in 2000

When Paul Ehrlich made his prediction of doom due to over-population in the 1960s, one can now say that he was out by a factor of many generations. Quite predictibly, it’s possible for some scientists to make “erroneous” predictions on this level. Erhrlich had probably based his prognosis on his biological research and some mathematical calculations that related animal and environmental relationships. Without adding the fantastic adaptability of the human factor, nor on the human ability to steal more from nature while diminishing it, humanity “was” on the brink of collapse.

In the 1970s, Professor Robert May, an Australian biologist, came to the accummulation point of an equation that had been lurking around, about biological balance of fish in ponds since the 1930s. May’s focus was the stability and complexity through mathematical calculations of what allows competitors to coexist. the equation is simple enough yet encompasses one of the most complex outcome that led to one of the development of the Chaos theory. The equation goes that the next x = r.x.(1-x). This led to biologists’ understanding that when the parameter is low, this situation leads to extinction, when the parameter is average, this leads to a happy survival rate, when the parameter goes higher, this leads to a “boom and bust” system and should the parameter rise further the system becomes chaotic, with no prediction possible, except further down the track with more frequent boom and busts -- and possible extinction... We should all know for example that should the population of insect be collapsing, then spiders and some species of birds will be under mighty stress as well. But without the birds and the spiders, there is a great chance that we would get swamped with insects in plagues like the annoying flies in the Australian outback. 

One of our easy way out is to use insecticides: we poison the landscapes. 

But we really don’t know the future impact of insecticides on the ecological balances of the next... ACTUALLY we DO KNOW what this does to nature... but we don’t want to know. We only think of the short-term rewards, one crop at a time, while the next crop might need more insecticide and more herbicide to be easily gleaned. It’s a race towards chaos as the insecticides destroy one key link in the food chain. We know.

In the SMH today (31/5/17), one Caitlin Fitzsimmons makes the prediction that anyone making predictions for the future is a fool: “anyone who tells you they can predict the future is full of it.” So starts her rant. Fair enough but I will say that envisaging the future is not a sin and we need to do it nonetheless, scientifically. 

Imagining the future is part of being human. Our scientific tools are getting far more precise than say in 1900 when some of the wild predictions looked great in engravings but lousy and dangerous under the microscope. We still can’t predict the weather too far in advance but we can predict global warming -- though not the full precise catalogue of global warming effect, nor the precise timeframe, yet the narrowing of the bracketing is getting seriously worrying. We are in dangerous territory. Should we ignore these predictions, there is no two way that we will get slapped. When? who knows. In geological terms, if will be like being hit today. In human terms it could be 50 years.

Even DARPA, the US Scientific Defence Department has to “predict” the future and invent new weaponry according to these predictions, though these new weapons will enforce the predictions somewhat. These days, there is a more accurate resonance in the prediction and the reality, though we can still be off the mark in some areas, especially when teaching “the next”. What Caitlin alludes to is that what we are teaching now will be superseeded soon after. My analysis here is a bit less drastic. Sure, what is taught now will be obsolete, especially in the area of electronic communication, but unless one has an understanding of the constructs of the present structure, one will never able to develop “the next” or be able to understand it.

The scientific predictions of global warming effect can be within a certain range of possibility -- and we have to trust these predictions, though there is an awful ignorant trend to embrace the unqualified opinions. Humans are good at cultivating ignorance through various means including media. Our scientific predictions can be right or wrong due to factors that we have not accounted for or adaptation to changing circumstances, but more often than not many unscientific opinions are baseless, populist and simply wrong. At least the scientific views are based on experimentations, on analysis and repeat of results -- in the future. 

When Paul Erlich made his gloomy predictions, governments reacted and increased supplies of food and energy. But these were made at the expense of natural habitats. We’re still in this downgrading process of nature. Daily, we destroy habitats -- those sanctuaries where our fellow travellers, animals and plants on this little planet live. We improve the yield of crops by using superphospate, nitrates, insecticides and herbicides. With these chemicals we poison the planet, we create acid rain and induce global warming -- just to name a few hiccups in our future that we can so predict but choose to ignore. 

