Extinction

To live without Hope is to Cease to live.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

I don't accept that humanity has to face extinction. We can get to the moon, we can live on the space station, we can plan to live on Mars, but we can't survive this? But, before anyone pulls out the flame thrower, let me state I do understand the issues and I understand that they are vast. I also understand that a great deal, perhaps the majority of us will not survive.

However, I believe it will mostly be because we sat around wailing about our fate. We need to start preparing.

The way I see it (a brief summary);

Heat - Because of heat stress certain regions of the world will be deadly in certain seasons. The rest will be hard in summer.

Oxygen - Some areas will become borderline oxygen deficient. (See Oxygen on the preppingForExile site)

Ocean - Oxygen Minimum Zones will be greatly expanded. Bacteria, toxic algae and bacteria will dominate

Economic collapse - Personal and National debt levels are unsustainable.

Environmental dangers, increasing fires, floods and stronger storms

Migration - Huge numbers of people will be migrating

Peak Oil - The carbon economy will collapse

Logistics - Logistics is the arteries of modern society, enough said.

Driven by oil prices and environmental damage food prices will go through the roof

Wars - There will be WWIII as predicted.

etc ( you know all this stuff )

OK, it is bad. But fatal? Yes, to the world as we know it. I am not pretending that we can keep civilization as we know it.

There is an essay on this site with an allegory of a butterfly. I am going to steal it. The cocoon is the situation post-crash. Those that have prepared could well emerge as a whole new entity. A type of society that has never existed in the history of man. This is no fairy tale where you turn the page and there's the happy ending. To me evolution is a fact, and it is going to be harsh. If we are prepared, we are going to evolve, if we are unprepared, we may well devolve or simply cease to exist.

We like to blame the government, but the sad reality is that our governments are a reflection of dominate selfish genes. It has to be, we keep doing this to ourselves all through history. But for once in humanities existence, there is a chance those genes will not survive the tribulation.

To collectively survive, we would have to;

Co-operate instead of compete.

Become indispensable while society crumbles around us.

Protect, without aggression

Share instead of hoard

Learn and retain huge amounts of information

Exist for long periods of time in stasis in order to reduce heat stress

Reduce body mass, over generations we may have to get to the size of Homo Flores

Be willing to eat differently

At times be nocturnal

If necessary, live underground.

And we may have to do it for hundreds to thousands of years.

There are obviously many many obstacles, far too many to be covered in this comment. I am trying to cover them on my blog. But it all comes down to connected communities. If they fail, we do not have the practical skills to survive in a hostile world on our own. Frankly, who would want to?

Suppose, just for a moment that a rapid melt of the Greenland ice sheet caused the thermohaline circulation to stop. Or that whatever caused the Younger Dryas asserted itself again. Or that once the migration chaos had subsided, that communities could move to the polar regions?

I would say to Mr. McPherson (and others like him) that they have a huge responsibility on their shoulders. If there is the smallest grain of hope for our survival, and they can accurately foresee the coming storm, then they have a responsibility to ensure that we are not only warned, but also prepared. No-one in all of human history from Lao Tzu to Einstein ever carried such a weight.

Personally, I do not believe we have to fund trillion dollar underground cities powered by Thorium. What we need is small inter-connected, Kibbutz style, communities all over the world. If we try and do this on our own we are done for.