Sunday, February 15, 2015

welcome to the world inside


aeon |  I stare out the window from my tiny flat on the 300th floor, hermetically sealed in a soaring, climate-controlled high-rise, honeycombed with hundreds of dwellings just like mine, and survey the breathtaking vistas from my lofty perch more than half a mile above ground: the craftsman cottages with their well-tended lawns, the emerald green golf courses, the sun-washed aquamarine swimming pools and the multimillion-dollar mansions that hug the sweeping sands from Malibu to Palos Verdes. These images evoke feelings of deep nostalgia for a Los Angeles that doesn’t exist anymore, back in the halcyon days before my great-grandparents were born, when procreation wasn’t strictly regulated and billions of people roamed freely on Earth.

There are only about 500 million of us left, after the convulsive transformations caused by climate change severely diminished the planet’s carrying capacity, which is the maximum population size that the environment can sustain. Most of us now live in what the British scientist James Lovelock has called ‘lifeboats’ at the far reaches of the northern hemisphere, in places that were once Canada, China, Russia and the Scandinavian countries, shoehorned into cities created virtually overnight to accommodate the millions of desperate refugees where the climate remains marginally tolerable.

Despite all this, history offers a game plan for our species to survive. In analysing his copious research, Parker came to a startling conclusion: the deprivations of the 17th century laid the basis for the welfare state that became the ‘hallmark of all economically advanced states’ by the 19th century. ‘In the 21st century, as in the 17th, coping with catastrophes on this scale requires resources that only central governments command,’ he notes in his book. ‘Despite the many differences between the 17th and the 21st centuries, governments during the Little Ice Age faced the same dilemma. . . [they ultimately realised] that, in the long run, it was economically cheaper and more efficient (as well as more humane) to support those who became old, widowed, ill, disabled or unemployed, thus creating the first “welfare state” in the world.’

Likewise, we are too technologically advanced – and, one hopes, too socially sophisticated – for the doomsday scenarios some foresee. Instead of fighting it out in barbaric, Mad Max-style, dystopian colonies reminiscent of the American West, humanity’s 500 million remaining souls, fed by artificially concocted edibles or even a 23rd century version of Soylent Green, will no doubt be crammed into towering high rises in dense urban areas creating their culture anew atop the world.

12 comments:

BigDonOne said...

..."back in the halcyon days...when procreation wasn’t strictly regulated "
At least the Future got one thing right...

BigDonOne said...

Well, at least the urbmon concept of 'Erasure' has promise....

CNu said...

lol, do I need to mention how one goes about eradicating a zeus bot once one identifies the presence and activity of the same?

If you have something to offer by way of pinpointing the creater of the bot bench churning out new custom signature bots, and can further elucidate the existing active networks of al the current bot-bench operators, then I'm all ears. If not, then I'm utterly clueless what you're on about

ken said...

From your link..."The best first step toward a future of light and love would be for rationalists to freely espouse their nonbelief and object to locutions that further irrationality. We might start, for example, by stating that we are not “children of God” but of the fact of evolution."


Ahh yes, the high horse of atheism, even the atheist considers the belief the beginning of the work.

Dale Asberry said...

WTF are you talking about??


As CNu states, people "stay missing what the hon.bro.preznit is really about".

Constructive_Feedback said...

My Dear Friend CNu:

You are offering a "Spot Market Solution" but are seemingly unwilling to "Play The Audio Tapes" about what the "congregation" was told 10, 20, 40 years ago regarding the BENEFITS that they would receive if they invested their VALUABLES (their HOPES).

TO-DAMNED-DAY "IS" the promise that has been manifest.

Why not engineer a "SIEM" system to track the CONFIDENCE SCHEMES that the masses of under-developed people are made to buy into? Yesterday I had my car radio on a local "R&B Oldies" station after listening the night before. On Sunday morning they had a "Chicken Eating Preacher" telling people who are "In Debt, Under Stress and without direction" to get a glass of water to sit on the table and call him. He would turn it into PRAYER WATER and then "Send Them Something" after they talk.

CNu - there needs to be a "Bunko Squad" WITHIN THE BLACK COMMUNITY. Surely the very same radio program manager who signed up this Chicken Eating Preach who was a fraud - also knows what his audience wants to hear in the rest of the radio programming schedule.

Or are you one of the listeners he got to call in and got a glass of "prayer water"

Constructive_Feedback said...

[quote]>Had religion not existed, had it waned by our time, all this violence
would just not have happened.
[/quote]

Salon.com seeks a new COLONIZER other than "Religion".
Their over-arching socialist blanket will smother all factional violence - and like Cuba or North Korea they can proudly claim: "We have few religious-based violent acts in our nation". This will be a point of pride for those who fail to look at the amount of repression that they had to architect under the guise of 'Social Justice".

Dale Asberry said...

EVIL Salon! Really, Salon??


Yet another missing of the point...


ken comes in here railing on his agenda (religion, atheists) and you come in here railing on your agenda (socialist media oppression of the black person). Jump off your rail and you might be able to get the point. You're both caricatures of thinking human beings. Someone shoves a message up your behind and you relentless spew it out your mouth. Or, did I get that backwards......

John Kurman said...

If, according to article, you have daytime temperatures of 180F near the arctic circle, then there ain't no 500 million living in nice Jetson apts. What you get is little bits of carbon fluff floating in a runaway Venus atmosphere, and have fun with that itsh.

ken said...

The president is about reading his prompter and trying to say as eloquently as possible every word on it. Why should I bypass all the total mishaps of this article to pull out its one nugget good and agreeable nugget?

"It is not up to the president or any other government official to pronounce on the artists’ motives. In drawing their images, they were not so much acting “in the name of free speech” as exercising their lawful right to free speech. This in no way constitutes an “attack” on anyone. Obama’s use of the word implies that they deserved what they got. Such clever verbiage really signals one thing: capitulation. Easier to pay false homage to the ideals of multiculturalism than to state the politically inconvenient truth: Islamists murdered cartoonists for their cartoons.

And neither President Obama nor anyone else in the government should dare tell us that we are “obligated to use our free speech” to denounce anyone for insulting religion. The First Amendment contains no proviso regarding insults, let alone excluding them from its protection; that would eviscerate the very right the amendment proclaims. To be free, speech must be free to offend. Even less are we required to show solidarity with “religious communities” of any stripe, no matter what the issue. Rather, we should stand for rationalism and the values of the Enlightenment, not bolster pernicious, backward-looking belief systems out of misbegotten notions of “tolerance.”

Perhaps if it was purposed not to get sidetracked with the text of this article, one could have just as easily used this Salon article to stay on point.

http://www.salon.com/2010/01/15/sunstein_2/



It would have been more interesting Dale, for you to actually take a risk to point out what you believe everyone else is missing about what the President is all about.

CNu said...

lol, Feed hongrey....,
http://youtu.be/GhWY6yFJsDY

CNu said...

oh yea of little faith.., NASA has submarines for the cold methane and ethane oceans of Titan and dirigibles for closely mapping and monitoring the surface of Venus.

Master Arbitrageur Nancy Pelosi Is At It Again....,

🇺🇸TUCKER: HOW DID NANCY PELOSI GET SO RICH? Tucker: "I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks ar...