(Eminent scientist) Frank Fenner sees no hope for humans

Dr. Frank Fenner, who died late last year at the age of 95, was an Australian scientist with a distinguished career in the field of virology. His two greatest achievements are cited as overseeing the eradication of smallpox, and the control of Australia's rabbit plague through the introduction of Myxoma virus.

This article from June, 2010 was probably the last interview he gave, and it was about the looming extinction of yet another planetary viral scourge...

:scared:

our demise!
Let the healing begin....2111

Aren't we lucky?

We are on top of the wave, so to speak. Humans have never had it so good. And the educated amongst us can see down the road. But I tell ya, it's gotta be depressing as hell to have to listen to us tell the truth? Eh?

Not only are we at a peak level of human accomplishment, but the changes are now happening fast enough to be perceptible on a decadal timescale. We actually get to experience the unraveling.

Oh, wait...

when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. ...

I think the realization that the crisis has arrived is one of the things that's behind the global surge in "awakening" I'm seeing these days. Some people couch their new open-eyed awareness in environmental terms, some in social-justice terms, and others see it as spiritual, but it's all flowing from the same root.

An old Cherokee told his grandson, "My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all.
One is Evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies, & ego.
The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, integrity, humility, kindness, empathy, & truth."

The boy thought about it, and asked, "Grandfather, which wolf wins?"

The old man quietly replied, "The one you feed."

Yes, it has a lot to say about facing a crisis with dignity and awareness.

Here's hoping for more joy, peace, love, integrity, humility, kindness, empathy, & truth in the world.

Thank you for that. :hug:

....I am a pretty tough individual. Love confronting problems head on.

But when it comes to this 'whole earth' scenario.... I'm freaking scared.

I can just imagine what it is like for our youth. And all we can do is try to educate them.

Peace.

playing video games, texting their friends, and rioting in the streets over movies about raves (as evidenced in NoHo last night).

I have no disrespect for anyone of any age group, but I'm much more likely to have a conversation about the last episode of America's Got Talent (or whatever) with my grandparents than I am with my college classmates. There are very few young people I know who aren't aware of the problems we face, and who aren't making some effort to figure out how to solve them. The difficulty is in prioritizing those problems (because the truth is they're all so tied together that you can't solve one without solving all of them,) figuring out how to make a meaningful effort, and deciding what institutions and movements are trustworthy enough for our time and energy. This isn't exactly an easy time to be a young person in America; how do you make the choices that will define your life when the future is uncertain at best?

(edited for a less confrontational title. I'm honestly not trying to pick a fight, but I've seen a lot of needless attacks on young people on DU, and I do get a little defensive about it)

I apologize for the state of the planet. Life is about being kind to each other, having compassion for ourselves and for others, finding Joy, giving Back. You are young, Use your Youth. Have fun and have sex and have love. None of us knows how long or how it will be. Have Passion. Talk to each other. Turn off the computer sometimes and Play. Read. Write. Draw. Paint. Sing. Be Kind.

of what is really important in our lives. Thank you.

And here we all (mostly) are, attempting to prop up the economic system that facilitates that.

I'm a deeply pessimistic (technically qualified) ecologist. It doesn't really help that at least I/we decided not to have any kids of our own, and we're in our mid-fifties now and living a quite resource-frugal lifestyle down here in the, still climatically-benevolent, Canary Isles.

I don't hear the words you spoke very often. You and I share a common core. We're in a very small minority.

I too have suffered greatly. The 95 year old man shared my views. Views that cost me happiness and health to hold and endure. I processed what I saw into rage and hate and resentment. I watched the most beautiful turned into garbage. And saw the future with clarity. And it did come true.

I won't drag out a long reply. For brevity's sake, I just want to salute and cheer you. I love people who see, and care.

:hug:

What will become of the domestic animals when we're gone?

they've been waiting for years for the chance to take over. :evilgrin:

or similar, how to manipulate things?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb#Other_animals_with_opposable_digits

in my patients occasionally.

The way he grips his rawhide chew with his paw gives me the willies...

Your subject line caused a real "Your what?" moment that really wasn't
helped by misreading the post content ...

