Controlling the planet Earth

Tags

Future of the humanity, New Technology, technology

What is the geopolitical geography of the modern world? The geo-politician strategists of the late 1800s like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Halford Mackinder wrote about what they suggested were the  guiding principles for geographic control of the world for the 20th century. Mahan’s point of view was that whoever controls the world’s oceans controls the world’s ports and thereby the world’s continents. This theory was a riposte to a slightly earlier one by Mackinder, who posited that whoever controlled the heartland of Eurasia controlled the world continent and thereby the world. Hitler’s policies were influenced by Mackinder’s theories and he tried to capture the heartland of Poland and the USSR but was defeated eventually by the United States who sought to control the world’s oceans. In hindsight it appears obvious that whoever controlled the air controlled both the ground and the sea. The United States has invested heavily in that policy ever since the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese defeat at Midway demonstrated control of the air was essential. All of this has changed in the public’s mind, but has it changed in the facts of the always ongoing world power struggle.

What is it that the controllers of power are seeking? These people are not like you and me in some of their basic motivations. Those who have the power to annihilate humanity within their grasp, and who know that if they make certain kinds of mistakes that eventuality may come to pass, must be different in some fundamental way. Or are they? Probably they are not very different, and the difference is primarily in placing a portion of their attention on issues which most of us never have to think about. Most of us live within the laws of the land, and therefore treat each other reasonably well. We can do that because if other people seriously violate our rights we have legal protections which we can turn to for security. The heads of state of major countries have no one they can turn to when they and their countries’ rights are violated. Thus what these leaders must do is strive with all their power and cunning to maintain their office and to preserve the nation and its institutions which they preside over.

So what they must control is a vast mixture of complex issues which confer control and stability. These things are always fluctuating and sometimes even normal fluctuations of various common things can combine to form a super-event. Let me approach this on a time scale for heads of state:

What a leader needs to control, based on a time scale.

1. Control one’s self in the present at all times!
2. Identify and keep loyal a few competent people.
3. Do presentations which inspire groups of people to the cause.
4. Identify the key points which must be controlled.
5. Secure these and prevent others from approaching them.

Mahan and Mackinder both sought to control the surface of the Earth and the people upon it, and they were accurate in their assessments in a world dominated by trains and steamships for moving quantities of men and materials great distances. By mid-century those were still the way to move things, but they could be destroyed from the air and so control devolved to where one could place airplanes with range enough to dominate. Thus the U.S. spent huge amounts of cash building a fleet of aircraft carriers and bombers capable of going anywhere in the world. Then came the ability to launch space missiles with ultimate weapons, which are held back for MAD missions. Mutually Assured Destruction. These can’t be used so nations are forced to use conventional weapons to exert power.

What a nation needs to control, based on a time scale.

1. Its people’s sense of identity.
2. Its people’s lives.
3. Its borders from aggressors.
4. Its food and water supply.
5. Its natural resources.

What needs to be controlled in the modern world.

1. The means of information distribution.
2. The money supply.
3. Natural resources. Oil, coal, gas.
4. The creation of new technology.

This is a very short list of critical things in the most general possible words, but without which there is no control. In the modern world, for a short while, the unusual thing to be controlled is the creation of new technology. If something comes up which is a game changer, whoever develops it first will be in control of the world. There are far more scientists and engineers working on things now than ever before, and we know how many times a new technology changed the world. This year it appears to be the cell phone, social networking and Craig Venter’s creation of new forms for creating life. Each of these could be world-changing.

Life is always exciting, but this time it is technology which is controlling the future.

Doomsday may bring on another Doomsday.

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Doomsday, Humanities 1000 year survival, nuclear war

How bad can it get? One Doomsday was bad enough, but that may not put an end to the madness of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). The current super powers are generally considered to be those nations possessing atomic weapons. Usually that term has been limited to the United States and the USSR (now called Russia), but most rational people would consider anyone holding H-bombs to be a super power, because a few of those weapons detonated at one time over the most combustible targets might bring on a nuclear winter. That level of disaster might develop without any response from the other H-bomb possessing powers, but there almost certainly would be a response.

