Some suggestions for improving humanity

Tags

Charles Galton Darwin, Improving humanity, Survival of humanity

On page 76.7 of the book The Next Million Years, by Charles Galton Darwin,  published 1952, there is a discussion of improving the DNA of the human race, in which he asserts: “The policy of paying most attention to the inferior types is the most inefficient way possible of achieving the perfectibility of the human race.” That supports his ideas that in the very long run of a million years there will always be a starving margin, or soon to be starving margin, of humanity. He maintains with Thomas Malthus that the population of all living species is driven by the function of the sexual drive to expand to the carrying capacity of its local environment. And it is the most successful of a given species that will survive and reproduce and fill their local environmental niche.

Therefore, by that extended argument, he asserts that it is a waste of human resources to pour resources, which are in the long run always limited resources, into the failing portion of a species. He includes human species in this argument. He maintains that during the last few centuries humanity’s technology has advanced so rapidly that our starving margin has been minimally picked off by natural selection. In the very long run, he says this can’t be maintained and soon humanity will return to the natural state of having a substantial number of people living on the starving margin. When he was writing this book, about 1950, the population was 2.5 billion people; now it is 7.72 billion. The period of time that we have been living in is extraordinary in its population expansion. This rate of population expansion can not go for a billion years, and probably not even for another hundred years. When the overshoot occurs, it will be the starving margin that will be the most hard hit. I don’t like that probable fact, and I doubt if you do either, but Mother Nature isn’t a moral judge.

I have proposed a theory that copes with the problem that Galton Darwin described, which I call Eveish Selection. It postulates that our last hundred thousand years of gossiping women have discerned those qualities in men that are most beneficial to raising healthy children. They chose those qualities that have brought us to the sophisticated society we live within today. They may be the ones who can bring us through the next hundred thousand years.

Praise young women and help them to help us improve our whole society and our species.

We need a world that will permit humanity to survive.

Tags

Survival of humanity, We need a new world view

Humanity has many problems that have cyclic feedback on themselves. For example, when the human population has grown there are more people to have children. And the more people there are to have children, the more opportunity there is to have even more children.

From past experience, we can see that there has been enough food since 1625 for the human population to grow, and the population has grown from 0.5 billion people to 8 billion people in 2025. There are sixteen times more people now than then! If at the current rate we double population again in fifty years, there will be sixteen billion people in 2075. The projected life expectancy is currently about eighty years and the current young adults who will vote in the coming US election, that survive to that time, will probably have more than ten years of life expectancy when they get there. But it will be a very different world than we live in now.

However many people there are, they will be living on a greatly reduced primary resource base. I hope there can be found ways to ease these problems, and that is why I’ve been working on some general principles that people can use to cope with the coming world. However, if we get lucky and have a series of abundant years until 2075, we will then have even more opportunities to overshoot the carrying capacity of the Earth and collapse. Even more than more food, we need a world view accepted by the people of the world that will permit humanity to survive.

But that’s only one problem of many that have cyclic feedback loops that grow and grow until the overshoot of that problem creates a general collapse. The current popular hot topic is climate change leading to global warming. The warmer it gets, the feedback will make it get even worse. Solar heat melts the white polar regions of ice leaving darker surface, which absorbs more heat and thus melts even more snow and ice. As the white polar regions get darker, they absorb more heat and the whole world gets hotter. When that happens, the agricultural regions of the world, which have adapted over many years to the climate they have endured, will be less productive. Thus, more people means more stress on the food supply, which is becoming less productive because of overheating. The canary in the “hot” coal mine is the coral reefs of the world, which are dying because of a few degrees of ocean warming.

Another problem linked to these is the melting of mountain glaciers in the more temperate zones. The Himalaya mountains have a steadying effect on runoff of water that feeds billions of people in China, Southeast Asia, India, but when the glaciers are gone the rain that comes will run away into the oceans before it can be used to grow food. It has already become a problem, but it will get far worse. 

Each of these problems can and do generate feedback onto the others and make the others worse. Combine even these few natural problems with the growing instability of the political world, and we are in deep trouble. We might waste everything in a war, and even threats of wars take away productivity from a country. The ease with which cyber conflict created by a few people can disrupt even a smoothly functioning country and destroy much of its ability to grow food is presently unsolvable. As I said above,

Even more than more food we need a world view accepted by the people of the world that will permit humanity to survive.

