SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“In constraining carbon through rationing, we might soon find that we were building a different sort of society, one emphasizing quality of life before the raw statistics of economic growth and relentless consumption. I have no grand plan for how this society might look, nor do I pretend that it would be some kind of utopia. Life would go on, with all its trials and tribulations—and that, after all, is precisely the point. Unless we do constrain carbon, life will very largely not go on at all.” Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., 2008, p. 302. [The next few paragraphs (ending in a grim list with a few addenda of my own) are a summary of this vital primer on global warming. Read them and weep].
Picture God as a
senile old coot, once lauded as the master artist of his time. Having lost the best part of his eyesight,
these last few years, he has reduced his worldly pallet to four shades: tans,
greys, the purest aqua blue and cloud white.
Gone icy silver white, wiped without mercy from equatorial mountains
(one degree Celsius), from the Arctic Ocean (two degrees), then from the Alps,
the Rockies and the Andes (three degrees), and finally from the mighty
Himalayas, even Greenland and the Antarctic, after a mere four degrees of
increase in the average heat on Earth.
Gone forest green, tropical or temperate, since the ice fields’
life-giving rivers no longer flow so dependably in summertime; gone the dark
browns of good soil, either flushed away by floods or reduced to dustbowl by
drought.
With the heat
engine of a hotter Earth, rains will conform to the biblical scheme: “For to
those who have much, more will be given; but for those who have nothing, even
what they have will be taken away.” No
more fallow fields, no woods, no living coral reefs and no fish left
alive.
Gone all the port
cities, flooded no matter how well fortified; gone the bioluminescence of human
cities by night, a few remaining smudges of subsisting luminosity closed up
against polar shores, if they can get away with it. Instead, there are countless bright flashes
out to sea where once deep-frozen and now sublimated methane hydrate froths up
from square miles of subsea continental shelf and detonates in titanic
explosions that will interrupt the occasional Force 6+ hypercane with tsunamis.
The oceans are
the purest aqua blue because there is no oxygen in the water and therefore no
life. The biomass remaining on land is
inedible scrub and mangrove swamp, and not much of that; all induced by a mere
five degree rise in average world temps.
Six degrees and forget human bioluminescence for at least a few
centuries, while the climate stabilizes from the equivalent of the
Permian-Triassic die-off, during which the world almost turned into a barren
ball of rock. A few humans might
survive, reproduce and rebuild in good time.
An equivalent drop of six degrees from normal would glaze the planet in
ice, perhaps all the way to the equator.
To ward off this
fate, we would have to start scheduling tranches
(‘wedges’ or statistical pie slices) of conserved energy and reduced greenhouse
gas (each wedge would reduce CO2 emissions by 1,000 metric tons per year by
2050); this according to Robert Socolow and Stever Pacala of Princeton
University. If we ‘inserted’ enough of
these wedges into our world, say 13 of them, and quickly enough, say tomorrow,
we might avoid the most deadly of these heat death phenomena. Some of the wedges to pick from, discard as
too noxious, or duplicate several times, include:
· Double every automobile’s fuel efficiency
· Halve every automobile’s yearly mileage
· Halve the number of autos on Earth (Should I lead by example and drive my VW Bug over the nearest cliff, so no one else can use it?)
· Make as many (?) habitations as possible energy-neutral
· 700 one-Gigawatt nuclear power plants (look out for those that Pop!) Thorium reactors might work better, cheaper and safer than Uranium ones.
· Fusion reactors? Cold fusion? It wouldn’t be the first or last time that the powers-that-be were 100% misleading and misled.
· Two million one-Megawatt wind or water power turbines
· Five million acres of photovoltaic solar panels (27 square feet per person on Earth; should I lead by example and go broke covering the roof of my house with solar panels?)
· Massive reforestation (? million acres of replanted trees) and bury those trees once they’ve matured
· End all clear-cutting and massive burns of tropical forests, as of yesterday
· Devote 618 million acres to biofuel instead of food (massively inefficient: fertilizer, pesticides and farm equipment = burning carbon; plus arm yourself against the famine-struck!)
· Sequester 1,000 metric tons of liquid CO2 underground
· Artificial photosynthesis (biomechanical, in vertebrates, in humans?)
· Genetically engineered coccoliths (plankton) producing calcium carbonate by the thousands of metric tons
· Send billions of mirrors into orbit, or fog the sky with shadow-inducing nitrates and sulfates?
· Orbiting solar power plants beaming power back to Earth (look out for unforeseen atmospheric effects!)
· A massive ‘cull’ of humanity: one Plague or several (natural or weapon grade) or an Apocalypse that would painfully but conveniently subtract 25%, 30% or more of humanity, and probably you and me too, between now and as soon as possible (the Gauls feared nothing, except that the sky should fall on their heads…)
· ?... Any other ideas: good crazy, bad crazy or otherwise? Allow a spent fuel rod pool to dry out, burn and contaminate the planet, like Fukushima Daichi No. 4?
