Where we’ll end up – the long view
by
Muck About
Part II
Major Wars (Civil, I and II) were fought over land, resources and loot. The crusades? Obviously religious in the history books but they were truly fought in retaliation for hundreds of years of brutal and deadly Muslim expansion from the middle East and Northern Africa into Spain and Europe. There were huge treasure hunting and resource overtones and outcomes as well. Hey, the winner of a war gets to rape, plunder and pillage a little, right?
When land or vital resources (oil, water, minerals or land that is arable and capable of growing crops or running livestock) runs short for any given population, without action, economic activity declines, hunger and deprivation sets in and standards of living drop unto death and the eventual destruction of that civilization.
Migration and flight/fight inevitably begins as will happen eventually between Bangladesh and India – India is already building a fence to keep the Bangladeshi out (and so is Burma) and I don’t even want to talk about India and Pakistan or India and China (although the Himalayas do provide a impressive bit of a fence!) and most deadly of all, if the populations have not been starved completely to apathy, war will follow when countries try to annex resources, arable land, water, et al of those areas and populations nearby. War also happens when migrants clash with those neighboring peoples who are inundated by fleeing populations. This is especially true of populations trapped so far below their abilities to improve their standard of living or even survive given the slightest interruption in the food chain (by nature or politics). After all, when there is nothing left to lose and life is not worth living, why not fight? If I wasn’t so “mature”, I’m sure I would..
Think of what Haiti would look like and be like with no relief supplies, no security, no boats or planes bringing food and water and evacuating the injured, building shelter (however slowly) and rendering medical assistance. Civilization is miles wide but has the thickness of three days with no food and one day with no water. In other words, civilization is not very durable if anything goes wrong at the infrastructure level.
India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia, several chunks of Central and South America and most of Africa are excellent examples of countries likely to implode if the intricate globalization of supply chains fail. As I write this, India and Pakistan have “made nice” over Kashmir all the while polishing and expanding an atomic warfare capability.
Iran may be close behind with both rocket and nuclear capability according to the war mongers among our elite powers that be (who I personally don’t trust to tell the truth if their life depended upon it!) . I can think of nothing that brings fear to my poor old black heart more than an Islamic Bomb – and it’s already there in Pakistan!
An Islamic bomb that falls into the hands of a suicide ridden Imam is one that cannot be stopped. When an aggressor (or assassin) is willing to die in the delivery of his/her weapon, they are beyond defeat except by exceptional luck.
Control of land is the basis of the dispute in Kashmir, stirred up with the old Muslim/Hindu hatred of several thousands of years.. The next war, if it happens, will likely be nuclear in nature. Boom! Radiation and particle fallout is no respecter of national borders and the wind blows and blows in that part of the world. Let us hope that rational men can prevail But don’t bet your life on it since “rational” is not an important topic in that part of the world while “national” is of the highest priority.
Only a relative few, compared with overall population levels, within the huge numbers of people of those countries mentioned above are smart enough or rich enough to climb out of the pit. The smart Pakistani and Hindu are the ones we see in our own diminished and ever poorer United States as physicians, scientists, mathematicians and other highly educated professionals. They have already “beat feet” to a better place. We would be much smarter to make it easier to vacuum this “cream of the crop” up for our use – but our Government is moving in the opposite direction, limiting immigration and restricting green card issuance even to highly trained scientists and engineers who try to come here (which may change in the appropriate direction shortly – I hope!).
In my humble opinion, this is so short sighted as to be classified as idiocy and incompetence. This is a country of immigrants and constantly changing. To deny good minds the opportunity to make us richer is – simply – nuts. But then who ever said the Federal Government is sane..
China, at the moment, is making a valiant attempt to drag itself away from the abyss of a centrally planned economy and begins to now compete for natural resources with the rest of the developed world. They are doomed by demographics to failure as within a generation there will millions of men with no women to marry thanks to misguided “one child” policies. Their population is aging even faster than ours which is another anchor around their national neck.
China is trying mightily to encourage wealth generation while retaining central control and ignoring human rights, environmental issues and freedoms. I wish them lots of luck at any distance beyond the short term.
