The "Trigger Effect" & the coming collapse of human civilization

[numan]

'
I have been looking through a book, Our Final Hour, by Sir Martin Rees, the noted Cambridge (not the one in Massachusetts -- the real one) physicist and English Astronomer Royal.

He sensibly writes :

I think the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century....

What happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter.

Long ago, decades ago, long before it became fashionable to decry global warming, I was warning those around me about the fundamental weakness, which overshadowed all others, of modern technological society: I coined the phrase "trigger-effect" to apply to this key danger. Simply, it refers to the truth that as technical expertise increases, it takes a smaller, less expensive, more easily obtainable trigger to set off a series of catastrophic repercussions.

I am pleased that Sir Martin has the intelligence to come to the same conclusion :

...risks plainly can never be completely eliminated. But far worse, they seem set to become more intractable and threatening....the "leverage" that each can exert is increasing.

emphases added

Sir Martin uses the word "leverage" for what I call "the trigger effect", however, I think my phrase is more felicitous and makes the point more clearly.
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[numan]

'
Sir Martin references something which Fred Ikle wrote. Ikle was a big wheel in the United States Terror Establishment :

"The knowledge and techniques for making biological superweapons will become dispersed among hospital laboratories, agricultural research institutes, and peaceful factories everywhere. Only an oppressive police state could assure total government control over such novel tools for mass destruction."

Unless there develops a radical restructuring of human societies, the exponential increase of "trigger effects" makes it not unlikely that the continued existence of human life will be impossible without the rigorous control of oppressive police states -- even more oppressive than the police states which presently exist in the United States and other "developed" countries.

In choosing survival over freedom, we are likely to make a Faustian bargain, because it seems unlikely that police states -- sufficiently oppressive to prevent our destruction by the manifold "trigger effects" which lie in our future -- once established, will ever again relinquish their control at any time .

It seems very likely either that we will be destroyed, or that all future humans, until the end of time, will live in exceedingly oppressive police states.
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[LoudMcCloud]

No on is gonna believe me, but I have sources inside from Compass Bank Board of Directors. Its a Spanish bank. He says a collapse is gonna happen in the next 10 years.

This guy is a multimillionaire who hangs out with Billionaires.

There are only 800 billionaires in the world.

 

[numan]

'

Well, anyone who has a little education and, despite that, is not a fool can see it coming.

You hardly need to hang out with millionaires and billionaires.
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[numan]

'
No matter how learned and qualified he is, Sir Martin's views are hardly the isolated assessment of one man.

Consider what conclusions the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reached :

US National Academy of Sciences

“Just a few individuals with specialized skills and access to a laboratory could inexpensively and easily produce a panoply of lethal biological weapons that might seriously threaten the US population. Moreover, they could manufacture such biological agents with commercially available equipment — that is, equipment that could also be used to make chemicals, pharmaceuticals, foods, or beer — and therefore remain inconspicuous.

The deciphering of the human genome sequence and the complete elucidation of numerous pathogen genomes ... allow science to be misused to create new agents of mass destruction.”

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[numan]

'
George Poste is a British biotechnologist and government advisor who now works in the U.S.A. :

Advances in Biotechnology: Promise and Peril

The other dimension which has already been referred to this morning is the increasing ubiquity of biotechnological capabilities. It would be interesting to reflect, if Ted Kazinski [the Unabomber] had been trained in the 1990s, whether he would have chosen to use bombs, or would have walked along and dropped something into a hamburger plant as an alternative -- as the ubiquity of "Biotechnology 101" becomes increasing commonplace in the university curriculum around the world.

"In 2002, the US approved a huge increase in funding for biodefence. This will, as an unwelcome by-product, disseminate such expertise more widely."
---Sir Martin Rees

[emphasis added]
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[numan]

'
Biologists create polio; terrorists could, too

Guided by the published recipe of the polio virus' genetic structure, molecular biologists...linked small pieces of easy-to-obtain DNA to make a virus template. A routine chemical process then converted the template into the polio virus itself....

Information on virus genomes is easy to access from papers published in scientific journals and online databases.

"You open the Internet and lift out a sequence and go to work and make a virus without ever having seen the virus in your laboratory," Wimmer said...."This work is very important to put society on alert....Society has to deal with it. It won't go away if we close our eyes."....