· massive industrial applications of terra preta? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810122030.htm
· Some unforeseen new technology?
In any case, no
matter what changes we undertake or endure now, the Earth will grow more or
less torrid for the next thousand years or so, until its climate restabilizes
naturally, with or without the burden of humanity and/or its civilization.
Thereafter, let
us imagine a planetary civilization dedicated to World Peace. I know that’s hard to do, but try. Fair and serene in appearance, it
would eagerly exploit the untapped riches of outer space.
· Limitless vacuum and weightlessness for perfect die-casting, crystal cultivation and the manufacture of extra pure alloys and compounds. For example, perfect ball bearings and gears that needed no lubricant.
·
Tremendous
new energy reserves tapped directly from the Sun.
·
Powerful
engines running on temperature differentials between sunlit and shadow surfaces
in the vacuum of space.
·
Floating
icebergs of liquid oxygen, frozen water and dry ice (carbon dioxide).
·
Giant
chunks of raw ore in accessible orbits: at least ten times more ore than that
contained in the Earth’s thin crust.
Imagine solid veins of pure gold out there in the silky, pitiless
black—fractionated heavy, fused and set adrift by some cosmic collision.
·
Artifacts? Documents?
Biology?
Once these
resources will have been properly developed (a major if unexpected dividend of
global disarmament and world peace), high pollution, high-energy industries
will migrate into Earth orbit and beyond.
This said, outer
space should not become more polluted thereby.
Learner debates on this topic will be crucial.
The skyward uplift of materials management, energy generation and heavy manufacturing industries will release much of the world’s acreage to regrow climax ecology. This liberation of the natural world will help restore it to an approximation of its former purity.
Learners may
fulfill what appears to be Gaia’s intent by seeding space with terrestrial life
forms. It seems obvious that one of the
Earth’s purposes is to spread Life back out into empty space, just as it has
been Life’s to seed the Earth and produce us, its pet pupils.
We may safely
ignore science’s rejection of teleology,
its a priori refusal to accept the
hypothesis that all systems, even non-human ones, could have ends, goals
and purposes of their own. Unbelievably, science rejects this hypothesis
without investigating it. This is an
excellent reason to question science’s pious faith in itself and opt for more
flexible “superstitions” instead of it or at least complementary to
it.
I might have
taken a more pro-science stance in a superstitious world, but I must question
science in a know-nothing-but-science world.
If only to contradict smug officials of dominant orthodoxy: as
misguided, as usual, as they are certain of the perfection of their
prejudice, as usual. Just as I would
contradict the organized fanatics of any orthodoxy: religious, scientific or
otherwise. I would contradict any authoritarian who made
every decision and forbade others, better qualified, to make theirs. For every discipline, more access to the
narrow field at which it excels, and less to its many fields of incompetence.
Recent Presidents
of the United States have militarized orbital space. Against whom, the Martians? A frenzied timetable of military
satellite launches prompted the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and the
Columbia was doomed by withdrawn NASA civilian funding in favor of military
expenditures. For decades, the militarization of orbital space has hamstrung civilian
space research. It has left us
enough nukes to sterilize fifty Earth civilizations, enough spyware to film it
in 3-D splendor, and a junkyard clutter along low Earth orbits.
Space planning
betrays a colossal lack of imagination.
It’s as if Spain's Ferdinand and Isabella had responded to Columbus’
petition for a trans-Atlantic exploratory expedition by building
thousands of coast defense galleys and beach fortifications. Let’s set aside, for a moment, their
bloodstained avarice and religious zealotry.
Those regressive grandees displayed magnificent vision compared to our
clumsy schemes.
This flawed
reasoning exposes the failure of current economic models. The more profits financiers accrue by fouling
the nest we share, the more clearly they demonstrate their inability to manage
so much as a yard sale without extensive supervision. Our ultimate cowardice may be this: we
delegate staggering responsibilities to crooked incompetents whose decisions go
way beyond their limited talent and ethics; then we refuse to amend their
errors.
As we speak, genetic treasure troves are being ransacked in the wild. Corporations are locking away a few tissue remnants in giant seed-bank repositories. They are patenting every biological element (even human cells and all their genes), relying on the full force of reactionary law.
Some sociopaths among our not-too-distant ancestors had dreamed of doing the same thing with chemical elements. “Pay us for the contractual privilege of breathing. We own the patent rights for oxygen!”
Once those corporations have removed most biological resources from their natural settings, they plan to reissue the surviving progeny – with or without genetic tampering, changes useful, benevolent or otherwise – then ransom their hostages with imperial royalties. What transcendent impudence!
