Although this book is published in May, it is available for pre-order from next Tuesday.
Here's a quick taster:
Dmitry Orlov wrote:In the interest of avoiding misunderstandings, it bears repeating that this is not a “Unless we...” book or a “We must...” book. If you are looking for a book that will tell you how to keep nine plus billion people alive in a carbon-neutral way, you are bound to be disappointed. Also, this book is likely to test the limits of your mental comfort zone, because you will, in the course of reading it, discover that the people who stand the greatest chance of surviving collapse do not resemble you socially or culturally. You might find it difficult to find common ground with them, or to respect them, initially. But looking back upon yourself, it may occur to you that you don't stand much of a chance if you remain who you are, and that you yourself would do well to try to change your outlook, your habits and the company you keep. You might even find yourself taking a small yet significant first step in that direction; and if you do that, then this book will have achieved its purpose. Link
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools - Douglas Adams.
It feels to me like we are passing into a new stage of this process, during which people stop talking about what we should/must do to prevent a catastrophe. That stuff, which Orlov is rejecting at length, is looking increasingly out-dated. I've noticed opinions shifting here, elsewhere on the internet and also in the range of what is currently being published and mentioned in the MSM, this being a good example.
I think this is an important change, because it alters the context and hopefully the course of a lot of the debates surrounding Peak Everything.
"We fail to mandate economic sanity because our brains are addled by....compassion." (Garrett Hardin)
Lord Beria3 wrote:Really? How much of this chatter is on the fringes and how much of it has effected mainstream culture?
I'm really talking about the perceptions of people who either consider themselves part of the green movement or take an active interest in politics. "Mainstream culture" is pretty much oblivious to the whole thing.
IOW, the "people" I'm talking about are the ones who think and talk about these things, not the vast hordes who aren't interested and don't care.
"We fail to mandate economic sanity because our brains are addled by....compassion." (Garrett Hardin)
They seem to be a whole tribe of jonny2mad's but wiki contends maybe the initial study The Mountain People (1972) of the tribe was flawed as if it was moulded to fit in with the authors theories.
Every time you spend money,you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich" -Napoleon Bonaparte
Orlov sheepishly admits to the omission of a sixth stage of collapse here.
So far so good, but our next example makes the desirability of a swift and thorough collapse questionable. Prime exhibit is the melted-down nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. Contrary to what the Japanese government would want everyone to believe, the situation there is not under any kind of control. Nobody knows what happened to the nuclear fuel from the reactors that melted down. Did they go to China, à la China Syndrome? Then there is the spent nuclear fuel pool, which is full, and leaking. If the water in that pool boils away, the fuel rods burst into flames and melt down and/or explode and then, according to some nuclear experts, it would be time to evacuate the entire northern hemisphere. The site at Fukushima is so radioactive that workers cannot go anywhere near it for any length of time, making it rather fanciful to think that they'll be able to get the situation there under control, now or ever. But we can be sure that eventually the already badly damaged building housing the spent nuclear fuel will topple, spilling its load and initiating phase two of the disaster. After that there will be no point in anyone going to Fukushima, except to die of radiation sickness.
But please, read the whole article. It's yet another of those profoundly depressing pieces. They're growing in number.
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
Actually, having thought about this for a while, I think he's missed something important.
I believe he's right that we are going to end up with multiple nuclear disasters on the scale of Fukushima, due to other natural disasters, rising sea levels or simply a society so broken-down that nobody ends up in charge of "safe decommissioning." So let's imagine we've got a world in 40 years time where there is an extremely high level of background radioactivity in the environment. Orlov sees that as the end - that the level of mutations would be so great that humanity would die out because nobody would survive to reproduce. I think he's wrong.
Studies in the disaster zone at Chernobyl have made very clear that the capacity to protect from or cope with environmental radiation causing genetic damage is itself a heritable trait: some species were far more vulnerable than others to mutations, and some individuals were more vulnerable than others. This is not surprising. DNA has always been vulnerable to damage caused by radiation and other things, and as a result there are quite a lot of complicated molecular mechanisms for detecting and fixing it when something goes wrong. If it weren't for these mechanisms, DNA-based life would never have lasted very long.
Given that there will be a radically-elevated level of mutations, and that there are more than 7 billion humans, the most likely outcome of the scenario in question is that a tiny number of those mutations will actually help to improve those mechanisms. There would be massive selective pressure on the human genome in favour of those individuals with the best radiation-defence systems, and especially those who have mutations which enhance those systems. In other words, some humans would probably survive, but which ones would end up depending almost entirely on this one trait, and all the other traits, from intelligence to disease-resistance to culture, would be totally irrelevant. It would be a genetic lottery, apart from the human race which emerges from the other end of the process would be highly radiation-proofed compared to us.
This would set the scene for further evolutionary changes down the line. Eventually the die-off would slow down and the human population would start to grow again, but life would still be very tough and a more general "survival of the fittest" would kick in again, although it is not clear what "fittest" means here.
RenewableCandy wrote:I wonder if that means that white people are stuffed? Oh the irony!
It could certainly be argued that sub-saharan Africa, with it's significantly greater genetic diversity, is more likely to be the source of the best genes for radiation-proofing, simply because there are more genes there to begin with. And conversely that places with the least amount of genetic diversity - Iceland, Finland, Japan - are the least likely.
It was more that darker skin has Melatonin(sp?) which protects against damage by UV, which damage is of a similar nature to that by (some types of) nuclear-power-type radiation.
However I'm probably wrong: the worst damage seems to be done by particles that are inhaled: thus, the people with the toughest lungs will be the most likely survivors.
Chernobyl released Caesium 137 with a half life of 30 years, but the contamination did not reduce as expected, so half life may not be the only consideration.
woodburner wrote:Chernobyl released Caesium 137 with a half life of 30 years, but the contamination did not reduce as expected, so half life may not be the only consideration.
RenewableCandy wrote:It was more that darker skin has Melatonin(sp?) which protects against damage by UV, which damage is of a similar nature to that by (some types of) nuclear-power-type radiation.
However I'm probably wrong: the worst damage seems to be done by particles that are inhaled: thus, the people with the toughest lungs will be the most likely survivors.
It's more the generalised DNA repair machinery that would matter - the biochemical pathways that detect errors in DNA and fix them. Melatonin, as you've suggested, protects against a specific type of DNA damage in the first place, which is not quite the same thing.