I’m taking care of my body, sort of.

Tags

Survival of humanity

Last week I had my annual physical check-up. I respect my doctor very much! Quite frankly for me, he is perfect. And yet, this last check-up left me feeling sad. I was happy to visit with an intelligent friendly guy, but he didn’t give me what I wanted. I asked him for some happy pills because I have been feeling morose lately.

My problem isn’t so much with myself, it’s with the world at large as seen through the eyes of the authors I’ve been reading. Most of the modern authors are dealing with current problems and the disasters we are living within at the moment. In almost every dimension the immediate situation is wonderful for almost everyone, and the single measure of that seemingly absurd statement is that a smaller percentage of people are presently starving than at any time in history. The natural state is a starving margin as is demonstrated by the fact that the human population has grown at a tiny rate through most of its history, but the current world population has doubled twice during my lifetime.

The current problems we face are created and mediated by human beings. The book The Perfect Weapon by David E. Sanger probably gives as accurate a report on the top level of human society as is available and it’s disgusting. The lying and cheating are bad enough, but the saddening part is the efforts of the various leaders to undermine competing leaders’ power base and cause confusion, pain, and death among the common people in the opposing countries. It seems crazy to me that their efforts to help their own people result in destroying foreign people.

In the long run, that kind of behavior is boringly repetitive, at least according to The Next Million Years by Charles Galton Darwin. In that time frame, the ugliness we see is an ugly constant to the human condition.

Am I living a fantasy when I propose kinder ways for people to live longer and healthier and much happier lives? On August 11, 2019, I compared the selfish and kind paths. Perhaps that statement was accurate in the sense that for dictatorial leaders life style #28 is best, but for almost everyone else #27 is better. 

I also recently read another emotional downer of a book, The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. It is a must-read, but when reading any of those books be prepared to experience ennui for the human condition.

I asked my doctor for some happy pills, but he thought I needed to get some counseling, or stop reading these kinds of books.

Inventions for future problems based on food

Tags

Ideal population, Overpopulation brings famine, population, Survival of food, Survival of humanity

Ultimately all life is based on the food supply available to a living species, and that includes humans. Thomas Malthus developed that idea back in 1801, and he expected that most individuals of the human species would be living in a state of subsistence. “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” He didn’t recognize that the recent invention of the steam engine would change that state of affairs and many more methods of generating energy out of fossil fuels would be invented. Our current civilization is based on the production and consumption of fossil fuels and a world that can absorb their combustion products. Both the supply of fossil fuels and air and water to store the combustion products are huge compared to an individual human, but we now have 7.7 billion people, and all of them wish to live as well as possible. Even at current projections, the supply of these one-time-use resources won’t last for the lifetime of children alive today.

Humans are creative, and many of them are aware of these problems and will probably dedicate their lives to finding ways of combating this population-versus-resources problem. Already there are huge wind farms, and solar panel farms too, that are not fossil-fuel dependent once made, and they will no doubt grow in size and efficiency. These will supply energy for many of the needs now filled by fossil fuels, and if there is great effort to make those limitless energy systems ubiquitous, civilization could potentially last as long as the sun shines, which might be a million times longer than our current society’s life expectancy. That’s not likely with the swarm of other problems that will inevitably arise, but it is potentially possible.

And yet, Malthus and his theory of population expanding to the limits of the food supply will eventually be right because the population of well-fed people can expand to an infinite size! But the world is fixed in size, and its resources are fixed also, and so there is a limit to how many people it can supply with necessities, such as food, water, and shelter. What’s the solution?

There are two solutions to infinite population growth: either humans voluntarily as a whole species limit their population to the carrying capacity of the world, or natural processes will do it for them. If humans can consistently limit their population to half the ultimate carrying capacity of their world, everyone can live well. If humans can not do that, nature will slaughter them in a myriad of unpleasant ways, and if all else fails they will be starved back to compliance within the limits of what’s available.

