What the Predictions of Greens, Luddites, and Doomers are Worth

CagleCartoon via Historian
The climate of doom generated by greens, Luddites, and doomers of 2010 sounds remarkably similar to the climate of doom generated by the same groups in 1970. Here is some food for thought on the reliability of such predictions:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” – George Wald, Harvard Biologist

...“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” – Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

...“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” - Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” – Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

...“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.” – Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” – Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” – Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” – Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
... _Historian_Predictions from 1970

More from Paul Ehrlich:

"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death." (Population Bomb 1968)
"Smog disasters" in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969)
"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." (1969)
"Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." (1976)
"By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people." (1969)
"By 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million." (1969) _igreens

Even more revealing quotes from our green, dieoff.orgy, and lefty-Luddite friends:

"We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing -- in terms of
economic socialism and environmental policy." Timothy Wirth, former U.S.
Senator (D-Colorado)

...Global Sustainability requires: "the deliberate quest of poverty . . .
reduced resource consumption . . . and set levels of mortality control."
Professor Maurice King

..."Giving society cheap, abundant energy . . . would be the equivalent of
giving an idiot child a machine gun." Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University _Source

Here are more proclamations from your elitist betters:

“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
- Prof. Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”
- Christopher Manes, Earth First!

“The extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on Earth - social and environmental.”
- Ingrid Newkirk, former President of PETA

“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
- John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal _Telegraph_quoted in Wiseup

You can find several more equally damning quotes here. Decades after they have been shown to be foolish frauds, these morons still do not know when to shut up (read the comments and weep). And the media does not hesitate to give them a "megaphone of doom" whenever they request one.

Universities, media rooms, and government bureaucracies are full of this type of idiot. If you send your children to university, chances are good that they will be taught crudely updated versions of the same message. The less intelligent of your children will take these ideas to heart, and never give them up. They will be good little lambs to the slaughter.

You, on the other hand, can see the duplicity, the lack of credibility, and have the opportunity to decide for yourself.

The Impending Cult of the Great Green Global Suicide

James Lee, devoted member of the CGGGS (cult of the great green global suicide) committed suicide by SWAT at the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.   Mr. Lee was strongly motivated by Al Gore and the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. More on the story from Wired:

According to a message on the savetheplanetprotest.com website believed run by Lee, the suspect demanded that the Discovery Channel broadcast its “commitment to save the planet.”

Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!

_Wired

Salon has more on the story, suggesting that Mr. Lee is a solitary, deranged gunman who took Thomas Malthus just a bit too seriously. But if Mr. Lee were, in truth, as solitary as some would have us believe, why are there so many voices on the wires and airwaves who sound just like Mr. Lee?

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is dedicated to the extinction of the human race -- or perhaps only those members of the race who do not whole-heartedly ascribe to the tenets of the VHEM religion. Some members and fellow travelers of VHEM are walking and talking within visual, auditory, or internet range of you at this very moment. When will they take the next step?

Of course there may be some who suggest that the current government of the United States is displaying some sympathies with the VHEM -- through its energy policies. Al Fin himself has occasionally described the Obama Pelosi energy policy as a form of energy starvation, or economic suicide. The way the O - P regime has dragged its feet on development of energy resources of all types -- except for ineffectual and corrupt big wind and solar -- is a sure tipoff that harder times are ahead, unless significant changes in the regime occur soon.

Not that top politicians or bureaucrats have any intention of killing themselves. No, they intend for you to be the victim of their policies. As for themselves? They anticipate sailing through their self-made disasters virtually untouched.

The fantasies of leftists have taken on macabre and disturbing overtones as of late. Mr. Lee's suicide by SWAT is but one of the unsettling directions such fantasies can turn. Expect more occurrences of leftist inspired eco-terrorism in the not-so-distant future.

Somewhere, in a jail cell not so far away, the Unabomber is giggling.

