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Tag: global warming

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Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.
October 25, 2016

Absolute Worstest Worst?

So today the task I’ve assigned myself is talking about the worst case scenario for modern empires. Luckily the heat death of the universe will come for the human race eventually, but maybe we’ll be wiped out by global warming before then?

Or knocked back to medieval levels of civilizational development. But wait, maybe first the Zika virus will spread everywhere! (By the way, read Spillover. Your paranoia levels will shoot up.) All kinds of exciting possibilities!

Arcology. Artwork by Robin Weatherall.

Artwork by Robin Weatherall.

In the near-term, I think it would be pretty bad for basically the whole globe if Donald Trump won the US election, but not as catastrophic as the Twitterati sometimes makes it out to be.

For someone who often shares links with captions along the lines of “I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW DYSTOPIAN THIS IS”, I have little to say about worst-case scenarios. Truthfully, I’m an optimist. My views roughly conform to the Exponent podcast’s latest episode.

I think the internet will have a positive long-term effect. But yes, of course, settling into the next economic paradigm will be painful.

“[I]t is important to understand that technology always is situated and gets developed within a particular set of political and economic institutions — institutions that from time to time must be reconfigured in order for a country’s political economy to be able to maximize the productivity benefits of emergent technology platforms.” — Nils Gilman

I mean, really, just go read Gilman’s essay.

August 9, 2016

Cyzombies

Artwork by Antoine Collignon, via ArtStation. Illustration of a wired cyborg.

Artwork by Antoine Collignon, via ArtStation.

Artwork by Antoine Collignon, via ArtStation. Illustration of a wired cyborg.

Artwork by Antoine Collignon, via ArtStation.

Can a cyborg become a zombie? Since a cyborg is a regular ol’ flesh human with extra hardware installed, I don’t see why not (assuming we accept zombies as a prior). In fact, the idea that humans will figure out how to technologically augment our bodies and minds, then succumb to a modern Black Death, is fitting.

I don’t think zombies transplanted straight from horror movies are likely, but a devastating epidemic is not implausible. Heck, even now, Zika is intimidating. I doubt that our society can quickly engineer ourselves all the way to pure `0`s and `1`s.

If the side effects of industrialization — say, global warming and dramatically reduced biodiversity — allow nature’s destructive randomness knock us back to square one just as we’ve reached the ultimate reward of having mastered machines… Well. That would be poetic.

The artist, Antoine Collignon, appended this quote from The Animatrix to the image above:

“In the beginning, there was man. And for a time, it was good. But humanity’s so-called civil societies soon fell victim to vanity and corruption. Then man made the machine in his own likeness. Thus did man become the architect of his own demise.”

Humans are nothing if not expert self-saboteurs.

July 24, 2016

We Appear to Be Globally Heated

The Computing Generation and all subsequent generations will have to cope with climate change (née global warming). That’s my own demographic cohort and probably yours as well: those of us who grew up with laptop keyboards and seemingly instantaneous information transfers. It’s important to remember that global warming is only bad insofar as it affects human beings.

Nature doesn’t give a shit, inherently. Global warming is fine as far as Nature is concerned — the key point is that Nature isn’t concerned at all. Wild flora and fauna constitute a vast assortment of interlocking systems, not a single entity with agency. Events like mass extinctions are only “bad” because human beings want to exploit biodiversity. Moral rectitude or lack thereof is in the eye of the beholder.

I find this revelation both comforting and terrifying. On the one hand, I needn’t feel guilty about hurting Gaia. She doesn’t care. On the other hand, will I live long enough for none of this to matter?

March 12, 2016

Very Basic Climate Change Reflections

I put climate change on my list of cyberpunk-adjacent topics, but this is the first time I’ve written about it. Here’s my take: Anthropogenic global warming is bad in terms of its effect on human environments and our access to natural resources. It’s not intrinsically bad because intrinsic badness doesn’t exist; ecosystems change over time and that includes extinction events.

Illustration by JD Reeves.

Illustration by JD Reeves.

However, climate change could drastically change the trajectory of the next century or three. We might have to drop everything — especially industrialization — and rebuild from scratch. Maybe it’ll look like Snowpiercer (which I haven’t actually watched). Or maybe we’ll figure out an alternate fuel source quickly and things will stay relatively close to the way they are now. I don’t have the domain knowledge to make a confident guess.

I consider climate change a cyberpunk topic because I see cyberpunk as part of a long timeline of humans using technology to leverage economic and sociopolitical change. Or, to look at it from a different angle, a long timeline of humans inventing technologies that cause economic and sociopolitical change regardless of the inventors’ intent. I remain fascinated with the way human nature flows into whatever container it’s given.

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