigued, with a creamy sauce of wonder, topped with fresh awe.
Really, it just strikes me as rather cool that I have gotten to hang out with such well-traveled atoms.
Thank you JMG, for the stirring of those feelings, which happens too seldom these days.
9/8/13, 3:55 PM
Roger Ebert said...
http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/forum/index.php?topic=1799.msg31752;topicseen#msg31752
I'd drop it on here except I don't think your comment stream takes graphics, least I have never seen any.
In any event, to get similar Oil creation over the next 150M years, you would need similar environmental conditions to occur, which seems unlikely at the moment. One can speculate though that conditions will change though to make it possible down the line some.
RE
9/8/13, 6:17 PM
Carl said...
Good luck, Carl
9/8/13, 6:48 PM
Moshe Braner said...
Now where's the app to help me read the fuzzy capchas to prove I'm not a robot? :-)
9/8/13, 8:06 PM
Moshe Braner said...
9/8/13, 8:14 PM
Hal said...
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2013/08/looking-for-conservative-phoenix.html
JMG, I think you'll like the second topic, as it makes use of an image you used in a post not too long ago.
9/8/13, 8:37 PM
KL Cooke said...
Darren, that happens to many of us here, myself included. What makes it particularly seductive is the contrast to the self-aggrandizing bombast typical of his critics.
9/8/13, 9:15 PM
rising-moon said...
I'm delighted by the current of glee running through this post. It sounds like you had a great time writing it. Thank you!
9/9/13, 6:56 AM
thrig said...
for speculatory spin
that includes Brunet,
druids, and the much-arrowed Brin
9/9/13, 8:51 AM
Unknown said...
I like milk in smoky teas like Lapsang Souchong. Chai is boiled with spices and milk. I don't put milk in plain Darjeeling, Earl Grey, or any green tea.
9/9/13, 9:54 AM
evodevo said...
9/9/13, 10:05 AM
jim said...
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8587336&postID=5105002076347799283
A person who goes by the name "occam's comic" tried to draw a thoughtful comment from David. But it did not really work out that way.
I think I know why he got so angry about your essay. This is what David Brin thinks of Science Fiction Writers
"the highest of all human professions....
Wait a minute. Brin said what? Oh, sure, readers of this book probably like science fiction. But isn't that taking things a bit too far, calling sci fi writing the highest profession? Well, in a profound irony that ought to amuse -- or perhaps grate -- the many atheists and agnostics who write SF, let me suggest that no other calling, not even that of monk or priest, has a greater claim to sacred status."
He apparently sees Science Fiction as the sacred text for the God of Progress, and then you (JMG) used the form of science fiction to undermine the God of Progress.
9/9/13, 10:10 AM
Iuval Clejan said...
9/9/13, 10:30 AM
Joseph Nemeth said...
Brin makes the same point, and his urgency I understand. His is a classic hero journey myth: there's a Great Thing to be accomplished, many obstacles on the path, and the threat of failure at every turn. In real life (or evolution) for every Parsifal who finds the Graal, there are a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand knights who get caught headfirst in a thicket in the deep woods and are never heard from again. The hero journey myth has the luxury of Author's Omniscience, and can focus with perfect foresight on that one guy who wins the prize, lending his triumph an air of inevitability. So Brin's mythology requires that we strive urgently and sincerely; it also "guarantees" success, because otherwise it's a lousy story (to modern sensibilities -- in Greek tragedy, failure is guaranteed.)
It seems you are trying to craft a different mythology, a more realistic one, and I'm simply not seeing the urgency in it. It unfolds in its own time.
Let's focus on a specific item of our culture: music. Let's say that I decide my passion is to preserve the music of Beethoven for the next global civilization.
I spend my own money (as a passionate hobby) to print up scores of all his works on archival paper with archival ink. I take a few of his best-loved melodies and etch them on glass, and again on stone. I write up a simple primer on our musical notation in a half-dozen languages, and have multiple copies printed on archival paper and bound into volumes. I even transcribe a few recordings onto platinum-coated metal disks, and hand-build cranked Victrolas that will play the recordings. I scatter these in a handful of caves in cool, dry climates around the earth, and found a Secret Society with the charge of preserving the repository locations in coded story form.
By quirk of fate, all of this actually works, and a growing civilization in what we would call CE 4100 digs up a book written in CE 3500 by some apostate member of my now-disbanded secret society, speculating on a legend that the founding story of the sect is a kind of coded treasure map. Someone goes treasure-hunting, and they find one of the caches.
The treasure they find? F**** music boxes? In a fit of temper, they torch the whole repository. Or maybe they drag parts of it back to civilization, hoping to make at least whiskey money off it.
Some fragment of one repository eventually makes its way into the hands of a member of the growing musical tradition of that society. To their ear, Beethoven is overly complex, noisy, and offensively emotional (something that would have been true had you moved Beethoven even a century backward in time, and had you moved it five centuries backward, it would have been banned as diabolical). A few composers adapt one or two of the melodies to "modern" ears. Everything I so laboriously preserved is buried in a museum and forgotten.
A longish story, the point of which is this: what parts of our culture will the future even want, and what is our purpose in trying to pass it down to them?