This colossal
corporate hijack reminds me of the Consultant’s words in Douglas
Adams’ satire, The Restaurant at the End
of the Universe, Longmeadow Press, Stamford, Connecticut, 1986, p.
299. He is gone, now—we’ll miss his
lively humor.
[Note: A management
consultant is addressing a crowd of fellow emigrants banished from their home
planet because their job skills were considered ‘redundant’ … The population of
that planet died soon afterward, because a seemingly redundant skill (that of
telephone receiver wiper) turned out to be crucial for public health.]
“‘…Since we decided
a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all
become immensely rich.’
“Ford [the
protagonist] stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively
at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits
were stuffed.
“‘But we have also,’
continued the management consultant, ‘run into a small inflation problem on
account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the
current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s
peanut.’
“Murmurs of alarm
came from the crowd. The management
consultant waved them down.
“‘So in order to
obviate this problem,’ he continued, ‘and effectively revalue the leaf, we are
about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and … er, burn down all the
forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s
a sensible move under the circumstances.’
“The crowd seemed a
little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how
much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets, whereupon
they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing
ovation. The accountants among them
looked forward to a profitable autumn.”
Surfing gaily
along the crest of Global Warming, conspirators of greed may bake sterile the
Earth’s equatorial zone, overheat or chill the seven seas, turn tropical
rain forests, barrier reefs and micro-organic marine colonies into regretted
memories. As we struggle to restore the air-purifying greenery we’ve squandered,
we shall have to dedicate a lot more arable land and sunlit shoals to
natural growth.
Will Gaia accept our confession of guilt, admission of remorse and painstaking tender of restitution? Will she permit us to commute our self-imposed death sentence? Can we readjust our lives thereafter with Nature?
We just might manage to moderate the chaos-driven catastrophes that spatter us today, and evolve from simpleton exploiters of the Earth into more subtle caretakers.
Someone compared the Earth to a living tree. Like the Earth, its vital epithelium is a thin outer layer covering a thicker, inner core of dead tissue. A mottled glaze of lichens coating the outer tree bark: that is how the anthrosphere appears to cover the Earth. We may reverse our cancerous growth and redesign our cities, nutrition and industry. If so, our collective identity may revert from toxic mildew to vital layer on the Earth’s living flesh.
It is interesting to note that if certain species of ants disappeared, entire ecologies would collapse in their absence; whereas, if humanity disappeared, most of earth’s ecologies would rebound. Our ignorance of ecological realities has shrunk to the point of no longer offering us an excuse for ecological mayhem.
The Environmental
Preservation Arm of the World Court will exert tremendous influence over future
events, as will its Administrative equivalents locally. They’ll shield the environment from further
corporate insult, not meaningless corporate profits from marginalized
environmentalists.
It is time we confronted
multinational paper, timber and agro-monopolists and challenged their
self-serving ads. “We plant x million
trees a year!” They mistreat the World Forest the way some hard-bitten cracker might
wear out his back-forty cornfield before moving on to ruin the next.
Corporate elites strip-mine old growth forests and then restock some of the devastated ground with methane farting cowherds and timber monocultures of fast buck, forced-growth inbreeds.
Something similar is destroying most of the remaining oceanic coral reefs: the rain forests of the sea. This devastation began with the construction of historic ports, and accelerated during the Greater Paroxysm’s frenetic construction program of coastal runways and fortifications.
The sea-surface
microlayer is a thin membrane of water and air molecules that teems with
microbial life and covers quite a bit of the oceans’ coastal
surface. We’re flooding it with toxins
while its densely packed micro-communities suffer additional heat and
ultraviolet stress. Coastal wetlands are crucial to our long-term
survival, even though we’ve turned most of them into landfills and
parking lots. These biohabitats need to
be re-cultivated as delicately as possible.
Clumsy
recombinant engineering projects may lead to unforeseen disasters, especially
at sea. Any release of recombinant gene
technology into the sea threatens
to induce toxic disasters we may never manage to clean up afterwards.
Subtler minds
will restore these shattered ecosystems, focusing their efforts along
altitude/latitude boundaries, as well as lakes, rivers and ocean waterfronts. This
undertaking will be titanic: the complete regrowth of wildlife habitats across
the globe and the reduction of industrial exploitation to the minimum required
for a comfortable, sustainable peace economy.
First priority: to replant diversified habitats along the demarcation lines listed above. The rest of the natural world may restock itself in naturally in its own good time, even though the need to reverse global warming may not permit such selective regrowth.