At the same time, every year, China must create 150,000,000 new jobs from a population of 2 billion and climbing. How long do you think that will last? Not very long I assure you. Don’t forget – for every Chinese who manages to raise his standard of living to the level now enjoyed by the United States, more and more pressure is put upon us economically through “globalization” and our standard of living is rapidly dropping!!. This is now happening as we all know as higher paying manufacturing jobs have vanished overseas to lower wage countries and prices rise as competition heats up for available natural resources such as oil, copper, zinc, and steel and rare earth minerals. China has adopted Africa as its’ own playground and is investing heavily in many areas thereof to capture needed resources and doing a fine job of it too. We fought a war in Iraq (remind me why, please!) and China is now sucking up Iraqi oil and didn’t lose a man in the process.
We, in this country are left with two wage earners sometimes working two or more jobs and prior to 2008 were borrowing more and more to maintain what is perceived to be an acceptable (i.e.”wanted”) standard of living. It is no surprise that our national savings rate was negative until recently. Now 1.0% or so — but according to the BS numbers by the St. Louis Fed it’s 3.7%. Wow! Past years saw savings rates averaging 6-9%. Now we are in the midst of a financial debt/credit crunch of worldwide proportions that will insure that, thanks to misguided political efforts to “do something” and “kick the can”, we will be all be poorer by and by.
While we sometimes see media driven cheerleading of scientific and industrial production in these developing countries, the truth is that the vast majority of the population of these countries cannot and will not improve their standard of living significantly over their lifetimes or the lifetime of their children or children’s children. Resource depletion and shortages will see to it. In most of Africa, people are doomed to live very short, nasty lives because they have never managed to progress economically or educationally (Islam has a part of the blame to shoulder here) to even start the process of climbing out of the pit they are in. I somehow doubt that China (or anyone else) will furnish them a ladder to do it. The Chinese are far too interested in digging holes in the ground to dredge minerals and drilling oil than making contributions to the general populations. I’m sure the “rulers” of those dictatorships will do well, retiring to other and less savage places with suitable Swiss bank accounts.
As an aside, my Oncologist (I have CLL/Lymphoma that’s I’ve been doing battle with for 17 years – so far, I’m still here!) is a native of Haiti, an extremely smart man to whom I trust my life. He is President of a Charitable Foundation and flies to Haiti every other week. Far away from Port au Prince, up in the poorest of poor mountain villages, his Foundation is building homes for Haitians that were displaced by the earthquake, quietly, no fanfare and no publicity. He’s saving his own people one family at a time. If you want to contribute, contact <http://www.haitihelpmed.org/> and you will find a true charity that’s worth your time.
Within these countries, there are simply insufficient resources and wealth to allow any but a select, very smart or very evil few to rise above the herd. The evil ones are the ones in charge who siphon off the relief efforts for their own and their crony buddies’ benefit and profits.
Eventually, as the size of the population continues to increase , the poorer masses will be heard from and that voice will be death and destruction. The fairly recent tribal violence in Rwanda (forgotten that already? Shame on you!) that killed eight hundred thousand people is a good example – and gee whiz – in our country the Main Stream Media didn’t broadcast news about it and it was totally ignored. The exact same thing happened in Sudan recently on a slightly smaller scale and while words and broken promises litter the bloody landscape, nothing is (or probably could) be done to stop it. More misery and no solutions.
As an accepted fact, the poorer, less educated and more religious a country’s population is, the more offspring they will produce. The cultural and genetic drive to produce many children so that some of them may survive to hopefully take care of elderly Mom and Dad is both
irresistible and deemed necessary in these countries and cultures.
Population expansion , regardless of how fast it explodes will never overrun the Earth. Again, sooner than later, population density will contribute to our demise, either through resource exhaustion, pestilence or war.
In the more densely populated areas of the world, pestilence is a likely result of packing too many humans in with too many of earth’s other creatures that are required to feed us. Look at China, India and Indonesia today. The National Institutes of Health openly estimates that a disease will cross over the animal/human barrier within the next few years (one already has – except it’s not sufficiently virulent to cause alarm yet) that will adapt to a human/human basis of transferal. Because this disease (such as the avian or “swine” flue) is new to the human race, no defenses are there to combat it and a vast world-wide pandemic will follow that has the potential of killing billions of humans. It is not a question of “If” this will happen, it is a question of “When”.
