Inventions for future problems based on isolation

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Alternate forms of residence, human survival, Long term human survival

For a few blog posts, I’m going to consider projecting twenty years into the future and thinking about inventions that will be needed for functioning in that world. This began yesterday with “Inventions for future problems based on insulation” where I considered a world where fossil fuels had become prohibitively expensive to use for temperature control of various parts of our home environment. Today I will swap a few letters around and consider “Inventions for future problems based on isolation.”

One of the ways to totally isolate oneself from the current world is to live underground in a cave. Actually, that form of escape has been practiced for thousands of years by prophets, hermits, and normal people fleeing from persecutions of various sorts. Also, it is a form of escape from daily heat where underground residences are made and the air is cooled with evaporating water, which is heavier than the hot air and sinks down into these chambers. Also, in many hot regions of the world, the buildings are made just high enough to create shade during the day. The walls are also low enough and made of heavy materials, so they absorb heat during the day and are cooled by convection during the cold of the nights. The excess heat of the day is balanced over the twenty-four-hour daily cycle with the excess cold of the night.

It is hard to imagine a large percentage of humanity living underground as a way to save on the energy costs of heating and cooling their bodily environment, but some individuals could already purchase and make livable existing underground places. For these kinds of living places, it is essential to make several fail-safe means of access to the outside. There are existing salt mines that have large expanses where apartment-like spaces could be created and people could live a modern lifestyle, wholly underground. The inside of these structures could be made to resemble being in a shopping mall with a hotel and residential apartments attached. Alternatively, if an insulated roof were created over a portion of a modern city at a hundred-foot height, and all transportation were small electric vehicles or pedestrian, the experience of being there would be much as it is presently.

Humans can adapt to almost anything, including protecting themselves from the horrible natural environment they are now creating.

World population, wars, famines, and atrocities

Tags

Atrocities, Famines, human survival, Long term human survival, Wars, World population explosion

I am not attracted to these issues, but they are important to consider when the subject of human beings and their long-term behavior and survival is considered.

World Population history estimates from 70,000 years ago until 2025.

A history of major war deaths shown on a logarithmic chart.

World famine 1860 to 2016 from ourworldindata.org

The greatest modern famine was occurring in China in 1959-61, under Mao’s rule, right when I was transitioning from being a US Air Force pilot into being a grad student and prospective Unitarian minister in Berkeley, California. Both of those careers fizzled out while a deadly event of nearly the magnitude of the recent World Wars and of the 1918-19 flu epidemic was occurring. I knew of this event but it was a tiny portion of the public consciousness at that time and all but unknown now. So much of that loss of life from famine was because of economic/political/war events. Thus, the 24 million of the 3rd chart is part of the 40 million of the second chart, – #3.

The premise of yesterday’s post postulated by C G Darwin was that in normal times, that is approximately ninety percent of the time, there is a semi-starving subsistence group of humanity. That condition of constant famine always lurking he maintained hasn’t been the case since the beginning of the industrial revolution, because people discovered how to convert the energy of coal and gas buried for millions of years into food energy for humans.

The two top logarithmic charts, which go back to 3000 BCE and 400 BCE, show that growth spurt which is starting to accelerate about 1600 CE and reaching its current growth rate about 1750. The third chart only goes back to 1860, which is well after the industrial revolution was underway and it doesn’t show the thousands of years when daily near-famine was nearly ubiquitous. The difference between the many millennia of natural near-famine and the modern hundreds of years of a condition of rare famine is illustrated in the slope of the curves. When food is plentiful, as it is now, then the population grows rapidly and the line is steep, but when food is in a natural balance with a population the line would be horizontal. The fact that the human population was doubling every thousand years meant that humans were slowly developing new ways to create more food for themselves. They were discovering ways to put formerly inedible things theretofore unused as foods onto the dinner table by new methods of preparation. Such things as various ways of cooking otherwise indigestible foods, and of course the development of agriculture and livestock domestication and improvements. But all of that took lots of human effort to till the soil, etc., until the discovery of coal and oil and the development of tools to use these newly available forms of energy. 

We are living in a Golden Age of superabundance based on one-time use of limited fossil fuels. Enjoy!

 

The Next Million Years by Charles Galton Darwin

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Charles Galton Darwin, human survival, Long term human survival, The Next Million Years

I must have read this book thirty years ago because there is some writing in the back that is clearly mine, but it isn’t the way I have been writing for a very long time. I can observe that I read the whole book because there is my characteristic way of noting key passages with dots on the edges.