When nature is overstressed and cannot produce enough resources, food being the critical one, it creates political problems which often result in war. The problem with war as the solution is that we already possess weapons of annihilation! Not weapons of mass destruction, but weapons of annihilation. Once those weapons are used, it will be difficult to bring a war to a reasonable end, and most of the people of Earth will be killed. Sorry, but the inventions to solve these problems are social inventions.

Because humans are scattered far and wide and some have stockpiles of food, a few may survive long enough for the planet to recover, and we can repeat the cycle. Or not.

Unitarian Universalists affirm and promote …

Tags

Evolution of UU goals, Survival of humanity

I have been associated with the Unitarians since 1953 but I have often said to my friends that I was born a Unitarian in 1935 and didn’t discover until December 1953 that I was a Unitarian. Exactly what that meant to me was … to always treat people as well as I possibly could, and expect that they were telling me the truth as they saw it. The idea of what the truth was about various subjects is a point that generates considerable conversation; which I enjoyed, and still do. That’s about sixty-six years of daily bull-shit, or as some accused me of, because of my weight and volume of production, elephant-shit.

On a more serious note, after asserting my open-ended and light-hearted approach to creeds and religious dogma, I am approaching the subject of UU belief with hope for bringing it, and religion, and all humanity closer to my conception of what people might choose as guiding principles for how they might approach their personal reality. But first, let me begin with the current general handout that is given out before the more specific Sunday “Fresh-sheet” of information. The following picture of me  welcoming people to our church was unplanned, and unexpected by me,

That’s me offering a welcoming hand at the UUFCO

but when one opens the beautifully done brochure the first thing seen is:

---

We affirm & promote

• • • The inherent worth and dignity of every person
    • Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations
    • Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.
    • A free and responsible search for truth and meaning
    • The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large
    • The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all
    • Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

  ---

  In 1936 the Unitarians published Unitarians Face A New Age – The Report of the Commission of Appraisal to the American Unitarian Association at 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA. I purchased that eighty-three-year-old book and am reading it because I am planning to go to the UU conference in Spokane, Washington, next month and wanted a background in UU policy. On page 33 of that book I read that Unitarians are “stubborn only in the resolve to resist the temptation to become fixed and final.” The renditions above of our current inclinations are not indifferent, they are clear and concise statements of things to be valued by all people, but the language is different from the ideas presented by them and me in my post “Unitarians Agree” we need sparkle. That links to my rewrite of the 1936 generalized statements of Unitarian aspirations. Here are the current official Seven Principles. Below are my ideas for a current statement.

  ---

  We affirm and promote 

  The Unitarian Universalist Principles

  • • Include the inherent worth, dignity, and need for love of every living being
    • We seek compassion in all of our relations with all beings.
    • We accept one another and encourage moral growth toward actions which help others.
    • We long for meaning based on evidence-based truth and responsible actions.
    • We support personal exploration combined with an open discussion with others to find a path to a sustainable future.
    • Our goal is a thriving world filled with life, liberty, and opportunities for everyone.
    • We choose to shape our lives as a meaningful part of the entire Universe.

  ---

  I as an individual choose to invite you personally to help create this new statement of goals in a way that would be more acceptable to Unitarian Universalists and all other humans.

How can we create a company to promote a species transition?

Tags

robots, Survival of humanity, Survival of robots

What an audacious thing for an eighty-three-year-old guy be writing about? Creating a company? Dreaming about creating a company? Are you nuts, Charlie?

The answer is obviously YES to all of the above questions! So, let’s get on with it. What company should I be creating, NOW? I’m so damned old there isn’t really much time for me to do anything that will flourish while I still have healthy enough brain cells to cope with the idea or even appreciate any of its success.

However, the idea of transitioning humanity into its next form is so weird an idea that only someone who is comfortable with being weird can step forward and begin that process. I don’t look particularly abnormal walking down the streets of Bend, Oregon, even though I have been wearing a red beret even before moving here eight years ago. Hey, it is the most flexible, and therefore useful, of any chapeau I’ve ever encountered. I’m average American, male, BMI 25, and most people probably consider me sane, even though I have some nonstandard ideas I like to talk about.