More (5Sep10):

The essence of progressivism, of which environmentalism has become an appendage, is the faith that all will be well once we have concentrated enough power in Washington and have concentrated enough Washington power in the executive branch and have concentrated enough "experts" in that branch. Hence the Environmental Protection Agency proposes to do what the elected representatives of the rubes refuse to do in limiting greenhouse gases. Mead says of today's environmental movement:

"It proposes big economic and social interventions and denies that unintended consequences and new information could vitiate the power of its recommendations. It knows what is good for us, and its knowledge is backed up by the awesome power and majesty of the peer review process. The political, cultural, business and scientific establishments stand firmly behind global warming today -- just as they once stood firmly behind Robert Moses, urban renewal and big dams. They tell us it's a sin to question the consensus, the sign of bad moral character to doubt. Bambi, look in the mirror. You will see Godzilla looking back." _WaPo

3 Days to the End of the World: Where Do You Go?

You might want to consider making early reservations to the Doomsday Bunker nearest you. Take a virtual tour through a prototype Doomsday Bunker in the video above. These shelters can supposedly be built to hold up to 4,000 each. A network of dozens of such shelters is said to be planned by California company Vivos.

A doomsday bunker envisioned by California company Vivos can offer you, your family, and 4,000 other people the chance to escape the end of the world in a network of 20 underground shelters. Surely even the skeptics can't resist the allure of scary music played over scenes of comfortable underground habitation, as NPR's All Tech Considered reports.
The company claims to be a privately-funded venture with no religious affiliations, except perhaps to the gods of commerce. It certainly takes an agnostic view by listing all the possible reasons why you might want to pony up and help build those $10 million bunkers, including predictions by Nostradamus, the Mayans, the Hopi, and the Bible.

...Vivos goes all out by promising a survival shelter stocked with power generation, water wells, filtration systems, sewage disposal, a year's supply of food, security devices and medical equipment.
Of course, you'll need all that if you believe disaster may strike at any moment because of a polar shift, super volcano eruptions, solar flares, nuclear war, and "even the return of Planet X (known as Niburu or Nemesis)," Vivos cheerfully states. _Popsci

It's an idea whose time may have come. To be safe, you may want to reserve space in multiple deluxe Vivos bunkers. Depending on the catastrophe, some of your choices may be downright inaccessible. A look at the early stages of Vivos below:

Sudden Death from Below: Undersea Super-Volcanoes

Located 1,500 km east of Japan, Shatsky Rise is as big as California. This underwater chain represents one of the largest supervolcanoes in the world: the top of Shatsky Rise lies three-and-a-half kilometres below the sea surface, while its base plunges to nearly six kilometres below the surface.

...‘About a dozen supervolcanoes exist on earth – some are found on land, while others lie at the bottom of the ocean. Those found on the seafloor are often referred to as ‘large oceanic plateaus,’ Sager adds. _CoalGeology

Supervolcanoes are nothing to sneeze at. Whether sitting in a continent -- such as the Yellowstone supervolcanoe -- or underwater, these massive dynamic geologic structures can radically restructure the shape of the geological and biological landscape.

The great Toba eruption 73,000 years ago on Sumatra deforested central India --3,000 miles away -- and almost drove pre-historic humans to extinction. Supervolcanoes are a very real hazard to large areas of the planet. It is quite possible for billions of humans to die in the global aftermath of a massive supervolcanic eruption -- which could go on for hundreds of years or longer.

Roughly a dozen supervolcanoes currently exist. Some are on land, while others lie at the bottom of the ocean. Each has produced several million cubic miles of lava — about three hundred times the volume of all the Great Lakes combined — dwarfing the amount of lava produced by the Hawaiian volcanoes or the Icelandic volcano that erupted recently.

These eruptions have dramatically shaped life on Earth, pumping huge amounts of ash, dust and gas into the atmosphere that have killed off species and altered global climate. Despite their global impact, the cause of the massive eruptions from supervolcanoes at times remains unknown. _LiveScience

“Supervolcanoes” have been blamed for multiple mass extinctions in Earth’s history, but the cause of their massive eruptions is unknown.

Despite their global impact, the eruptions’ origin and triggering mechanisms have remained unexplained. New data obtained during a recent Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) expedition in the Pacific Ocean may provide clues to unlocking this mystery.

To explore the origins of these seafloor giants, scientists drilled into a large, 145 million-year-old underwater volcanic mountain chain off the coast of Japan.