In James Blish's Cities in Flight novellas, the last living members of our dying universe are launched into other dimensions to spawn new universes through Big Bangs. To do so, they have to exterminate another species that is racing to get to the “fulcrum” of our dying universe first. It's clearly an act of reproductive desperation, a naked attempt to compete for dominance and control even in (literally) universal death.
That's true of all the “expanding through the galaxies” stories: they are merely European imperialism written on the stars. The Egyptians wouldn't have found those stories very inspiring at all. Nor do I any more, though they fascinated me when I was young.
How much of that is also true of our attempt to “pass on” our culture to the future?
9/9/13, 10:58 AM
blackwingsblackheart said...
http://www.apex-magazine.com/the-glutton-a-goxhat-accounting-chant/
It used to be that the thought of the end of planetary life and the planet herself saddened me dreadfully, but with (middle) age and a couple of decades of meditation on the moon and the Wheel of the Year, I'm growing more comfortable with cyclicality. It's not like Nature gives us an option, after all--we're caught up in cycles from beginning to end, and we can fight them, ignore them, accept them, or celebrate them, it doesn't change Her reality.
9/9/13, 11:07 AM
wagelaborer said...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080424-humans-extinct.html
9/9/13, 12:24 PM
mallow said...
9/9/13, 2:48 PM
onething said...
You don't understand why I care whether or not I exist?
9/9/13, 3:29 PM
Christian Smith said...
9/9/13, 4:13 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Roger, well, since my scenario has the Earth going into a hothouse climate 10 million years from now, following an oceanic anoxic event that laid down gigatons of carbon to start with, I think I've already complied with the conditions you specified.
Carl, we get temperatures in the teens most winters, so tea probably isn't an option here yet. Thanks for the details!
Moshe, okay, one more in the "comforted" category. As for the rapid buildup of topsoil, I'd like to see data also, I admit.
Hal, of course Brin is a smart guy. That's what makes it all the more instructive that challenging the basic beliefs of his religion -- the civil religion of progress -- reduced him so promptly to spluttering fury.
KL, thank you!
Rising Moon, what can I say? I find the perspectives of deep time an endless source of delight, and am glad to have been able to share some of that.
Thrig, I'm still trying to parse that.
Unknown Deborah, well, to each her own.
Evodevo, to do what?
Jim, thanks for the link! As for Brin's self-conceit, that's priceless -- and embarrassingly common among SF writers of a certain temperament. Isaac Asimov used to be deeply into the notion of science fiction writers as humanity's forward scouts on the great march into the future. (Of course Asimov's ego was the size of a gas giant -- fans used to argue about which one, though I think the consensus was that it had a distinct resemblance to Uranus.)
9/9/13, 4:16 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Blackwings, I loved the Goxhat poem! As for the death of our species and this planet, well, it's very much like each of our individual deaths: a reality we can either deal with, and attain maturity in the doing of it, or flee from, and remain children.
Wagelaborer, it's an interesting theory, and entirely possible. I admit I'd want to see confirming data.
9/9/13, 4:26 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...
9/9/13, 5:15 PM
thrig said...
9/9/13, 6:16 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
How funny is that? It was a definite tea spitter! The irony is not lost on me that as a culture here, we have a quite different process. Yep, who would have thought it, that a culture founded initially by convicts would actually end up being quite law abiding? Strange, but I’ve always wondered how elections in your country could possibly lead to court action.
Back to the topic at hand though. I reckon that you are onto something with this style of essays. People think and act on stories and narratives. That's why I reckon so many people are asleep at the wheel (Cognitive dissonance).
The real problem becomes though, what happens when the prevailing narrative no longer matches the facts on the ground and yet people still act out their lives upon the dominant story?
I assume that was what your critical thinking essay sought to address?
My gut feel says that it is a dangerous situation / time in a culture for the dominant narrative to be incapable of delivering and yet it is repeated at ever louder volumes. The problem is intensified because of the blind acceptance that the current dominant narrative requires, stops people from developing skills such as:
- how do you even know when things are going wrong?
- what do you do when things go wrong?
- Do you have the skills to correct whatever error has occurred?
- have you allowed enough resources to correct any errors that may occur?
I could just keep going on and on with questions...
It reminds me very much of the research that goes on here in the aftermath of a major wildfire. Peoples responses have consistently been evenly distributed amongst the following 3 options:
- Planned for the eventuality and acted on that plan;
- Understood the risk and thought about planning for the eventuality but decided to take a "wait and see" approach instead; and
- No idea.
I'd like to say I'm making this stuff up, but unfortunately that is the outcome time and time again. It is so consistent that there must be something in it?
Regards
Chris
9/9/13, 7:34 PM
Iuval Clejan said...
Seems like I've hit a sensitive nerve. You are correct that access to modern medicine can be a life or death thing (especially for childbirth and young children) and hence is not comparable to the perks of , say, central heating, flush toilets or driving cars. It is one way though, that the system has got people by the balls (or should I say ovaries?) and prevents them from making significant changes in their own lives. Change involves risk and sacrifice, but it is totally understandable that women of childbearing age are unwilling to take big risks or make big sacrifices. It is just one way the system perpetuates itself.
9/9/13, 7:53 PM
onething said...
"This is also kind of consistent with my general observation of a division of labor in genome propagation, where females are generally in charge of genome maintenance and males are in charge of producing genome variation. Maybe it generalizes to cultural maintenance and variation as well."
