June 5, 2006
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Socrates Cafe's Latest: How Much Time Do We Have?
How about this for an open-ended question
I think I'll start by approaching this from the point of view of current American (and Western) Culture:
We are very much a time-bound culture which tends to try to predict and plan for where we think we are heading - and worry that we might not get there, or that when we do arrive, it won’t be as we expected.
This leads us to take the gloomy view and predict the worst while exhorting each other to “Wake up and stop ruining things”. This viewpoint is a sensible one, if you are one of those who is convinced that the world was a better place when you were young, or are a scientist noting the changes and disappearances that mankind seems to have caused.
In 1798 and again in 1803, Thomas Malthus, to take a famous prophet of doom, predicted the famine overpopulation would cause the world. Was he right? Depends on whether you died of starvation in the early 1800’s or not - many did.
In 1972, to move closer to the present, The Club of Rome published “The Limits to Growth” in which they used fairly primitive computer models to prove that world-wide collapse was probable beginning about 2010 and continuing into the next century unless we took drastic measures by the year 2000. We didn’t take the measures (or at least most of them) and we still seem to be tracking by their models.
At the time they were ridiculed, denounced, and persuaded that their models needed revising. They revised their projections and published two more reports: “Mankind at the Turning Point” (1974) and “Reshaping the International Order” (1976), neither of which was acceptable to most Americans as they tended to call for “Balancing the world’s economies”, and reshaping the United Nations so as to insure world peace, environmental regulation and world monetary and resource regulation and control, all of which meant giving up a good deal of our sovereignty.
Like it or not, the Club of Rome called our attention to what Humans are doing to the planet and made us more aware of global resource utilization, climate changes, pollution, the implications of a rapidly rising population, and world industrialization.
To answer my own question: Not much; or None, time’s run out.
Welcome to the brave new world.
Comments (19)
Linking you now.
Time for what? Wiring are nuclear bomb to go off during the NBA Championship or lunch?
no hope, how sad. If this global warming thing keeps up... maybe you are right
Creed hate Xanga komment secshun ..leave wurd out ore misspell werd and lQQk like dumb a$$. No deeleet ore edet funkshun. *smash smash* me caveman creed.
(now let me try that again)
Time for what? Wiring a nuclear bomb to go off during the NBA Championship or lunch?
Oh not another global warming sheep. http://www.junkscience.com 30 years ago the same crowd thought we'd all be in ice right now. I remember as kid they had plans to mount solar panels on the poles to melt the ice.
Ok, retracting global warming comment. Just saying.... I don't believe in global warming but my senses are telling me something has changed. I only had to shovel snow once this year - at all and I live in Ohio. There was no real sled riding... Hurricaines are getting much worse as the water temperture is warming. Glasiers are melting much quicker. Like I said, I concede. I am not predicting anything. In fact, I don't agree with the no hope. I do think we should take better care of our planet but I am not an environment, mother earth worshipper. I have my beliefs about the end of the world - but they are religious and since I don't have scientific - philosopher proof evidence I am not presenting them in this arena. Actually, the question needs to be better defined. Do we have much time left - of the world or our souls.
Global warming = pseudoscience through graph manipulation, etc.
Earth will most probably die when the sun becomes a red giant. People will have to become nomadic searchers. Do you think that time will run out before then through some other means, or was your "time has run out" thought more philosophical than physical?
The end of days eh?
Global warming, sun evolution, the return of a savior… The question asks us, ‘how much time do WE have left?’
These suggestions of the earth ceasing to be seems to spawn out of the assumption that humans will make it that long. Earth could randomly go at any moment or last a billion majillion years (or even a real number). We… in the sense of human kind… are screwed, considering we will most likely kill off the vast majority of our population within the next 100 years
Society itself seems to be moving forward through he degeneration of faith in my eyes. As technology increases and the spiritual world takes the hit, people are learning to plain get along more. Whether the recent worldwide decline in faith is a good or bad thing is a topic for another time, but I believe that as a society, we are moving forward to coexistence…
That having been said, a life of coexistence breeds trust in the fellowman… adoption of universal control with the extinction of formal states… Becoming one Earth.
