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If you hadn't had enough scary sounding possible future calamities that you as an individual have no control over to worry about, here's another. My anxiety sys

by lemevi 11y ago

If you hadn't had enough scary sounding possible future calamities that you as an individual have no control over to worry about, here's another. My anxiety system for these kinds of things broke back when peak oil turned out to not be a thing (well as described). There lots of things to be concerned about where we as individuals can make better choices, such as sustainable living and not contributing to carbon emissions, but stuff like this, while something I'm not going to ignore because it's at the very least interesting, I can't feel anxiety about. I just don't have the capacity to be anxious every minute of my life for everything that could possibly go wrong for us someday in the future.

ctdonath 11y ago
Indeed. I've lived long enough to see a whole lot of TEOTWAWKI scenarios panicked about and either were duly mitigated by sensible people or simply failed to instantiate. "Y2K Bug" was an ideal example (chronic programming flaw could have knocked out computer systems worldwide and knocked humanity back to the Middle Ages, but was recognized as a solvable problem and was indeed solved). At some point I looked at my own anxieties and simply decided to not be anxious: do what I could about what I could given resource (time included) constraints, be prepared for eventualities within reason, and otherwise carry on. My biggest recurring concern now is how I'm not anxious. Should something horrible happen, I may be disconcertingly unconcerned - having done what I could in good faith, there is/was nothing else to do but accept reality and move on.
- coldpie 11y ago
  I agree with you, but I think it is still important to be anxious and raise awareness of these problems. Without the panic, would Y2K have been "recognized as a solvable problem and solved"? We need to continue to raise awareness of these really big potential problems, even if we have confidence that they are solvable.
clarkmoody 11y ago
I can't find the source now, but some estimate that removing only a few of the largest boosters on orbit each year would decrease the cascade risk significantly, since those boosters represent a large fraction of the mass. This is a much smaller move than many other avoid-the-end-of-the-world suggestions given throughout the years. Now: better modeling would probably help us determine whether Kessler syndrome will actually happen.
javajosh 11y ago
Well, don't feel anxious. Charles Stross is a science fiction writer and dreaming up (or researching) interesting calamities pays his bills. If humans are an ant hill, you're just one ant, and unless you work for NASA, ESA, SpaceX, or (at the very least) have a prestigious professorship at a major university and/or serve as the science advisor to someone with real political power, there's nothing you need/can do about this one. So relax, and enjoy a good setting for a dystopian story.
hellbanner 11y ago
He is a sci-fi author, so his profession is to think of "what if"
- Malic 11y ago
  As a sci-fi author, Stross is known for having a t-shirt that reads "I tell lies for money." (One of multiple reasons that I'm a fan of his!)
carapat_virulat 11y ago
Better to think about it and end up being wrong, than just having blind faith on Father Progress protecting us forever. Just because one Malthus was wrong once doesn't mean that no Malthus will ever be right. The problem of progress is that by its own definition we can never be sure of what we are doing until we do it. Being cautious has to be an important virtue to keep in mind.
elipsey 11y ago
Instead of being anxious, our goal should be to fix things if we can, and plan mitigation strategies if we can't. Peak oil is a thing: by definition there is _some_ global maximum in produciton volume over a long enough chosen interval. It might turn out that the solution is built into the problem though, because price is a function of supply so we get a soft landing, especially if we plan ahead. And we should plan ahead. It's the same with Y2k. It was a serious problem, but we fixed it before it was a disaster. The Mathusian Catastrophe has also failed to fully materialize because people are not bacteria, and so we planned ahead and are trying to control population and improve agricultural efficeincey. Did we do a perfect job? No, but we did better than bacteria. Just because a doomsday scenario fails to emerge does not mean the problems were completely bunk. So I'm guessing Stross thinks we should imagine what will happen if we don't do something about Kessler Syndrome, and then become motivated to do something about it.
CJKinni 11y ago
I don't see this article, or these end of the world scenarios, as things you should be anxious about. Maybe some people suggest they are, but to me an article like this serves two purposes: 1. To remind people who are in positions to solve this problem that it is still a problem, by bringing attention to the issue. 2. To give an interesting example of an unexpected negative externality of a system as a case study, which might help me think differently about systems I create.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