Every oceanic
plateau, marine highland and land-bound sea shall become a Marine Sanctuary,
Park or Preserve. Terrestrial park
systems will double and redouble in size. Land and Marine Parks will come under the
jurisdiction of genuine Environmental Protection Agencies—not Defense,
Agriculture, Fisheries, Commerce, Interior, Tourism and other exploitation
bureaucracies. In most cases, local Administrations will relieve national
governments and international corporations of their environmental
influence. In turn, the environmental
arm of the World Court will oversee them.
No longer shall ecological concerns be controlled by corporate and
government interests who make it their business to devastate the largest areas
as soon as possible, in pursuit of trivial, short-term profit.
Some preliminary
eco-projects will halt the spread of the Earth’s deserts and reverse their
growth. While English speakers
use the term desertification, their peace-shallow/war-deep vocabulary offers no
worthwhile antonym. “Afforestation”
reads too much like “aforestation,” the practice of strip-mining forests for
raw profit. Besides, not all biohabitats
will take kindly to brute reforestation.
Perhaps the term ‘edenization’
will do.
Learners will
water mountainous and desert areas from nearby rivers and seas. Water treatment plants can convert brackish
water into fresh, using solar power and new genetic biotechnologies. Using biological osmotic forces,
enormous amounts of fresh water could be pumped into deserts to irrigate
heat-resistant green cover. Such installations, built big, will ensure
public access to clean piped water; and, built small, as public
fountains from natural local springs.
As our prejudices
become slightly more subtle, we may expect to edenize large areas of
desert. Learners will make use of
advanced irrigation techniques to prevent salt-poisoned soils. Ancient aquifers will be topped
off. All the deserts can be watered
during a logistical exercise equivalent to a global war. In the long run, no insurmountable problems
should present themselves. It may be
that the great deserts expand for a while longer, despite initial attempts to
reverse their growth.
Besides shrinking
the deserts, we should think about the controlled growth of glaciers. Glaciers function like giant weather
gyroscopes, moderating the weather with their cold and dry hold over the
continents. Some hypothetical
Eden might emerge on submarine plateaus and raised above sea level and dried
out in the process. (See Global Atlantis). This would be a multiple thousand-year
project.
The disenfranchised of the Earth – be they political refugees or ‘surplus’ population – could migrate into these new lands. They would be housed in arcologies of a kind proposed in the Learners chapter linked here, “White Noise.” A watchful World Court would guarantee their communal charters, political rights and self-determination.
The logistics required to edenize each continent’s deserts will come from a pool of funds collected from each of that continent’s governments. Each would contribute funds in direct proportion to the number of volunteers it sent. Each will reduce its desert areas to the minimum required to sustain a healthy biosphere.
Wimps and Prisms
may see this project as a convenient way to dispatch political
undesirables out to perish in the desert.
That kind of genocide would be forbidden. Each colonist will require the life support
inputs of an expeditionary soldier. The
Israeli kibbutz movement has
handbooks that outline exactly what is needed per capita and per
community.
Mountain ranges
can be adapted to terrace agriculture.
One has but to look at the magnificent terraced fields of Oceania, Asia
and South America to see that much more land could be cultivated in this
manner. This project will require more
intensive labor than spendthrift capital.
In addition, we should carpet
the mountainsides that have been stripped bare, with lush ground cover and tree
stands, thus moderating floods, landslides, erosion and water-born
pollution. These tasks would make
excellent work projects for urban youth setting off for summer camp or quest
treks.
Priority would go
to replanting and protecting areas stripped of climax vegetation. Learners will micro-manage corporate
exploitation to re-establish climax native ecologies. Industrial forestry will be limited to fringe
orchard areas, while old-growth forests expand outward. If possible, native populations and their
guests will administer these areas. Learners will clean up and restock sterilized
seas and waterways.
Current pollution
levels will be curtailed. If necessary,
major polluters will be fined until they shut down. Funds so acquired will finance cleanup
programs for less polluted industries, and municipal waste treatment
systems of sound design. Urban storm
drains will become just that, not just sewage flushing systems on rainy
days.
Learner gene
architects will redesign plankton and marine algae to flourish in changing
conditions of oceanic salinity, eutrophication and warmth. Current conditions are stressing natural
strains and becoming less survivable.
Tolerable maxima will be established for every pollutant, much lower than ‘scientific’ guesstimates. Reversible processes will fine-tune toxin inputs to neutralize their harmful effects.
Many pollutants
are chemically unstable. They can be
transformed into less toxic residues while they circulate through
industrial processes. This
transformation can release useable energy to power these industries. Tailored
bacteria can break down persistent toxins into less harmful substances. Those whose toxicity
cannot be minimized to tolerable levels, will become Controlled
Substances outlawed by Learners.
The World Court
will offer large bounties to whistle-blowers who turn in hoarders of weapons of
mass destruction and producers of omnicide toxins.
