Well, not really angst at all. I'm not depressed, just scared. Okay, let's see:
I am currently taking Psychology as a summer class. I hope to get an A, because that will help get me into the Organizational Studies programme here at UM. I want to be in that program so that I can learn to run an organization, and than create an organization that will take over the world and unite it in peace, under a really cool government that I would love to talk about some other time.
Meanwhile, did you guys know that in the next 20-30 years, a lot of the human race is going to die out because most of the world will be flooded? (The heat of global warming causes water to expand, etc etc.) After that, we will be covered in a variety of crazy weird weather that we have never had to face before, which will kill off even more of us. Also, on top of that, very very soon there is going to be a huge outbreak of the flu that will kill off a lot of us right away.
Now, we still can do something about this as it is not too late yet. And it is fortunately becomming more mainstream to care about global warming. But if we do escape global warming, in the next 15 years, thousand-dollar computers will be smarter than humans in every way (yes, every way—we actually have creative computers already). Will there be any point in me even being here?
The computer thing doesn't worry me so much because it is too hard to imagine what will happen, but the global warming thing? Scary.
Not because of all the death. No, if it were immanent, I would just be doing all I could to enjoy my last years alive. I mean, death is immanent in general, so what? But I am scared because I have no idea what will happen. Will we fix it just in time? I don't know. I can't even guess. I don't mind not knowing, but I hate not being able to guess.
Ten years ago, I wanted to be a math teacher. I didn't think I'd have to deal with any of this. I didn't even know it was a problem.
Eight years ago, it was 1999 and someone said, "Hey, waitaminute, what about all the computers set with two-digit years?" One year ahead of time. Sure, it ended up not being a problem, but it could have been, and frankly, I find it terrifying that it can take intelligent humans to notice something so potentially dangerous.
I'm not depressed. I'm not angry. I maybe feel a little gypped. But I definitely am scared. Not terrified, just scared. I don't like not knowing. Well, I'm okay with not knowing, but I hate being completely clueless.
And what am I supposed to do? Go to protests? Vote? Switch my major to Environmental Studies? Cover my eyes and continue to rape the planet like there's no tomorrow? Open my eyes and try to enjoy myself as best I can, knowing there's nothing I can do? Is there something I can do?
I'm scared. I know I should try to enjoy myself, because I really don't want to die regretting not enjoying myself, however I die. I'm not afraid of dying, but I'm afraid of not knowing whether or not I will have children, and if I do, whether they will live to be older than 10.
That's scary. I'm scared. I have good reason to be scared. I feel like a rat that has been released into the centre of a room with no walls or cover in sight. I feel like I need to do something, but nothing I do will change the situation I am in.
I'm not at a loss for what to do, I'm just scared. Very, very, very scared.
And it's fucking scary.
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6 comments:
I wouldn't worry too much about the prediction that the world is gonna flood in 20-30 years. That honestly sounds like a huge load of horse sh!t. Hell, the instruments we have to predict the future aren't even all that accurate about next week's weather. The way everything's going right now, I think it might be more realistic to guess that most people will be dead in 20-30 years because we'll all have killed each other off. -Josh
You know, I *was* scared, for like, the longest time. Then recently, I realized I didn't give a fuck. I mean, if you consider the sheer amount of people that we'd have to convince...
America is only one of SEVERAL countries that would have to make VAST changes in a very short amount of time. China pollutes almost twice as much as we do (because, I mean, look at their population) and there's Japan, India, Thailand, Germany... pretty much any industrialized country.(Lets just define industrialization as a country that produces steel. Easiest that way) Now, China, India, Germany and Japan are the main ones for us to be concerned with. We would have to convince the likes of China to cease roughly 40--75% of their greenhouse emissions... and India... You see where I'm going.