It was published in 1952 and has many insights based on the characteristics of the human animal and his mental qualities. From that base of known qualities and their probable histories projected back through distant species similar to humans, Darwin would make long-term predictions. He presumed a slow rate of mutation and change of genetic qualities and his assumption was that it takes a million years to make fundamental changes in the human species. Hence, the name of the book – The Next Million Years, by Charles Galton Darwin

As everyone knows to predict the future sets one up to be made a fool, and even so brilliant a thinker as this younger Darwin succeeded. He couldn’t predict things like genetically modified organisms (GMO). The only method for accelerating evolution when this book was written was to bombard sperm and eggs with radiation or chemicals to mess up their DNA structure and then grow the organism to maturity and observe a thousand failures for every potential success. With GMO it is now possible to purchase genes from a gene bank and probably get predictable effects in the final virus, plant or animal.

In Chapter IX THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS is analyzed and sadly for us, Darwin proves that happiness isn’t likely to be incorporated into human DNA via natural selection. Nowadays, it probably could be bred into humans because there are some twin studies where individuals separated at birth are preternaturally happy. Thus, there must be a gene for happiness. Other unusual family genes have been discovered; thus a happiness gene might be incorporated into the human future.

On page 118 – “A chief question, from the point of view of this essay, is whether there is any survival value in happiness. Are the naturally happy people more likely to be the ancestors of future generations, than are the rest, for if they are, then a greater number of the future race will tend to inherit this happy disposition. The answer is very doubtful, and it may well be negative. The reason lies in the fact that contentment is not a stimulus to action like discontent. … a man, who has the spur of his own genuine discontent to drive him, will struggle harder to achieve success than will the contented type. On the average, he will be more successful, but the success will not content him, so that he will always be spurred on to further efforts. If this success is, as in the long run it will be, associated with his making a greater contribution to later generations, it follows that the discontented type will increase in numbers at the expense of the contented type. This argument leads to the disappointing conclusion that future man will be more discontented than man of the present day.  … there seems absolutely no reason to expect any notable increase in the sum of human happiness.”

If you like that kind of reasoned thought experiment I recommend this book, but if you are wishing for a happy reading experience this one probably won’t deliver it.

My UU statement hits a serious snag – Version #15

Tags

Charles Galton Darwin on population, Evolution of an idea, human evolution, human survival, humanities survival

Version #14 as seen just below, with the slight rewrite, dropped Version #11 line 2’s  words sustainable world and inserted meaningful life. The problem is that in the long run of over a hundred years the population of the world must be brought to a balanced and sustainable level. The population has gone from just over 2 billion when I was born to almost 8 billion now. If our current population is multiplied by four times again, that would be 32 billion people. That seems impossible, but people are still reproducing rapidly because all necessities are available. Unfortunately, our current energy that supports almost everything we do is created by burning oil and coal and these are polluting the air and ocean to where the environment is having trouble sustaining us at our current population. There simply isn’t enough for 32 billion people, and nature will certainly return our population to something that it can sustain.

In 1952 Charles Galton Darwin, the grandson of Charles Darwin, published The Next Million Years, in which he takes an extremely long view of problems and tries to figure out what humanity must do to survive that many years. On page 136 he writes –

“But the difficulty in the world is going to be that the number of people born is too great for the food supplies so that a fraction must die anyhow; may it not be better that they should die in infancy? The truth is that all our present codes about the sanctity of human life are based on the security of life as it is at present, and once that is gone they will inevitably be revised, and the revision will probably shock most of our present opinions.”

That is a horrible realization that must be faced, even with an optimistic set of goals like my UU statement has been trying to espouse. Population control isn’t hopeless but it is a terrific challenge … so I have reinserted sustainable world into bullet point #2. However, how that sustainable world will actually be attained will require some serious changes of thinking and behavior from our present ideas.

We Unitarian Universalists are finding hope and giving kindness by:

1. —discovering the orderly nature of our Universe, so we can help ourselves and others benefit from all that is possible.
2. —creating an ideally balanced human society, so you and I and everyone else can have a meaningful life in a sustainable world.
3. —dedicating our wisdom to the great tradition of alleviating the suffering of all living beings.
4. —helping one another use our abilities for our own and others’ well-being.
5. —appreciating that we as a fellowship of people expressing diverse views are discovering wonderful new ways of living.
6. —making a habit of doing kind things that help us love one another and our Universe.

