This fall, The Institute for the Future invites you to play Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. It’s not just about envisioning the future—it’s about inventing the future. Everyone is welcome to join the game. Watch for the opening volley of threats and survival stories, September 2008.

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This is a game of survival, and we need you to survive.

Super-threats are massively disrupting global society as we know it. There’s an entire generation of homeless people worldwide, as the number of climate refugees tops 250 million. Entrepreneurial chaos and “the axis of biofuel” wreak havoc in the alternative fuel industry. Carbon quotas plummet as food shortages mount. The existing structures of human civilization—from families and language to corporate society and technological infrastructures—just aren’t enough. We need a new set of superstructures to rise above, to take humans to the next stage.

You can help. Tell us your story. Strategize out loud. Superstruct now.

It’s your legacy to the human race.

Full Story: Institute for the Future

(via Grinding)

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Our planet is not at risk from the world’s most powerful particle physics experiment, a report has concluded.

The document addresses fears that the Large Hadron Collider is so energetic, it could have unforeseen consequences.

Critics are worried that mini-black holes made at the soon-to-open facility on the French-Swiss border might threaten the Earth’s very existence.

But the report, issued the European Organization for Nuclear Research, says there is “no conceivable danger”.

Full Story: BBC

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“For the third time in less than 15 years, the End of the World draws near. It’s discussed in coffee shops and saloons, and texted from couches by punks of the New Age while UFO Hunters flickers unwatched on TV. Theories inundate the Internet and books are already in print. Although apocalyptic theorizing might seem a hard sell in these grim times, conferences are being staged, at least two major motion pictures are planned, and the collective consciousness wonders if the date 2012 is already copyrighted. We can be certain we are going to hear a mess of both ominous and grandly metaphysical predictions for 2012 before the crucial date arrives.

We have, of course, seen all this before. In July of 1999, after much consternation and endless documentaries on the History Channel, we survived the quatrains of Nostradamus predicting terror descending from the sky. Then, on New Year’s Day 2000, we made it unscathed through Y2K and the near-hysterical scenarios that every computer across the planet would crash due to a basic time-keeping glitch. Airplanes were supposed to fall from the sky that time, and the Midwest find itself without power in mid-winter. A third major End Time in less than a decade is hard to embrace. Too many hints of that cracker-barrel “fool me once” proverb that George Bush can never quite remember. On the other hand, stress levels are currently running high, and that is frequently when an Armageddon panic pops.”

(via Los Angeles CityBeat. h/t: Doc 40)

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Full Story: Guardian

(via Disinfo)

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Warren Ellis writes:

The IEEE Spectrum “special report” on The Singularity makes for interesting reading, but I’d like you to try something as you click through it. When you read these essays and interviews, every time you see the word “Singularity,” I want you to replace it in your head with the term “Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

(My personal favourite right now is “The Flying Spaghetti Monster represents the end of the supremacy of Homo sapiens as the dominant species on planet Earth.”)

The Singularity is the last trench of the religious impulse in the technocratic community. The Singularity has been denigrated as “The Rapture For Nerds,” and not without cause. It’s pretty much indivisible from the religious faith in describing the desire to be saved by something that isn’t there (or even the desire to be destroyed by something that isn’t there) and throws off no evidence of its ever intending to exist. It’s a new faith for people who think they’re otherwise much too evolved to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any other idiot back-brain cult you care to suggest.

Vernor Vinge, the originator of the term, is a scientist and novelist, and occupies an almost unique space. After all, the only other sf writer I can think of who invented a religion that is also a science-fiction fantasy is L Ron Hubbard.

Does George Lucas count?

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1. Wired’s Inconvenient Truths (did Stewart Brand write this? It sounds a lot like this)

2. Counterpoint: Dangers of Focusing Solely on Climate Change by WorldChanging’s Alex Steffen

3. EcoGeek point by point response

4. More from Alex Steffen

I mostly agree with EcoGeek’s response. But here are a few additional thoughts:

“Accept Genetic Engineering”

In general, yes. Specific GM projects might be bad, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with biohacking. Every technology must be considered on a case by case basis.

“Carbon Credits Were a Great Idea, But the Benefits Are Illusory”

I’ve generally been more in favor of carbon tax than carbon credits, but EcoGeek makes a valid point about about the sulfur dioxide cap-and-trade market. So I’ll have to give this one some more thought. But offsetting’s not off to a good start.