I think you are correct in this.
Iuval is worried that there are few women interested in leaving the middle class lifestyle behind for the hard work of homesteading. I wonder if that is true? I have seen a number of posts by men, Orlov included, who seem to say that their wives present a hurdle.
9/9/13, 7:59 PM
valekeeperx said...
Excellent. Last week’s post was like a slap in the face (for me at least), this week’s was fascinating. Back-to-back home runs. In answer to your questions, I guess I am intrigued and relieved by the prospects you describe, though having studied geology, deeper time is something that I have always found interesting. IMHO, recognizing and embracing our individual and collective fates only makes life that much sweeter. Reminds me of the Buddhist sand mandala ceremonies and their celebrations or demonstrations of impermanence.
Surprised that you did not include a large meteor impact or two in the scenario. I read somewhere several years ago that there seems to be somewhat of a pattern in the periodicity of large impacts. IIRC, there was speculation that as we complete our galactic circuits, our solar system on a regular basis may pass through regions of the galaxy that cause perturbations in our system or may pass through regions with relatively denser debris fields.
Someday this planet is gonna end.
9/9/13, 8:17 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Thrig, got it! Thanks for the clarification. The line about "the much-arrowed Brin" somehow had me thinking about St. Sebastian...
Cherokee, the core theme of this blog is the need to replace defunct narratives with ones that actually help us understand the world in front of us; yes, the critical thinking post related to that, but so does almost everything else I've written. As for people shrugging and going on with their ordinary lives in the presence of grave risk, that's a fascinating phenomenon we see a lot over here, too. It would be something to see some serious studies done on it.
Valekeeperx, I'm sure there were big bolides in there now and then -- for all I know, that's what killed off the cyons, or a later intelligent species descended from land-dwelling starfish. It's just that none of them happened to hit close enough to the decimal intervals I borrowed from Bardi.
9/9/13, 8:37 PM
Glenn said...
My wife is the driver in our homestead. I'm not just along for the ride mind you, but she's definitely leading.
She has the advantage over a young unemployed woman with no health care in that she is married to me, a military retiree with a decent health care plan.
However, when she was younger, jobless and had no health care, she also lived this way. But she had no children, and did not consider having any until she had health care coverage.
Glenn
Marrowstone Island
9/9/13, 8:41 PM
Glenn said...
I too, remember reading an article a year or so back about humans almost becoming extinct. The number I remember is more like 10,000, and I don't remember how long ago it was. This was derived from examining certain genetic markers, which pointed to a bottleneck at a particular time.
Glenn
Marrowstone Island
9/9/13, 9:04 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
The big picture is really starting to sink in. Thanks for your efforts.
I don't think we're short of research on the subject matter of natural disasters and peoples responses to those here. After such major wildfires occur we often have a Royal Commission which produces recommendations and gives people a chance to vent their spleens. It’s just that once it has been finished, no one ever reads the report again.
What we are short on is action and a commitment by the community to tackle the reality of the environment that they live in. It is simply just too expensive and labour intensive and there are too many people with their fingers in the pie.
Years back I spoke to the local MP about the issue and was told that people complain when nothing is done, but they also complain when fuel reduction burns are undertaken (apparently children’s birthday parties and washing on the line are a major source of those complaints - true story).
In the past 6 months after a few wet years (and surviving the past dry, scorcher summer), there has been a perceptible shift in peoples perspectives on the matter here. It didn’t take long for people to forget.
On Sunday I travelled up to Kinglake which isn't very far from here to see how the areas affected by the Black Saturday fires of 2009 are now going.
A lot of money has been pumped into that area and there are now a lot more houses and the bakery had moved to bigger premises (yum). However, what disappointed me is that I did not see a single house in the area that incorporated bushfire resistant construction techniques. I was truly baffled by that unexpected turn of events, but don’t know why I expected differently.
Lightning can strike in the same place twice.
Regards
Chris
9/9/13, 9:49 PM
MawKernewek said...
9/10/13, 3:06 AM
Les said...
I know as many women "held back" (or should that be "forward"?) by men unwilling to see the need for downshifting as the other way around.
I also know a very small sample of men & women who work together to find the best way into a low energy future. The women in this sample have formed what they call the "Invisible Wives Club", as it seems all the kudos for all the innovation and all the ideas accrues to the men, regardless of the actual source.
Marie Curie aside, we have some very major cultural blinkers that make it really hard for us to see the sexes as equals. I've lost track of the number of blues I've had with my wife over this, as if I actually have some control over the perceptions of others - I spend a large amount of effort pointing out the stuff she's done, but it's like talking to bricks most of the time.
We need to lose the blinkers; if you can't get your SO on side, you aren't communicating, you need to try something other than speaking louder. And yes, it took near 5 years to get my SO seeing what I saw, but luckily my heritage is Frisian (very, very stubborn).
Les
9/10/13, 5:06 AM
Juhana said...
I have been irregular commenter to this blog for a while now. With my quite terrible pidgin English I have tried to voice my firm believe that current liberal package of moral codes is totally dependent on expanding, prosperous economy. That if feeling and reality of progressing material wellbeing is taken away, liberal moral code follows into trash bin of history in short notice.
I have based this opinion on two sources.