Nature always wins in the long run, but we can win in a very long short-run.

“Unitarians Agree” we need sparkle

Tags

An attempt to state Universal goals, Challenges to humanity, Evolution of an idea, human survival, Unitarian Universalists, We Unitarian Universalists choose to:

Okay, I’ve already rewritten the Unitarian 1936 Doctrine twice, and I thought the original one was good, but my first one was more modern, and my second one more meaningful, but on rereading it today it became obvious that it lacks sparkle. There are two renditions of an idea about helping people to approach achievable human goals that I have revolved in my mind many times: Jefferson’s “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and Jesus’ “Live life and live it more abundantly.” Those are the basic ideas implicit in the old Unitarian Doctrine, and in the current one too. They are excellent, and I liked the original Unitarian attempt to make it a more concrete statement for modern people. Here is the original …

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Unitarians Agree

1. —in affirming the primacy of the free exercise of intelligence in religion, believing that in the long run the safest guide to truth is human intelligence.
2. —in affirming the paramount importance for the individual of his own moral convictions and purposes.
3. —in affirming that the social implications of religion are indispensable to its vitality and validity, as expressed in terms of concern for social conditions and the struggle to create a just social order.
4. —in affirming the importance of the church as the organized expression of religion.
5. —in affirming the necessity for worship as a deliberate effort to strengthen the individual’s grasp of the highest spiritual values of which he is aware.
6. —in affirming the rational nature of the universe.

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Below is my first rendition …

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Unitarians Agree

1. —in affirming the primacy of the free exercise of intelligence, believing that in the long run, the safest guide into a more secure future is human intelligence.
2. —in affirming the paramount importance for the individual of his own moral convictions and purposes.
3. —in affirming that the social implications of religion are crucial to its vitality and validity, as expressed in terms of concern for social conditions and the struggle to create and maintain a just social order.
4. —in affirming the importance of the UU church as the organized expression of a profound religion.
5. —in affirming the necessity for a deliberate effort to strengthen the individual’s grasp of the highest values of which he can become aware.
6. —in affirming the orderly nature of the universe.

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Below is my second rendition …

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Some people imagine

1. —the free exercise of a single human intelligence isn’t an ideal path to a secure future and a group of involved people with opposing world views are more likely to find better solutions to inevitable conflicts.
2. —that individuals are too removed from their own invisible thinking processes to ever understand their own convictions and reasons.
3. —that to create and maintain an optimal society with minimal suffering that idea needs to be stated as a clear goal that is publicly defined as the ideal.
4. —that there needs to be an organized declaration by an acknowledged group that affirms and struggles to minimize suffering.
5. —that a deliberate effort is needed to strengthen every individual’s understanding of the highest values of which he can become aware.
6. —there is an orderly nature in the Universe and support humanity’s efforts to better understand the natural order.

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Below is my third and current rendition … p. 33 Unitarians are “stubborn only in the resolve to resist the temptation to become fixed and final.” The renditions above are not indifferent, they are clear and concise statements of things to be valued by all people, but the current language is slightly different and a new rendition needs more sparkle. I am reordering the ideas to move from the general Universe to the specific moral human actions.

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We Unitarian Universalists choose seek to:

1. (6)—discover the orderly nature of the Universe so we may be in closer agreement greater harmony with its behaviors.
2. (4)—seek to minimize all suffering and to enhance human health and abundance.
3. (3)—state clearly that we want to create and maintain an optimal ideal society so we may all live within a sustainable world.
4. (2)—acknowledge that individuals are too removed from their own invisible thinking processes to ever clearly understand their own convictions and reasons.
5. (1)—believe acknowledge that a group of involved people with opposing conflicting views are more likely to find solutions to conflicts than a single person an isolated individual.
6. (5)—make a deliberate effort to strengthen every individual’s understanding of the highest values of which he they can become aware.
   

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   Below is the above list is rewritten without the strikeouts.

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We Unitarian Universalists seek to:

1. (6)—discover the orderly nature of the Universe so we may be in greater harmony with its behaviors.
2. (4)—minimize all suffering and to enhance human health and abundance.
3. (3)—create and maintain an ideal society so we may all live within a sustainable world.
4. (2)—acknowledge that individuals are too removed from their own invisible thinking processes to ever clearly understand their own convictions and reasons.
5. (1)—acknowledge that a group of involved people with conflicting views are more likely to find solutions to conflicts than an isolated individual.
6. (5)—make a deliberate effort to strengthen every individual’s understanding of the highest values of which they can become aware.