But its that trust of universal government combined with the future of technology which will set the wheels into motion for oblivion.
Basic principle of American government is that there can never be a single party because there are too many opinions… and that is guaranteed by expansion… the world is continuously growing, and as it does, so do the amount of people with something different to say. And it’s a solid system… make more people… expand to different types of people…
Yet technology is on the brink of immortality… longer life spans are already here… and scientists believe that the fountain of youth is just around the corner… Which, sounds great, really does, I don’t plan on dying
Though where does that leave us with over-population? If people stop dying of natural causes, where are we to put these people? Feeding them I don’t believe is an issue, we are at the point now where genetic strands can be manipulated to give us an easy surplus to support populations that well exceed our current… Hell, we burn our food… pay farmers to not grow that much to keep the economy stable… And space… space is interesting… we don’t take up as much land space as you’d believe… the world can handle 20 times our population… as long as the technology progresses at the rate it is now, we should be fine… and I don’t doubt space (as in the stuff up there) isn’t out of the question when we get there as a society…
What we do have though… is a whollllleeee bunch of people… and a whooollleeee lot of room for error, hence the need for a universal government… its hard enough to get stuff done now… and as our species interbreed and spread, we will weed out most faith differences and find practicality in having one central body….
It will be miraculous, and it will work….
As long as you can avoid the unavoidable… the channel 74 effect… channel 74 being my configuration for the SciFi network
There are always conflicting interests… and the formation of the one government will not go over without consequence…
And lets face it… the further our technology travels, the easier it is to build weapons of destruction… Weapons of mass destruction are big in the news, whether they are used or not… The advances we make in technology bring us closer and closer to an easy and efficient way to do everything in our daily lives… brushing our teeth, commuting, grooming, and destroying the world….
It will take one group of people headed by one ideal to destroy everything we know.
We will organize our own destruction by limiting ourselves to one government…
We shall lay the foundation for the end of days…
Our time is short… enjoy it while you can…
How much time do we have? I’ll ballpark it at 250 years.
Within 10 years you will see the formation of a single internet…. Power-lining will link every electrical device in this known world to the internet… the power of which will cause a single entity to govern… this force with grow over a couple of decades so that the next generation knows only this one intertwining network… All the while scientists will develop the means for immortality… 30 years pass to that point…. The next 20, religion looses its ground from our cheating of death and the increase of atheism with lack of answers…. We will cure ailments, yet God is nowhere to be seen? By 2100, Governments will begin handing themselves over to one system… eliminating the need of control of such a variety of people in any form of ‘boundaries,’ considering the mix of races will eliminate a nice big chunk of individual/regional culture…
And it will work…. It will work for a solid century… we will prosper into utopia… the world will become one… we shall respect our fellowman and live life as healthy, seemingly immortal beings with no other purpose than our own…
Yet madness… madness of a handful of people will breed rebellion… This rebellion shall amass in private… developing through secrecy… harmless to the naked eye… and in one swift move… channel 74 will take over, and the world will blink…
And our time will run out…
250 years.
Werd
ok, so maybe i went a little far... but thats my best guess
Whether or not the global warming theory is real, the planet is being poisoned. If it takes a "fake" theory to make us sit up, take notice, and change our ways, then maybe that's not such a bad thing.
My goodness, you ARE a bunch of pessimists.
A few , well maybe more - it seems like a few - years ago the buzzword was Future Shock. We were being impacted by our changing world faster than we could cope and it was causing us all kinds of problems- environmental, psychological, political, social, etc. Actually it did cause problems but we did somehow managed to adjust.
When I was a kid, ( I was 9 years old in 1939) my world was an urban one, but some big guy still hauled ice up the stairs to fill our icebox, you told the operator what number you wanted and I remember being amazed by the blast of cold air coming out of the door of the only store in town with air conditioning. the movie theatre had huge doors on the sides that were opened on hot nights - yes you could sneak in.
My point is that my world has changed beyond my wildest dreams and even though a lot of real neat stuff has been forever lost, its place has been taken by more real neat stuff - and some stuff I don't think is so neat.