Gene architects will restock traumatized ecologies and refill barren niches with newly tailored wildlife. Learner naturalists will restore biological diversity after decades of weapon-directed biosimplification.
Nowadays, genetic
engineers frighten thoughtful people with elaborate preparations for
horrific new weapons and runaway disasters-by-deliberate-error. For example, the 'accidental' release of
African killer bees into Brazil, and of recombinant genes into primordial corn
strains in the Mexican highlands and in organic harvest fields in Canada. Then there’s the vicious, stupid decision of
the Canadian Supreme Court in 2004, to punish an organic farmer instead of the
insidious corporation that polluted and ruined his crops.
Total prohibition
of genetic engineering would merely drive its military research apparatus
underground. As usual, military
applications are at the forefront of secret research. What did you think was happening while
you refused to pay attention?
Gene architecture is a problematical peace technology; it will grow in reward as other peace technologies mature in parallel. But it would be unrealistic to expect weapon managers to regulate genetic engineering, since they are neither able nor willing to address its negative consequences. Their spiteful tantrums are suicidal in the long run.
Exponentially growing greenhouse gas emissions threaten
to cook the planet to such a degree that plants won’t grow anywhere (eighteen
degrees F or hotter by 2100 or sooner—almost ten times as much additional heat
as was predicted, in about half the time).
So be it. Forget the Kyoto
protocols and their call for some return to sanity. Instead, let emitters of pollutants based on
sulfur and nitrates multiply their toxic activities so that their
pollutants and the solar dimming they induce may counteract the greenhouse
effect. Let everyone pollute as much as
he can! Whoopee! This is what our weapon managers contemplate:
balancing the solar regime of Earth by turning its atmosphere into something
like the pea-soup smog on Venus.
Such staggering
risks we’re taking, like drunkards driving a planet-sized car!
There is a simple test for new technologies. Will the insurance company Lloyds of London (representing the hallowed Free Market) insure it against accidents? If so, proceed with caution; if not, drop it like a hot potato. Lloyds will not insure any nuclear power plant at any premium. Nor will it insure recombinant genetic engineering carried out in the open. Insurance companies in France won’t even insure communications industries against the health hazards of electrical transmission towers. Will anyone insure high-tension power lines against their biological effects? Lessons for the wise.
James Lovelock
(the scientific prophet of the planet at this time) advocates the proliferation
of nuclear power. I suppose he does so,
not only to increase the availability of ‘green’ energy free of greenhouse
gasses, but also to reflect his indifference to collateral casualties from the construction
of so many nuclear power plants that some of them will pop (a statistical
certainty) and scatter lethal radiation across the planet. The fewer the people, the lesser their global
impact. Learners will be less
flippant about human suffering, relying on the benevolence of a non-scientific
God of Love to fix our errors, instead of compounding the painful outcomes of
human failure.
In addition to
being far from stupid, Dr. Lovelock does not strike me as particularly
mean. Having read a few of his works, I was not struck by his
Republicanism (of the kind I am horrified to note every time another one of
them twangs his idiot bile through the speakers of my TV set). My waking childhood nightmares included
televised hate-speech from some porcine bigot talking in a lazy, Southern
drawl. Same drawl now, with the addition
of a western nasal twang; different but equally vicious and stupid speech.
So Lovelock’s
indifference to the likelihood of human harm may have another basis. Indeed,
he could believe that, when he describes the future of humanity, it is of dead
people walking. He may have convinced himself that mankind will boil down
to a toes-and-fingers – count ‘em – residue of its
once-bacterial swarm. It has become a
question of the most likely combination of annihilations rather than means of
survival. That is not a hard argument to make or believe in, these
days―sad, but not hard to believe. In that case, might as well die
by radiation-induced leukemia (though I would not wish that fate on my worst
enemy), as by famine, say, or stray collateral damage as the last Main Battle
Tank blows down the last Community Center to retrieve the last jerry can of
gasoline. Take your pick from your worst (and most lethal) choices.
At least we’d die with the lights on…
Atomic and other
high pollution industries will migrate to Earth orbit and beyond, or
they’ll be taxed out of existence.
Smaller
communities will be more attentive to local ecologies. As we become more grounded in peace, we won’t
require so many polluting inputs.
Finally, bright minds may elucidate the paradoxes of human
nature, nature and supernature.
Data trespass and
environmental pollution – both ‘legitimate’ and illegitimate according to
current law – will fuel mobster criminality of the future. This will happen, whether or not we
regulate it today.
Of course, now
that I think of it, the worst criminals will gravitate toward the
highest-paying crime: the traffic of human flesh. Whether this involves spare organs, enslaved
human/animal chimera, immune and other cloned cells, bioweapons, illegal
human fertility or some other biomedical technology as yet unforeseen; that’s
of little importance. Here, in the heart
of darkness of the human soul, nightmarish criminality will fester. This unspeakable syndic will take root
whether or not humanity organizes some rational, global eugenics program to
shrink its size peacefully and thus ensure its survival. See Population
Control.