First, my personal experiences about systemic collapse of industrial networks in former Soviet bloc during 90's, where mentioned collapse led eventually to current mood of society where patriarchy, kinship and nationalism are taken very seriously and tolerance towards deviancy is very limited. This mood is comig from grassroots level, I remind you, it is not force-fed by Powers That Be from above. Pussy Riot incident is good example of that, Mr. Putin probably saved the group of university intellectuals from far worse fate in hands of common people by throwing them into the jail.
Secondly, on my reading of history, where danger of insufficient resources and violence (pretty much all history before Industrial Revolution's second phase) has led to human societies which are conformist and narrow-minded, if measured by standards of modern liberals.
These are not my preferences but observations, which I have made after spending huge amount of time with people from backgrounds with no exposure to Western indoctrination about morality and ethics. I have heard it all said in loud without any memorized self-shame: Elders of Zion conspiracy revisited, that female's plave is between stove and fist if she does not behave, that dark-skinned Caucasians are vicious breed of untermensch. These have not been opinions coming from marigins of society, but opinions that engineers, civil servants and welldoing small-scale shopkeepers have voiced after vodka glass or two without any shame or hesitation. This scenario is utterly outside any imaginable in the current Western society, and while trying to describe how wild mood changes you experience just by travelling outside your own culture's borderland, you probably just agitate persons so immersed in their own cultural narrative that they do not see it's limited sphere of influence. It is not about MY opinions, but observed facts about huge cultural gaps between moods of even Indo-European nations.
Now, it seems to me that among JMG readers there is faction of people that subscribes his vison about huge population decline during current century, but at the same time have instinctive dislike against anyone that points out that just maybe this kind of future scenario does not hold change for current mix of Western morality (sentimentalism, feminism, multiculturalism, pluralism, racial diversity without subordination)to survive.
In the Europe last big fall in population was during Little Ice Age from 1600's onwards. That development led among others to horrible wars (Thirty Years War, anyone?), general hysteria against witchcraft, tightening of moral code, subordination of female gender when compared to Late Middle Ages. World War Two was nothing compared to good old 17th century, if you look demographics. Little Ice Age is last historical event in Europe that truly measures against scenario JMG describes, and fall of Soviet bloc is only known internal breakdown of advanced industrial system known in human history. In both cases, current package of Western morality had no more change to survive than snowball has in the flames of Hell.
So I throw ball to you folks who believe that mankind can both collapse and maintain it's Western morality inherited from distant forebears of Sixties hippie generation. How you are going to do it? And while wondering that question, remeber that shooting the messenger does not solve the underlying problem.
9/10/13, 5:34 AM
trippticket said...
"It is suppose to be ok down to Zone 7 and that is what we are, but nights of 28 to 27 d weather is too cold for it and you lose most of the leaves."
Lest anyone outside of the subtropics get discouraged, ALL of my 10 Camellia sinensis bushes grow in a fairly shady place and have seen temps at least as low as 20F, and are doing just fine.
9/10/13, 5:38 AM
Juhana said...
After glass or two (or three...), as social awkwardness starts to vanish, people somewhat reveal their inner reality in more unreserved conversations... This phenomenon is universal.
I can assure readers of this blog who have had unfortune to spend their whole lives inside just one bulking cultural or even state formation that opinions indeed change between different parts of the world... Cultural climate of Hungary cannot be assimilated with that of UK, and things viewed as perfectly normal opinions by Byelorussians are anathema to enlightened citizens of US... We indeed are no harmonious world village with shared views...
9/10/13, 6:13 AM
Liquid Paradigm said...
Today's guest post at Orlov's blog takes square aim at that very issue. No comments at it thus far, though I expect howls of rage and indignation if/once it makes wider circulation.
9/10/13, 8:11 AM
blackwingsblackheart said...
Speaking of books, I was delighted to find the paperback of "Blood of the Earth" at good old Magus Books in Minneapolis. We have a new anarchist bookstore in town, Boneshaker Books (named after a type of bike, apparently), and when I ordered "Green Wizardry" from them they told me they were so intrigued by it that they ordered copies for the shelf. I'll have to stop in again and find out how the book is doing.
You're right, acceptance of mortality is not only a marker of maturity, but of wisdom. I've buried the entire elder generation of my family, and learned amazing things about death--ugliness and pain, yes, but relief and peace and grace as well (and some startling experiences that aren't a subject for this blog). It's a profound initiation for those of us who witness it...if we allow it to be.
9/10/13, 8:25 AM
Ing said...
luval, this has not been my experience at all, across many families including my own, although I won't pretend that finding a mate with similar sensibilities is always easy. The above seems, to me, to reduce a complicated issue that deserves its own attention (what props the status quo) down to an argument that may not even be true or relevant, and worse, may prevent one from seeing other contributing factors that would have an impact on being selected against.
9/10/13, 8:54 AM
Juhana said...
But if you look those societies that are too weak, stiff or brittle to roll effects of resource restraints today into tomorrow of near future by financial gimmicks and account frauds, as the West does, you notice that actual reality is not that pretty. There is very lively conversation about this difference between expectations and reality in both Russian and Finnish languages going on, but as those are not useful for most readers of this blog, here is link to American blogger doing decent job by tracking down societies that have already hit the resource limits wall... He has no limitation of pidgin English fighting against him. Do societies he describes look like they are going to be agrarian utopias any time soon...?
