“Physics – Zero Sum Game”, or “Back to the Future”
The Future I Was Promised (from Eurotrib)
BY De Clarke
Now I find myself facing the possibility that my lifetime occurred during an astonishing period of Good Old Days, an efflorescence of cheap energy and technoculture that may never recur — a one-shot deal. It seems hard to believe that anyone will be looking back on us with anything other than sullen rage, envy, blame, and hatred;, or perhaps in the best case an obscure and muddled religious awe. We — my parents’ generation and my own — will be the ones who “did it,” who screwed everything up, who were so stupid that knowing what we know we refused to change our ways and sentenced our grandchildren to some very dysfunctional situation… at least that’s what I fear.
I don’t look forward to the future any more. I was promised a bright Star Trek future, all shiny and clean. Now I look at hungry Chinese ex-peasants sifting recyclable materials out of multi-acre, mountainous waste dumps with their bare hands and I think, This is the future we have made for ourselves, nice innit. But the funny thing is, the more I look at where we actually are today… the less thrilled I am, on sober reflection, about that shiny Star Trek future I was originally offered.
Futurism, the art or rhetoric of envisioning the future, is at the heart of all our politics. What we believe about the future and the past fuels [ahem] our strategies and allegiances in the present. The narratives with which we make sense of the world, our lives, and history are cautionary tales; we direct our efforts to seeking certain outcomes and avoiding others, heading for “the happy ending” or as close as we can get to it, trying to “learn from the past” (or from the narrative our imaginations and prejudices have imposed on the past).
One of the most powerful narratives of Western industrialism has been Progress — the storyline being that “in the bad old days” everyone was poor, sick, hungry, unhappy, stupid, bullied and short-lived, and by the continuous improvement of technology these conditions have been more and more ameliorated; this trend will continue until we reach a Happy Ever After of abundance, freedom, health (maybe even immortality), luxury, high intelligence, universal leisure etc. The Good Days are yet to come! Nothing in the past is of the least value, because we have outgrown it and exceeded it in every way.
So here I want to talk about this narrative in the context of the Space Dream and the Jetsons Future, the Gernsback Continuum, the World’s Fair and Tomorrowland: the idea that our confinement to this ball of rock is the Bad Old Days, and we will look back on it from a future of abundance, when we mine the entire solar system for minerals and energy and colonise distant solar systems, finally transcending the limits of Earth.
Ironically one of the things we do (and spend a lot of money on) while pursuing the Space Dream, is intensive research into how to survive in a closed ecology. Some years ago I commented that the failure of Biosphere was hardly a good advertisement for our progress in this area. One futurist of my acquaintance, on hearing this cynical comment, protested:
“The Biosphere project was a fraud from the beginning and is now no more then an amusement park. The real research on closed environmental systems is being done by NASA and the Russian space program….”
Read full post. It’s well worth it!
R.S. Morris:
I kept reading after De’s essay (good grief! what a great writer) and came to the term “Doom Porn.” What a wonderful phrase! I am fully guilty and complicit in the spread of doom porn. I am also fighting with indecision as to whether or not spreading it is appropriate.
I had a disturbing revelation just a couple days ago. I was doing inventory on the trips I wanted to take this summe–in light of my newly-imposed “freedom”–and I suddenly had a distinct vision of the world getting BIGGER. All these years of cheap energy have conditioned me (along with most everyone else in this country anyway) to take travel for granted. “The world is shrinking,” went the proclamation.
But the other day–inside my head–the shrinkage jarred to a stop; I was looking at my internal atlas, following the routes to Seattle (VFP Nat’l Convention), Crawford (Easter vigil) and Mobile/New Orleans (return to help rebuild), and instead of calculating in miles and hours of travel, I saw the COST. And the map began growing to intimidating proportions.
I’m a roadtrip junkie kinda person, so this is pretty unsettling. I’m also practical, and a “peak oil” student, so I’ll deal. But, just like an earlier realization that we would probably never reach the promised Sci-Fi Utopia that’s been fed to me over the years, I now have to decide what kind of travel-recovery program I am going to enter to make this grim future bearable.