What prevents the various super powers from using their weapons, at present, is the MAD policy of annihilating anyone who does use them. The problem is that there may already be over 30,000 H-bombs. No one really knows how many but one low end estimate is: US~5,535, Russia~16,000, UK~200, France~350, China~160, India~120, Pakistan~80, North Korea ~10, Israel 200. That makes nine different known nations that could choose to ignite a nuclear conflagration. With modern technology such as supercomputers it is possible to construct reliable bombs without testing them, so there is a good chance that quite a few other nations possess them already, who have chosen to keep it a secret. The original implosion type A-bomb was designed using slide rules, and it was at that time an unknown technology, and it exploded perfectly over Alamogordo. The deployed bomb at Hiroshima was of a gun barrel type that was so simple in construction that didn’t need testing, even in 1945, and it worked all too well, also. Therefore, any modern high tech country could probably build, and stockpile a few bombs without anyone knowing about it. Possibly a really rich person could do it in a salt mine. This is pure speculation of course, and I have no information you can’t get off of Wikipedia.

A real problem is that once a few of these bombs explode over random cities a general military reflex will probably set off a bunch more, and then an uncontrolled chain reaction to where each nation ultimately deploys about half of their personal arsenal against their favorite enemy of the moment. There isn’t much sense in using more than half their weapons because they will run out of targets. This “war” will take place in less than a day. After that the world may pause for a while, (days, maybe years) to see what happened, and let the dust settle. Most scenarios from this level of war suggest a massive amount of smoke, and several years before there is a return to an approximate ecological normalcy.

The big problem during this period is that each of these original powers only expended half of their arsenals, and they still have the other half available. Whoever now controls any of those weapons is now holding everyone else hostage, especially their own former homeland where the weapons were stored. Before this first Doomsday the number of weapon controlling people may have been ten or so heads of national countries, but after the Doomsday events there may literally be hundreds of individuals with the power. They would be formed from the small formerly military groups who somehow during the war got hold of the weapons, and the release codes. They would then possess these immensely powerful monsters, and have no nation to represent and no constraints. This brings about a second Doomsday, and a third, and a fourth, and so on for who knows how long until all of the known weapons are used up. Some weapons would be destroyed in the first day, but some of those may only have been buried in the earlier attacks,and may be found later, and dug up much later and used.

Even the Lifehavens will become hostages to these rogues. And the Earth Ark will be simply captured, and exploited until some other rogue succeeds in capturing it or destroying it in an attempt to capture it. The misery will be long, and the suffering will be great, and the guilt will be parceled out in the survivors’ imaginations to the creators, and users of these monsters, but these guilty ones will be long gone, and only their names will be condemned forevermore.

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Survival, Survivalism, Lifehaven, Doomsday, Armageddon.

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A-Bombs, H-Bombs, Lifehaven, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, Survival strategies

Survivalism automatically gets a bad reputation by sticking that ism on an otherwise fundamentally reasonable idea; after all if you don’t survive you aren’t going to be doing anything else, and in a larger sense if humanity doesn’t survive then it isn’t going to be doing much of anything either. Back in the 1950s the US government got interested in the idea and supported a lot of fallout shelter programs. This was mostly done on the cheap by putting up signs pointing to local public basements where some water, and leftover WW II food supplies were stored. That may have made some sense up until about 1965 when our possible enemies had so many H-bombs that no one in an American city was going to survive anyway. The US and USSR then gave up on the hope of surviving, and went for a mutually assured destruction policy, (MAD) for short, and the world has lived precariously on the brink of Doomsday ever since.

Some other countries like England and France seem to have hoped that having only a few A-bombs would make everyone hesitate to attack them while appearing not excessively threatening. Switzerland has had a policy of making their country extremely difficult to conquer by having methods of dispersed heavy weapons made readily available to the public. Thus, even if an army were to move into their country they would have to fight a guerrilla war faced by an guerrilla army equipped with very sophisticated weapons, and not just improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

There are some survivalist groups with newsletters, and blogs such as survivalblog.com and Survive Club which I am in basic agreement with for disasters up to DISS~9 (Click here for a nice printable PDF DISS~ chart.), but beyond that survival in the Northern Hemisphere where most survivalists seem to live is improbable. However, if anyone does survive there, it will be some of these well prepared people.