Today’s drug,
gambling and prostitution criminality (whose victims suffer
multi-dimensional punishments, instead of wealthy racketeers and their
reactionary political patrons who go home rich), are just warming-up exercises
for data-and-pollution crimes of tomorrow.
In the same way, the American Prohibition provided a cozy nursery for
organized drug crime and its police ‘control’ agencies. Both sides, stuffed with sociopaths.
Personal liberty
resembles a social vacuum that meddlesome authoritarians must fill, or lumps in
society's orderly batter that they must whisk away. They only make exceptions for their own
misdeeds, which they defend and perpetuate in the name of “liberty and
the pursuit of happiness.” Real liberty
can only shrink in their hands. It will
be up to Learners to deprive them of the means to "fill this void"
while simultaneously forbidding them to abuse it. A very delicate and paradoxical task.
In the pollution law of the future, the burden of proof and cleanup will fall squarely on polluters. These environmental abusers may include organized criminals, government collaborators (like Congress), corporate managers and other powerful groups that profiteer from pollution. We will stop subsidizing those absentee polluters who have managed, up ‘til now, to evade the worst personal consequences of their greed. Currently, they live in luxury, fortified communities carefully tucked away from their own pollution outfalls.
That form of profitable
escapism will come to an end. In the
future, these same people will be exiled, along with their families, to
dumpsites within their areas of responsibility.
They may not relocate until those sites and their annexes have been
certified clean. High-tension power
lines will pass over their rooftops, and sulfurous smokestacks, stand upwind of
their windows. Pollution trials will be held on-site with few environmental
protections for defendants. High
officials and rich investors will be placed on trial, not sacrificial
subordinates. They will attend their
trials in tents or on rafts floating on wastes.
The threat of these harsh measures may accelerate honest cleanup efforts
that have been delayed indefinitely by high-rewards-for-doing-nothing
legalisms.
We badly need to
shower in a cascade of good will and common sense—and scrub off corresponding
layers of ritual stupidity.
Should this course in miracles come about, the world might turn into a
peaceful caricature of Victorian England.
A few decades
from now, the Earth may turn into parkland mosaic inlaid with lovingly tended
squireships. They will be smaller, more
scattered, and environmentally friendly than today’s cities and corporate
agro-complexes. Agricultural freeholds
and garden/university townships will flourish; extended family and volunteer collectives will farm intensive
horticulture and aquaculture from just enough plow land and shoreline to
support local communities.
Cottage industries will produce exquisite crafts for luxury export. Each Bioregion will support climax
reforestation in local parklands, as well as intensive soil, flora and wildlife
restoration projects.
We should pickaxe
another fault line here.
Squireship implies the hereditary succession of proud yeomen and
soil-worshiping squires, each intent on nurturing fruitful landscapes, sleek
livestock and vigorous offspring. This alternative – like that of Hindu castes
– might stabilize skills, talents, political order and consumer demand. Nevertheless, it would consign many people to
inherited duties and inferior accomplishment.
As successive generations of squires oversaw proud yeomen (busy
scrubbing every tree with a toothbrush) cultural stagnation might take
root.
The common social
alternative is promotion by merit. When
administered with grace and imagination, it offers more promise than its caste
equivalent. But such systems often go
wrong when hyperactive scoundrels promote themselves by abusing their
Napoleonic share of cunning and greed.
As usual, neither
solution suits every circumstance.
Flexible combinations would offer more promise and a greater challenge
to administer. Future agricultural
communities may become collective and hereditary; built-up municipalities may
recruit restless talent through free market certifications of competitive
merit. Freedom of choice would be
assured by voluntary transits between these communities and many others, whose
local arrangements best suit their own circumstances.
We have yet to
mobilize our full public health potential against AIDS and older, resurgent
pandemics (transmitted sexually and otherwise).
This shocking oversight is just another weapon effort at slow-mo
genocide and mass misery. As we speak, plague, tuberculosis, malaria,
hepatitis, meningitis, polio and cholera reassert themselves. The list of inexcusable pandemics grows every
year, while that of effective drugs and ‘acceptable’ preventives is shrinking
down to a blank page.
We should have a
thousand times more
medics.
AIDS – or some new
mutant – may become transmissible as an aerosol. When (not if) some ancient lethal disease
becomes immune to all our wonder drugs, we may anticipate casualties of
biblical proportion. Perhaps AIDS will
trigger explosive secondary pandemics.
Vulnerable populations are growing at alarming rates: the AIDS-infected,
the immune-suppressed, hospital patients, prisoners, airline passengers,
wartime and garrison armies, the homeless and refugees (some of them
international, many more trapped in their own countries, paradoxically), all of
them at the mercy of disgraceful levels of care.
