[ExI] mazlow's heirarchy of needs and Mars one way

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 4:00 AM,   "spike" <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>>. On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg

snip

>>. But it is amazing how fast we have adapted to a world where information
> is accessible. It is also integrated in many parts of our life: the food,
> shelter, social stuff are all partially linked to it.

snip

> By extension, we need to think long and hard about how the internet has
> gradually become or is in the process of becoming a feature of modern
> society on which many lives hang, or will soon.  If the net went down
> everywhere, I honestly feel we could have hundreds of deaths indirectly
> resulting, within days.  Example left as an exercise for the reader.  I can
> think of a bunch of manufacturing processes that wouldn't work because it
> depends so heavily on just-in-time delivery of components.  I don't know how
> grocery stores would do their orders; we no longer have the proper
> infrastructure to do snail-mail based inventory or restocking.  All
> paper-based mail inventory systems are an order of magnitude too slow.
>
> The internet going down is more catastrophic than the apocalypse.  If Jesus
> were to return, whooping ass and so forth, we could google on some sort of
> strategy for how to deal.  But if that internet goes down, we are profoundly
> screwed.

Right, for example, libraries don't even *have* a card catalog any more.

Charles Stross in his incomparably excellent novel _Halting State_
titles a chapter "System Fails, People Die".  Most of us would
probably survive an extended outage of the net from a big EPM, but it
would be a mess and a lot of people *would* die.

But the net will not do it all.  I have found the net almost useless
for the initial spreading of the laser propulsion and power satellites
solution to the carbon/energy problem.

Incidentally, *that* problem is bigger and worse than I thought it
was.  Without an overwhelming kind of solution, we are going to be in
for a rough time.  Really rough, and coming soon.

Keith

Keith