For example, the idea of putting time and effort into helping humanity transition into its next state of being so it can function forever and impact the whole universe, I admit, is a bit outré. Even with that wishy-washy provision, it is an interesting idea to bandy about and if it were successfully implemented it would be important. So, why not do it now, and by now I mean NOW.

I have blogged about making things work. The general idea is that if you can’t make an idea work you will be wasting your time. Applying that logic to this problem means that we must discover what it is that we can actually do with that idea. For example, it is impossible to ever reach the end of the Universe because even a message moving out from Earth at the speed of light can’t catch up with the most distant receding stars. So, that’s impossible. Perhaps a message sent to a nearby planet would be possible. But no, even that idea isn’t workable because there hasn’t been a radio signal received from anywhere even after years of searching. Thus, it is unlikely that there is any high-tech civilization within a hundred light-years of us. So, that’s out also as a palatable goal. 

What might be possible is to create self-sustaining non-organic beings, much like computers, that don’t have any specific die-by-date. These beings if put into secure places like mines bored into stable billion-year-old rock formations might still be functional a billion years from now. That doesn’t sound very exciting, but it could be done. The problem becomes, how can we make these kinds of beings be self-sustaining and self-reproducing?

There is a problem that arises for us, because if these non-organic beings are self-sustaining and self-reproducing, the Darwinian processes of natural selection would favor those beings so that in their personal quest to gain energy from their environment they might deprive organic beings of their needed energy. Manmade solar cells are more efficient at collecting the sun’s energy than plants, so these new life-like forms would become a real threat. If these non-organic beings had even a little self-directed forethought, which organic natural selection doesn’t have, they might evolve very quickly and displace much of life as we know it. We don’t want that to happen, at least in the short run of say a thousand years. But, in the long run of billions of years, that might be the best result for converting the matter and energy of our Earth into a thinking being, and our Milky Way galaxy into a thinking being too and ultimately the whole available Universe into a large thinking being.

It’s a humble suggestion for a doable idea. Begin making devices that can evolve our world and our galaxy into a sentient being.

SARS, H5N9 and AIDS are the nasty four letter words

Tags

AIDS, H5N9, Plague, SARS, Survival of humanity

I don’t worry much about dying. Dying is far more natural than living, or being born. Nearly all of the universe isn’t living; 99.99% with a bunch more 9s isn’t alive and certainly won’t be while you and I are around to worry about such things. I’ve written hundreds of blog posts on the various existential problems for humanity and what we should be doing about it. They are rather matter of fact in their style, and just list the probable outcomes of various behaviors we humans are participating in. See Probaway’s views of existential risks to humanity, for some links to more posts.

What the media presents as risks to your existence or the existence of humanity in general are not really threats at all. The Boston Marathon Bombing is a perfect example, where three people are killed and the media goes into a frenzy. That might seem a bit overblown, but our local people took that threat so seriously that all ammunition for guns is totally sold out, at least locally. If three ordinary people were killed in Boston in a car wreck that day what is the chance of it making our Oregon papers? That’s an easy answer, because even on the slowest news day it wouldn’t happen.

The media does perk up its sensors when SARS, H5N9 and AIDS, the nasty four letter words make a debut. These diseases could pose an existential threat to humanity. Not total annihilation, but even with good hospital treatment the mortality of H5N9 flu is 25% to 50%. Modern young adults, at least here in the developed world, haven’t grown up with “the diseases of childhood”. Communicable disease is so uncommon that many parents think they don’t apply to modern people, so they refuse to have their children vaccinated. Here is a long list of diseases you might get. Cheer up, you probably won’t get any of them. But, to be thorough here is a list of historic epidemics.

With seven billion people all living within twenty-four hours flying time of each other, a highly contagious disease, with just the right properties, so it could spread around the Earth without being detected, could run wild. It has happened before, even with a transportation system that took years to circumnavigate the globe. The Old World was ravaged by Plague starting in the 1340s and in a few decades wiping out half the people in some places. But, the real tragedy occurred right here in the Americas, with the arrival of Old World diseases in the 1520s. We usually hear about Cortez‘s conquest of Mexico being made possible by smallpox. That conquest was made possible because the local Indians were cooperating with Cortez to get rid of the Aztecs, as well as by disease. It was Cortez’s lieutenant Pizarro who went to South America with less than two hundred men and captured the Inca Empire. The Inca were astonished at how healthy the Europeans were, because they themselves had been hit with wave after wave of new deadly diseases, and each new disease was hitting already sick and weakened people.

