On the disaster of the future planet now
Alan Sondheim
.."If one person, sane to a degree, may be found willing and ready to
sacrifice his life and the life of others, for his beliefs in the now
and hereafter, the world is doomed."
.."And yet it is a commonplace among us that the swarm of men and women
shall bring the scythe to bear on all others who covet not the truth."
The Cusp of Information, a continuing digression
The plethora of the world, its fecundity (potential for production of
organism and information) is at its maximum. Future knowledge will no
longer be at the beck and call of its past; if anything, it will be vastly
reduced as power grids collapse, desertifications and extinctions set in.
What I am writing now, what you are writing, has no chance for survival.
Records, archives, require potential wells which become more and more
difficult to maintain in environments which are increasingly adverse. If
we are headed towards any singularity, it is the collapse of the Sememe,
the disappearance of universals as the world turns towards isolated and
violent localizations. Think of the chains of supply and demand that
produce for example this computer - chains that span continents as a
result of research and sterile laboratories that construct the truth-value
of the isolated molecule or atom. All this disappears in the maelstrom of
disease, inundation, mafia and gang rule, suicide bombers, new forms of
terrorism still undreamed. The Internet provides a convenient model;
created within regimes of relative trust and open communication in spite
of the cold war, it now proves so leaky that Usenet is rendered useless;
the ratio of spam to personalized email is probably four or five to one;
hackers continue to bring down data-bases, operating systems, and hardware
for fun and profit; communality creates hundreds of distributed and
problematic best friends; and what's left of the Net can just as easily
(perhaps more easily) be used by criminal organizations, however defined,
than by the rest of us. Packets or no packets, without the power grid,
without wireless or functioning computers, perhaps without broadband, what
passes for transparent information will become bottle-necked, hopelessly
entangled, dysfnctional; one can imagine ghost-mail for example, ghost-
sites passing for the "real thing" which no longer exists. And it's no
longer true that technology will save us (it never was), that the ruin of
the world will revert to universal efflorescence; temperature rise is
fast-forward, and whatever changes might bring back a temporarily sustain-
able equilibrium will take tens of thousands of years at best. The Sahara
for example is nowhere near greening, and what's lost in the Amazon - a
premonition of information in general - remains lost. "There's no there
there" because the sentence is cut off in mid- sentence with nowhere to
go. Was it Hawking who recently pointed out that humanity's only chance
(forget the rest of the biosphere) is space travel? Shall we take our
problems elsewhere, only to repeat them - to create places defined by
escape velocity, strategies of escape, one from another? And how do we
live with ourselves without the most radical desensitization, objecti-
fication, in relation to the untold and unbelievable suffering we bring to
the remaining animals on the planet? (For as Foreman has pointed out, we
have already done a good job of ridding most of the continents of their
megafauna - Africa is the last to go.) In the future, even our knowledge
of these things will have disappeared, along with the last of the last of
"their" species, of any _other_; without communication pipelines, the
"clean and proper" use of the electromagnetic spectrum, what happens in
one part of the world will remain in that part of the world. Be assured it
will be in ignorance, it will be in violence, permeated by gangs, deeply
religious hysteric. Some few will remain. Information, in the sense used
here, will not, and only its residue, dissolution and chaos, the symbolic
of the broken hard-drive, will remain. (I should add one literally cannot
cope with this, with this second-sight permeated by information, hence
one's tendency towards suicide, which must be continually monitored. Not
that one wants to disappear, voluntarily, from this world, not yet. In any
case, we shall die within the beginning of the worst of it, although who,
then, shall know of that, shall think otherwise? If wisdom is thinking
otherwise, wisdom as well is close to its final site, final citation. One
cannot think otherwise, with so much knowledge, structure, text and sub-
text, at one's disposal.)
P!^VP 0!Z!^VP
Eric Yost
You could be right. The sky COULD be falling.
Of course the sky has fallen before. In the mid-14th
century, the Black Death killed a quarter of the population
in Europe. The Mongol Invasion was not a good time for
thoughtful people either.
Plus as Arthur Koestler points out in _The Ghost in the
Machine_, human knowledge has NOT been a slow and steady
accumulation of information. Rather most of our progress has
been in fits and starts, with sudden reversals. Archimedes
knew more geometry than mathematicians who lived a thousand
years after him, for example. DaVinci's highly sophisticated
methods for making pigments are lost to us. And so on.