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That is another attempt to state a personal point of view that might be an effective guide to UUs.

[Update 2019-05-13, the day after its first publication. In keeping with the page 33 quote above, and the new choice 5, I as an individual choose to invite others to help state these new choice goals in a way that would be more acceptable to Unitarian Universalists.]

Moses’ Ten Commandments compared to Jesus’ Beatitudes.

Tags

Evolution of an idea, human survival, Jesus' Beatitudes, Moses Ten Commandments

Moses lived some six hundred years before his Ten Commandments were written down about the year 830 BCE in what is known as the Elohist document. ( See, 1st Presbyterian. Bishop John Shelby Spong – Unbelievable page 211.) There are three versions of the Ten Commandments: Exodus 34 – Deuteronomy 5, – and Exodus 20 the usual version. Here is a brief list.

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Ten Commandments from the Bible
I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy
Honor thy father and thy mother
Thou shalt not kill
Thou shalt not commit adultery
Thou shalt not steal
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor
Thou shalt not covet (neighbor’s house)
Thou shalt not covet (neighbor’s wife)
Thou shalt not covet (neighbor’s slaves, animals, or anything else)
You shall set up these stones, which I command you today, on Mount Gerizim.

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That list is derived from the Jewish Elohist scholars and appears to be a truncated one culled from the commonly known much longer list published on stone-stelae at Delphi, Greece, created by The Seven Sages. Those stelae were sent to all cities in the known world where there were Greek-speaking people.

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That is a copy of yesterday’s opening to this blog, but today’s will be a little different because Spong on page 191 of Unbelievable writes of the parallels between Jesus’ life and message as being patterned after Moses’ life and message. “All three of these gospels were originally created we now recognize, to provide Jesus stories for the seasons and Sabbaths of the synagogue’s liturgical year. That is why the story of the crucifixion was told against the backdrop of the Passover and why Matthew placed what came to be called the Sermon on the Mount against the synagogue’s observance of Shavuot, or Weeks, the day set aside to celebrate God giving the Torah through Moses at Mt. Sinai.”

That and the following pages show many parallels between these two men’s lives, but what was significant was that each of them went up a mountain to receive God’s message and then presented what they found as a set of ideals to be lived by the believers.  Moses gave the Ten Commandments, and Jesus gave the Beatitudes and His Golden Rule. This parallel becomes apparent when the list of parallels are presented by Spong. Without his observation, I wouldn’t be making this one, but the Beatitudes is an ascending scale presented to help people move from a lowly state of meaning existing in God’s Heaven on Earth up a staircase of grander skills and responsibilities until they themselves were in a Heavenly state created by their own actions.

See the development of this idea in previous posts on the subject of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

How to maximize human pleasure.

Tags

A robot society, Building a robot society, human survival, Long term human survival

This blog has been supporting the evolution of the human species into its next stage of development. There are two ways this is presently progressing, first by CRISPR-mediated DNA enhancement and second by transitioning into a transhuman robot-associated society. CRISPR has the potential to perfect humans in their present form into a healthier and longer-lived species, and everyone would live more of their years as vigorous adults. There is a problem, however, in that our population even as it is will consume some of the Earth’s natural resources to exhaustion, and it may prove impossible to find enough alternatives to those missing resources to support billions of people. There needs to be some kind of political arrangement to accommodate a large human population which includes a high percentage of the longer-lived individuals. That would require somehow overriding the Darwinian-driven life tradition of reproducing maximally and letting the excess population endure deadly risks such as starvation. That seems like an ugly way to go, but it won’t go that way because independent H-bomb-possessing nations will wage wars to get the resources needed to maintain their people. Those wars would likely bring an end to our species and the loss of the benefits of long, healthy lives for most people.

The second route is to quickly develop our already existing robot society to be self-sustaining and needing little or no human development or maintenance. That society has very different demands on the Earth’s resources than our human society and yet it can and has been supplying us with many things which we value.

The common requirement of both humans and robots is energy. Humans must have food energy which is derived from the sun, and we desire fossil energy, which is also derived from the sun, for creating food and other pleasurable activities. Fossil energy will last a hundred or maybe two hundred years but it is finite, whereas solar energy will last for a billion years; thus both humans and robots will be using solar energy exclusively as their primary source in a thousand years and probably much sooner. Solar energy may be converted into petroleum products and fuel energy for special uses but it is derived at some cost of time and effort from the solar sources.

