``...Back in the desert of the real, humanity is partially organized for survival but mostly -- and here, as you say, is the chief barrier to solving planetary-scale problems -- we're organized to help a relatively few...'' .d.
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I thought about this essay all day, and I am going to down load and read it more carefully tonight. But in the meantime, it finally occurred to me as I was reading his outline of the threat of nanotechnology, that all these scenarios with the exception of few of the more outlandish were all the direct result of privilaging the needs of the economic system over the needs of people.
At least two conclusions follow. First, the most direct threat to the continuation of the human species, and therefore the most virulent of all possible existential risks is Capitalism itself. The driving force of technological development and its unchecked and unregulated penetration into domains of threatening the existence of the species all come down to various laws and policies that engender such developments and directions specifically for the benefit of capital. An historical trace of the development of genetic engineering is a case in point.
The arbitrary (non-biologically based) dispersal of genetically modified species will sooner or later become some form of existential risk. If these developments in the non-human biosphere ever begin to interact with the related developments of unregulated and unchecked control over human health, medicine and reproduction with its privilaging of capital over any human world need, such as continued health and reproductive freedom, then we are in some complex and deep shit.
In the some sense this kind of existential risk was ignored. It seems to me to be highly probable, given current economic and regulatory regimes (patent rights and privatization), that ordinary people will lose control or at least lose any alternative choice of potential survival value over three life sustaining processes: eating, being healthy or disease free, and reproducing.
By pursuing these insane economic policies we have begun to interfere with our own evolutionary stability. Contrary to the intuitive thought that we have insulated ourselves from the forces of evolution by natural selection, by virtue of culture, we have actually succeeded by modifying our cultural context, in adding additional, new, and unknown forces to the so-called natural environment. Natural selection has no problem promulgating its filtering, management, and determinants on us, no matter the specific origin of the natural selection process involved. Everything from climate change to volcanic activity to meteors has become a force of natural selection. Where is there any refutation that human culture can not add to this list?
I would like to call this the Saturn Scenario, after Goya's painting of Saturn eating his children, where the policies of neoliberal capital are symbolized by Saturn.
The second conclusion is more difficult to explain, and I am not sure it's correct. It comes down to this. The entire justification for the nation state is usually given in terms of its ability to protect its people under a collective agreement of trading personal security and freedom from want and death, for the individual and collective submission to laws and governance. In other words we give up our individual freedoms to do as we please and the dubious freedom to die at the will of fortune for the collective security that a state political structure provides.
But in the great words, ``When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another...''
It just may be that the current national states as they are presently constructed and as they presently favor their most powerful members, namely the personification of their corporate and economic elite, may actually constitute another existential risk. In effect, by privilaging the elite few for their own immediate self-interest in the name of securing our economic system (a supposed collective good), we may be reaching a point where any gestures toward collective security have been nullified by the kinds of threats listed in the article, all of which in fact benefit the few at increasingly dire cost to the many. If this inequality trend continues unchecked, at some point the few will simply not be sufficiently biologically viable to insist their survival and such survival must take precedent over the survival of the many.
If the first conclusion seems to fall under the category of a Bang, the second seems to fall under the category of a Whimper.
In the second scenario, the many or the mass become biologically so reduced in number and so reduced in potential economic productivity and social reproducibility that the few can no longer survive and we all go down the toilet--hence the whimper.
I would like to name this latter scenario the Lebowitz Scenario, after the famous science fiction novel, Canticle for Lebowitz.
And now for the ultimate scenario. It seems to me that the ultimate social message of Einstein's paper on special relativity had a completely unspoken point. If in fact no material entity can travel faster than light, and the nearest star system is three light years away, it follows that we will never become interstellar travelers, except in our imagination. The horror that follows from this physical constant is that we will never, no matter how long we survive, escape the solar system. Since this is the only planet that can sustain us, we had better start planning on prolonging the absolute, which is our own extinction.
And it gets darker. Given the speed of light (SL), the probability that any life outside the solar system will ever become known to us or that we will be able to interact with it, possibly benefit from its existence in any meaningfully material way is very likely near zero. Even if life exists elsewhere, we will never discover it simply because we will not exist long enough as a species to find it. And then, it is also possible we are the only life in the entire universe, no matter if the universe is bounded or not.
Given the empirical evidence we have from our own solar system, it appears that almost every object of planetary size has a unique identity by virtue of its unique circumstances of development. For example, it is impossible to mistake Io for Callisto. We should contemplate this uniqueness and consider two things. If absolutely unique histories are always found for planetary objects, then it is not impossible that our own history is also unique. This is not a theoretical impossibility since we can always find a singleton, a real number that identifies a unique occurrence in a multi-infinite sequence---and no matter how we adjoin transfinite extensions of infinity to the original sequence, we never countermand that singleton.
And so, let's get to the point. Our existence is both conditional and provisional in their respective absolute frames. If we modify our conditions in almost any direction except a very few, we will also modify the extent of our provisional circumstances, and thereby very likely shorten our existence as a species. The few exceptions all require very unlikely modifications to our existing conditions.
Is anyone familiar with Charles Ives, `The Unanswered Question'? Well, play it and think on this. If we are the only candle in the universal night, then why not burn in incandescent brilliance, if only once, because there is only once (Rilke, and Blade Runner)? In my over fevered imagination we are fighting much more than the trivia of capital or the idiots who rule us. We exist against our own immanent extinction and we had better make the most of it.
I would love to call this the Shelley Scenario, where we never live like maggots in time, whose wingless moments crawl...
While capital lives as if in terminal brilliance, what would happen if we subsumed such orders of power and took on the great project for ourselves?
C