We were lucky with the last “swine flu”. Will we be equally lucky the next time? I’ll borrow a Grant Williams, “Hmmmmmm”.
One does not have to actively be involved in war to die from it, especially in our not so brave new world of nuclear and genetically engineered possibilities, biological and chemical agents none of which are contained at nor recognize national borders. The availability of such devices is only going to proliferate with time.
The new kids on the technological “better watch me” block are a totally different animals in that they can either destroy us or save us, depending upon how they’re used.
The two potential technologies with the most promise of either doomsday speculation or great advances for the human species is that of genetic modification and nanotechnology . Genetic modification has been going on in slow motion for centuries in many agricultural laboratories, gardens and kennels and is a chief reason why we are able to feed those multitudinous mouths of an ever expanding horde of people. But until relatively recently it has been used on veggies, plants, animals and trees and other slow growing and slow spreading things that offer an excellent chance of control. It has been done v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
Now however, we are applying genetic modification to corn, soy, dogs, cows, sheep, pigs, one monkey (according to rumor), frogs, viruses, bacteria and probably humans (Shhhh!) and now it’s being done really, really fast. DNA and nanotechnology are two genies that are out of the bottle and racing each other to practical application.
Genetics is not a new science. Agriculture has been in the business of genetic modification for centuries and the major thing changing for them now is the speed at which these modifications can be made and tested – or not.
In days past, agronomists and animal breeders would breed and breed and cross pollinate (including sperm) and breed some more in order to select the traits in a plant, or tree or animal they desired to have. Dog owners have been modifying genes in dogs forever in order to create new subspecies of canines with critical (to the breeder) traits. They have been successful in that dogs are the first species on Earth to totally subjugate their existence to another breed of animal – us. They can no longer survive in the wild but must have us to nurture, feed, care for and play with them to live.
So what’s the big deal about modifying DNA or playing around with the human and plant and animal genetic makeup directly instead of just cross pollination or breeding experiments?
Well, for one thing, instead of just modifying a single species by breeding or selecting for desirable traits within that species, we now can do something better.
We can insert a gene from a luminescent insect (think lightning bug) into a frog. We get a glowing frog. How convenient! No more big lights required for frog gigging at night. (This is a true example of a genetic modification that has already been done some time ago).
The serious thing here is that we are no longer limited to single specie genetic sources for modification of a selected species. We can take a gene from a bug, virus, animal or plant and insert it into some other plant, virus, bacteria, animal or bug that is not related to the original genetic sample at all. We can now cross-modify from specie to specie and genus to genus and that is a whole new ball game.
This makes for some pretty broad experiments in modification of living things. Picture a human with owl genes – big sexy eyes and he can walk around in the dark without a flashlight. And think how the ladies will be wowed by the length of his eyelashes! How about a human with gills and a modified skin that makes him truly amphibious. Not an impossibility in the future and a great idea to populate the 6/10th of our world now under water. Of course, I wonder what the modified human will think when he finds out about us land dwelling varieties!
There are two voices that can be presently heard on this very broad and complex subject. One voice is very loud and strident and full of end of the world as we know it screeching.
This voice includes the noisy output of all religious groups across the board and political persuasions that pander to those religious groups. It boils down to the fact that all religions are terribly threatened by the idea of us being able to grow a human being from the guts of a cell and an empty egg. Or that we may be able to modify a human being in some wild and wooly manner by inserting or removing genes of human DNA or some other species’ DNA to get something that “god” didn’t design. (Oh please forgive me for even mentioning “design”!)
You know the arguments – it’s immoral, against the word of god (used in the same sentence to try and make it sound better), tampering with nature, unnatural behavior that will lead to all manner of terrible things like designing humans to custom specifications.
Well, what’s wrong with that?