If the population is at present levels it may be difficult to create that much energy and wars will destroy not only the people but the competing nation’s infrastructure. Wars would destroy the robot society and its life-sustaining energy supplies. Thus it becomes imperative that there is an absolute end to solving political problems by resort to wars. That can be more easily accomplished if there is a small enough human population to be easily fed and entertained by the robot society.

There need to be living human beings for there to be the opportunity for pleasure, and that requires time for our species to live. Put simply, we might sustain ten billion people for ten years, and then go extinct as a species. Or, alternatively, we might with the cooperation of a robot society sustain a billion healthy long-lived people for a billion years. That would have many millions of more opportunities for human happiness and thriving.

We can maximize the human species’ health, longevity, and happiness by making our robot society maximize its potentials.

My great failing has been lack of enthusiasm!

Tags

A robot society, An inhabited Universe, human survival, Long term human survival

From an early age, I have been accused of a lack of enthusiasm. It has always seemed strange to me that I have done so very well on objective tests of my abilities and so very poorly on ratings of me by my superiors, peers, and inferiors. That social valuation has happened to me virtually every time in essentially every situation. And yet it isn’t really true. For example, it doesn’t seem to be a lack of enthusiasm to have written 3,919 blog posts without missing a single one, does it? Nor does it seem that I lacked enthusiasm when I graduated tops in my USAF flight school class on all the objective measures, some 75% of my score, but last in my class in officer effectiveness, 25% of my score, because of perceived lack of enthusiasm.

Well, let that be. I could give many examples!

Tonight, in a conversation I finally realized, at age 82¾, what my enthusiasm really was, and still is, and why people never thought I had that god-like quality. TheFreeDictionary.com defines enthusiasm as, “Ecstasy arising from supposed possession by a god.” I haven’t been very enthused about gods, but that isn’t it. The reason was that I didn’t believe in the projects that were being presented to me. The easy one that ruined my life was deciding not to drop hydrogen bombs on people, or other bombs for that matter. At least since listening to the radio in September 1945 with my grandfather, where the broadcast was describing the end of World War Two with the destruction of two Japanese cities with atomic bombs, my goal became to somehow transcend that human insanity, and nothing I encountered in the meantime really satisfied that need, and so I lacked enthusiasm. Being captain of my softball team in grade school didn’t do it and I was accused of lack of enthusiasm; being a pilot in the Air Force didn’t do it; last year’s thoughts on how to save humanity from obesity weren’t enough to generate enthusiasm; there are a hundred other examples. But now I have found something I can be enthusiastic about. This will sound absurd, even crazy, and yet my goal is to transcend humanity by helping our species evolve into a new life-form.

My enthusiasm is to do what I can to bring a robot society into existence which will endure for billions of years.

 

Human life expectancy

Tags

human survival, Life expectancy, We are extremely old!

Yesterday I had a strange epiphany about human life and wellbeing that resulted in a complete reanalysis of what human life expectancy really means. It came about because of this paragraph …”This sounds ridiculously gloomy given the fact that our world is overall better off than at any time in human history. The adequate proof of that assertion is that over seven billion people now have a life expectancy of over seventy years. In 1825 there were about one billion with periodic famines and a life expectancy of thirty-five years.”

Well, what do you make of that?

What is the measure of life expectancy but that period of time that you are in charge of your own actions? Measure your life not from the moment of birth but from the moment when you become an adult. In other words, measuring a person’s lifespan by how much time they have to do exactly what they want to do, and not what their parents tell them to do. How many years do you have to live after you are emancipated?

For easy computation let me choose age twenty for that status, even though the voting age was recently changed from age twenty-one to eighteen. If we apply that standard to an American in 1825 when the life expectancy was thirty-five years, then they would only be in that emancipated condition for fifteen years.

But, if we apply that same standard to a newborn child today with a projected life expectancy of eighty years, and subtract the twenty years of childhood, we get an adult life expectancy of sixty years. That is, our modern human has four times as many years of emancipated actions as they had two hundred years ago. And it gets even better for modern people if you compute from the life expectancy of earlier humanity, which some people who study these things claim was about twenty-eight years.

Primitive human beings, which includes most of the hundred billion people who have lived in the past, lived most of their lives as children. If we start with the base of twenty years as adulthood, then they lived only eight years in the exalted state of emancipated adults. If we divide those eight years into the sixty years of adult freedom of modern people then we are living seven and a half times longer lives than those ancient people.