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/09/09/oil-and-gas-limits-underly-syrias-conflict/#more-38432
So when Soviets overstretched their imperial muscles and simulated resource depletion crisis quite accurately, they got horrific demographic crisis and evetually settled down as today's reactionary society, with no rainbow weddings behind the corner. And as societies in Near East are hitting actual resource depletion wall described by blogger above, they succumb to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7LXEy-ugzY
But maybe, just maybe in the West everything shall be different when we run out of financial gimmicks and real, physical limits have still not vanished, as current economical theory insists. Right..?
I reccomend that there should be at least some plan B for worser scenarios thought up. What if so-called civil society is not so civil anymore? How to guide your kids through uncertainties of next decades into at least moderately happy life? Hard questions and I have no answers to give. Reason enough to continue reading different opinions and be aware about different options.
I am off from this mirror world of internet for a while, adios.
9/10/13, 12:19 PM
artinnature said...
I've been darting in and out trying to balance work in the garden (just planted Swiss Chard, it grows all winter long here) and keeping up with this delightful and surprising discussion. David Brin, seriously?! I loved "The Postman" and had no idea he was so deeply into techno-cornocopianism.
Regarding Corvids, sometimes I feel like they've been mocking me my whole life. The fact that they live so happily around humans and have prospered from our activities seems to predict greater things for them. Last winter a crow decided to dive upon and "swoop" my wife five or six times as she walked one block to work. This was the middle of winter, so no nesting activities or young to be protected, I cant figure out why...they must be panning something big.
Cherokee Organics, I've really enjoyed your posts over the years! I like how after addressing the theme of JMG's topic you always give an update on your farm activities, keep it up!
Regarding growing tea and coffee, I'm a professional gardener here in the Seattle area on Puget Sound, and Camellia sinensis grows easily in this climate. Minimum winter temperatures here (lately!) range in the high to low teens Fahrenheit. After mild winters (high teens F) the plants are completely undamaged. After a winter with temps in the low teens F, the plants definitely have some damage but grow back vigorously in spring. Coffea arabica on the other hand is not even close to being hardy here. If you are unsuccessful with tea but are able to grow coffee, hardiness to winter cold probably is not the issue. I'm sure there are many factors relating to your "down under" climate that are unfamiliar to me.
Now of course as you know there is always a wide range of hardiness within a given species depending on where the parentage originated and human selection for hardiness. The tea plants grown here are undoubtedly selected for increased hardiness to cold. Perhaps also there are coffee varieties that I am unaware of that have been selected/developed for increased cold hardiness? I Don't know.
Time to go out and collect coriander (cilantro) seed. Ive been making my own bhindi masala lately, yum!
Cheers from Seattle!
9/10/13, 12:50 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
There are certainly many example of the sorts of things you describe, present and past. But I wonder if pervasive structural oppression requires large-scale social organization? What is likely to follow the fading to the fossil fuel era is much smaller scale social organization. Some pre-feudal societies of 1st Millennium Europe appear to have given women more freedom than the more complex Feudal societies did, for example. I believe tribal societies vary greatly between each other when it comes to these things . So I am not sure we really can just extrapolate from what Russians say and do now, in a very early post-peak (and still completely fossil-fuel-based) industrial society, to guess what it might be like in 200 or 500 years.
9/10/13, 2:55 PM
Enrique said...
With regards to your question about the outcome of the Syrian crisis being partly a question of whether Obama is more clueless than usual, here is an email/op-ed from a friend of mine. A bit overheated, but I think it sums things up pretty well.
*****
OMG!!! Once again, our Community Organizer In Chief gets his head handed to him on a silver platter by Vladimir Putin. As someone recently put it, “That’s what happens when an Administration filled with arrogant, petulant political animals plays chess against old pros”.
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/09/10/russia-checkmates-obama-on-syria/
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/09/10/syria-and-obama/
Is there any doubt left in America and the rest of the world that this country is being run by a bunch of amateurs, craven fools and utter incompetents? I mean, they can’t even push through and implement their signature domestic policy initiative, Obamacare, without completely bollixing it up in the process. Moreover, it’s not just Obama; it’s the rest of these idiots and numbskulls on his foreign policy team, including John Kerry, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, all of whom and their boss have proven time and time again that running the foreign and national security policy of a great power is completely beyond their level of ability. And that’s not counting the stupidity, corruption, dereliction of duty and irresponsibility that has become the order of the day in Congress. This is beyond belief. Unlike many on the Right, I don’t subscribe to the view that Obama and his team are part of some vast, subversive conspiracy to subvert the United States. Rather, these people are exactly what they appear to be: a bunch of inept fools, incompetent hacks and arrogant half-wits with overinflated egos who are way out of their league and don’t have a clue. You would at least expect that someone who could slither his way to the top of the Chicago political machine would be more intelligent and competent. Judging from the quality of its leaders, America must really be slipping. Wow!!!!!