...“Seafloor supervolcanoes are characterized by the eruption of enormous volumes of lava,” says William Sager of Texas A&M University, who led the expedition with co-chief scientist Takashi Sano of Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo. “Studying their formation is critical to understanding the processes of volcanism, and the movement of material from Earth’s interior to its surface.”

About a dozen supervolcanoes exist on Earth; some are on land, while others lie at the bottom of the ocean. Those found on the seafloor are often referred to as large oceanic plateaus.

Current scientific thinking suggests that these supervolcanoes were caused by eruptions over a period of a few million years or less–a rapid pace in geologic time. _WattsupWithThat

Anyone living within a few thousand miles of an erupting super-volcano -- particularly on the downwind side -- may find survival almost impossible. But even people living on the opposite side of the globe from the eruption could find their sunlight and food supplies shut down by the distant eruption. Global climate would cool abruptly for an extended period of time. Outdoor growing seasons -- in the light of an already feeble sun -- would shorten to a period of several weeks.

The civilised communities that survive would be those with ample electrical supplies -- probably nuclear power with access to a lot of fuel -- and the ability to grow food indoors under artificial lighting.

This is true existential risk. Not global warming doom, not peak oil doom, not Doombama dark ages or Islamic Jihadi dark ages doom. The risk from supervolcanoes compares to the risk of a large comet or asteroid collision, or the risk from an abrupt change of solar output. It is even comparable to the risk from an invading alien starfaring civilisation intent on transforming Earth's entire ecology to suit its needs.

One day you're humming along, minding your own business. The next day you're covered by a thousand feet of hot ash. What's a Terran to do?

Five SuperVolcanoes to watch

Human Extinction: Pro and Con

How do you feel about the prospects for human extinction? More specifically, are you in favour of human extinction, against it, or indifferent?

Listed below are several websites dealing with human extinction, both pro and con:

Pro Extinction

Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
Dieoff.org
Gaia Liberation Front
Church of Euthanasia
More links here

Pro Survival

Lifeboat Foundation
Alliance to Rescue Civilization
More links with emphasis on space
Surviving Future Technologies

"Civilisation is Doomed" Sites

Life After the Oil Crash
Timeline of Doom
Survival Blog
Survivalist Blog
Survival Links (just in case)

Several bona fide existential risks are hanging over the Earth. Unlikely visions of doom such as "peak oil" and "global warming" are popular catastrophes du jour, but they are two of the less likely sources of doom we face. Over the next two decades, humans will move progressively away from petroleum and fossil fuels, to substitute fuels and energies. And for the foreseeable future, a devastating ice age will be more likely than any type of warming catastrophe.

Al Fin blog salutes those working to mitigate the influences of the several bona fide existential risks that threaten the planet. For those such as the current US Congress, the IPCC, NASA GISS, and other incompetent political/bureaucratic groups who divert important resources away from solving real problems, only to waste precious resources on phantom fears, Al Fin--together with Oynklent Green [OTC:OYNK]--is helping to devise suitable remedies and work arounds.

Wiping Out the Human Population of Earth Lovelock: This is the Real Thing Dammit

James Lovelock is the revered, grand old man of doom. Lovelock is quite cheerful about the coming demise of humanity. After all, what has humanity ever done for Lovelock?

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature;....But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."

Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action and Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe?...when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: "Personality." ___Guardian

Lovelock...appears to have laughed and grinned and smiled his way through this interview. He predicts doom for almost all, and laughs about it.

"Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."___Source

Lovelock is not the only one of his generation to predict massive human die-off. Modern prophets of doom have been profiting from the apocalypse since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when eco-apocalyptic books became best sellers. Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, Rachel Carson--all these and more preceded Lovelock and Al Gore through the Valley of the Shadow of Human Apocalypse, and made money doing it.

According to these prophets, NYC should be underwater, the population of the Earth should already be below 1 billion from starvation and resource depletion, the entire Earth should be a wasteland, and the new Dark Ages should have long since fallen onto surviving human populations.

Remember Y2K? Sure you do. Unless you are too intent on the prophets making profits from the crises du jour, such as CAGW and Peak Oil? The Ozone hole scare has taken a backseat for now, but it can always be re-cycled, once the climate scare dies down and alternative energy sources predictably come on line one by one.