There are some very real advantages to living a much longer life. Much more than the years of doing the same old boring stuff. For many occupations, the practitioners keep getting better and better at what they are doing well into old age. The most extreme example is symphony conductors, about whom I’ve heard from other conductors that they keep getting better even in their eighties.

Obviously, the numbers I’ve been tossing about are very soft in their detailed specificity, but the general conclusion is meaningful.

We are living incredibly long, healthy and productive lives.

Now is a time to revisit my Doomsday considerations.

Tags

Doomsday, Doomsday predictions, human survival, Personal survival

I’ve been feeling gloomy lately, because of what appear to be precursors to the disintegration of world civilization; thus now seems like a time to revisit and repost some of my earlier posts on Doomsday. There are many posts on that subject but I will begin with this one from January 13, 2010. The new editing tools offered a few minor spelling and grammatical touch-up suggestions, which I will follow.

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Who wants to die on Doomsday day? Not I!

The Doomsday Clock is past Midnight 1945-07-16  and still running

Doomsday when it finally arrives full-blown is very unlikely to be the end of humanity. The reason for such a bold statement is that if all of the H-bombs in the world’s arsenals were exploded in a war it would not equal the Chicxulub meteor which exterminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. There were many animals which survived that extreme event including our mouse-like ancestors or we wouldn’t be here and neither would the birds or alligators. If that exact event happened now there would be a similar devastation to the wild animals for the simple reason that those animals do not know what they need to do to survive such a violent change in their environment. Humans do know how to cope with many environments and are more widespread on the planet than any other creature. We get along quite well all the way from the South Pole to the depths of the jungles, deserts, and cities.

With the immediate atomic bomb devastation of the Doomsday war and the several year-long Nuclear Winter, most humans will die. Depending on how things develop during the war the human population will drop far below the current 6.8 (7.4 = 2016) billion people and perhaps well below the early Roman era of one hundred million. But most people will not be killed by the atomic bombs or by a few weeks of radioactive poisoning but by the total disruption of the food supply. The attacks of the first few days may kill a few billion people, almost all of them in cities and in heavy fallout areas, but the real problem will be that the creation of food will be disrupted.

If Doomsday repeats itself there will be repeated drops.

The destruction of food creation happens in several ways. 1. Destruction of existing food supplies located in cities, along with the people in those cities. 2. Destruction of the distribution of food chains to bring food from supply depots to the people. 3. Heavy overcast from dust in the air preventing the crops already in the fields from maturing. 4. Lack of distribution of seed for next year’s crops. 5. Lack of fuel for transportation to bring seeds and fertilizers to the areas where they can be used. 6. Lack of fuel to operate the farm equipment which is needed to plant, plow, cultivate and harvest the crops. 7. Infestations of insects which, without insecticides, will eat what few crops are available. 8. Lack of skilled farmers to operate the equipment. 9. Lack of knowledge of where and how to distribute what crops are available because of lack of infrastructure. 10. Continuing hostilities and threat of new hostilities and problems of local organized and unorganized hostilities. 11. And, the unknown unknowns and the unknowable unknowns which will probably bring on the worst problems.

All the same, there will probably be many pockets of people surviving in many different places and for very different reasons for the first few months. Those surviving for over a year and certainly those surviving for more than five years will have to be members of functioning social groups. These groups will have been successful in solving all 11 of the problems mentioned above. Perhaps they survived from simple luck at the beginning but will continue surviving because of coordinated social activity which creates food. Those living in the Southern Hemisphere will have the best chance of surviving the first months after Doomsday but they too will probably have difficult times creating sufficient food because of the disruptions.

When talking about these awful things to people many, perhaps most, of them say they hope the bomb falls right on them. They want to die in the first instant of the catastrophe. That is unnecessarily fatalistic and gloomy because there is hope and if one prepares properly the chance of moving on to a brighter day is made more possible. A couple of years afterward might even be a wonderful time, not so much that life is as easy as it is right now but because things will be getting better every day and there may be a feeling of creating a wonderful new society.

The EarthArk Project – logo shows seeds shipped to Antarctica

If The EarthArk Project has succeeded in storing lots of various seeds and other stuff in the deep Antarctic mountains then much of the Earth can be restored. Not the animal life so much but the plant life can be saved and those surviving people will enjoy seeing the world come back to life. It will be a wonderful adventure.

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Here is a list of links created in 2010

The EarthArk Project – Index page is listed by date posted.