My basic approach to this survival of humanity problem is that when WW III starts everything living in the Northern Hemisphere is dead, and only those in the Southern Hemisphere have any chance whatsoever. If it is a particularly bad conflict where most weapons are actually exploded then going south is one’s best hope, and the further south the better. Southern Argentina and Chile, become the last to die or to put it a bit more positively the last to survive. The graphs resulting from that major war would look like this:

Doomsday population crash with food shortfall as a precursor.

Note that in this scenario the quantity of food tops out and begins to decline before WW III begins. This graph postulates a Doomsday of DISS~10 or 11 with quite a few people surviving, but they will probably be only those very far south. The people, even the prepared survivalists, in the Northern Hemisphere will be under a dark cloud for over a year, and will have no new crops, and no new food. That combined with all of the other problems will probably make life in the Northern Hemisphere unsurvivable. The most realistic plan for decent survival of humanity in the one hundred year, and beyond range is the Lifehaven strategy of setting up large storage facilities filled with recovery materials in remote Southern Hemisphere locations.

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Top Ten reasons not to worry about Doomsday.

Tags

psychology, survival

Most people don’t think much about Doomsday even though it will probably be an important event in their life, like a birthday, or having a child, or dying. Because it seems like a worthwhile topic I have brought the subject up many times with my coffee shop friends, but most of the time people soon tune out or just walk away. Here are some of the usual responses to Doomsday.

1. “Oh NO why didn’t someone tell me about this before …” ahhhhh … actually that never happened.
2. “Those dirty warmongering arms dealing rats! They will do anything to make money.” That happens quite a lot. It always works to blame somebody else.
3. “This is an unpleasant topic so let’s talk about something more interesting. Where are we are going to have dinner. Or the coffee doesn’t taste as good as it used to. Did you see … ???” Insert a movie or book or silly political silliness.
4. “A major atomic war will never happen because no one is stupid enough to do that.” Yes, like Hiroshima never happened or even Nagasaki.
5. “Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) prevents wars so we haven’t had one and never will.” To say the least there is lots of luck involved in this strategy.
6. “The world is just too big, and too important to be destroyed.” On these subjects there is no one doing the measuring.
7. “God wouldn’t permit it, because he loves humanity, and besides I am going to heaven when I die because I believe in – blat.” We all might wish this were true, but it would be helpful if there was some reproducible corroboration.
8. “Our President has all the facts, and isn’t worried so why should I worry.” Our leaders are scared all the time, but they are carefully protected from showing fear, because it makes the public behave irrationally, and they start thinking.
9. “Outside problems don’t interest me, when I am fully involved in my own thing.” That works quite well, until you and your thing vanish.
10. “We will all be dead in a hundred years anyway, so why worry about the exact date or reason.” Actually a more realistic number is ten years.
11. “I can’t do anything about it anyway, so why waste time thinking about it.” Actually there is quite a lot you can do, but it requires some thinking about it.
12. “I focus on the good stuff, and I have some really good pot.” If that fails there is always some religious person to help you, for a small fee—like all your money, and your soul.
13. “We have plenty of problems already, and don’t need to worry about that one until we get to it, and don’t bother me while I’m thinking about riding my skateboard down this staircase railing.” Duh.
14. “I will do my job, and if everyone does their job, everything will be all right.” That’s a nice sentiment but millions of people’s jobs is to kill other people, they are called soldiers.
15. “The Lifehaven project will give us a second chance.” OK but you have to do it, for it to work.

Okay, so I overshot the Top Ten a bit. It’s easy to do because there are infinitely more than ten reasons why not to worry about Doomsday. Just pick anything ridiculous that comes to mind, and promote it as a reason not to worry about Doomsday, and without doubt you will soon find you have plenty of boisterous supporters of your pathetic whine.

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Doctor doom and doctor gloom and now trying to doctor Doomsday.