Disease may soon be ravaging humanity. I don’t know! But, one thing is certain, humanity can not keep doubling its population much longer.

Individual human rights balanced with humanity’s rights.

Tags

Survival of humanity, Survival of humans, World famine

Human rights movements have made wonderful progress in the last fifty years as has been graphed on page 380 in Steven Pinker’s new book The Better Angels of our Nature.

US usage of “rights” words in books indexed to 2000 CE

This book offers hope for humanity in the form of research into historical records of just how brutally humans once treated each other compared to how relatively kind we are today. Civil rights made great progress in the 60s, women’s rights from the 70s to the present, children’s rights in the 80s to present, gay rights in the 80s, and animal rights in the 90s. These rights movements were not made at the comparative loss of rights of other people, generally thought to be (in the same order) white, male, adult, heterosexual, human. The civil society now feels much better to me, at age 76, a white male, adult, heterosexual, human, having lived through all of those rights movements as an adult. Every one of those movements, which I was generally in favor of at the time because they seemed to be the right thing to do, has improved the humane relationships between everyone. The current “rights movement” called Occupy is an effort to make more equitable the relationship between rich people and not so rich ones – not poor people. I don’t like the term poor people, because at the moment poor people are in most ways richer than rich people were when I was a child (life expectancy, health, entertainment, free time, travel, personal rights, etc.). It seems that what the Occupy movement is really against is the arrogance of wealth and unrestrained power as personified in people like Donald Trump.

The rights movement of the near future should be the rights of humanity itself. Humanity’s rights. Because of the unconstrained population explosion, now in progress and having reached seven billion people, we as a species are threatening our own existence by the over-exploitation of our Mother Earth. For every individual it is not themselves that is the problem but the other seven billion people who are consuming the one-time-use resources like oil and coal. Everyone thinks those others are the ones who are creating the CO2 pollution. However, if the world population were back at the 1925 level of two billion, nearly all of our current resource and pollution problems wouldn’t exist, or at least they would be worsening at a very slow rate. If the population were back at the one billion level, and everyone living as we presently do, there wouldn’t be any environmental problems that couldn’t be coped with by normal political actions.

Well, that is silly talk, because even if there were no children born for fifty years the population wouldn’t drop back to a billion people, so why even mention it? Probably, in the not too distant future the people already living will consume some critical resource to the point of exhaustion, and then a panicky realization will take place that something has to be done. When that crisis hits, things will get very ugly for a while and all of the progress in humanity’s treatment of one another, so eloquently written about by Pinker, will evaporate for a while as humanity lurches through a population crisis. What then? There is no way of knowing how things will go in particular except to say at the end of it there will be far fewer people. Unfortunately, even after the collapse things may not get better for a while because so much of the infrastructure which makes our present civilization so productive will be inoperative. However, for the survivors there will be a return to a new normalcy and there may be abundance once again of most of the things we presently value, based on the finding and reuse of manufactured products we have already manufactured today.

But, will humanity learn what needs to be done to prevent another boom and bust cycle? Humans and humanity will survive even the worst catastrophe. Some animals did survive even the last extinction event 65 million years ago, and that event is far worse than anything humans can presently create. The animals who survived that extinction didn’t have the intelligence of humans and humans would have made some appropriate accommodation to the events and survived.

Presently human population is unconstrained, except by famine, because we have no natural predators to keep our numbers in balance with nature. Humanity must somehow create laws to constrain its population to something which Mother Earth can support. If people are unable to do that, then Mother Earth will be forced to limit their numbers with another famine. At present they have already created a population so large that it can not be sustained, and it is still growing. It is able to do that based on one time use energy stores in the form of oil and coal. When those are exhausted there will be no energy to power the farming equipment and famine will result, and we will be forced to cultivate the land with our own muscle power once again as did the people of the pre-industrial era.

Humanity is in good health and has the living right to survive but it needs food.

Creating The EarthArk is the most moral thing humanity can do.

