It looks to me like the techies are starting to get anxious.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/05/fermi-paradox-and-end-of.html
Well, I’m responding to my own post, but this comic seems appropriate. ;D
Honey, they’ve been anxious in Seattle en masse. I know cuz I serve them coffee. 
I saw a post like like this on The Archdruid Report some time ago and it made me think. That post deserves a topic of its own, and my thoughts about it aren’t organized enough right now. But then I saw Life After People, and they said something like radio signals degrade into background noise after only 2 light-years? Alpha Centauri is 4-ish, so why should anybody expect to find anything?
Lets not forget about ancient and modern UFO sightings, or the anomalies like stretches of green glass in the deserts, or gold chains in coal that are attributed to everything from ancient technologically advanced human civilizations to “proof” that man walked the Earth with dinosaurs 6000 years ago. Couldn’t it just as easily be said to be evidence of ancient extraterrestrial visitation?
I’m no scientist, but Fermi’s paradox seems like a non-issue to me.
Hey Locke, that comic is hilarious. Where did you get it?
Hey Scout,
I found it posted over at The Fall of Civilization (So Very Doomed). The comic itself is called Pictures for Sad Children. I read through a few of their other comics, but didn’t find the rest of it very interesting.
I like the comic. It’s true, technology seems like an ersatz religion for some.
Has anyone seen these links before? (Sorry if you have already). They’re all about peak oil:
http://www.kunstler.com
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/8r17begefKA&hl=en"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8r17begefKA&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Kunstler ties the peak oil problem to flaws in the financial problem and to flaws in modern city planning.
Just watched the first third of this 2006 talk called The Energy Non-Crisis, in which he claims Alaska has significantly more oil than stated, the true amount was classified, Russia has discovered significantly more than they state and oil is primarily not a fossil fuel. As for his credibility, his predictions on some things like oil prices before and since this talk have been spot on. It doesn’t seem like he made up his story.
While I don’t think he grasps that at best such oil would only delay peak oil, and he doesn’t know the numbers behind the conclusions to get a better sense of their true scale, I like to hear alternate perspectives for the sake of intellectual honesty. Is peak-oil not in the near future? Or is he solely telling 99.99% of people who think Civilization is the way people are supposed to live, what they want to hear to sell his book? What do you think?
I think it’s more the latter, and probably because he himself wants to believe it. But even if peak oil is delayed and/or its effects won’t really hit for awhile, global civ is collapsing anyway. Just as big of issues as peak oil, and possibly bigger, are the problems of peak water and peak topsoil, occurring in many places (particularly the world’s “breadbasket” places, like central N America), and the collapse of the biosphere in general. And of course there’s accelerating climate change (always turning out to be worse than predictions indicate), a major solar flare event coming up, and potentially a polar shift in the earth’s magnetic field (we’re due for one, and the great increase in geo-magnetic activity points to that possibly happening soon) - the sum total of which has and will continue to cause a massive increase in earth changes, natural “disasters” like earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic activity, tropical storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, etc. There’s also the global economic crisis, not even caused by any of these other things but by the inherent instability of capitalism (the crisis of over-production and the completely absurd inequality of wealth) - along with increasing civil unrest around the world as it continues to get harder and harder for ordinary people to survive.
Putting all these factors together, it is clear that civ is doomed, and in fact may only have a few short years of “stability” left - regardless of peak oil (although peak oil will certainly accelerate the decline when it really starts to hit).
The idea that any oil producer would understate their reserves on purpose is ridiculous just on the surface. Letting people believe you have less oil would mean less market confidence. Just look how much effort the Saudis have gone through to lie about their reserves. If there’s any fudging of numbers, it’s to make the reserves look bigger, not smaller.
On the surface, it would seem that way. Then you factor in that an understated reserve now is tomorrow’s “never gonna run out, look, it grows back” spin and it suddenly makes much more sense.
That’s my “Devil’s Advocate” play for today. Reality is that we’re teetering and I wish we’d just fall already and get it all over with. I don’t wanna be 60 when it happens.
After reading many more comics on that site than I intended to, I finally came across another cool one.
http://www.picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=262