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Doctor Doom, Doctor Gloom, Doomsday, human failure, human limitations, human survival, survival

NASA’s Estimated climate forcings between 1850 and 2000

NASA’s Growth Rates of Greenhouse Gas Forcing 1850 – 2000

Note that this chart is of the growth rates of these greenhouse gases, but it doesn’t show the cumulative effect of these gases, and with the dropping off of the chlorofluorocarbons, shown in red, it makes it appear that success is being achieved. Except, possibly during WW II, there was a year by year accumulation of these atmospheric pollutants. At present there isn’t an improvement, there is only a slowing down of the rate of accumulation of disaster, and that rate of increase is presently higher than in 1970 when the disaster was in full progress. What this chart doesn’t show is the accumulation, and that it takes a very long time to clear out these pollutants. That is thought to be over one hundred years, and so that CO2 that is already up will continue to have its global warming effects for at least that long. Furthermore, that assumption on this clearing is that there are no new CO2s put into the air, and clearly that isn’t the case, it is getting worse, as is shown in the chart above. The charts below show the cumulative effect much better.

The IPCC WG1 AR4 Report [Intergovernmental panel on climate change] is the most authoritative document on this subject

These charts are from page 448 of the IPCC report showing the CO2 concentrations, Nitrous Oxide, Methane and the rate of change for these atmospheric pollutants. This is a condensed chart of the most authoritative scientific observations on these subjects. What is now absolutely unquestioned by objective observers is that all of the precursors, and predictors of massive climate change are now in full progress towards global warming.

What to do? — ? — ? — ? — FIGHT — ? — FLIGHT — ? — FREEZE — !!!

The problem now confronting humanity, is what to do about this physical condition, and the coming  disaster for humanity which it implies. What is happening now on this Doomsday problem is what is reported as happening during more traditional disasters, and that is that everyone just continues playing out their existing social roles. This response to disasters has been written about in a new book THE UNTHINKABLE: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – And Why by Amanda Ripley. She wrote a feature article in TIME magazine June 9, 2008 p. 40 on this same subject. In the article a passenger on a stricken ferry boat M.V. Estonia recalls groups of people frozen like statues for several minutes before it sank. ‘I kept saying to myself, “Why don’t they try to get out of here?”‘

During times of great stress people don’t think they just do what they are trained to do, and they do it like automatons. Sun Tzu said that 2,500 years ago in his book THE ART OF WAR and in fact it was at the heart of his strategy for controlling the behavior of the men in his army, and men of the enemy’s army. But this same human trait is at play with everyone in the world today including our leaders, because the problem is simply too big for anyone to take charge, and take responsibility for the coming world disaster. Even our leaders appear to be frozen into zombie like behavior, and are simply responding to the Doomsday threat with their standard rhetoric, which they have trained themselves into, and which has always worked for them before in previous situations. But, they are responding to the situation in a wrong way, like the band leader on the Titanic when it sank, who continued conducting the band instead of trying to save himself, and the others for whom he was responsible. The band leaders job was to conduct the band musically not to save the people from disasters, and the players jobs were to play their musical instruments not to man the lifeboats. Even what would seem to be the most basic animal instinct of people, that of survival, was overridden in times of mortal stress by the trait of conformity to a pack mentality. Everyone would obey whomever was behaving like a leader, but sometimes in a situation of known mortal danger the leaders themselves freeze up, and become members of the pack, and simply do whatever it is that the terrified pack is doing. The intelligence of the leader then drops to the level of a the average member of a terrified pack of somnambulant zombies.

So this human trait is at the heart of the Doomsday problem — we as a species are unable to view the problem, because it lies outside of any of our human experience including the experience of our leaders. In a world where the leaders operate on a policy of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) we are locked into an eventual Doomsday event. No one is capable of confronting the enormity of the obvious life threatening issues for all humanity, so they just ignore them, and expect the leader to show them the way. Unfortunately, there is no leader because in this case they themselves are just part of the zombie pack. Well, I don’t want the job of trying to prevent this Doomsday from happening (and I officially rejected it in 1960), but because of my weird personal history the problem doesn’t lie totally outside of my experience. I at least see the problem, and am willing to confront it, and offer operational answers to potential survival. At least I am not totally locked into the zombie mentality as it appears that our leaders are. Read this blog.

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