From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org] Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2002 10:47 PM To: JR Mooneyham Subject: RE: another Futurology site > Brian, I've spent some time perusing > http://home.attbi.com/~brianholtz/Thoughts/Thoughts.html. > > I must say it is an impressive work, almost staggering > in its ambitions and real accomplishment. Especially > if the rest of your life and work is taken into > account, from examining your bio (i.e.: how could you > possibly find the time and energy to create this > densely packed behemoth?). > I plan on linking to it from various places on my > site. Cool. Let me know if you could use any more anchors. > Breaking the page up into maybe 20-60 smaller pages > would make it more digestible. Yes, I'd love to organize it somewhat like the Principia Cybernetica, as a hierarchy of interlinked nodes that still has a canonical ordering, but I don't know of any software to help me do that. Back when the shape of the hierarchy was more fluid, I kept each node as a separate directory and used Unix scripts to build the final text and its table of contents. But I didn't put in the work of making the links work both in the final text and in the separate nodes. > Breaking up your large doc into many small ones offers > more opportunity to raise your profile in search > engine rankings too Yes -- although now that I work at Yahoo, I may try to get it cataloged more prominently. :-) > may be excessively optimistic in mankind's survival > chances over coming decades and centuries. According > to projects like SETI so far, it seems virtually no > race survives much past our current stage of > development. But it only takes one surviving technological civilization to colonize the galaxy. I think the answer to the Fermi Paradox is some combination of low density of civilizations, us being among the early ones, and their not being as easy to detect as we might hope. > Keep in mind totally wiping out humanity > would not be necessary to forever ruin us. I think it pretty much would. > Anything > which simply put us below a critical threshold in > certain measures of survival, prosperity, and other > elements could be sufficient to permanently end our > hopes for a star faring destiny. One example: too > large a setback in tech could leave us unable to climb > the ladder again in terms of energy production, as all > the easiest to exploit supplies of hydrocarbons are > now gone (something similar may be true of raw nuclear > fuels). The economics of industrialization might be a little different for a follow-on civilization, but fossil fuels being harder to acquire would not impose any kind of ceiling on technological development. Think ethanol and fuel cells. For fissile fuels, we'd only need to find enough to get us over the research hump to fusion. As for deuterium, we'll have self-sustaining colonies long before we could run out of that. > Humanity's past history appears filled with > things like climate change or overcrowding or disease > or other items leaving various sophisticated > civilizations in ruins, requiring people in the > affected region to essentially start over once again. If climate change or natural disease could ever have extincted H. sapiens, their chance for doing so has long since passed. Natural climate change, like the impending and much worse problem of heat pollution, would now only be a brake on progress and not a cause of regress. (Overcrowding barely even qualifies as a brake on progress; read Julian Simon's _Ultimate Resource_ to see past the conventional wisdom on population.) The only things I see with even a theoretical chance of extincting H. sapiens in the coming thousands or millions of years would be (in the short run) interplanetary impact or bioterrorism, and (in the long run) aggression by aliens or (nano)robots. For details, see 5.7.8. Social Science / Futurology / Possible Catastrophes. > Many sorts of such catastrophe scenarios can be put > together. Our civilization as it stands at the moment > is somewhat fragile in its underpinnings and > direction. Look at the enormous political, economic, > and military changes which can be wrought by a single > inordinately lucky terrorist strike It only seems fragile to us Americans because we've been so well-protected. Note that even after the utter devastation of half a decade of war, Germany by the late 1950's had actually returned to its pre-war projected GDP curve. Even the worst-case nuclear war scenario would I think only set back human progress by a few centuries -- a blink of an eye in biogeological time. > As for supporting references for certain of my own > conclusions/opinions offered above, those can be found > on my site. I'll be looking at your (impressive) material in more depth, and I'll send you feedback as it develops. -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net