There is a cry coming from the monocultured deserts that we have created. “Where have all the insects gone?” http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/where-have-all-insects-gone

It is often noted, as footnotes, that extinction of species in 2017 is 40 per cent of the species in existence 100 years ago... And this rate of extinction is probably accelerating, but we don’t flinch. Because we base our understanding of things on the value we place on them, as food or decoration, we don’t see beyond utilitarian concepts. In fact most of us, balk at this idea, but under these circumstances of natural degradation, our media and our governments have sold us a comfort we are loathed to abandon. We make a stylistic decision: bugger nature, it can look after itself as we destroy more of the barrier reef by mining more coal. We don’t see that the food chain is ragged, because it is only episodically ragged, with an increase in frequency until the last gasp of a species. And decoration is only a stylistic judgement made often on fashion and trends of idiots trying to make a buck. A rare species stands in the way of a pipeline? You know the rest. 

So can we carry on growing our population to satisfy the god of capitalism, for which the increase of population is paramount, because capitalism is a huge Ponzi scheme disguised as a method to improve humanity. 

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainabilit...

Extinction is the most serious, utterly irreversible effect of present unsustainable human population. Unfortunately, many analyses of what a sustainable human population level would look like presume that the goal is simply to keep the human race at a level where it has enough food and clean water to survive. Our notion of sustainability and ecological footprint — indeed, our notion of world worth living in — presumes that humans will allow for, and themselves enjoy, enough room and resources for all species to live. We are deluded.

Meanwhile we get the “I’m not a scientist but...”... This was Ronald Reagan’s attitude for increasing hubris. This is Donald Trump’s attitude as well, with less intelligence and more drafty winds under the caboose than the second rate actor. To some extend, the rise of someone like Trump could have been pinpointed in a Chaos theory calculation. From then on it’s impossible to predict anything sane in a political context. And it could have been as bad or worse with The Woman...

Though prediction of the next was not easy in the past, there was a sense of possible outcomes. Nowdays, all the outcomes are like shit, with more or less of it.

Gus Leonisky

Your local crystal ball gazer...

in terms of political predictions:

“The nations of critical strategic importance to our security… have us blackmailed…. Aid to the rest of the underdeveloped world should, for the self-respect of all concerned, be phased out of the American government.” Davies’ chapter heading euphoniously asks the proper question: “Why Ouagadougou?”

In underdeveloped countries, Davies tells us, “A stern military regime that abridged the liberty of the citizenry but provided security for economic development is preferred over a lax civilian government permitting economic or political disorder…. the process of development through which these people are passing is deeply disruptive.”

As for strategic armaments, Davies prophesied that “the grisly absurdity of nuclear war re-popularizes conventional weapons … the hope is that everyone remembers that wars, after all, are fought for finite gains at finite costs.” He found hope in the avoidance of chemical warfare in World War II.

He was spot on in his prophecy about the Soviet Union: “The real threat to the Bolsheviks in the Kremlin is not imperialism in its last throes nor the heresies of fraternal parties nor the Russian masses who they have so abused but the new Soviet elite which they have nurtured—their own serpent-toothed sons.”

He was wrong only in his estimate of China, writing during the dislocations of the Mao period of “an underdeveloped country confronted by a staggering demographic versus resources dilemma… China hath not.”

As for Europe, he foresaw the present revival of nationalism. “[A]n acceptance of national diversity in the western half of the continent and its practical encouragement in the eastern portion are strategically sounder—and more workable because they are more in accord with the inclinations of the Europeans. With its enormous and versatile nuclear capacity, it is difficult to see why the United States needs a Western European contribution of the dimensions that we ask to deter Soviet attack.”

Davies decried the wreckage of the Foreign Service in the McCarthy-Dulles era, but reminded us that the East Asian experts had been driven out by Kennedy also:”in a rather novel transaction, some two hundred senior Foreign Service officers were brought into premature retirement in mid-1962, while there continued the politicization of the Department of State with pedagogues and politicians…. another, but genteel purge, this time from the liberal center. That the Foreign Service did not win the confidence of the New Frontiersmen is not surprising. Crusading activism touched with naivete seldom welcomes warnings of pitfalls and entanglements.”

The Middle East received little attention from him. He credited a UN force for providing a fig leaf over Israel’s attainment of most of its objectives, but underrated the power of oil: “The sheikdom of Kuwait has become a member of the U.N. If Kuwait, why not Sharja and the other Beau Geste sheikdoms of Trucial Oman, beside which Monaco, Andorra and Liechtenstein tower as models of statehood?”

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/john-paton-davies-foreig...

We are at the mercy of those who take over the leadership roles... and of the loonies who assassinate some Prez like JFK.

http://www.upworthy.com/11-ridiculous-future-predictions-from-the-1900-w...

http://www.sadanduseless.com/2011/03/world-in-2000/