[extropy-chat] Futurist priorities was ex-tropical

The Avantguardian avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com
Mon Mar 1 09:18:19 UTC 2004



Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
Thanks for providing a reality check. The launch capacities might be there,
but there's nothing to travel to. To make it worse, no one is even doing
research on long-term stable closed-loop ecosystems for human life support.

We're not a space-travelling culture. Repeat after me: we're not a
space-travelling culture. 

We'd better learn to become one, quick.

* I heartily agree with you, Eugen. I feel that we are reaching the stationary phase of our growth curve as a species/population. For all intents and purposes we are at the carrying capacity of our environment. Yet economic growth is such a high priority with our leaders that we are willing to fight wars to expand our markets, just so that the wealthiest minority can buy yet another banal symbol of their wealth and prestige. Yet wealth and power is wasted on these people because they have no vision beyond keeping it and gaining more of it. 

I recently read an interesting book called "Them: adventures with extremists" by Jon Ronson. It is the account of a journalist that spent over 5 years searching for the elusive cabal of ultra powerful men that supposedly rule the world from smoke filled rooms that lie at the heart of many conspiracy theories. It is an interesting read but the gist of his findings is that he found them but they don't really rule anything. Their meetings are more like drunken frat parties than conspiracies and they claim that "market forces" are what really rule the world.

I think I would have preferred a conspiracy, since this is kind of like fighting your way to front of the bus only to find that the bus driver isn't really driving, instead he is just "along for the ride" and the bus is out of control. After all market forces don't have thought or conscience and are incapable of setting goals and achieving them. Market forces place no value on survival of species, human or otherwise. They can only, like a runaway bus, continue forward until something stops them forcibly with catastrophic results.

This being said, I feel that it is imperative for own survival that we do as Eugen suggests. We need to find a way to develop a closed loop ecological/economic model that can merge seamlessly with the world economy and the environment in such a way that radical changes to each are kept to a minimum. This can theoretically be done because nature has been doing such a thing for billions of years. Nature wastes nothing while man's modern consumer economy is based on waste. (e.g. disposable goods and programmed obselescence of machinery) This is partly a logistics problem. For example, many factories using fossil fuel combustion produce sulphur dioxide as a toxic waste. It goes into the atmosphere and causes acid rain that kills the fish. Now a different industry might have need of sulphuric acid so they synthesize it de novo by burning sulphur and pumping the sulphur dioxide through water. So what is the waste of one industry is often the manufactruing precursors of a different
 industry. 

Yet because we have the senseless economic models that we do, one industry vents sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere (and will move to china if it has to in order to do it legally) while another industry has to make it from scratch. Would it be so hard to arrange it so that industry two can harvest and purify the waste of industry one for its own use? Find an industry that needs the waste products of industry two and so on until you find an industry whose waste products are of value to industry one and voila, you have created a closed economic loop that models the closed ecological cycles of nature. Such an economic model may be costly in the short term but will be profitable in the long term because it would be indefinately sustainable and all the industries in the cycle would profit not to mention the fish and the people that eat the fish.   

Reengineering the global economy like this would buy us time to do other things that are important to the long-term survival of humanity. Things like finding habitable extra solar planets and developing a "space-faring culture" Moreover those of us who have been "perma-lifed" won't have to wear gas masks while fighting off toxic waste mutants from our clean water supplies.           

The prospects for humanity seem dim when one reflects that technological and societal innovation is currently fueled solely by economic interests. What is commonly called "human nature" is no more enlightened or transcendant than the nature of a common dog or other brute that lives more off instinct than thought or reason. We don't really have any cause to be optimistic about the future unless we are willing to do what needs to be done to effect a positive one. If you are all the way in the back of the driver-less bus than all the optimism in the world won't keep you from plummeting off of the cliff.  



The Avantguardian 


"He stands like some sort of pagan god or deposed tyrant. Staring out over the city he's sworn to . . .to stare out over and it's evident just by looking at him that he's got some pretty heavy things on his mind."

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