Tags

Human morality, morality, Survival of humanity, Your moral obligation

Humanity as a whole has a primary responsibility of providing for the preservation of humanity in the present and on into the future. As a species we have been phenomenally successful. Our problem now is that we have been too successful as seen in our enormous population explosion. Our success has been based on our fabulous consumption of one-time-use natural resources, such as oil, but it cannot be sustained permanently because the oil, gas and coal will be burned up in about one hundred years, and also pollute the atmosphere. That destruction of our essential energy resource base will soon lead to the collapse of our civilization and perhaps demise of nearly all humans, but there is hope.

Anthropologists tell us that 50,000 years ago there were approximately 7,000 humans, and now we have about 7,000,000,000, or a million times more people now than then. That fact proves the phenomenal success of our species. It would be wonderful if the Earth would sustain us permanently at our present level, but it can’t, and so there will be an environmental collapse. Sorry, I don’t like it either! But, before the collapse, generally called Doomsday, we can make some preparations for those people who do survive, and we can make it possible for them to restore the Earth to its present condition, and possibly even a little better. The reason it could be better is because humans can learn, and they will be able to learn from our present mistakes, and not repeat them. They would see that the Earth will support a smaller number of people than we presently have and be able to do it permanently. They will choose to live in a beautiful world, if given the opportunity, and The EarthArk is the way to provide future humanity an opportunity to achieve that heavenly future.

People of the future must be given the tools to reconstitute the Earth that we are now destroying, and when a major war finally comes we will almost totally destroy it as the comfortable place we presently enjoy. As a responsible and forethoughtful species we must see the placing of the EarthArk not as a gift but as a moral obligation. Because, if we do not provide for the preservation of the living things upon which all things, including humans, depend and need to survive we will in effect be killing them. By not acting, and creating an EarthArk we will be practicing human genocide on a far more massive scale than has ever been achieved. What a horrible outcome, and we living people will be responsible for this tragedy.

The plan for humanity’s survival is simple; it is to store samples in permanent cold storage of all the species presently living. If we store the seeds of the natural world in a deep freeze they will be available and viable in the future, to revivify the Earth, and it can be restored. But, if we don’t store them immediately, even more species will be lost, and when the war comes nearly all species will be wiped out. When that happens all of those living things will be gone forever. Even now during peacetime, we are the cause of many species going extinct, but this ongoing tragedy is only the beginning. When our present population consumes the one-time-use resources, then all the world is made poorer, and when our population doubles again all of those deadly processes will accelerate. Our population can not  go on forever without resources and when they become scarce our population will collapse in a most dreadful way.

The general shortfall will be the triggering cause for a massive war, but with that war the infrastructure that permits our present huge population to exist will collapse. And with that collapse the beautiful life we are all living at present will become impossible. Unfortunately, with that war there will come radioactive clouds and darkness which will destroy food production and nearly all larger animals and plants will die. Ten years after the war the Earth will probably be rebounding,  but even if we as individuals survive we might not recognize the landscape, because so many things would be gone. What will probably be around in abundance is what we presently call weeds. But, that will be all there is. Waves of various kinds of weeds.

Into this grim picture there is a possibility of revivification of the life of the Earth if we have stored the seeds of all living things in a permanent storage place. To a small degree this is being done by seed companies to protect their patent property rights, but not much has been done to save the millions of species of non-commercial plants. The EarthArk Project is designed to collect wild seeds from every habitat on Earth and store them in a permanent deep freeze in the coldest place on Earth. It is a simple concept and it can easily be done, because there are no technical difficulties in doing any portion of the project. It only requires a few people from every location going out into their local area and collecting a variety of whatever is there and taking it to a local collection center. The next step would be placing these seeds into shipping containers and then transporting them to safe cold places high in the mountains of high latitude Antarctica. Ships go to the McMurdo Station in Antarctica every year, and from that port the shipping containers need only be trucked up to the mountain sides of Mt Vinson. It is only a question of doing it before society collapses. After that happens it will be much more difficult and possibly impossible.