Or perhaps as Lovelock says, this is "the real thing." The evidence suggests otherwise, and it should be noted that Lovelock is promoting a new book. Should we simply put Lovelock up on the shelf alongside Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, the Y2K thrillers, and Al Gore? Perhaps we will.

Why Is There Nothing Instead of Something?

While scanning the spectral emissions of the universe, astronomers must ask themselves that question. Why is there no evidence of anything beyond a raw, untamed cosmos? Earth's solar system is only 5 billion years old, whereas the universe appears to be 15 billion years old, give or take 5 billion. Where are all the old, wise civilisations of intelligent beings that evolved in other galaxies? The universe does, after all, have a long history that precedes us.

Centauri Dreams blog's Paul Gilster wonders the same thing.

We’re beginning to learn that planets are abundant around stars in our region of the disk, with the encouraging expectation that habitats for evolving lifeforms must be widespread. But maybe there are natural caps other than technological suicide that could end a civilization’s dreams.

You can’t help pondering this when you run into the recent news about a long duration gamma-ray burst (GRB) that took astronomers by surprise. GRBs are normally thought to flag the death of a massive star, but in this case the burst seems to come out of nowhere. What caused the event in a region of space where the nearest galaxy is 88,000 light years away? [ed: see photo above--the long tail of the Tadpole Galaxy. Some such tails--the result of galactic collisions--are too faint to see]

...Of course, where gamma-ray bursts are concerned, the farther away, the better. But there are other interesting sources of trouble besides GRBs. Consider 3C321....Both these galaxies, according to Chandra X-ray Observatory data, contain supermassive black holes, but the larger galaxy shows a jet that seems to be pointed right at the smaller. That could make things interesting indeed at the receiving end

Centauri Dreams

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are highly focused events of generally short duration--usually no more than a few seconds, but occasionally lasting minutes. If you are not directly in the path of a GRB in that time period, you are probably safe from its furious energies. But if you are in the path of the jet of an active galactic nucleus, as is the companion galaxy described above, you may be in for a long and deadly bombardment of lethal energy.

There is protection in numbers, even for star systems, however. The same way that the solar wind of our star protects us from extra-solar radiation, the "galactic wind" from the Milky Way Galaxy protects its member star systems from extra-galactic radiation. But there is a limit to its protection, and a sufficiently powerful extragalactic jet--or an intra-galactic jet within 500 light years of earth aimed in our direction--could mean lights out for our own very young civilisation. Some scientists believe that at least some of earth's large extinctions were triggered by the solar system's eccentric orbit out of the plane of the galactic disc every 62 million years.

While the universe is clearly a hostile place without the help of alien intelligences, we should consider that our dominant vision of wise, long-lived, peaceful elder races may be a bit uninformed--if not naive. We may be surrounded by evidence of scores of intelligent civilisations, and not know it--as in this online story by David Brin. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

So, although our noisy existence in this corner of an unexceptional galaxy would seem to have gone undetected by outsiders--so far--that may actually be a good thing, for all we know. It might simply be better for us, as a baby civilisation, to just watch and learn for a while. Explore our local neighborhood, send out robotic probes, extend our observational range as far out and back as we can. What we discover cannot help but surprise us.

At the same time, we should look into placing some of our eggs into other, well padded baskets.

Hat tip Advanced Nano.

Year of the Plague

I Am Legend topped the box office in a US record-setting December opening box office. Killer plagues make headlines, and attract readers and movie-goers.

A recent set of cautionary nano-revo scenarios from Nanowerk prominently featured biological plagues as significant existential risks. We know it could happen, because it has happened so many times before across the planet's times and places.

One of the reasons that killer plague is likely to hit the modern world, is how easy and powerful the tools of biological creation are becoming. A killer virus must be virulent and readily transmissible.

But the most disturbing news this week is that scientists have created the human killer virus in the lab. The dreaded H5N1 avian flu, as feared, finally mutated last August into a virulent form that can easily spread from person to person, increasing the likelihood of a pandemic that could kill hundreds of millions — much like 1918s infamous Spanish flu.