“Embrace Nuclear Power”

If nuclear waste can be managed effectively (a big if), there’s still the insane cost to be reckoned with. Alex is right to say it’s not just about carbon.

“Used Cars, Not Hybrids”

EcoGeek’s objection here makes little sense. Certainly hybrids are better than other new cars, or used cars with below average gas mileage (or maybe even average gas mileage). But that’s hardly the point. But really, like Alex says, the greenest car is the one that doesn’t exist. (Sadly, I’ve had to take up driving again, due to work requirements.)

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Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. “Maybe they’ll synthesise food. I don’t know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco’s, in the form of Quorn. It’s not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it.” But he fears we won’t invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects “about 80%” of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. “But this is the real thing.”

[…]

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”

Full Story: Guardian

Contra: A skeptical look at the economics of nuclear energy from the Nation

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Connelly criticizes Ms. Gandhi, influential author Paul Ehrlich (”The Population Bomb”), and other thought leaders who agreed that only population control could save the world from poverty and other maladies. The 20th century marked the first time the future of a species – not only its numbers but also its nature – became the object of its own design, he writes. People eradicated diseases, regulated migration, and manipulated fertility rates. Human populations became the subject of scientific experiments and political struggles. The stakes – and the consequences – were huge.

Americans were the first to pursue policies to shape the world population and played a leading role in institutionalizing the science of demography and the political strategy of family planning. But critics on both the left and the right have attacked population control as something perpetrated by white, wealthy, elite people (especially in the United States), upon the rest of the world, particularly poor nations, where populations had been spiraling out of control.

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But now that Asians have reduced their reproductive rate to 2.1 children, for example, there are other issues to consider. If they also have air conditioning and automobiles, they will have a much greater impact on the global ecosystem than a billion more subsistence farmers, he writes.

Full Story: Christian Science Monitor

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Sometime in the latter half of this century, human population will peak. Having swelled to a bit over nine billion people, our numbers will begin to drop as people age and women worldwide pass through the urban transition, gain control over their own life-choices and have fewer children.

After that, population will proceed to decline by the middle of the 22nd century to a number somewhere between 8.5 billion and 5.6 billion (depending it seems largely on whose assumptions about longevity growth you find most credible).

That’s pretty much the consensus position among demographers (though there is a range of belief about when the peak will happen and whether we can expect to more or less plateau at 8.5 billion or experience a long bumpy slope to a stable-state population of about 6 billion). Note that we don’t need to assume any sort of apocalypse here: this is the orderly progression of human beings passing through a post-industrial demographic threshold you can already see in cultures from Japan to Italy to Finland.

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The standard response to these facts is that some new technology will “save” us, and make limits irrelevant. But I am consistently impressed, when I speak with folks who are hard at work in the fields of biotechnology, molecular engineering and software design, at how real a sense of limits actually exists among the smarter ones. There are things we don’t know how to do now and may never (in any foreseeable time span) know how to do; there are others that seem like good ideas until you start doing them and encounter the unintended consequences; there are still others that work, but work in ways that mean something different than we expected. Where in the 90s we expected emerging technologies to unleash the boundless, more contemporary thinking about these technologies seems to me to be all about seeing them not as magic but as tools: profoundly useful, if used right, but perhaps far less transformative than once we hoped. They may greatly extend the range of actions we can take within the fundamental limits we face, but they most likely won’t change the limits themselves.

Full Story: WorldChanging.

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“The builders of the world’s biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.

Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe’s CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there’s no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they’re bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is due for startup later this year at CERN’s headquarters on the French-Swiss border. It’s expected to tackle some of the deepest questions in science: Is the foundation of modern physics right or wrong? What existed during the very first moment of the universe’s existence? Why do some particles have mass while others don’t? What is the nature of dark matter? Are there extra dimensions of space out there that we haven’t yet detected?

Some folks outside the scientific mainstream have asked darker questions as well: Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into “strangelets” that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?”

(via Cosmic Log- MSNBC)

(Related: Virtual tour of LHC via Popular Science Blog)

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also:

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Today sees the inauguration of the Svalbard global seed vault, a top-security repository that will house batches of seeds from nearly every variety of food crop on the planet, such as wheat, rice or maize. The aim is to protect them in case of a global catastrophe. “It is the last line of defence against the extinction of our agricultural diversity,” says Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Diversity Crop Trust (GDCT), the brain behind the project. “People are aware of the extinction of the dinosaurs, but they don’t know that we are currently experiencing a mass extinction of our crop diversity.”