If we create a human being without “gods” help then how does the religious community make peace with something that is obviously not the work of their gods. Of course religions would either collapse or have to do big rewrites of “the gospel truth” should we discover evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe, but genetic science is here and now and SETI research is there and who knows when, so religion worries about what’s more immediate. (I love Steven Hawking’s reply when once asked “Is there a God?”. He replied, “I don’t answer God questions.”)
The second voice crying for caution has a much better point to make. It is scientific in nature and more truthful of its motives.
What happens if a genetic mistake is made that produces something that is extremely deadly or simply overwhelmingly successful and through an “oops!” or the purposeful release into the environment, we may have a big problem? Since it’s absolutely new and with no or only a partial real world genetic connection (and maybe no natural enemies), will it lay waste to us all?
That is a distinct possibility and examples of such experiments have already happened several times, though none of the results have escaped into the environment. It has been dubbed “The Grey Goo” result of a too successful genetic or nanotech creation.
Experimenters at research laboratory at a University in Canberra, Australia, were working with a non-human disease called mousepox in hopes of discovering a way to control a hugely excessive and annoying mouse population in Queensland by preventing mice from reproducing. Mousepox, in itself, is a more or less innocuous virus that only affects mice and is not deadly even to them in its native form – kinda like human flu. You catch it, live with it and pretty soon it goes away unless you’re very young or old or have a crippled immune system.
These experimenters modified one single gene in the DNA of the mousepox and then grew some of the resultant mutated virus. To their astonishment ( and horror I expect), when introduced to the lab mice, it killed every mouse in the lab, quickly and thoroughly and mice given vaccine against the pox died just as rapidly.
I do not know the rest of the story as it vanished from scientific magazines and the MSM and I haven’t bothered to be a detective, but I would be very surprised if the lab was not decontaminated and stocks of the modified mousepox summarily destroyed (I hope).
For further information feel free go to Google and search “mousepox mistake”.
Think about smallpox being modified in the same manner. It affects humans and is an absolutely horrible killer. A university research laboratory in the mid-West has modified a gene within the smallpox virus to produce a protein that (get this now!) assists the virus in overcoming the human immune system! They insist (rightly so, I think, even though it makes me sick!) that in order to fight the virus they need to know what makes it tick. But now that they recognize this genetic bomb they’ve made, they say it is a possibility they “may be able” to modify the protein to enhance the human immune system to fight smallpox instead. Jeebus, I hope so. Smallpox is bad enough in its generic form.
Researchers at the University of Kyoto in Japan were recently working on a variety of HIV virus to investigate whether genetic modification by insertion of a human protein producing gene would slow down the virus by stimulating the human immune system. Instead, the mutated HIV virus they created was a super HIV virus that was much more virulent that any of the five strains of “common” HIV. It reproduced at lightning fast rates and was, in essence, a super killer. I hope they burned that one up too.
And all this is lurking out there right now. Today. And there will be much more on tomorrow’s menu!
Again, world renowned theoretical physicist Steven Hawking once said that unless the human race escapes the Earth’ gravity well and establishes itself on other planets or satellites within the solar system, that we would likely be extinct within 200 years from introduction, either by accident or design, of a genetically designed disease or a bioweapon run amok or simply an accident that escaped into the environment.
Steven Hawking is no dummy and when he fears something, I’m terrified of it (and so should you be!). I think his “200 years” is much too conservative and a shorter 50-75 years should be used instead.
Yet there is no way to ever stuff a genie back into the bottle. Whatever tools humans discover, design and fabricate, they use. Whatever weapons humans design and are capable of building, they will use it; be it nuclear, biological, genetic, chemical or anything else..
As an aside, I am all for genetic redesign of humans myself. How about humans that are genetically designed to thrive in zero G? They would be the ones to lead the way to the stars. When or if we reach the stars, who is to say that planets circling those suns will be compatible with our native and fragile human physiology? The odds are heavily against it. If we are able to genetically modify human beings, we can then populate those otherwise unlivable planets by literally making humans to match the environment of the world we wish to settle.