Luckily, this mutation was the creation of scientists at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, and the mutated strain lives — for now — only
in petri dishes. Source

A mass epidemic of killer virus (or bacteria) would initially be seen as a medical problem. As significant numbers of "weight-bearing members" of society fall to the virus, the epidemic becomes a massive social problem. As the medical infrastructure itself falls to the killer microbe, efforts to control its spread become medieval and draconian.

The killer plague scenario is but one of many existential risk scenarios that the Lifeboat Foundation, JG Matheny, Nick Bostrom, Michael Anissimov, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and many other futurist thinkers contemplate.

The risk of a naturally emerging super-killer microbe may be minimal. But given that human researchers have already modified the H5N1 avian flue in the lab to spread from person to person, we are not necessarily dealing with naturally emerging viruses. We will soon be dealing with intentionally created mass killers.

With the loss of the medical infrastructure and most civil security apparatus, the western world would begin to resemble Baghdad or Beirut at their worst. All the predictions of what would happen should George W. Bush be elected would suddenly and finally come true.

Uninfected refugees would flee the "hot zone", inadvertently carrying the killer microbe in their midst. The "wealth" of generations would be abandoned in a millisecond in the mad rush to escape the spreading death.

What I am suggesting is that with the tools of synthetic biology, modern medical tools--antibiotics, antivirals, the entire pharmaceutical R&D infrastructure--would be either ineffective or too slow to help anyone.

The type of proactive prevention that could hold back such threats have little to do with your government or the technological infrastructure of your society.

More later.

If This Man and His Friends Try to Kill 90% of Earth's Humans, Where Can We Go to Escape Them?

The man pictured above is Eric Pianka, a University of Texas ecologist who suggests repeatedly in public appearances that viruses such as Ebola should be modified so as to be able to kill off 90% of earth's human population. He claims to advocate these extreme measures in an effort to save the planet. Among radical left environmentalists, Professor Pianka is not alone, and may even be considered a hero.

I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka (Fig. 1), the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

...One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, “What good are you?”

Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, “We're no better than bacteria!”

Pianka then began laying out his concerns about how human overpopulation is ruining the Earth. He presented a doomsday scenario in which he claimed that the sharp increase in human population since the beginning of the industrial age is devastating the planet. He warned that quick steps must be taken to restore the planet before it's too late.

...Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

Source

So where could we go to escape madmen who try to carry through on Pianka's "bold" plan to save the earth? Robert Shapiro of the Lifeboat Foundation advisory committee recommends pursuing a course that leads to human settlements on the moon.

When we face a brand new situation, such probabilities are impossible to calculate. Countermeasures against each individual threat can of course be taken, but we would also be prudent to back up our civilization and our species. We need to place a self-sufficient fragment of society out of harm’s way, which for practical purposes means off the Earth. A buffer of empty space would protect that sanctuary from virtually all of the catastrophes named above.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, and a number of others, have called for humanity to spread out to distant planets of our Solar System. But there is no need to go so far to protect ourselves. After a few decades—centuries at worst—dust and ash will settle, radioactive materials will decay, and viruses will perish. Earth will once again become the best home for humanity in the Solar System. Return would be easiest if a safe sanctuary were nearby. In the more probable instance that only a limited disaster took place, that nearby sanctuary could also play a valuable role in restoring lost data and cultural materials, and coordinating the recovery. And of course, construction of the rescue base will be much easier if it is only days, rather than months or years, away.

We do not have to build the base from scratch, in an environment of emptiness, as we are attempting to do with the space station. A suitable platform has been orbiting our planet ever since its formation. On most clear nights, we need only look up to see it. If I employ the same arithmetic that I use when I insure my home, the cost of the lunar base can easily be justified.

Source

To build a sustainable lunar base, we will need to find water there, and be able to build and extract whatever else we need from lunar materials together with abundant sunlight. We can easily bring the genetic material for the living plants, bacteria, and animals we will need. Eventually, using molecular engineering and nanotechnology, we will be able to design and engineer whatever we need as long as we have water and planetary or asteroidal mass.



Knowing that many members of the radical left support what Pianka is advocating is not reassuring. Particularly when one of the major political parties in the US currently is being strongly influenced by the radical left.