Meanwhile, Obama’s Minister of Propaganda, David Axelrod, jumped the shark once more again with another tweet.
http://twitchy.com/2013/09/09/david-axelrod-credits-obamas-credible-but-unbelievably-small-threat-for-possible-syria-deal/
It’s hard to tell whether this guy is a shameless liar, completely delusional or a combination of both. Too bad we’re stuck with such nincompoops for the next three years. There’s something seriously wrong with this country when it entrusts the leadership of the nation to such people as Obama, Axelrod, Pelosi and Kerry. As I’ve said before, these clowns make George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz look like strategic geniuses by comparison. This whole comedy of errors would be hilariously funny if it weren’t such a fiasco for the nation and the rest of the world. I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
*****
As I said, a bit over the top, but not a bad summary of how clueless Obama and the rest of the American political class has become.
9/10/13, 3:26 PM
D^2 said...
http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-starting-to-realize-new-era-of-american-inn,32156/
9/10/13, 4:09 PM
wall0159 said...
JMG, I think a more detailed description of the history of the Corvin's industrialisation would be very interesting and informative (in your spare time, of course :-)
9/10/13, 4:10 PM
Liquid Paradigm said...
"I also should note that I did NOT find this to be the case in (more affluent and theoretically less conservative) Colorado, where if someone hated your politics, sexuality, or religion, they also hated you, yourself, as a person."
I moved to CO from the American South well over a decade ago for a job. What you say rings sadly true; my fellow native Southerners have their numerous faults, but the people out here are crazy.
9/10/13, 7:37 PM
Joseph Nemeth said...
My sense is that there are only small windows during which any culture/civilization is even interested in other cultures, particularly its own ancestor-culture.
Certainly, no one in Europe would have had much interest in Roman music from CE 400-ish to, say, 1200 (beastly Pagan stuff, ugh!) There was a huge surge of interest in things Pagan in the late 1400's in Italy, and it might have made a splash then. But from 1500-1900, Europe was perfecting its own styles, from Palestrina to Liszt, and I suspect no one would have cared much about ancient Roman music. At best, it would have been grist for the composer's mill.
It wasn't until 1900-ish, as Western Civilization was reaching a certain point of ossification, that composers started casting about in earnest for new ideas from outside the Western European style, such as the influx of Hungarian themes under Liszt, or (as you note in EF) African themes in the Jazz movement. That might have been a window for ancient Roman music to enter the living music scene. After that, music became a commercial commodity, and $ucce$$ mandated certain formulas.
If we are now heading into civilizational senescence filled with material hardships, I can't imagine that a treasure-trove of Roman musical scores would be used as much of anything but kindling.
I would expect the same to be true of Western European music preserved for the next culture.
9/10/13, 8:32 PM
Joseph Nemeth said...
I'm merely trying to understand the urgency.
I think I understand Brin's urgency. I don't agree with his mythology, and so I don't share in the urgency, but I understand it.
For the Long Descent, not so much. I'm seeking clarification.
Urgency implies both an objective and a deadline.
I think I understand the objective, the deadline, and a sense of urgency in the 1970's. But that ship sailed, and it isn't coming back.
What is the objective today, and what deadline constrains it?
9/10/13, 8:53 PM
team10tim said...
wagelaborer is referring to new study. I think that you are probably referring to the Toba catastrophe theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#Genetic_bottlenecks_in_humans
About 10,000 people about 70,000 years ago.
Thanks,
Tim
9/10/13, 9:10 PM
Joseph Nemeth said...
Curious exactly where in Colorado you lived, Bill.
Colorado is a rural/urban mix. Urban centers tend to be more affluent and vote Blue, while rural folk are less affluent and vote Red, though they tend to be more radically Libertarian than Red: private property and free market magic.
I think the rural/urban split makes it a little too easy to not talk to each other, which leads to demonizing.
Agree with you both. Small towns and communities are more conservative, not less. Affluence begets selfishness and isolation.
9/10/13, 9:12 PM
wall0159 said...
9/10/13, 9:47 PM
Tom Bannister said...
To everything
Turn Turn Turn
There is a season
Turn Turn Turn
And a time
To every purpose
Under Heaven...
A time to live, a time to die... etc
Lovely Bible quote/Byrds Lyrics. I thought it fitted in nicely with the general theme of this post.
9/10/13, 11:23 PM
Bogatyr said...
Speaking as a card-carrying member of the Anglosphere's liberal wing, with a firm belief in Enlightenment values, I have to say he's absolutely right.
As it happens, this is something I've been working on recently, so for anyone who is interested in learning more, I'd suggest going to Google Scholar, and searching for "russian cultural characteristics hofstede"; the first four PDF links that come up are quite accessible, and give a good insight into how Russians (and Chinese) think very differently to us.
I'd also suggest searching for "blat and guanxi" to pull up a paper by Michailova and Worm which shows how expectations in Russia and China on how to get things done are very different to the way we think in the West...
These may also shine some light on how things might go in the West as collapse sets in, by the way, per Orlov.
9/11/13, 12:36 AM
con-science said...
The source of the idea that lost civilizations are actually destroyed and abandoned by the very people that built them comes from the novel "Beyond civilization" by Daniel Quinn. It is a great read and one of my favourite books. Here is a brief quote, discussing why none of the theories proposed for their decline will be satisfactory:
• The soil may be depleted here, but it’s not depleted everywhere.
• Earthquakes and hurricanes don ’t last forever.
• Climatic changes can be ridden out.
• Diseases run their course.
• Insect pests come and go.
• Peasant revolts can be put down —or survived.
• Invaders can be repelled—or absorbed.