The trick there is that most things are systems, rather than point variables. Just like you can't push down just one place in a bowl of water, you can't expect that the system will not respond to the change in variables. Whether it is Peak Oil, Kessler Syndrome, Global Warming, or Free Markets. People use extrapolation to scare others into some action, rarely are the predictions correct because other parts of the system have adapted.
- TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
  I never was very intelligent, just smart enough to quote intelligent people, so I'll invoke Steven Pinker from his book 'The Better Angels of Our Nature': Also distorting our sense of danger is our moral psychology. No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better, and bearers of good news are often advised to keep their mouths shut lest they lull people into complacency. Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society.
wrong_internet 11y ago
Side note: peak oil is still very much a thing. Enhanced recovery and fracturing of source rocks bought us about another 15 years, but the Seneca cliff is still there.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  It's also pretty much exactly as described. Light, sweet crude is gone and we can't sustain low oil prices (the current dip notwithstanding). Oil costs 5X what it did in the 90s. We are forced to use dirtier, more expensive types of oil. Economies suffer as a result. Peak oil happened as advertised.
  - barney54 11y ago
    Except that it did not happen as advertised. Peak oil was advertised as "running out of oil period," not "running out of easy-to-access oil." The problem is that for as long as we have been using oil, we have been running out of easy-to-access oil. U.S. production started in Pennsylvania and moved to Ohio. That was the easy-to-access oil in the late 1800s, early 1900s. After Ohio and Pennsylvania, oil production shifted to Texas and California and then, when people found it tougher to find oil onshore they tried offshore. There is nothing different with newer technologies like hydraulic fracturing, directional drilling, and advanced imagine. We aren't at peak oil because extracting oil always has been heavily dependent on technology. Here's what the peak oil chart for the U.S. looks like today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#/media/File:Hubbert_Upper-Bound_Peak_1956.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#/media/File:Hubbert_U...
    - flavor8 11y ago
      > Except that it did not happen as advertised. Peak oil was advertised as "running out of oil period," not "running out of easy-to-access oil." That's false. There may have been a few tin foilers who didn't read the source material and thus came away with the wrong scenario, but _peak_ oil by definition has always been about production peaking, based on the cost of extraction.
    - 11y ago
jfoutz 11y ago
Peak oil kinda happened. All of the abundant easy to access oil is gone. We're gradually moving to other sources like offshore and fracking while using more technology in existing locations like pumping seawater into old wells to get more out of them. Tech has done wonderful things to keep costs down, but it's a lot tougher to get that barrel of oil now days. I think there are, at least to some degree, costs being offset by increased risk. Deepwater horizon is a pretty obvious example. Groundwater contamination from fracking is another. I think the price per barrel has been on a steady downward trend, but I'd bet that including the environmental impact just from accessing (not burning) oil, we're paying more. I'm not aware of any such study. In any case, we're the first, but also last technological civilization to use oil. If a wizard waved a magic wand, and we were suddenly sent back to a 1700's level of technology, i don't see how we'd be able to get much oil at all. It's not bubbling up out of the ground anywhere anymore. The easy stuff is gone. there's no way to get the hard stuff by hand.
- barney54 11y ago
  Other than the fact that there isn't evidence of fracking contaminating groundwater...
  - jfoutz 11y ago
    huh. weird. I thought it was known to be happening, but not yet widespread. http://ofmpub.epa.gov/eims/eimscomm.getfile?p_download_id=523326 http://ofmpub.epa.gov/eims/eimscomm.getfile?p_download_id=52... "We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The number of identified cases, however, was small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells. " Also the sort of vague claim with no support that "well it hasn't happened yet" is kind of annoying. Nothing is zero risk. we can argue about p(bad_things) <.001 or .1 or whatever, but i think it's foolish to just pretend everything will be sunshine and rainbows forever.
mdpopescu 11y ago
Scientists only figured out in the last decades what religions knew for millenia: people love to be told "the world is ending, give us money". Back when I was a teen, the coming ice age / famine of 2000 predicted by the Club of Rome was a serious problem for my educated (adult) friends. So was nuclear war. Lists like [1] remind me of my extremely scary youth :) [1] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/19/great-moments-in-failed-predictions/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/19/great-moments-in-faile...