The fever pitch to which anxiety over "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming" is being sold to students and members of the public no doubt pushes some people over the brink. The same thing applies to "peak oil" doomsday theories that circulate among many university students and other pseudo-intellectuals. What is essentially an economic problem of managing scarce resources becomes another apocalypse.

This tendency to create doomsdays where no doomsday are justifiable, twists the minds of those who are caught up in the perverse excitement associated with such fictional apocalypses. It is not surprising that many true believers take doomsday theories a step further--to propose bringing about doomsday themselves.

As if they cannot stand the suspense of waiting for doomsday to happen--they simply must concoct it for themselves.

Hat tip Michael Anissimov.

Update 5 Jan 08: Several people in comments and emails have made the claim that Eric Pianka was misquoted by Forrest Mims in Mims' account of the 109th meeting of Texas Academy of Science in Austin. Such a claim is unlikely, given the fact that Mims' written account is the only "transcript" of that particular talk by Pianka. Since all recording devices were required to be turned off for the talk in question, we must depend upon written accounts.

Support for Mims' account can be found here. Apparently others besides Mims' can remember that Pianka referred fondly to the idea of a virulent strain of Ebola (or other microorganism) reducing the population of earth by 90%.

The sad thing is that some of the apologists and deniers for Pianka probably agree with his point of view, but simply do not wish it to become more broadly known. Unfortunately for them, the people who need to know about the Pianka perversion have already been informed.

After Synthetic Biology: Comes the Plague?

Synthetic biologists such as Craig Venter, are optimistic about their future. They believe that once they have mastered the art of forcing nature to do their will, the good life will follow--for everyone.

Synthetic biologists, as they survey all the new genes and control elements whose DNA sequences are now accumulating in data bases, seem to feel extraordinary power is almost within their grasp.

“Biology will never be the same,” Thomas F. Knight of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory wrote recently in describing the new engineering discipline he sees as emerging from it.

....“Grow a house” is on the to-do list of the M.I.T. Synthetic Biology Working Group, presumably meaning that an acorn might be reprogrammed to generate walls, oak floors and a roof instead of the usual trunk and branches. “Take over Mars. And then Venus. And then Earth” —the last items on this modest agenda.

Most people in synthetic biology are engineers who have invaded genetics. They have brought with them a vocabulary derived from circuit design and software development that they seek to impose on the softer substance of biology. They talk of modules — meaning networks of genes assembled to perform some standard function — and of “booting up” a cell with new DNA-based instructions, much the way someone gets a computer going.

The first practical applications of synthetic biology may not be so far off. “The real killer app for this field has become bioenergy,” Dr. Collins says. Under the stimulus of high gas prices, synthetic biologists are re-engineering microbes to generate the components of natural gas and petroleum. Whether this can be done economically remains to be seen. But one company, LS9 of San Carlos, Calif., says it is close to that goal. Its re-engineered microbe “produces hydrocarbons that look, smell and function” very similarly to those in petroleum, said Stephen del Cardayre, the company’s vice president for research.

Synthetic biologists are well aware that, like any new technology, theirs can be used for good or ill, and they have encouraged open discussion of possible risks at their annual meetings.

One possible danger is bioterrorism.

Source

Bioterrorism. For western scientists looking for all the good things in life for themselves and others, bioterrorism is not first on their minds. Yet for hundreds of millions of religious fanatics and apocalyptics, the possibility of ending man's reign on earth offered by a perverted synthetic biology must be too strong to resist.

Most of us simply do not want to think about it. Why not simply dwell on all the good things biotech, nanotech, advanced computing, robotics, and molecular fabs will bring to our living rooms and workshops? Why think about a potential hell when we could be thinking about a potential utopia?

Because we like to think about the apocalypse. There is no apocalypse like a "plague apocalypse." Remember 12 Monkeys, or 28 Days Later? How about the classics Earth Abides, No Blade of Grass, or Andromeda Strain?

In a plague apocalypse, the victims can die as long and as painfully as the author desires. Victims can even pass into a zombie state to prey on survivors and the uninfected. Or instead of humans dying from plague, they can die from starvation when diseases attack food crops--destroying the entire food chain from the bottom up.