It couldn ’t have been things like this that made these people quit, becau se look at us. These
things are mere in conveniences compared to what we’ve faced—all these things, plus much worse:
famines, wars of every kind, inqui sitions, government by torture and assassination, endlessly rising
crime, corruption, tyranny, madness, revolution, genocide, racism ,social injustice, mass poverty, poisoned water, polluted air, two devastating world wars, and the prospect of nuclear holocaust, biological warfare, and extinction. We faced all that and more—and never once have been tempted to abandon our civilization.
There had to be something else at work —or missing — among these people. And indeed there
was something else.
9/11/13, 3:47 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Thank you. That is a very sweet thing to write. The updates are also a practical insight as to what is required to live a sustainable agrarian life (in an ecotechnic future sort of way). I was brought up in the city and so have no fixed ideas about any of this sort of stuff, so I try my best to tell it like it is. I'm not doing it as hard as some of my forebears were doing it here even 100 years ago. Our host makes some good points in his books about the benefits of organic agriculture and the concept of permaculture and they truly are really worth the time. The plants that I have access to, our ancestors would have killed for.
As an interesting side note, the rats and mice versus chooks situation has been resolved in a truly disturbing and certainly most definite way this morning with some help. I can't say any more as there is an internet article with some fascinating photos in it - hopefully over the next week or so. Stay tuned!
PS: Thanks to Trippticket, SL Claire and Carl about your experiences with tea camellia. I read in a lovely plant catalogue today that they don't like the hot dry summers here, but I find that they survive these but die off in the winter. It may be the cold winds, so they may require a very sheltered spot just like avocadoes which died off but are now bouncing back. Thanks for the link SL Claire as I'll have a good look at it.
Regards
Chris
9/11/13, 4:02 AM
MawKernewek said...
CAPTCHA: eivepi 314
9/11/13, 11:59 AM
Marcello said...
While the USSR might have thrown the odd bone to women and minorities it was not a liberal society, not by a long shot. Homosexual acts for instance were punishable by law with up to a five years sentence and the "black asses" epithet was not a 90's invention either. In other words, they did not reject politically correctdness, feminism, multiculturalism etc. They simply did not get them in first place.
They might have grown more conservative lately, but is it really a sea change from soviet era attitudes? Probably not and in the 90's people were likely more concerned with putting food on the table than social mores.
9/11/13, 12:48 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
9/11/13, 2:08 PM
Joseph Nemeth said...
You're right, of course.
The more reliable division recently has been between urban and suburban, with the city-city folks leaning left, and the suburban-city folks leaning right. On the front range, at any rate.
I'd kinda forgotten how nasty it got in the 1990's. I think it's gotten a little better, but it could just be that I don't stick my neck out so far any more.
9/11/13, 4:29 PM
Unknown said...
The historical patterns Juhanna cites are one reason that American Jews (who pay more attention to history than many other Americans) tend to be more politically liberal than short term class interests might dictate.
A society with widespread prosperity and some social solidarity is less inclined to go in for scapegoating and pogroms than one in which groups are played off against each other by elites.
I agree with Marcello that liberal values never had a chance to take hold in the Russian culture; I don't know much about the Finns.
How deeply Enlightenment values and social tolerance run in US culture is arguable. More deeply than in Russia, but there are people still living who remember when public lynchings were widespread and popular, and not just in the Deep South.
9/11/13, 5:03 PM
Roger Ebert said...
You can find it at http://collapsecafe.com
RE
http://doomsteaddiner.net
9/11/13, 5:04 PM
Ray Wharton said...
I started putting down roots in Fort Collins over the last year and wanted to chime in.
The Front Range is a very strange place. Right now it is almost as sheltered from decline as anywhere in the country, but those days are ticking down fast, just last year I got to watch Catabolic Collapse in action digest a foreclosed community near Berthoud. I suspect that Fort Collins will be hit hard when the Student Loan bubble bursts.
In the longer settled and poorer areas I find as many reasonable and agreeable people as anywhere, but the sprawls of built up suburbs of the last two decades are absolutely mad house places filled with the odd ducks of the whole country clustered around a 'lovely view of the mountains'. On the other side, some of the folks who are in the libertarian mountains are also very strange, but in a way that I find agreeable, under the politics I find on an interpersonal level the old homestead values of 'leave well enough alone' and 'help a neighbor in need' to be tolerably well intact. The various modes of hippie who have settled down in the Front range are in small groups wonderful, but in the sorts of concentrations found around Boulder prone to some weird political mutations.
Being Native to the mountain folk of Colorado I find this state to have what feels like an under current of sanity, maybe for no better reason than finding it easy to get along with a type of craziness I already understand.
9/11/13, 5:10 PM
Jose Coces said...
9/11/13, 6:29 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...
And not just lynchings! I'm old enough that I remember hearing about three living Civil War soldiers, one Union and two Confederate. That was when I was about 9 years old. The last person probably born into slavery in the USA died at a very advanced age in the 1970s, after both of my children had been born. These things weren't all that far back.
9/11/13, 7:45 PM
Villager said...
Too bad that the symbiosis of a cyanobacteria and an archeon that eventually became a nucleated cell powered by ATP has only happened once in the universe. Kind of throws a monkey wrench into your ending. See Nick Lane for details.
But hey! This is all good fun. I'm sure you'd have a great time shooting the breeze with Olaf Stapledon.