According to Fowler, maintaining agricultural diversity is essential to protect our food supply. “We need [it] to help farmers and to help agriculture adapt to climate change, pests and diseases, droughts, and whatever demands we’re going to have make of agriculture, including feeding more people.”

Full Story: Guardian.

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Alexander Cockburn has recently published an article called “I am an intellectual blasphemer,” about the treatment he has received as a global warming doubter. Full Article: Spiked.

I’m not a scientist, much less a climate scientist. So as a concerned citizen it’s up to me to look to scientists and science journalists to form an educated opinion about human-centric global warming. My conclusion: it appears that the scientific consensus is that global warming is occurring and that it is at least partially caused by human activities. It also appears that global warming doubters have been defecting at a greater rate than global warming believers.

Scientific consensus has been wrong before, and will be wrong again. The case of Galileo is often brought up by those who wish to challenge the authority of the scientific community. And indeed scientific opinion can at times be as ridged as any religion. But history provides us with far more discredited cranks than vindicated Galileos. So if the fate of the planet is at stake, I’ll bet with the scientific community even if I’m rooting for the dark horse (really, it would be nice if there were no such thing as global warming).

But that isn’t really the point of Cockburn’s article. He seems mostly to be miffed at the treatment he’s received for having taken such a politically incorrect view. But how would Cockburn expect people to react if he suddenly took up the creationism, phrenology, radionics, or some other discredited theory? Would he really expect people to take his arguments seriously then?

(more…)

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While this is an interesting and short read, worth its perusal, I found this little snippet quite interesting about possible solutions to help the U.S. out of its sinking situation. I’m interested in the first point, but like I said, the whole thing is worth reading:

We might possibly be saved, he explains, if the nation engages in massive, radical reform in three areas: 1) Eliminating the current income tax system and moving to a national retail sales tax of 33 percent. 2) Privatizing social security so that workers own their savings accounts and the federal government can no longer swipe funds from Social Security. 3) Launching a national health insurance program that covers everyone and relies on a system of government-issued vouchers that citizens can spend with health insurance companies.

Full article via NewsTarget, by Mike Adams

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I’ve spent a lot of time ragging on Ron Paul, so for some balance here’s a frightening article about the race’s other theocrat, Mike Huckabee:

Huckabee routinely warns of the threat of “Islamofascism” at campaign rallies and is perhaps the first major presidential candidate in American history to essentially call for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Huckabee declared during a New Hampshire fundraiser in October that a Palestinian state should only be established outside of biblical Israel, possibly in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, according to the Jewish Russian Telegraph. He reiterated this position during an appearance on Face the Nation in November.

Huckabee’s advocacy of forcibly transferring the Palestinians to other Arab nations reflects his close association with some of America’s most prominent End Times theological proponents. Among Huckabee’s leading evangelical backers is Pastor John Hagee, head of a Pentecostal congregation in San Antonio, Texas, with 18,000 members and the executive director of Christians United for Israel, a national lobbying group that organizes against a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis and in favor of a military strike on Iran.

Hagee’s zealous support for Israel is kindled by his belief that Jesus will one day return to “biblical Israel” to usher in a kingdom of Heaven on Earth. “As soon as Jesus sits on his throne he’s gonna rule the world with a rod of iron,” Hagee told his congregation in a sermon this December. “That means he’s gonna make the ACLU do what he wants them to. That means you’re not gonna have to ask if you can pray in public school…. We will live by the law of God and no other law.”

Full Story: the Nation.

This confirms for me that the worst possible outcome of this year’s election would be a Huckabee presidency.

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“The beast of the Book of Revelation intruded into the banter of the House of Commons on Thursday when a motion calling for the disestablishment of the Church of England was numbered 666. The last book of the Bible says 666 is the number of a beast that “had two horns like a lamb, and … spake as a dragon,” and that “doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men.”

“It is incredible that a motion like this should have, by chance, acquired this significant number,” said Bob Russell, a Liberal Democrat lawmaker.”

(via Salon)

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At least 30 members of a Russian doomsday cult have barricaded themselves in a remote cave to await the end of the world and are threatening to commit suicide if police intervene, officials and media said Thursday.

“They have covered the entrance and refuse to come out and are threatening to blow themselves up,” an official in the local prosecutor’s office told Reuters by telephone. “They threaten to detonate a gas tank and blow themselves up.”

Full Story: Reuters.

(via Irreality News Wire).

