The Ninth Threat to Sentience: Technocide

While the first six Threats are owing to Mother Nature, the final Three are due to our own nature; our propensity to kill ourselves off. As previously blogged, the Seventh and Eighth Threats of Genocide and Ecocide are well under way. And now, the Ninth Threat of Technocide is looming.

Technology can get us in many ways. We can use it to facilitate Genocide a.k.a. nuclear and chemical/biological weapons of mass destruction.

 

 

Or it can accelerate and abet Ecocide, namely through massive clear cutting, over fishing and farming, and climate change.

 

But, like a drug, it can also make us so dependent that we couldn’t live without it. Not many of us, me included, know how to farm, hunt, or fish. Infrastructure is the first target of war (just look what at we did to Iraq). And Power Grids are wide open to terrorists and hack-attacks. What will we do if food doesn’t show up at our local supermarket and water doesn’t run from our taps? I know many who might not even survive the loss of their air conditioners and cell phones!

Then again, technology might just take over and exterminate us.

 

 

In any event, technology is a double-edged sword; we can’t survive the first six Threats without it, but we may not survive ourselves if we use it.

 
Clearly, only a wise and spiritually strong species will make it. But many of the same people who can't hunt or fish want to leave our fate to Divine Providence. To survive the Nine Threats to Sentience, we must all ask the Six Questions of God. Stay tuned.

8th Threat: Ecocide

There is a limited amount of air, land, and water to sustain us, not to mention a narrow band of environmental factors such as temperature, climate etc. in which we can prosper. There is no doubt that we’re having a greater and greater impact on all of the above … and our numbers are growing.

If you think that we can’t destroy civilization by ruining our ecosystem, just look to our past. Throughout our history we have overhunted, over farmed, and over consumed whatever. The Mayans and Easter Islanders could attest to disastrous result … if they were still around.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Maya/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/fate-of-easter-island.html

Now, even though we are playing on a worldwide scale, we have only one planet to work with. We are not only clear cutting nature, we’re putting garbage into the soil, sewage into the water, and since the Industrial Revolution, pumping pollutants into the atmosphere. It’s not just that we are breathing  back in soot and dirt, but that the gases (like CO2) we pump into the air that are harmless at environmental feedback loop levels (plants take in CO2 and exhale Oxygen, animals the reverse), are bad in excess. They change the built-in climate-controls that have evolved over eons. Like the Mayans and Easter Islanders, we are playing with forces beyond our comprehension that will have dire results.

http://climate.nasa.gov/effects/

Next up, the Ninth Threat … one we’re just beginning to understand.

7th Threat: Wars and other Acts of Terrorism.

The last three of the Nine Threats can be called Latent: it is the great burden of sentience to carry within the seeds of its own extinction.

At no time in our history, starting with the apes, have we been free of murderous conflict. Even those who harken back to the blissful days of the Garden of Eden must face the fact that Cain got his wife from a pre-existing pool of blood. I don’t need to beat a dead horse on this, but just in case there are any doubters, look at this: http://conflicthistory.com/#/period/1936-1946

Today is no different, at least from the standpoint of armed conflict and the new face of War; to wit, Terrorism. Of course, now we can not only kill off neighboring tribes, but those on the other side of the world as well. The sticks and stones of yesteryear became arrows and bullets, then atomic bombs.

And for those who think détente can save us from ourselves, ask yourself this: would Bin Laden have used ‘The Bomb’? http://www.kingofbombs.com/terrorism.html

With the proliferation of nuclear weapons (and the club is growing), it is only a matter of time before some single-minded madman becomes the ultimate suicide bomber.

http://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report
But cheer up. Climate Change may get us first! Next up, the 8^th Threat.

The Sixth Threat

The last of the Three Local Threats we can call Biologic; by predation from microbes to monsters, life is the eater of life. And we’re the monsters. Having hunted and clear cut our way to the top of the food chain, we’re killing off other species at some thousand times the rate of natural selection.

http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversity/

But when you reach the top of the ladder, the threat doesn’t come from above.  The big can be toppled by the smallest of creatures below. The world around us provides many examples: microorganisms are killing off fauna from Brown Bats to Honey Bees. And we just have to look to our own history to see that we are not immune.

More than five hundred years ago, the Bubonic Plague (caused by bacteria) killed about 1/3 of Europeans  … in crowded cities, up to 2/3 of the population died faster than they could be burned.  http://www.health24.com/Lifestyle/Man/Your-health/Bubonic-Plague-15-facts-20130318

 

In a perverse feedback loop, bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics because we've overused them. Now, drug companies aren’t even making many antibiotics these days; there’s not enough money in it! Makes you wonder who they think will buy their products when the next killer bug bites and we have no defense?

Then of course, there's viruses. Just a hundred years ago or so the Spanish flu killed 50-100 million people, nearly  1/3 of those infected died. Believe it or not, the worst hit was the 20-40 age group. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic

Today, pandemics still threaten us.  The kill rate for H7N9 is some 33%. And there's no vaccine. It's just a matter of time before this mutates into an easily spreadable form. http://healthland.time.com/2013/06/24/most-recent-h7n9-flu-deadlier-than-h1n1/

We’re killing the planet and leaving ourselves open to Mother Nature’s revenge all for a few bucks. And do we really think we can prosper as a sole survivor when most of the animals and plants are gone. Biodiversity is a symbiotic feedback loop that sustains itself. Like the climate, it has a tipping point beyond which our house of cards will fall. We know this is true, we just won’t know how much killing is too much until it's too late.

In truth, greed is willfully short-sighted. And Capitalism feeds off greed. The mantra of the blissful blind has become “Market forces will fix everything.” Yet consumerism is driving us like lemmings to the cliff. We better wake up; the Market has no conscience. It makes a better servant than master.

But such predators aren't our worst problem. Next, the ‘Latent Threats’  7-9 where we willfully prey upon ourselves.