:evilgrin:

That will teach me to take a step back and proof-read before I hit "Post message"!

On the other hand, since we're talking about my schnoodle...

As my MIT brother put it, "It's going to happen so fast, we aren't going to know what hit us."

We talk via phone every couple-few years, and he, of all people, signs off with "Love you, sis" each time. This, after his never knowing what my middle name was! :cry:

But, water, without human intervention is scarce.

Though, I was also thinking in evolutionary terms, as Viva_La_Revolution sussed.

Families need to stick together, no matter how far apart, if you follow me. So tell your brother what he doesn't know, already. :hug:

...and that skin has diseases; one of those diseases is man." -- Nietzsche

truly true

... one of the coolest geological phenomena to see is a fault line.

In Red Rocks Colorado there is a fault line that that I had the pleasure to see which, physically, exists as a gap of about 1 to 3 inches wide, but the temporal difference in the age of the rocks on either side of that small gap is measured in hundreds of millions of years.

Too cool.

However, as an analogy, we (individually and as a species) are very likely to jump across a similar gap in technology, once our colossally complex system (i.e. the modern age) begins to collapse in short order due to any one of the major issues confronting our species: overpopulation, climate change, peak oil or the economics of inifinite growth on a finite planet.

It will not be pretty, and it will likely be televised (at least initially).

the more fragile it is.

The excessive complexity of our civilization is the context for the whole thing unraveling. Adding more layers of complexity at this point is likely to make matters worse, not better. Tainter's book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" addresses this very well.

On the other side of the coin is the complexity of the problem space we're confronting, both in terms of the number of issues and the interactions between them. In some cases they amplify each other and in others if you try to solve one you make another one worse.

but not that 1988 book - I was beginning to earn nearly finished earning a living as a software engineer by then.

But, you're right. This goes to the heart of the matter.

I don't have any solutions to offer, dismissing perhaps possible technological (and totalitarian) fixes, beyond catastrophic socio-political revolution.

Nb. This certainly resonates with me (and from my more recently acquired Spanish Barbarian perspective ;) ):

We often assume that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Archeological evidence from human bones indicates that average nutrition actually improved after the collapse in many parts of the former Roman Empire. Average individuals may have benefited because they no longer had to invest in the burdensome complexity of empire. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.

/... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

With the austerity programs being enacted in many countries of the world, I would imagine there's going to be a die-off of the poor. Then the rich will be the only ones left.

We're going to end up throwing rocks at one another, without the resources to recreate what's been lost.

Doing less, doing less slower, and doing less inefficiently.

"Doing less" backs us out of overshoot - in theory we could get all the way out if we do only 2/3 of what we're doing today, but in practice it would probably require us to cut it in half.

Doing things less efficiently makes the whole enterprise more resilient overall, since resilience and efficiency are inversely proportional in many activities.

I don't think we will accomplish either of those voluntarily, at least not on anything but a personal scale. We will eventually accomplish both changes involuntarily - accompanied by a lot of wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.

Although greater inefficiency, in resource-consumption terms, implies greater waste.

As long as doing less (especially all the unnecessary, low quality, essentially valueless consumption) becomes the priority.

It might well be, but accepting it as fact will make it certain.

Really? And suppose I don't accept it and it turns out that way anyway, whose fault will it be then? Some other poor schnook who didn't believe hard enough?

Sorry, I categorically refuse to don that mendacious mantle of blame. We all have the right to come to our own conclusions. I don't clap for Tinkerbell at my age.

and as you convince others of the inevitability of doom (from which you seem to derive some kind of bizarre pleasure) your share increases proportionately. If you don't accept it and it turns out that way anyway, then it won't be your fault.

Acceptance is surrender. You can stamp your foot and refuse the blame, that doesn't decrease your culpability a whit.

Which is by way of saying, "Thanks, but you can keep the box. I have enough."

http://www.cooltheearth.us/

He was my prof and I love him very much. http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hartelab/

a rabbit shot on the run. It is alrady dead, but it keeps going for a while in the same diection before it falls over.

We might not go extinct that fast, but even if we do survive for a while, it will be as small pockets of people scraping out a desperate living on a poisoned planet.

