Friday, January 19, 2007

We're doomed (NOT)

Gillis is writing a series of Anti-Primitivist Essays. Very deep stuff (or so superficial it masquerades well) and I’m not generally interested in the topic. A prole, that’s me. I generally skid past them in my RSS feeder.

- space bar - “We do not live in a closed system” (ya ya) “Although its certainly true our current mass infrastructure” - eye skid - “Stop doing your fucking around in an infinitely complex non-linear dynamic system you don’t yet understand. In 2020 there’s an asteroid that’s going to swing by the Earth’s doorstep carrying Twenty Trillion Dollars worth (today’s market) of precious metals vital to our advanced electric circuitry based technology.” - hey pay attention - And it’s a perfectly reasonable possibility that humanity, or even mammals, will not survive such. - what?

Oh. An essay that says “hey we’re not doomed to a primitive life and misery”.

Although grinding into the Earth’s crust for specific resources is a progressively harder and harder zero-sum game, the plain and simple reality is that we have the capability to reach huge swathes of resources in an extremely productive, cost-effective manner (far more efficient, in fact, than any previous process available us in history). Whatsmore, in an unprecedented (and probably unreasonable) act of forgiveness on behalf of the universe, we don’t have to completely destroy our rotting civilization in order to start acquiring them. We can implement this new process of acquiring resources and use the proceeds to gradually fluidly abolish the horrific structural cancers of our civilization. All the while giving us footing to develop more dynamic and integratable technologies. And, if that weren’t enough, the rigid structures we utilize in this process don’t inherently replace biomass. Because we won’t be mining our resources from within a dynamic biosphere.

Where, then, Brother Gillis?

We’ll be chewing up God’s little bit-sized gifts and breathing in the source of all energy on Earth, finally allowing us to bypass the middlemen and stop fucking things up for them.

Asteroids and solar energy.

It’s a real simple and practical solution.

Well of course it is. Getting there is a problem of course - but we might have an (PDF link) idea to help that along.

We can reach out, explore, learn and we can invent. We can choose connection rather than isolation and we can choose to see the externalities of our actions clearly. We do not yet live in a closed system. There is still hope.


Respectfully Submitted,

Brian Dunbar

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