by lemevi 11y ago

ctdonath 11y ago

Indeed. I've lived long enough to see a whole lot of TEOTWAWKI scenarios panicked about and either were duly mitigated by sensible people or simply failed to instantiate. "Y2K Bug" was an ideal example (chronic programming flaw could have knocked out computer systems worldwide and knocked humanity back to the Middle Ages, but was recognized as a solvable problem and was indeed solved). At some point I looked at my own anxieties and simply decided to not be anxious: do what I could about what I could given resource (time included) constraints, be prepared for eventualities within reason, and otherwise carry on. My biggest recurring concern now is how I'm not anxious. Should something horrible happen, I may be disconcertingly unconcerned - having done what I could in good faith, there is/was nothing else to do but accept reality and move on.

coldpie 11y ago
I agree with you, but I think it is still important to be anxious and raise awareness of these problems. Without the panic, would Y2K have been "recognized as a solvable problem and solved"? We need to continue to raise awareness of these really big potential problems, even if we have confidence that they are solvable.

clarkmoody 11y ago

I can't find the source now, but some estimate that removing only a few of the largest boosters on orbit each year would decrease the cascade risk significantly, since those boosters represent a large fraction of the mass. This is a much smaller move than many other avoid-the-end-of-the-world suggestions given throughout the years. Now: better modeling would probably help us determine whether Kessler syndrome will actually happen.

javajosh 11y ago

Well, don't feel anxious. Charles Stross is a science fiction writer and dreaming up (or researching) interesting calamities pays his bills. If humans are an ant hill, you're just one ant, and unless you work for NASA, ESA, SpaceX, or (at the very least) have a prestigious professorship at a major university and/or serve as the science advisor to someone with real political power, there's nothing you need/can do about this one. So relax, and enjoy a good setting for a dystopian story.

hellbanner 11y ago

He is a sci-fi author, so his profession is to think of "what if"

Malic 11y ago
As a sci-fi author, Stross is known for having a t-shirt that reads "I tell lies for money." (One of multiple reasons that I'm a fan of his!)

carapat_virulat 11y ago

Better to think about it and end up being wrong, than just having blind faith on Father Progress protecting us forever. Just because one Malthus was wrong once doesn't mean that no Malthus will ever be right. The problem of progress is that by its own definition we can never be sure of what we are doing until we do it. Being cautious has to be an important virtue to keep in mind.

elipsey 11y ago

Instead of being anxious, our goal should be to fix things if we can, and plan mitigation strategies if we can't. Peak oil is a thing: by definition there is _some_ global maximum in produciton volume over a long enough chosen interval. It might turn out that the solution is built into the problem though, because price is a function of supply so we get a soft landing, especially if we plan ahead. And we should plan ahead. It's the same with Y2k. It was a serious problem, but we fixed it before it was a disaster. The Mathusian Catastrophe has also failed to fully materialize because people are not bacteria, and so we planned ahead and are trying to control population and improve agricultural efficeincey. Did we do a perfect job? No, but we did better than bacteria. Just because a doomsday scenario fails to emerge does not mean the problems were completely bunk. So I'm guessing Stross thinks we should imagine what will happen if we don't do something about Kessler Syndrome, and then become motivated to do something about it.

CJKinni 11y ago

I don't see this article, or these end of the world scenarios, as things you should be anxious about. Maybe some people suggest they are, but to me an article like this serves two purposes: 1. To remind people who are in positions to solve this problem that it is still a problem, by bringing attention to the issue. 2. To give an interesting example of an unexpected negative externality of a system as a case study, which might help me think differently about systems I create.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

The trick there is that most things are systems, rather than point variables. Just like you can't push down just one place in a bowl of water, you can't expect that the system will not respond to the change in variables. Whether it is Peak Oil, Kessler Syndrome, Global Warming, or Free Markets. People use extrapolation to scare others into some action, rarely are the predictions correct because other parts of the system have adapted.

TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
I never was very intelligent, just smart enough to quote intelligent people, so I'll invoke Steven Pinker from his book 'The Better Angels of Our Nature': Also distorting our sense of danger is our moral psychology. No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better, and bearers of good news are often advised to keep their mouths shut lest they lull people into complacency. Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society.

wrong_internet 11y ago

Side note: peak oil is still very much a thing. Enhanced recovery and fracturing of source rocks bought us about another 15 years, but the Seneca cliff is still there.

astazangasta 11y ago
It's also pretty much exactly as described. Light, sweet crude is gone and we can't sustain low oil prices (the current dip notwithstanding). Oil costs 5X what it did in the 90s. We are forced to use dirtier, more expensive types of oil. Economies suffer as a result. Peak oil happened as advertised.
- barney54 11y ago
  Except that it did not happen as advertised. Peak oil was advertised as "running out of oil period," not "running out of easy-to-access oil." The problem is that for as long as we have been using oil, we have been running out of easy-to-access oil. U.S. production started in Pennsylvania and moved to Ohio. That was the easy-to-access oil in the late 1800s, early 1900s. After Ohio and Pennsylvania, oil production shifted to Texas and California and then, when people found it tougher to find oil onshore they tried offshore. There is nothing different with newer technologies like hydraulic fracturing, directional drilling, and advanced imagine. We aren't at peak oil because extracting oil always has been heavily dependent on technology. Here's what the peak oil chart for the U.S. looks like today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#/media/File:Hubbert_Upper-Bound_Peak_1956.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#/media/File:Hubbert_U...
  - flavor8 11y ago
    > Except that it did not happen as advertised. Peak oil was advertised as "running out of oil period," not "running out of easy-to-access oil." That's false. There may have been a few tin foilers who didn't read the source material and thus came away with the wrong scenario, but _peak_ oil by definition has always been about production peaking, based on the cost of extraction.
  - 11y ago

jfoutz 11y ago

Peak oil kinda happened. All of the abundant easy to access oil is gone. We're gradually moving to other sources like offshore and fracking while using more technology in existing locations like pumping seawater into old wells to get more out of them. Tech has done wonderful things to keep costs down, but it's a lot tougher to get that barrel of oil now days. I think there are, at least to some degree, costs being offset by increased risk. Deepwater horizon is a pretty obvious example. Groundwater contamination from fracking is another. I think the price per barrel has been on a steady downward trend, but I'd bet that including the environmental impact just from accessing (not burning) oil, we're paying more. I'm not aware of any such study. In any case, we're the first, but also last technological civilization to use oil. If a wizard waved a magic wand, and we were suddenly sent back to a 1700's level of technology, i don't see how we'd be able to get much oil at all. It's not bubbling up out of the ground anywhere anymore. The easy stuff is gone. there's no way to get the hard stuff by hand.

barney54 11y ago
Other than the fact that there isn't evidence of fracking contaminating groundwater...
- jfoutz 11y ago
  huh. weird. I thought it was known to be happening, but not yet widespread. http://ofmpub.epa.gov/eims/eimscomm.getfile?p_download_id=523326 http://ofmpub.epa.gov/eims/eimscomm.getfile?p_download_id=52... "We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The number of identified cases, however, was small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells. " Also the sort of vague claim with no support that "well it hasn't happened yet" is kind of annoying. Nothing is zero risk. we can argue about p(bad_things) <.001 or .1 or whatever, but i think it's foolish to just pretend everything will be sunshine and rainbows forever.

mdpopescu 11y ago

Scientists only figured out in the last decades what religions knew for millenia: people love to be told "the world is ending, give us money". Back when I was a teen, the coming ice age / famine of 2000 predicted by the Club of Rome was a serious problem for my educated (adult) friends. So was nuclear war. Lists like [1] remind me of my extremely scary youth :) [1] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/19/great-moments-in-failed-predictions/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/19/great-moments-in-faile...