Kids today will grow up in a world with problems we wish they didn't have but they won't even recognize them as problems -it's just the way the world is.
They will ask:
"Is it true that once people could plan on working for a company for thirty years and then get paid for the rest of their life?" ; "Did you really carry a pocket knife and ride your bike without a helmet when you were a kid?" "Wasn't that dangerous?"
"No TV? What did you do?"
"What's a slide rule?"
You can probably think of lots more.
One serious problem lots have mentioned is Global Warming. No, it's not a silly notion or some liberal scare technique - it's really happening. What's causing it doesn't really matter - it's here NOW and we're not going to cool off very much in your lifetime. The thing is, we have to learn to live with it. I do not recommend buying land in New Orleans, for example.
BTW, you better hope we don't move into an ice age anytime soon. That will cause a massive die-off of land animals as the world dries up ( all that airborne moisture gets locked up in ice. The ice was 6000 feet deep over Maine 15000 years ago and the land was pretty much a desert where there wasn't any ice). Too cold is as bad as too hot - maybe worse. Drastic climate fluctuation is a reality and we seem to have speeded it up a little - just another future shock.
How much time do we have to plan for next year?
Not nearly enough - we never have enough. But next year's coming, ready or not.
what's a slide rule?
Dear Dick,
There is no such thing as "time". Mankind uses "clocks". The Earth uses geologic "time", which is much slower, and has "been around" much longer than mankind's clocks. The universe exists in the "now". It's certainly true that global warming is changing some of the Earth's "cycles" and maybe mankind might not have too much 'time left' but mankind has written about his end of days since he began to write, so this shouldn't surprise him.
I don't know yet if I'll write an essay concerning any of this week's SC entries, so I'm not "asking questions" in this comment. Perhaps later.
Michael F. Nyiri, poet, philosopher, fool
I knew someone would ask "what's a slide rule?" You get to explain, though I do know what one is. Good post, though a little depressing. Whether the earth warms up or cools down, I won't be around for it, probably, unless I'm right about reincarnation, and who knows what things will be like then.
I think the earth has all the time in the universe - at least until our sun goes nova. But whether humanity will still be around is another question. If we keep causing other species to become extinct, we will eventually become one of those species.
Gee, more depressing. But peace and blessings anyway.
What's a slide rule? - google it - and be glad, if you're a science or math student, that you don't need to use one.
Hey! Here's a little known fact about logarithms* and slide rules: Logs were developed because someone was trying to figure out how the damn slide rule really worked - in short the slide rule- which is based on logs, came first.(See: Napier's bones)
Mike: Don't tell the universe about time being just a human imaginary construct. The universe apparently thinks it's a dimension.
* Google that all you young whippersnappers
Back to the social impact of time limits and deadlines; Mike is quite right, these are mostly arbitrary guideposts set by us for our own reasons, most often based on what we are afraid might happen.
"Not having enough time" generally means we get all excited and make extra efforts - in the case of a Nation's concern, this can be both expensive and limit effort (and time) we might better have spent on other projects. This does not mean we should just let ourselves ride along and see where time takes us, we certainly can structure our use of time - and should; but rationally.
I used to love slide rules. I even had a circular slide rule. That was the one the real geeks used to make themselve feel cool.
But back to the matter at hand. Do you know if anymore work has been done on the models first presented by the Club of Rome?
Hah! Did you ever use one of those cylindrical jobbies? One kind even came with a crank.
I just Googled the Club of Rome and found some interesting comments about it - it's worth a look.
Even the primitive model used in the "Limits to growth" 1972 report seem to have been good enough to predict where we are now - pretty much as they said, still on the up-swing in most areas (population, energy use, food production, pollution, et al). The down-slope, according to their model will really be noticeable in about 50 years.
As far as I have been able to discover, there have been many models of most of their projections, but these are separate and I could not find any upgrade of their grand overall projection.
The main question, How Much Time... seems to indicate that we have a limited time to act to influence where we will be. The question probably is: Can our actions make any difference in where we will be on a global scale?
Obviously, hindsight tells us that had we done "X" differently, than "Y" would have been different, but what seems reasonable to us today might not be tomorrow - take the Iraq invasion, for example.
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