Yesterday in Shanghai, a woman miscarried. The child that wasn’t born would have led a unified China to attack and defeat India, Russia, and finally Europe, resulting in a Chinese empire that ruled the world from 2050 to 2100. Instead, China wilted under internal political strife caused by economic and environmental pressures, and became a second-rate power in the 21st century.
A lot of things keep me up at night – everything from the trivial (“did I remember to brush my teeth?”) to the to the profound (“does it matter?”). But recently, I’ve been plagued more than usual in the wee small hours by the challenge of developing sustainable and resilient technologies.
A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.
If the field of futures were invented today, what would it look like? What would its intellectual foundations be? Who would it serve and influence? And how would its ideas and insights be put into practice?
The nation-state as a primary locus of power in the world is a paradigm that dates back only a few hundred years. Could that model be replaced in our lifetimes by something different?
If human intelligence evolved from a need to keep track of complex social networks, then perhaps our minds are naturally predisposed to building webs, complex manifestations of order, like ecosystems.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the “hacked climate emails.” Long story short: Hacker steals email, posts. Wingnuts take some lines out of context, claim they show a cover-up, cry conspiracy. Scientists refute, in detail. Media covers “controversy.” Driven by talk radio and oil money, the whole thing escalates into a scandal. But a much bigger scandal is just waiting to break.
How do you design a society for the really long term? There are a couple of levels to consider: notably, decision-making and economics. And it doesn’t look as if we’ve got any good solutions to either.
I am proud to announce that this Sunday, November 8, the BIL Unconference Series will present its first ever SustainaBIL, taking place from 11 am to 7 pm at ASU’s SkySong facility in Phoenix, Arizona.
On this lazy Sunday afternoon (or evening in Europe—or Monday morning in Asia), we offer four new Links Of Required Clicking for your mandatory perusal.
Every asteroid that will ever strike Earth is already out there and already on course to strike Earth. Every future asteroid impact event is already an event in progress.
Millions of potential planet-killers lurk in the Kuiper belt, any one of which could be jostled from its orbit and sent plummeting toward the Earth at any time.
Technology is a double-edged sword, but science and reason have made our lives immeasurably better overall—and only through science and reason can we hope to make a real difference in the future.
In Rob Reiner’s classic The Princess Bride, we learned about ROUSs (Rodents Of Unusual Size). Now we present a new feature from the IEET: LORCs (Links Of Required Clicking).
At least four big conundrums must be confronted if we are to make anything close to sufficient progress in preventing the worst outcomes from global warming.
Although it’s easy to think otherwise, the structure of the modern global economy is not terribly old, arguably dating back to the collapse of the gold standard in 1971, or the post-World War II “Bretton Woods” conference in 1944. Earlier versions of what we would nonetheless still call “capitalism” had very different degrees (and kinds) of government intervention, roles for labor and capital, even rules about currencies. Add to that the mention more extreme variants such as socialism and communism, corporatism (fascism), and the sundry experiments in anarchism, and you have quite a menagerie of all-but-extinct economic models.
IEET readers appear to be mostly optimistic about our civilization’s chances for survival by the end of the 21st century. In a recent poll, every multiple choice response that was either positive or neutral was selected more often than any of those that were negative.
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