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Monday, June 23, 2008
Spinning, But Which Way?
Via Drudge, a dystopian vision from a couple of AP hacks-- “Everything seemingly is spinning out of control”:
Americans need do no more than check the weather, look in their wallets or turn on the news for their daily reality check on a world gone haywire.
Floods engulf Midwestern river towns. Is it global warming, the gradual degradation of a planet’s weather that man seems powerless to stop or just a freakish late-spring deluge?
It hardly matters to those in the path. Just ask the people of New Orleans who survived Hurricane Katrina. They are living in a city where, 1,000 days after the storm, entire neighborhoods remain abandoned, a national embarrassment that evokes disbelief from visitors.
Food is becoming scarcer and more expensive on a worldwide scale, due to increased consumption in growing countries such as China and India and rising fuel costs. That can-do solution to energy needs — turning corn into fuel — is sapping fields of plenty once devoted to crops that people need to eat. Shortages have sparked riots. In the U.S., rice prices tripled and some stores rationed the staple.
Residents of the nation’s capital and its suburbs repeatedly lose power for extended periods as mere thunderstorms rumble through. In California, leaders warn people to use less water in the unrelenting drought.
(...)
Why the vulnerability? After all, this is the 21st century, not a more primitive past when little in life was assured. Surely people know how to fix problems now.
Maybe. And maybe this is what the 21st century will be about — a great unraveling of some things long taken for granted.
Etc, etc.
I read this over the weekend, and figured it was just moderately subtle propaganda for the Obama campaign. Otherwise, why push it now? When it gets to the point that anybody in America, including homeless persons, doesn’t have enough to eat and the crowds start to gather to burn government buildings and hang tax collectors, I’ll listen to this tripe (wait, maybe that would be a good sign!).
I think both writers of the above wail need Paxil, or perhaps a revolver, a cartridge and some courage.
For those of you who didn’t experience the Carter presidency and its immediate aftermath, let me tell you, things are better now than they were then, and somehow the country survived and thrived for the next 27 and one-half years; that is until now.
Meanwhile, the Next Big Future blog advances a number of reasons to think we’ll soon be Achieving a Mundane Technological Transhuman Singularity. Here is merely the first “measurable goal(s)” he’s talking about:
1. End scarcity : Relative economic abundance with every living person having an personal resources at the affluent level of a current US citizen. $250,000 per person per year in purchasing power parity income. [The income level that Obama would want to tax more heavily if he become President]. No shortages of any basic need water, food, medical care [equal to that which is achieving the medical results currently affordable to an affluent person now] and energy [currently a US citizen uses an average of 13,000 kwh per year for electricity and three times that for transportation and a share of industrial energy usage. So abundance is 100,000 kwh for every person and assuming a future population of 10 billion is 1000 trillion kwh.
Do read the whole thing, as there other, equally interesting goals discussed.
Which of these visions of the future seems more plausible to you, Dear Reader? Something somewhere between? That would be the sensible answer. Scientists now tell us that the tendency to see the glass half-full, half-empty or perhaps brimming over with sweet, pure water is partly a function of our genetic heritage. If you have it in you to see an exciting, bright, compelling future I suggest that you do so; the future is going to do what it’s going to do, and you’ll have a lot more fun getting there.
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