9/11/13, 8:17 PM
Emmanuel Goldstein said...
I think it would be lovely to have Racoon People, Crow People and Clam People as the next tenants of Earth. Someone once came up with the idea that God decided to break him/herself up into gazillions of bits of matter and consciousness, then let all of us bits interact to create a grand, new Story. The Raccoons, Crows, Clams and whatever else would fit into that idea very well. Meanwhile, I plan to make the best use I can with the bits I've got.
(PS -- here are YouTube links to the two songs above -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH2w6Oxx0kQ ).
9/11/13, 9:26 PM
Hal said...
Thanks to Emmanuel Goldstein, I now have one of the worst songs ever "composed" in my head and refusing to leave! And I didn't even have to look at the video. It's going to be a rough night.
9/11/13, 10:07 PM
starfire rage said...
9/12/13, 4:52 AM
Emmanuel Goldstein said...
9/12/13, 9:47 AM
Alphonse Houner said...
For all its allure I would love to accept the techno fantasy that weaves through so much of the dissent to the ideas expressed but they are essentially illogical. Down deep I think the techno fanatics are really fearful of the future and just blow a bit louder when someone makes a well-constructed argument that the future may, and probably will, be entirely different.
I found the early writings of Kunstler useful in raising awareness of the then less obvious events with a general roadmap into the future. Your books “The Long Descent” and “The Ecotechnic Future” cast doubt on what was then our high-tech path plan of adaption. Course correction came through your “Green Wizard” effort and we are now close to the land.
You most recent effort is developing in a void that is opening. To me that void is one of a wounded spirit based on a heightening sense of loss. It can be expresses as being well into a death experience, a greatly expanded version of that experienced by all of us as we move through and enter the autumn of our life. In that time we see new generations come and older generations die and in time it is our turn as well.
Are civilizations any different? Perhaps not.
9/12/13, 11:37 AM
Michael Byron said...
9/12/13, 12:25 PM
fred said...
9/13/13, 8:23 PM
Eddie said...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1o3byr-xuo
9/14/13, 11:23 PM
Travis said...
Thanks again.
9/15/13, 3:02 PM
Travis said...
9/16/13, 8:20 PM
Adrian Skilling said...
Sounds like those Tea party support who support lower taxes for rich. Even though they'll almost certainly never be rich they still want to dream.
9/19/13, 8:36 AM
Øyvind Holmstad said...
http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2013/September/habitable-life-on-earth
Plenty of time for Earth to recover and for new intelligent species to evolve. Your science fiction novel is the best I've ever read in this genre!
9/22/13, 10:49 PM
Annie B said...
9/28/13, 5:57 AM
Max12345 said...
But even without our own conscious role in evolution playing any role, the "normal" Darwinian ++ ongoing evolution of the human species is very likely to continue. So the human species of a million years from now, if any survives at all, is going to resemble us probably about as much as we resemble humanoids of a million years ago? And will resemble us far less than we resemble Neanderthals which are almost "tit for tat" the same as "homo sapiens baloney" I don't know exactly how long it took in the past for successive species of humans to evolve from earlier ones. But I am sure somebody more or less knows this. What I am suggesting is that this is going to continue at about the same speed and we may even start to play a conscious role in accelerating the process.
Not to even mention the obvious idea that if we cannot adapt the universe to ourselves, perhaps it may be easier to adapt ourselves to the universe?
Or maybe we can only think of that once homo sapiens authenticus fully evolves from homo sapiens baloney?
10/21/13, 4:10 AM
Himanshu said...
A brilliantly written essay. I have a question - how do you mark the beginning and the end of an intelligent species. Is it an extinction-new species cycle, or an evolution of current species into forms that adapt to their own biological environment, but eventually are removed enough to count as a new species. Also, somehow, even with a gulf between two consecutive species, I hope to imagine that a species will leave behind some signs, clues and chunks of their legacy of technological advances. At least the humble wheel, surely. I sure have that hope from our batch.
12/6/13, 12:36 PM
Jagataband said...
However, there is one subject that makes me wince a bit~ the one of climate change. Of course, the climate has been changing throughout geologic time according to our best efforts at interpreting proxy data, and it will no doubt continue to change into the future, but I honestly don't see any good evidence that human activity has any measurable effect on climate. In forecasting the future, I see no reason why the earth would deviate from the glaciation cycles of its more immediate geologic past. If the glaciation (ice age) cycle holds, we are due for the next one, as we are currently near the statistical end of an interglacial period. I would imagine that the 'near term' future (+100,000 years or so) would be dominated by severe cooling, not warming. There is evidence that sea levels have been much lower than they are today~ undersea ruins on the continental shelf for example, but scant evidence of sea levels being much higher than they are currently, and that is with proxy data indicating that co2 levels were as high as 8000 parts per million in the past. I'm not posting this to argue. I'm sure many will take offense with this post, but it is only intended as another point of view. How the future plays out will determine who was right or wrong. Anthropogenic Climate Change has become a religious topic~ an anathema to the religious sensibility of progress. I can find no one who takes peak oil seriously whom does not believe in the actuality of Anthropogenic Climate Change. Why are the two so intertwined? That is a good question to explore, because science favors one, and newspaper headlines favor the other.
3/20/14, 2:51 PM