After all, humans survived the Toba bottleneck that reduced our numbers to just a few thousand, along with two ice ages bracketing that cataclysm, and here we are ravaging the planet today. So, I think Fenner's conclusion is too extreme, by at least one use of the word "possibly".

What I do think is inevitable is the disintegration of modern industrial civilization, one way or another.

We all have our own ways of coping psychologically with that possibility. Some of us choose to work on local problems, some are monkey-wrenchers, some are are activists or policy wonks, others just get on with their daily lives. I try to lead a mindful, localized life, but my main response is to be a "vocal witness", as I describe in the article Bearing Witness to Collapse.

This OP has been another step on that path.

That's my most likely worst-case scenario.

My ultimate worst-case scenario is turning into another Venus, but I think it's far less likely.

My reply:

Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
--- Dylan Thomas

Translation: the human race will survive because that is what we are programmed to do.

Capitalism, however, cannot survive along with us.

Rage is too hard on my spirit. I much prefer acceptance to resistance - I really enjoy just watching events unfold.

ETA: "Wrong" has be qualified. what may seem profoundly wrong to you may seem perfectly natural to me, and vice versa. Wrong is not an absolute state, but a personal judgement.

The poem is not advocating violent outbursts. It (and I) meant the alternate definitions: 6.) ardor; fervor; enthusiasm: poetic rage. 7.) the object of widespread enthusiasm

FYI: wrong does not reside in one of the grey areas. It is not subjective, it is absolute. Statements are either right or wrong, empirically, as judged by the society or by history or scientific inquiry.

I see nothing wrong with accepting the coming of night, either physically or metaphorically. If you do, by all means have at it.

I prefer to use the terms "correct" and "incorrect" when talking about quantitative judgments. An action can be right when seen from one viewpoint, and wrong when seen from another. For example, I think agriculture is wrong, because I take the viewpoint of the non-human species that are extirpated in the process. From the purely human viewpoint it's right, because 7 billion of us need to eat, and this is the only way we have right now to accomplish that.

By 2050 it'll be 10 billion of us... we'll need additional farmland equivalent in size to Brazil. Unless global warming makes Antarctica seem like Kansas by then we are in serious trouble if we continue farming in the dirt. "The Green Revolution" was nothing but a short term bandaid. We need to stop thinking just like farmers did in 1905, grubbing around in the dirt and hoping for good weather. Greenhouse hydroponic growing done by qualified personnel under the direction of a hydroponic farming degreed professional is the only solution.

Even today, with Big Ag receiving $$$ Trillions worldwide, Monsanto pushing GM this, that, and everything, agriculture using 70% of all fresh water on Earth, and 20% of all oil burned in America (who even knows in the other countries), even with all those resources thrown at it 40% of the produce grown today will rot before it gets distributed to market. Stop that waste and we can feed everyone on Earth today and have a little elbow room while we transition to greenhouse hydroponic growing.

I want to see our numbers shrink to under 2 billion by the end of the century. A perspective like that completely changes my preferences when it comes to topics like farming. I'd much rather see us hit a food supply limit over the next 20 years to start that process rolling.

I suspect this position is incomprehensible to many.

...is that it will occur almost entirely among people that do not look like you.

Now, I do not for a minute believe that you are a racist, and I've never seen you post anything remotely racist. However, the inescapable truth is that if food supplies start to dwindle it is the poor countries of the world, not the rich ones, that will suffer. Even if you are talking about proactively reducing the population before serious food shortages kick in, you are still talking about reducing populations in the third world because that is where all the growth is. These facts make it hard for people of color to listen to you talk about what you "want" without getting a little angry.

However, a population decline from 7 billion to 1 billion isn't going to play many favourites with skin colour.

However, a population decline from 7 billion to 1 billion isn't going to play many favourites with skin colour.

If food production starts to dip, countries that are currently food exporters will stop exporting food and keep it for their own populations. Here are the top ten agricultural exporters in the world:

1) United States
2) France
3) Netherlands
4) Germany
5) United Kingdom
6) Canada
7) Australia
8) Italy
9) Belgium
10) Spain

Now, what do all the countries in that list have in common? Hmmmm...

