[lbo-talk] Let's All Argue About Nuclear Power!

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Thu Apr 1 13:25:17 PDT 2010


I think we should face some realities. When we are talking about "civilization" here, we really mean "technological, industrial civilization," because they are the only ones who could have the hypothetical techno-magic to take care of this stuff. While civilization may be around in 10,000 years, it is extremely unlikely that it will be a technological, industrial civilization.

First of all, technological, industrial civilization almost annilihated itself 25 years ago, and the chance is extremely nontrivial that the general state of affairs that led to that will repeat (not to mention other not hard to conceive of events with catastrophic consequences, the most likely being some novel form of rapidly spreading disease, the spread of which is not going to be limited by caravan routes this time. If HIV had been airborn, the damage would have been collossal.).

Second, technological, industrial civilization has a shelf life because it is based on finite resources which will run out. Whether that happens in 50 or 500 years it will happen eventually, and sorry you are not going to get enough from Mars to run a giant technological, industrial civilization.

Any civilization that emerges from either instant catastrophic collapse or resource repletion will be nonindustrial and nontechnological, because we have already used up all the shit they need. (Any hypothetical nonhuman intelligence evolving any time in the next 100 million years or so will be in the same situation.)

So, Magic Space People in the Future are not going to help us deal with the problem, because they are likely not going to exist.



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