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Just at the time the threat of a nuclear apocalypse was lifting, ecologists evolved their own expression of end times. Awareness of a looming disaster was triggered by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring. This focussed on the threats from non-degrading biocides such as DDT. Popular opinion has caused this threat to be reduced. However other threats have been recognised – such as global warming, damage to the ozone layer, and exhaustion of fossil fuels. These threats are real, yet the ‘messages’ are built on foundations that owe everything to myths of the apocalypse.

If the interests of ecologists are largely at the expense of big business, then big business created an apocalyptic scare of its own, truly millennial in nature, when in the late 1990s the risk of widespread computer problems were envisaged if ‘bugs’ caused critical systems to fail in the first few hours of 1st January 2000. The ‘Y2K bug’ proved to be inconsequential. Some might say this was because of the vast sums of money spent to upgrade software and hardware, others that the risks were in many instances greatly exaggerated.

Full Story: Foamy Custard.

(via Discordian Research Technology).

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By 2030, or by 2050 at the latest, will a super-smart artificial intelligence decide to keep humans around as pets? Will it instead choose to turn the entire Earth, including the messy organic bits like us, into computronium? Or is there a third alternative?

These were some of the questions pondered by the 600 or so technosavants meeting in the Palace of Fine Arts at the second annual Singularity Summit this past weekend. The meeting was convened by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The Institute’s chief goal is to make sure that whatever smarter-than-human artificial intelligence is eventually spawned by exponentially accelerating information technology that it will be friendly to humans.

Full Story: Reason Magazine.

Buy The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

Buy Bailey’s Liberation Biology: The Scientific And Moral Case For The Biotech Revolution .

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Extreme Islam was produced primarily to get across an idea that wasn’t disseminated widely in American culture — to show how strong the [fundamentalist Muslim] belief system is and how unmanageable it is, considering there are tens or possibly hundreds of millions of people sharing these ideas. America has to come to grips with the intensity of their beliefs. Any conflict with them will not be resolved by simply saying we’re great guys, we believe in democracy.

I believe Osama bin Laden, if you examine the Koran, is closer to the Koran and the prophet Mohammed’s beliefs than the hope that Islam can be democratic. It’s not a very democratic belief system. To say that it is comes out of a wish that has nothing to do with Islam. It comes from the idea that everything good has to do with democracy or democratic ideals. Well, there are different ideals at work in the world, and we need to come to grips with that.

Full Story: Reason.

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Huge collection of articles and essays on apocalypse culture (that’s lower case apocalypse culture, lots of cross-over with the Feral House book, but this is not from Parfrey and company).

Surfing the Apocalypse.

Surfing the Apocalypse: Apocalypse Culture section.

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Since it seems nothing much came of Noble Resolve, I present you a dramatized evacuation of Portland circa 1955:

Day Called X Part 1.

Day Called X Part 2.

(Thanks Trevor!)

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The best, IMHO, alternate explanation for global warming is looking a bit less likely:

“The upshot is that somewhere between 1985 and 1987 all the solar factors that could have affected climate have been going in the wrong direction. If they were really a big factor we would have cooling by now.”

Reason Magazine science editor Ronald Baily adds:

Of course in areas that are prey to big uncertainties, no study is definitive. However, as the evidence for man-made global warming continues to accumulate, policymakers and citizens should turn our attention to what should be done about it. See some of my thoughts on the carbon taxes vs. carbon markets here.

Disclosure: Just in case any H&R readers missed it, I am a former skeptic of man-made global warming. See my mea culpa here.

Full Story: Hit and Run.

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Al Gore can go screw himself. Worth the watch if you’ve boughten in to the global warming media frenzy. Or just want some fodder to hit ignorant hippies and fear-mongers over the head with.

I was not aware of some of the misrepresentation going on in this doc, though the whole thing is not to be dismissed. I love being proved wrong when I jump to conclusions! Thanks, barry!

Produced by Channel 4, U.K.

Available in better quality via sweet, sweet DivX over at Joox.net (link).

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Good story for sure, except that the study in question had nothing to do with mobile phones and was actually investigating the influence of electromagnetic fields, especially those used by cordless phones that work on fixed-line networks, on the learning ability of bees. The small study, according to the researchers who carried it out too small for the results to be considered significant, found that the electromagnetic fields similar to those used by cordless phones may interrupt the innate ability of bees to find the way back to their hive.

Full Story: International Herald Tribune.

(via The Guardian via Robot Wisdom).

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