More and more
animals are caged in forced-feeding factories and torture laboratories; fewer
survive in the wild. One way or another,
these unwholesome habitats may incubate some new plague. It’s as if we were witnessing some
horrific, microbiological sequel to the movie Alien.
As wild fauna
face annihilation along with their wilderness habitats, their disease organisms
undergo enormous survival pressures.
Normally, they have achieved Level Three and Four relationships
with their animal hosts. (In order to
decipher these Levels, please consult the chapter Beyond
Darwin.) They revert to Level
One and Two with the last remaining hosts, humans. Level Two diseases are no fun—go ask any
Plague victim.
Meanwhile, dollar
democrats enjoy the best medicine that money can buy, and are indifferent to
the inferior level of care of their social inferiors. If we connive much longer with their criminal
negligence, supersaturated hospitals will collapse and abandon all of us
simultaneously.
Once the cities
that remain house their inhabitants in an acceptable manner, great heaps of
corporate competition, atrocious living conditions and high pollution will
continue to fester here and
there. In these last citadels of
Capital, Blade Runner visions of dystopia may materialize.
Everyone accepts
this abortive misconception as our most likely future.
To be more
precise, we should expect these dystopia enthusiasts to assemble in a
few cramped conurbations. These last
economic ghettos may shift to the Equator where extra-planetary and orbital
payloads require less energy to hoist aloft.
Such hyper-urban space gantries may materialize in the Andes, the
mountains of equatorial of Africa, Sumatra, Borneo and other elevations
fringing the Equatorial Zone.
Otherwise, people
will choose to live in orbit, in self-sufficient squireships, in small
garden/university communities and in the giant arcologies described above—or as
primal hunter-gatherers in the heart of the World Forest. As their needs and desires evolve, they will
migrate from one type of community to the next and back again. None
of these settings would rule out the rest.
On the contrary, each would complement and reinforce the others,
offer new markets, sources of necessities and luxuries. They’d only be limited by sustainable surface
transport, which local Learners can figure out.
Domed cities and new
recycling technologies (Paul Lackman mentions the Biosphere experiment)
may teach us to deal more effectively with pollution, incoming ultraviolet and
heat exchange programs in urban settings.
Super canon, MAGLEV-driven and
space elevator freight payloads may become routine technologies, once they stop
menacing us as cheap strategic weapons.
Our usual transport methods will shrink, replaced by others we cannot
yet imagine. See the chapter, Plus LTA, Minus Nukes.
The problem with
‘soft’ technologies like parapsychology and New Age research, is not
their scientific soundness or lack thereof.
This, despite well-financed ‘debunking’ of zero scientific
validity. However, it is hard to imagine
a greater threat than that posed by their potential to summon enormous
destructive energies, as long as weapon managers retained control of them.
Mega-project
technocrats look forward to a future of giant orbital solar power
collectors/transmitters and moon-based solar power plants. They intend to refine lunar regolyth into
deuterium, cement and water; and use these materials to build power
plants that would beam raw energy back to Earth. These
projects are fine, provided that orbital and lunar factories soak up all this
extra energy. Forget about microwaving
power back to the Earth’s surface through the atmosphere. Such techno-hubris (hoobreess, God-aping pride) could invite
unimaginable weather disasters. The
ozone layer might tear further apart; Grand Chaos cyclones might be unleashed,
and we might have to endure another Deluge or Ice Age for good
measure. It's likely that the Earth's
Van Allen belt would be distorted, which would aggravate cosmic radiation
bombardments. Bad news all around.
Energy acquired
from outer space should be expended on-site to manufacture beautifully finished
products from raw materials mined in outer space. These artifacts would be delivered by
relatively cheap free-fall onto Earth-surface communities that had become
edenic, low-population and low power. Solar energy collected along Earth orbits
will power the orbital Birminghams, Coventrys and Glasgows of this new
Victorian model—not gigawatt weapon technologies squirming across the Earth's
surface.
The near and far
reaches of the Solar System would represent the outer colonies of this
Victorian model. Braving great peril,
enterprising pioneers will cast off from Earth, and a few survivors will return
bearing fantastic treasure. At first,
expect these space colonies to be plagued by isolation, dearth, primitivism,
terror and exceptional lethality.
All puns aside,
we cannot expect to explore space in a vacuum. Space colonists will require massive
transfusions of survival necessities, energy quanta and elite human
reinforcements, which only a thriving Earth-base could provide. We
will have to dream up many new peace technologies in order to colonize
outer space.