If I could just get people to visit me here in Wyoming.
12 April 2006, 1:54 pmJim Withey:
The trouble with left rhetoric is that it is as arrogant and in my humble opinion in many ways stupider than right-wing rhetoric.
10 May 2006, 3:39 amThose doctrinaire “correct” authoritarian leftists taught us I seem to remember that being eclectic was a bad thing; no doubt “incorrect”. Why is this so? What is the problem in having a variety of positive scientific functions and life experiences that blend well together or work well in a more closed environment?
Why are the choices that the intellectuals give us so closed and “uneclectic” (is that a word)? So we have these hippie types (who sold out en masse, by the way) critcizing industrial progress while they “mellow out” by listening to their amplified electric Grateful Dead music. (I think it sounds good too).
The “alternative” to this group and their ideas is the truly destructive use of such industrial progress in a narrow and arrogant fashion to accrue power and wealth.
Pardon me for being naive or stupid, but why hasn’t anyone of any significance proposed that we should not only stop spending so much on the military, but also why shouldn’t the taxpayers “invest” in scientists who can find alternative energy (particularly solar) so we can have our fun without ruining everything in the process. (It seems odd that a society that is so obsessed with “sound investments” wouldn’t consider this). “The Evergreen State” where I live, has rather tepid programs for keeping its nickname from becoming a joke. Hopefully some sort of evironmental/economic ecclecticism will happen sooner rather than later.
I would have to say our political choices are as stale and “uneclectic” as the societal philosophies they reflect. The efforts to do something simple like drastically reducing or eliminating the influence of money in politics are minimal and effete. We can’t even conceive of a democratic system with full employment. Churchill’s statement about democracy being the best choice amongst the bad choices offered rings pretty true right now.
So instead of using more rigid terminology like “democratic socialism”, perhaps we should consider something like “democratic ecclecticalism”. just a thought. It’s about time.
Stan:
I’ll let your straw man representation of the “left” go, and respond directly to alternative energy. The problem is much deeper than failure to diversify energy production… and this IS a place where some on the left, but ALL on the right, have continued to delude themselves. That delusion is not based on the correctness or in-corectness of “rhetoric”, but on a failure to apply the implication of one thing that is ALWAYS correct to the situation we find oursleves in. That one inescapable thing is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The laws of society are — at some level — fictions enforced with the threat of violence, and therefore laws we can break and sometimes get away with it. The Second Law is not that kind of law. It doesn’t get broken.
Alternative energy as a general idea is important, but the grim reality is that the way the world of almost 7 billion souls now functions, including how it feeds itself, is fundamentlaly designed around vast inputs of fossil hydrocarbons. These hydrocarbons are finite. The most portable of them with the biggest bang per unit of volume — oil — has peaked and will now begin a decline that marks the backside of what in history shall be a one-time event — hydrocarbon homo sapien.
The idea of alternative energy has to be tested against the reality. There are two of those realities, interfused but analyticalll separate: (1) No alternative out there can eve come close — calorie for calorie — to directly replacing the production of “energy” now based on burning oil, and (2) this is a social and not merely empirical situation. Capitalism is the system driving ALL production and consumption.
The question of preventing the continued vandalism against the biosphere, of implementing alternative energy systems, and the choice of going through the inevitable transition from hydrocarbon homo sapien to the post-hydrocrabon epoch as either a graduated, disciplined, technical process that is as painless as possible or a nightmarish catastrophe of disease, starvation, and war, is not a question we can address rhetorically or ecclectically. The introduction of every available alternative energy there is — in a capitalist world system (and you should take a bit of trouble to find out what capitalism actually is, before you critique the left’s critique) — is a drop in the bucket. The real social emergency we are facing, that goes WAY beyond the Evergreen State to places where billons of people already live on the razor-thin margins of survival, is only resolvable by dramatically CONSERVING the fossil hydrocarbons we have, and intentionally planning the energy soft-landing over the next several decades. That kind of planning doesn’t happen in a capitalist regime; and — my apologies to my anarchist friends — it can’t happen without the power of states.
I hate to be the bearer of rigorous news, but what I am talking about is precisely — socialism. Words have meanings.
Telling people only the stuff that makes them comfortable strikes me not only as dishonest, but irresponsible.
Cribbing from one of my favorites — Andrea Dworkin — I am a socialist, not the fun kind.
10 May 2006, 8:54 amJim Withey:
Stan, I must respond, short and to the point.
10 May 2006, 11:25 am1. To assume your opinions are unbiased (you’re no fun) or infallible is to my way of thinking, a mistake. I took the time a while back to read a long piece you wrote that appeared on the Counterpunch website. One of the premises you stated was that solar power was unviable, mostly due to lack of silicon material to make solar collection feasible on a large scale. I took the time to google the topic and found that there is not a shortage of such material, at least on the sites I was looking at. My reasonably intelligent neighbor also supported this idea. Balls in your court on that one.
2. I may sound redundant appropos point No.1, but scientists and dare we say, reformed? Special Forces operatives have biases and fallibilities. I don’t believe for a minute that people’s power politics (including and especially scientists) don’t influence their stance(s) before the world. Consider Bill Wattenburg, the right-wing nuclear physicist who hosts a radio talk show that I can hear up here in Washington State at night. He combines an avuncular, in my opinion phony concern for the “working people” with a subtly dirty minded personality. (If he wants to sue me for slander, so what. You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip. Besides, I could probably defeat him pro se by just tape recording one of his shows and using his probable slanders against “eco frauds” and others as a countersuit. I’m not going to waste my time straightjacketing myself by worrying about legal technicalities. I believe in free speech, almost universally.) Anyway, he believes in nuclear power and basically wiping out the Middle East if they commit a significant terrorist attack agaist us. For those and other reasons I would sarcastically call him a “swell guy”. Assuming Abert Einstein would be the same type of person he used to be, if he were alive today, there’s a monumental gulf between the two nuclear physicists’ philosophies. People have different reasons for espousing their perhaps similarly intelligent opinions.
3. Like the advice you get when going to the doctor, get more than one opinion. I have the belief that society is going to have to “invest” in the eclectic means to solve our problems. For the time being, good opinions, scientific and otherwise are going to have to be, with few exceptions, bought by the society to the extent that that society is progressive and discerning. In the near to mid term, that could be taxpayer funding of scientific research into energy and its applications. We fund other things scientific with tax dollars, so why not the best (I’m still hoping for solar as No. 1) alternative energy solutions as well.
That’s my two cents worth on this topic, I at least am grateful for the forum you’ve provided to discuss these matters. The future is in our hands, each one of us.
Jim Withey:
I appreciate alot of what you say, Stan, but must add that “figuring things out” is a complex process.
11 May 2006, 9:00 amI feel that metaphorically speaking, there are alot of those 5’9″ mafia cut-ups in life out to “hit” you in varios ways. As much as I don’t like war, I can appreciate that we’re sort of in one in various ways, and that your military experience probably taught you about probing those enemies for information without getting “hit”. That’s what I feel like while trying to discern who’s saying what and why.
The key is, Stan , I think some but not all of your comments ring true. Just trying to make progress.
Elki:
Jim Withey
You sounds like you live with wealth, and probably can’t see the bigger picture. Left, right – who the hell cares about these groups, i don’t know who is who, all i know is there’s a diabolical need for everyone to wake up, stop numbing themselves with roses, and see how corrupt the variety of systems that are in place right now, are.
I personally don’t view the future as negatively as the author of this article (I’m a trekky through and through), but at least she’s being realistic. If you see what Germany is doing to make changes in it’s energy source (by becoming 100% renewable energy driven) then we can follow this precendent and stop being so dooms dayish about things.
Get positive, get active, make a change. It ain’t that hard to do.
23 June 2006, 7:24 pm