Then there's the people here in America we'd need to convince. We've got a good amount of religious freaks who wouldn't believe... and even if you exclude the nuts, you've got the perfectly reasonable people who still can't trust the facts that are placed in front of them. People like my grandfather, who's convinced that while global warming is real, it's a perfectly natural thing, because the earth goes in cycles. He thinks that people are over reacting to An Inconvient Truth, and taking the movie at face value without doing research of their own.
Now, that being said, I'd rather just enjoy what life we have left. This is entirely personal of course. But I honestly believe that if a majority of humanity refuses to acknowledge or attempt to fix a problem that there's good evidence of, then a majority of humanity deserves exactly what they get for ignoring the problem.
So, I mean, I've yet to change my ways signifigantly. If, in this flood, I die, well, I deserved it. And I will be severely pissed if we manage to find some way to adapt after destroying our planet. I mean, my god. That's ridculous. If we killed the planet, we should die too.
Gynelle
Josh—I'm not really sure how to explain this without getting into differential equations and chaos theory. Basically, the weather of one hour from now is really really hard to predict, because the critical points are constantly changing and very far away, plus we are dealing with a 3-dimensional directional field with trillions of unpredictable variables. (What they do is compare the situation to similar situations in the past and guess based on that. I mean, chaos theory is fucking jesus ass christ impossible.)
On the other hand, predicting something like the world flooding is pretty easy. Basically, we know that water expands with heat, and how much it expands with how much heat, and all sorts of things like that. We also know how fast the planet is heating up, and we have a nice topological map of the world, so it is easy to see where the water would flood to. It is basic topology, without any chaos theory.
So it is a very accurate prediction. Now, as far as when and where the first crazy hurricane/tidal wave hybrid will hit and all that, we have no fucking clue. We just know that kind of thing will happen.
Gynelle—More and more people (worldwide) are starting to wake up and care about this, so it is possible that we'll stop it in time. It isn't unlikely. But it is also not unlikely that we won't. There is no way of making an educated guess, and that's why I'm scared.
A part of me wants it to happen just so I can turn around to the world and say "SEE??? SEE????? I told you!"
Despite our amazing technology, humans can be surprisingly bad at predicting the future. I mean, I guess there's a possibility the entire world could flood in the next 20-30 years for all we know, but there's an equal possibility that that won't happen. And maybe if it does, it'll be because of some technological malfunction and won't have anything to do with the atmosphere at all. Maybe giant falcons will take over the world and eat us in 5.78 years. We don't know. The future is never really guarenteed; we can sometimes make educated guesses which turn out to be partially or even mostly correct, but in the end what happens happens, whether we predicted it or not. I think Gynelle is right; we should just enjoy life while we have it.
Remember when the new millenium was coming up and some people were super-freaked out that all the banks and computers were gonna crash and that the world was gonna explode? Some people even committed suicide. And whatever came of that? The year changed to 2000, life went on, and everyone who thought bad things were gonna happen just kind of moved on.
Similar thing when Bush Sr. was in office. People were saying, "Our grandchildren are going to be paying off this debt", because we were seriously in debt. And it made a lot of sense, but then Clinton got into office and we wound up with a huge surplus (which has now been squandered again).
While it's very nice to look ahead, we have to control how much we do, because if we spend too much time looking (too far) ahead, we can start getting really psyched for something that might not happen as we intended it to at all. Just my 2 cents on this subject. -Josh
Josh, what I'm saying is this has nothing to do with technology. It is basic math. The range of 20-30 years is the error based on how much humans pollute between now and then, assuming it doesn't go down significantly before it's too late. The "technologies" we are using are called "calculators," and they don't screw up much.
This isn't a matter of science and chaos theory, it's a matter of knowing that if you throw a ball into the air, it will fall back down. It is barely more complicated than that. (Actually, it isn't at all more complicated than that.)
Now, it is true that a seagull might pick up the ball in midair, I mean, anything could happen, so we don't know that the ball will come back down. We can't predict the future.
Seaguls, falcons...It's all the same. :)
-Josh
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