The problems won't start with famine. They will begin with economic collapse, that will affect the most prosperous countries first - who also happen to be those on your list of white men. Infectious diseases will follow along behind. Malnutrition and disease will rapidly become major problems in the USA if the medical and social security systems go south. In fact I'd expect to see problems like that manifesting in the USA very quickly following the onset of an extended global depression. Some countries will be better off as things unwind, and some will be worse off. But if we were to end up with a global population 15% of today's numbers, I'm pretty sure that the USA will have paid its price along with Egypt, Lesotho and Laos.

Yes, Africa and Asia are most at risk. Unfortunately, we will not be able save them, because the problem will be too big. Depending on the severity of our own problems we might not even try. Hell, we're already not trying to save them, even though the problems they face today are tiny and the world is in the best shape it's ever been in. Yes, it sucks. It's also the reality of the situation.

such as cheese or beer, and so isn't an accurate measure of which countries will have basic surpluses they can fall back on. More importantly, it's just gross exports (for instance, the UK is a net importer of food - £31 billion imports/year, £11 billion exports), so if international food trade dried up, the UK would be in a dire position.

When you were in school your teacher would grade a quiz.

Your interpretation: Question #n is marked with a red "X" but all the others were marked with a check mark. That must mean that there is simply a difference of opinion or viewpoint between you and the teacher. You are "Correct" but the textbooks, scientists, government,and your teacher think (on that question) you are "WRONG." You feel that you are correct but can offer no evidence, nor logical reason for your feeling.

My interpretation: Wrong is wrong, incorrect, false, untrue, etc.

However, that's not the only way we use the word:

wrong:   
1. not in accordance with what is morally right or good: a wrong deed.
2. deviating from truth or fact; erroneous: a wrong answer.
3. not correct in action, judgment, opinion, method, etc., as a person; in error: You are wrong to blame him.

You are using definitons 2 and 3, and I agree with them. However, I think that when we use the word "wrong" about actions, values or beliefs, much of the sense of definition 1 bleeds into the conversation. I'm concerned about that, because it clouds factual judgments with a layer of moral judgment that may not be immediately perceptible. The objective fact gets overlaid with the subjective, personal, moral significance of the fact.

When that happens people can become very entrenched in their positions. Their sense of moral rightness adds extra subjective weight to any facts under dispute and prevents a fully objective assessment. I know this happens because I've watched myself do it, much to my later chagrin.

My comments were firmly rooted in the modern "western" concept of moral right and wrong. I can see your point that societies choose their morals (or evolve them perhaps), e.g. the Mayans and the Incas believed it was morally right to have human sacrifice -- something that modern society would find morally repugnant.

You are correct that if our society collapses as you envision then our current mores go out the window and "dog eat dog" becomes the morality that people live (or die) by.

I just hope that you are wrong (incorrect) that this societal collapse is coming.

I used to think that "the collapse of civilization" would be s sudden, apocalyptic, universal event with an associated roar of thunder - sort of a globalized manifestation of the collapse of the WTC. The more I think about it the less likely that seems. I now recognize that some places will devolve quickly, some slowly, and the circumstances will be different in each place.

Because the physical circumstances in each region will be different, the associated evolution of culture and morality will be different in each place as well. This is in line with Marvin Harris' proposal that the abstract components of culture (institutions, values and beliefs) tend be driven by the physical circumstances (resources, food and population). The implication is that some places will develop a more competitive dog-eat-dog culture in response to unfolding hard times, while others may develop a more cooperative, altruistic culture.

We can see examples of this in today's world. The United States, for example, already has a strong dog-eat-dog morality, while Norway has a very altruistic culture. Cuba is quite altruistic while Angola is considerably less so. Altruism and cooperation have strong survival value, so I would not expect them to disappear even if civilization itself devolved. On the other hand, in many places the loss of opportunity will trigger deep self-protective instincts.

Whether my expectation of the nature of coming events is incorrect will be be revealed by the event themselves. Whether my equanimity about the possibility is "right or wrong" in a moral sense is for each of us to decide, and that decision will be driven much more by subjective values than objective facts.

then capitalistic tendencies won't go away, seeing as how we want to privatize the planet for our use.