General
contractors must study plans, sample soils, learn new techniques, stock novel
materials and line up skilled craftspeople before the bidding begins. Like them, we should redirect our
attention to the Earth itself – to the well-being of its inhabitants and
ecology – and fine-tune these titanic details before we begin to explore the
heavens in earnest.
The robust health
and matriarchal solidarity of an elephant herd permit it to raise a
delicate calf, despite apparently insurmountable difficulties and dangers. The African savannah, what a very harsh place
to raise a tender cub! Like those elephants, we Earthlings should develop
hardy utopias and ecotopias. Only a
rationalized Learner civilization could nurture space exploration
through to its late adolescence to the mid-century.
In the future, we
may explore other planets with specially conditioned and equipped insect colonies. Their life-support requirements would be
minimal; their curiosity and survival instincts would drive them to
explore the rocks and sands of Mars, for example, with inhuman thoroughness, at
a fraction of the cost of manned exploration and a thousand times more
thoroughly than clumsy robots.
Specially
tailored multi-species insect colonies could dispatch scout patrols equipped
with miniature cameras and sampling equipment from one or more centralized
‘nests’. Their life support necessities
could be issued from these nests.
Sampling results could be collected, fractionated and transmitted
from them back to Earth. Freight payloads, slowly boosted and parked
in orbit, could supply these insect colonies.
Insect sterilization would delay the biocontamination of new
habitats. Or we could simply let
them operate under pressurized tent domes and die out as their oxygen ran out.
The difference
between extraterrestrial contamination and terraforming is largely moot. This problem is critical, and future Learners
will have to thrash it out. Indeed, we
shall have to pay particular attention to the pollution of outer space. A ballistic junkyard is already cluttering
near-Earth orbits; thousands of thoughtless discards and weapon remnants
threaten astronauts with fatal collisions. Every new collision between them aggravates
this problem exponentially.
No doubt some
entrepreneurial genius will earn a fortune by sweeping up all this
orbiting trash and recycling it as precious raw materials for future
construction in outer space. Land-based
entrepreneurs will empty our landfills with much the same intent. Presently, our best-laid plans involve
slowing the orbit of as much of this horrifically expensive debris as possible,
so that it will fall into the atmosphere, burn up and thus disappear from our
radar screens.
Outer space offers
us a relatively clean slate. We should
keep it that way.
Earth’s
Consolidated Space Program will erect permanent space stations and factory
complexes at every Lagrange point: five points where the Earth's and Moon’s
gravities cancel out and where satellites require minimal fuel burns to
remain stationary relative to the Earth-Moon system. Two of those points are fully stable; the
other three require periodic fuel burns.
Remote-controlled,
long-endurance orbiters, fuel tankers, surface landers and Earth-return
vehicles could be parked at leisure, tethered in orbit and warehoused on
distant planets for later use. Gigantic unmanned spaceships could contain
massive exploratory payloads and elaborate life support systems. They would orbit other celestial bodies or
land on them softly to await future crews. Unmanned,
modular payloads could swing to other planets along long, lazy
trajectories. These vehicles might
augment chemical rocket trajectories with gravitational fly-bys and solar wind
navigation.
There, they’d await much faster, smaller, more specialized human-transit vehicles, built more like fast armored cars, shielded against cosmic rays (probably with brand new bioelectrogravitational technologies; otherwise, with a protective layer of melanin-saturated living cells).
This more relaxed
project, taking decades to develop instead of a few years, would eliminate the
need for a complete life support/exploration/return vehicle package that
carried a minimal crew in one costly, pared-to-the-bone and triply redundant
spaceship.
Already, NASA
intends to make rocket fuel from the oxidized sand of Mars and generate
power and ceramics from sun-kilned Moon cheese and lunar ice. According
to the Russian newspaper, Izvestia,
the U.S. plans to harvest Helium-3 from the Moon where it is plentiful and
bring it back to the Earth where it is rare. It turns out that Helium-3 would be a safer
fuel for thermonuclear reactors.
Shipping it back from the Moon would be cheaper than refining rare
traces of it from Earth dirt. http://www.hindu.com/2004/01/26/stories/2004012600601500.htm.
Heat exchangers
may harness the enormous energy differentials between cold shadows and sunlit
surfaces—on the Moon, for example. Space
travel will teach us quite a few new tricks we could learn nowhere else.
It might be best
to limit space exploration to a few automated recon probes, at least until our
methods become somewhat less clumsy.
One is led to wonder,
have so many crashes, losses and ‘disconnects’ of Mars explorer payloads been the result
of extraordinary bad luck? About twenty
missions have failed, out of the thirty or so we have launched. “Sorry,
we just lost the carrier signal from our latest, billion dollar space
probe." Or could this have been a
deliberate policy of hiding significant findings regarding the
biohistory of space and the authenticity of UFOs—no matter what the cost?
Sooner or later,
we shall see.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld