A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

This image, spotted on The Oil Drum, reminded me of cortezopossum's occasional musings on bicycling, and why it may be a good time to learn bike-foo now.

http://www.austincycling.org/art/after_the_peak.jpg

An interesting bit of self-realization: the looming threat of a global oil crisis has effectively replaced the looming threat of death as the thing I have obsessive low-to-mid-level worry about.

Let's compare:
(1) Aging & death is a threat to jmac and the people that jmac loves. This is especially true so long as the mainstream fails to frame aging as a terminal disease that deserves a cure.
(2) Peak Oil and its implications is a threat to human civilization. This is especially true so long as the mainstream fails to think about it.

jmac is soft and weak and needs human civilization to survive. This is also true for anything he might ever create, which is equally soft and wholly informational. Furthermore, if civilization goes away, so does organized science and mass communication, so attending to point (1) becomes a total wash.

Therefore, fixing (2) looks like a prerequisite to fixing (1). Not to say I believe there's a zero-sum game going on here; one can support both. In fact, I think one ought to.

But (2) is the one where failure brings ruin for all.

Conversely, (1) is already in a failure state, and has been since the dawn of mankind; the challenge is to toggle it into the win state. This is a very different challenge, with no macro-deadline like (2) has. (The micro-deadlines are the "natural" lifetimes of the participants. Their being met doesn't spoil the game for everyone, though.)

On the other side, (2) seems more immediately fixable, since its solution, to my eye, lay in getting most people to think about it all, where (1) requires people to think about a well-known thing in a wholly new way. In other words, there is no denying that oil is a finite resource. Even "big oil" acknowledges this. And there is a perverse part of me that wants palpable problems to hurry up and start now so that everyone wakes up and lets us start working on solutions together.

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While I acknowledge their role in the early debate spectrum, I am nonetheless pissed off by sites like Life After the Oil Crash which state with such confidence that we're riding a slot car and absolutely nothing we do can avert complete and utter destruction of everything; cast off your clothes and follow Tyler Durden back to the trees and 35-year lifespans. One gets the impression that the dude totally gets off on this. An angel could descend from heaven and announce that henceforth all oilfields would magically replenish themselves, and the author of the site would just add another paragraph: "No, that won't work: see figure 1."

I also resent the anti-capitalist attitude that the alarmists inevitably possess, dismissing any who profess trust in the market as if they thought the mere presence of a free market means that the problem will magically fix itself and nothing will appreciably change, so let's keep partying woooo. I count myself among those who look to the market, but I don't think that riding the oil production decline down will be easy, or painless. In fact, I think it's going to take a lot of sacrifice and be very painful for everyone, at least for a while, because changing shape due to outside pressure always hurts. But I don't think it will kill us.

As I walk around my daily routes, I see all the cars roving around, and think: most of these will be gone, soon. I wonder how life will change when it becomes too expensive to drive without some sense of automotive triage. I can imagine many scenarios, many hopeful, some unexpectedly beautiful.

But as I do so I reserve real raw anger at those who think that humanity is so inflexible that the only possible outcome is a network of corpses with death-grips on their steering wheels. I wonder how they can ignore the fact that we as a species have slogged through so much to get as far as we've gotten, that we can't work around this upcoming obstacle just because they, as individuals, can't see a way.

It is, ironically, shortsighted of them.