Think of each species as a corporation, and the planet as the government. Functioning governments regulate corporations. Functioning planets/environments/ecosystems/whatever regulate species. What do we as a species do? We attempt to write the rules in our favor, much like many of the major corporations that we know and love. Now the top 1% own most of the wealth. It's the same with we humans, in relation to the rest of life on this world.

Capitalism isn't some other thing. It's what we do. We privatize the profits of the planet, while socializing the costs to the rest of life. We don't like the regulations built into the web of life on the planet, so we unaccountably and undemocratically take what we want. We even give ourselves vast bonuses and golden parachutes for doing it.

when we try to pull the rip cord on our golden parachute...

It's only our civilization that has behaved this way en masse. Up until the invention of totalitarian agriculture there was a very different cultural narrative in play. You could still see it in some indigenous societies until we finally got them all.

If the coming events unleash nuclear war.

If non-nuclear, I'm guessing we'll be knocked down to a few hundred thousand or less. Humanity will be unrecognizable to us today. But extinct? Nah.

...the more likely they are to subscribe to the notion that the world is doomed. It is almost as if they fancy the notion that their generation represented some sort of peak (in a positive or negative sense) and after they are gone the world simply can't possibly continue. It is an odd type of hubris that is almost always wrong.

the more they subscribe to an irrational optimism about the future. I suspect their lack of experience with the vagaries of life, and the feeling that their own lives stretch limitlessly in front of them make them believe that anything and everything is possible.

The truth is, as always, somewhere between these two extremes.

And statistically speaking, they are as a result more likely to be right about the future.

On average the future is almost always better than the past assuming your criteria is standard of living--which I believe is a fair criteria to use given the OP. (When you assert that people love to bring up how people in the Middle Ages were worse off then those in the Roman Empire. However, that is not only a very Eurocentric view of things, it is also an elitist view of things. Standards of living did not decline outside of Europe over that period, and there was precious little difference between the life of a Roman slave and a feudal serf. The only people who really saw a significant decline in standard of living over that period were a relative handful of rich Europeans.)

If I stick one hand in a bucket of ice, and one hand in a bucket of boiling water, "on average" I'm at a comfortable temperature.

The past can't be taken as an uncritical guide to the future, we also have to analyze the portents and signs inherent in current events. Ice ages, deforestation and soil depletion happen, and change the course of civilizations. For the first time in history we have the ability to foresee the course of events before it becomes visible to the naked eye. The question is, will it help? Or will we just keep ambling along with the herd, placidly chewing our cuds, thinking "Thus it was, thus it is, thus it shall ever be" - until we all tumble off a cliff together?

I agree that when you are as close to the land as the average serf or slave, going from bad to worse isn't as much of a change as it is for a Roman Senator or feudal Lord. That's one of the issues with comparing the impact of "collapse" on Africa to its impact on North America or Europe. The further you have to fall, the more it's gonna hurt.

For the first time in history we have the ability to foresee the course of events before it becomes visible to the naked eye.

I see no evidence that this is true. The past is littered with the failed predictions of those that claim the ability to foresee the course of events, and I see no reason why this will change anytime soon. In reality, at any given point in time there are some people making optimistic predictions, some people making pessimistic predictions, and some people predicting the status quo will continue. The fact that somebody ends up being "correct" is evidence of nothing more than the future has to take one of those forms.

Satellite image of advancing deforestation in Brazil

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/chile/rapa-nui-easter-island/history

They impoverished themselves by massive overuse of resources; but their worst moment was significant contact with Europeans, which brought disease, slavery and exploitation. If you're trying to say our species will go extinct, it's not a good comparison to use.

If by recent we mean within the last 50,000 years. Probably some genetic lines ended with Toba, but even through that bottleneck we've been able to follow mitochondrial DNA back 150,000 years to mitochondrial Eve.

The human remnants of failed civilizations scattered and merged with surrounding populations. Civilizations disappeared, but their people did not go extinct. Extinction of human beings is going to take a lot more than global warming. My bet for a candidate mechanism would be a change in ocean chemistry ("Paging Dr. Canfield"). Extinction of our global industrial civilization won't be such a tough nut to crack, though.