The White Plague is a revenge tale, about a scientist who loses his wife to terror and embarks on a far more lethal campaign of terror himself. Why not? Scientists are as human as anyone else. Anyone who has not witnessed the passion of a scientist probably just doesn't know any scientists very well.

The point is, synthetic biology makes synthetic plagues--aimed at people or plants--possible. And given the rampant religious apocalyptic fanaticism that possesses the young burgeoning populations of certain countries, it is likely that many of these fanatics will take up biological science as a profession. In other words, it will happen if we let it.

What will our world be like if we get sloppy, and allow the secrets of synthetic plague to slip into the hands of fanatic apocalyptics? To visualize that, you must use your imagination. Reading some of these books might help. Or you may want to read some of these. After all, apocalypses share many consequences among them.

Facing these possibilities is what organisations such as the Lifeboat Foundation and the Society for Creative Apocalyptology are all about.

It is not inconceivable that the future will belong to the city-state, rather than to the nation-state. A city-state can trade with other city-states and with the surrounding countryside, but is more defensible than the nation-state--having shorter borders.

The US-Mexican border will not keep out a deadly plague. Neither will the long border of the Mediterranean Sea between much of the third world and Europe. Chinese military officials have threatened to devastate the US west coast with nuclear weapons, but why bother when a simple microbe will do even more damage?

Round the world cruises and air travel are custom made for spreading deadly plagues. It is quite possible that we will look back on these days as a time of extraordinary freedom to travel and experience the world. In the future, many unknown perils wait.

This is not a time for academic lobotomies or psychological neotenates. It is a time for teaching children basic skills of living and survival, as a matter of course. Think of life in an orbiting colony or on a moonbase. Think of how children would have to be raised in order to deal with the deadly hazards existing right outside the door.

Then start thinking realistically about what life on Earth could easily be like in a decade or two. And stop wasting generations of human life by dooming them to incompetent neoteny and frivolous helplessness.

Society for Creative Apocalyptology--Apply Here to Register Your Chapter

The editorial board here at Al Fin has come to a momentous decision: we have decided to organise the founding of the worldwide Society for Creative Apocalytpology (SCA). It will be modeled after another SCA, the Society for Creative Anachronism.

While the Society for Creative Anachronism is organised for recreation and historical re-enactment, the Society for Creative Apocalyptology will be organised for recreation and education. Education with the aim of creating a core of competence within each participating community--competence for meeting the various challenges of the apocalypse.

Apocalyptology is the study of the end of the world, better known as doomsday or the apocalypse. Many people are amateur apocalyptologists without being aware of it. Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction happens to be very popular with the reading and movie-going public. It is a short step from watching The Matrix, Aeon Flux, Jericho, or Terminator, and actually taking a serious interest in developing useful skills that could save your life, or the lives of your loved ones.

The Society for Creative Apocalyptology would not be your typical "community organising" political scam. Besides being fun and entertaining education, the SCA might actually save the lives of large numbers of people living in communities lucky enough to possess an active chapter.

We are currently in the process of collecting ideas for how the SCA will be structured. Soon, we will announce the launching of a new web headquarters of the SCA where future plans will be announced. Stay tuned.


It is the intention of the SCA to remain nonpolitical and nonreligious. By focusing upon the core competencies and skills needed by communities who lose their lifelines to the larger economic and emergency systems of their regions and nations, the SCA attempts to assure that a kernel of competency will exist within all participating communities. In a true major disaster that severs the ties of a community from its regional and national lifelines, several problems have to be addressed simultaneously.

It was clear from observing New Orleans and Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, that the local city and state governments were caught completely unprepared. If not for the US military assets who responded almost immediately, the people of New Orleans and southern Louisiana would have suffered far worse than they did.

There are many conceivable disasters and catastrophes that would not allow free-loading and corrupt local governments to abdicate their responsibilities in that way, without suffering far worse penalties than the government crooks of Louisiana suffered.

Do not completely trust your governments at any level, with the safety and well-being of yourself and your loved ones in a disaster, catastrophe, or worse. Be prepared.