Would these genetically modified “people” still be human? Of course they are. They are based on human DNA and because they are designed for the world on which they live they are – surprise – exactly like we are. We evolved within our environment so that we are, if not perfect for the world on which we live, are at least well accommodated by it. All we would be doing is the same thing for extraterrestrials, only faster. What’s wrong with that? (But would they appreciate being modified when they grow up and find US here? Ah! That’s the question!)
I also have no objection to genetically designed trigger drugs or stem cell therapies that will cause the body to repair specific breakdowns within itself or stem cell generated spare parts that can be developed from cells of my own body to replace a failing heart, a bad kidney or a liver or an ear. Anything to allow me to live longer than my scheduled three score and ten would be welcomed! (Which I’ve already exceeded by a good number of years!)
I have no objection to custom DNA modified and genetically tweaked embryos to allow parents to pick a brown/blue/green/violet eyed, blond/red/black/brown/straight/curly haired, boy/girl baby that will have an IQ of 200+. Or one genetically enhanced so the child will never require a vaccination or fall prey to any currently known disease.
Would there be abuses of genetic modification of human embryos? Of course there will. So what?
If society determines that these rogue modifications are a bad thing, then catch those who are doing the bad thing and take their genes away from them – permanently – preferably by gentle lobotomy. But don’t trash an entirely new and most valuable science to keep out a few bad guys.
Why should anyone object rationally to such developments? All that would happen, if such genetic modifications were done would be the passing of some superstitions which, in my opinion, is not a bad thing.
The current political/religious/ethical debate (ethical being an interchangeable word for religion in some conversations but being pushed as some undefinable but separate discussion) is nearly 100% against genetic modification of any sort in order to save current religious beliefs and organizations from collapse.
But that mischievous genie is out of the bottle and countries ruled by little minds and populated by less than rational people that prohibit the continued research into cloning, stem cells and genetic science are destined to fail in that attempt.
Bad laws drive out good people and the experimentation and perfection of such techniques will merely go over the border, leaving the prohibiting country at an eventual huge disadvantage and unable to benefit from the great and wonderful things (and, I’m sure, suffer some bad ones as well) that will come from such research. Which is where the United States would be right now except that the science of stem cells has figured out a way to make an end run around the use of embryonic cells. Now skin cells can be modified into stem cell fairly well and others advances will follow rapidly if quietly. Eventually, if all works well, the sources of stem cells will become irrelevant.
Yet those countries who prohibit the science are at exactly the same risk from the mistakes, errors and potentially evil uses as are countries who sanction the research.
Cool, huh. Prohibit genetic research and loose an enormous range of benefits while risking the same disasters as if you hadn’t banned it! It sounds like something politicians are good at.
My thinking on the subject is that it would be far better for us (we are the good guys, even if we are fading a bit) to know all we can about genetic modification, DNA manipulation, stem cells and the whole nine yards, thereby being far better prepared to deal with the potential buggers that lurk therein and thereabout.
Genetic research is just like anything else the human race has come up with.
Prostitution for example. Far better to acknowledge its existence and its necessity in the scheme of things human and allow it to do business openly with as little hindrance as possible. Regulate it only as much as is required to protect the participating public and do that only based on scientifically peer reviewed evaluations of actual (not perceived) dangers. I know – fat political chance of that ever happening.
As yet another short aside, I once managed a NASA Site on top of a mountain near Ely, Nevada. Nevada enjoys the legal, supervised and regulated operation of brothels. In my three years of living in Ely, which had three houses of prostitution at the time, there was only one case of a sexual nature brought before the people’s court. It happened that a cab driver picked up a lovely young lady as a fare and during the ride, exposed himself to her in an obscene manner. The young lady, outraged by such crass behavior, turned in the cabbie who was subsequently arrested and fined appropriately. The young lady was employed by the Green Lantern as a prostitute and obviously preferred to leave her work behind when she was off shift (so to speak).
I was raising two teenaged daughters when we lived in Ely – which is tough mining town with a lot of transients. I never worried about them a minute when they were out and about as far as anyone accosting them or doing them harm. It just didn’t happen there (or anywhere else prostitution is legal and practiced openly and policed).
Tells you something about “morality” doesn’t it??
End Part II
Click here to read Part I