Your argument about Internet corruption is also an argument
for good old analog, manual books. And even books are not
secure, as we all probably know about the murder of Hypatia,
librarian of Alexandria and inventor of conic solids math,
by a Christian mob, or the later complete destruction of the
Library by the Islamic conqueror who used all the scrolls
and codexes to heat steambaths. ("The only book we need is
the Koran.")
The barbarians are always at the gate, true. Equally true
seems to be that small populations of light always persist
in the darkness of barbarian times.
Finally, the disaster of the future planet is solely driven
by the one factor people refuse to discuss: population.
Human overpopulation drives pollution, resource depletion,
damage to the biosphere, wars, famines, crowding of the poor
in hypercities ... you name it. There are too many humans in
the habitat. So maybe chaos and disease is a way of
resetting the balance?
Alan Sondheim
capacity of the planet will be reached around 2050. Global warming is
already creating desertification at a furious rate etc. And it's not only
over-population; it's also the gluttony of energy absorption that's
occurring worldwide. Year ago I taught a course in futurology; the two
things that come to mind - this crisis _isn't_ like others; and there's
really no technological fix.
- Alan
blog at http://nikuko.blogspot.com - for URLs, DVDs, CDs, books/etc. see
http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt - contact sond...@panix.com, -
general directory of work: http://www.asondheim.org
Trace at: http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk - search "Alan Sondheim"
http://clc.as.wvu.edu:8080/clc/Members/sondheim
Dirk Vekemans
greetings,
dv @ Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee
....this is y sum of us _c[onsciously]hoose_ 2 not biologically reproduce.
chunks,
][mez][
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Eric Yost
energy absorption that's occurring worldwide.
But that's driven by population, isn't it? If world
population were a tenth of what it is now, the "gluttony"
would be similarly reduced, wouldn't it?
Plus nature does heal itself, though not always as we would
prefer. Case in point is the famous hole in the ozone layer
over Antarctica: the hole is closing.
(As a sidebar to how we are manipulated by elites, I would
point out that the "ozone hole" became a popular item in the
media just as DuPont's patent for freon was expiring; the
subsequent clamor to fix the ozone hole coincided with
DuPont's introduction of its newly patented non-CFC
refrigerants. Not to say it wasn't a problem, just that
DuPont found a way to manipulate the problem so as to cash
in on it.)
Sometimes I feel like the condemned man in the Borges story
who imagines his execution in many ways, knowing that
however he imagines it, it will not happen that way, because
the future is never how we imagine it.
chris mann
> >>it's not only over-population; it's also the gluttony of energy
> absorption that's occurring worldwide.
oh, you mean knowledge? which is why, of course
Alan Sondheim
>>> it's not only over-population; it's also the gluttony of energy absorption
> that's occurring worldwide.
>
> But that's driven by population, isn't it? If world population were a tenth
> of what it is now, the "gluttony" would be similarly reduced, wouldn't it?
>
Not necessarily; the US uses between 1/4 and 1/3 of the world's energy
with much much less population.
> Plus nature does heal itself, though not always as we would prefer. Case in
> point is the famous hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica: the hole is
> closing.
>
This is really a mistake; nature isn't healing at all. You might want to
look at Lovelace's book or climatology sites. The rate of species
extinction is increasing, as is desertification, etc.
> (As a sidebar to how we are manipulated by elites, I would point out that the
> "ozone hole" became a popular item in the media just as DuPont's patent for
> freon was expiring; the subsequent clamor to fix the ozone hole coincided
> with DuPont's introduction of its newly patented non-CFC refrigerants. Not to
> say it wasn't a problem, just that DuPont found a way to manipulate the
> problem so as to cash in on it.)
Well it _was_ and will be a problem. I was in Perth; there were warnings
everywhere to cover yourself from the sun. The odd thing was you could
_feel_ it - it wasn't like anything I'd experienced.
>
> Sometimes I feel like the condemned man in the Borges story who imagines his
> execution in many ways, knowing that however he imagines it, it will not
> happen that way, because the future is never how we imagine it.
>
- We don't know what will happen, but we do know what's irreversible.
- Alan
P!^VP 0!Z!^VP
P!^VP 0!Z!^VP
On 24-Nov-06, at 12:00 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote:
The plethora of the world, its fecundity (potential for production of
organism and information) is at its maximum.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
0!Z!^!P writes now:
Pray it isn't so.
D^