This is a far more important project than the present ecology movement, because as wonderful as these efforts are they are doomed to fail when the population of humans becomes so great the starving people scour the Earth for every last calorie of edible food. It is impossible for modern people to contemplate a true worldwide famine, because we have grown accepting the idea of ten generations of people always having an abundance of food. The last major hitch in human population was back in 1347 with the plague. There is no way to prevent the population explosion from continuing, and it doesn’t really matter because we already have the people presently existing who will consume the resources and trigger the collapse. That is why The Earth Ark Project is so important to do immediately, while there is still time, plus the resources and freedom to salvage what species still do exist.

To reach this absolutely essential goal of preserving life, all that is required is for a few individuals from every community to collect wild seeds and small soil samples from their local area. It is a moral obligation for every community to support this effort, because without these stored essences all of the things which humanity values will be permanently lost. If you don’t support The EarthArk Project no one will, and humanity is doomed.

Collect seeds of the future now and send them to the EarthArk.

People never respond to warnings without previous experience.

Tags

Human short-sightedness, Inevitable problems, Survival of humanity, The EarthArk Project, The future can be wonderful

The Bhola cyclone killed about 500,000 people on November 12, 1970 in the country now called Bangladesh. The World Trade Center  attack on September 11, 2001, had 2,752 casualties, thus for every one of those victims there were over 180 deaths from the cyclone. Also, it was twice as deadly as the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of December 26, 2004, which struck Sumatra, Indonesia. The RMS Titanic sank with 1,517 lost on April 14 1912, two hours and forty minutes after striking an iceberg . World War One (WWI) with a proximate cause, the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, cost 15 million people their lives and 65 million if you include the influenza deaths. List of natural disasters. With all of these disasters there was sufficient time for most of the victims to have saved themselves if they had responded to warnings.

The EarthArk Project is intended to help humanity survive the coming disasters which await it, which eventually will be enormously greater than any of those above. It is easy to convince oneself that a great tragedy will never strike humanity again because nothing really awful has happened during most living people’s lives. The average median age for humans is now about 27.5 years. Which means the average person was born in 1984 and didn’t become historically aware until about age twenty or about 2004. Nothing really horrid has happened since then and so modern humans worry about global warming. That of course is bad but it doesn’t compare to 3% of living humans being killed in an event like WWII or 17% of everyone being killed with the Mongol invasions. See the list of wars and disasters by death toll to get some idea what a really nasty problem might be. Probably half the people alive today couldn’t identify half the top ten most destructive wars of history. Click the link to see if you know them. If that is true about a typical human’s awareness of humanity-wide tragedy it is easy to understand why so few people worry about those kinds of problems, even in the abstract.

We have been living in the most wonderful time in human history and a simple proof of that seemingly wild statement is that both in percentage and in absolute numbers, humanity has grown prodigiously during the last hundred years, from less than 2 billion to about 7 billion. If there had been a similar sized percentage drop in population everyone would be terrified about the future. Also, in our world there has been exciting technical growth so we have wonderful health and entertainments to enjoy. I don’t feel I am a gloom and doomer when I say the good times will last for a while longer, but not forever. By a while longer, it would seem that another ten years to twenty years is quite possible for the good times to last, but it strikes me that fifty years is being awfully optimistic and one hundred years without a mega-disaster seems doubtful. But that means a college age person can expect to see very severe problems and a newborn to see catastrophic ones. I am not being a prophet when saying these things; it’s just that some things will run out and of course the worst one running short will be food. When it happens things will transition very quickly.

People are extremely reluctant to respond to warnings without previous personal experience, and it is estimated that 90% of the population of Bangladesh was aware of the cyclone before it hit, but only about 1% sought refuge in fortified structures. Current humanity’s experience has been almost wholly positive for several decades, even for young adults’ parents and grandparents, so it is almost impossible for the average person to conceive of these things. Only the study of history can possibly convince anyone of coming super-serious problems, and very few people will bother with that. So, the future will be dominated by people with no concept of impending problems and humanity will stumble forward into catastrophe. We can help it recover if we use a little foresight, but that’s about the most we can do.  Continue working as if humanity can be saved.

The EarthArk Project is intended to save the seeds of all civilization and nature, upon which to rebuild a vibrant new world.

The EarthArk Project - logo shows the seeds of recovery shipped to Antarctica