Scientists have speculated that terrorists might try to create deadlier viruses, such as smallpox, from published genetic recipes.

Making the smallpox virus would be more difficult than making the polio virus....

"It is much more difficult to do currently, but with progress in science and technology, it will be possible in 10 to 15 years to make smallpox," Wimmer said.

The polio virus was synthesized in 2002.

Of greater concern, Block said, would be efforts to combine different viruses into a chemical chimera with the most dangerous properties of each.

"I'd be more worried about people patching together chimeric viruses," Block said. "Imagine something as contagious as measles but as lethal as Ebola."

emphases added
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[numan]

'
Martin Rees : Our Final Hour

We may not have to wait long before new kinds of synthetic microbes are being genetically engineered. Craig Venter, former chief executive officer of Celera, the company that sequenced the human genome, has already announced plans to help solve the world's energy and global warming crises by creating new microbes: one type would dissociate water into oxygen and hydrogen (for the "hydrogen economy"); others would feed off carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (thereby combating the greenhouse effect) and convert it into organic chemicals of the kind that are now made from oil and gas. Venter's technique involves making an artificial chromosome with about five hundred genes and inserting it into an existing microbe whose own genome has been destroyed by radiation. If this technique works, it opens up the prospects of designing new forms of life that could feed off other materials in our environment.

Wonderful! Marvelous! The answer to all our problems !!
HOWEVER :

...fungi could be designed that could feed on and destroy polyurethane plastics. Even machines could be under threat : specially designed bacteria could change oil into a crystalline material, and thereby clog up machinery.

I wonder what would happen if those marvelous bacteria that created the Hydrogen Economy got out of the laboratory and managed to survive in the oceans? · ·

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[Decus]

What you've written must be true. I've found another: 19 predictions that "the end" will come on or after the year 2020. Predictions that the end of the world will happen after the year 2020

Seems this prediction of the end of the world gimmick has been a big money-maker for more than a few centuries. Makes me want to ask what you paid for the book.

 

[LAfrique]

'
I have been looking through a book, Our Final Hour, by Sir Martin Rees, the noted Cambridge (not the one in Massachusetts -- the real one) physicist and English Astronomer Royal.

He sensibly writes :

I think the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century....

What happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter.

Long ago, decades ago, long before it became fashionable to decry global warming, I was warning those around me about the fundamental weakness, which overshadowed all others, of modern technological society: I coined the phrase "trigger-effect" to apply to this key danger. Simply, it refers to the truth that as technical expertise increases, it takes a smaller, less expensive, more easily obtainable trigger to set off a series of catastrophic repercussions.

I am pleased that Sir Martin has the intelligence to come to the same conclusion :

...risks plainly can never be completely eliminated. But far worse, they seem set to become more intractable and threatening....the "leverage" that each can exert is increasing.

emphases added

Sir Martin uses the word "leverage" for what I call "the trigger effect", however, I think my phrase is more felicitous and makes the point more clearly.
.

Numan, you think this maybe reason NASA and MIT are out seeking habitable Planets NASA And MIT Mission Will Search For Habitable Planets - Forbes and the Netherlands seeking volunteers Want to Live on Mars? Private Martian Colony Project Seeks Astronauts to colonized Mars?

 

[numan]

'
The simple fact that a manned Mars mission was proposed by George W. Bush should be enough to indicate that it is propagandistic bullshit.

There will be no manned mission to Mars in the forseeable future. It would be too expensive, of no important benefit and far too dangerous and unlikely to be successfully carried out. Until there is some way to protect humans from being fried by solar coronal ejections, humans will never go far from Earth.

One of ways you can know that the Mars mission proponents are bullshit artists is that they never talk about the Moon. Any sensible space travel would start with the baby-step of setting up lunar bases. It would still be hideously expensive, and even more expensive to create the means of making the bases independent and self-sustaining, but at least it is possible. Whether such trouble and expense is worthwhile is another question.

Is there anything that would justify condemning people to an unnatural, dangerous imprisonment in a hostile environment? Certainly there are interesting and potentially useful experiments that could be performed on the Moon, particularly on the side which faces away from the Earth.

Perhaps the most practical argument for a lunar base is that dangerous experimentation which could create disaster on Earth (like the imbecilic idea of creating microbes which would dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen, mentioned earlier) could be explored and developed in an environment where the damage of human folly would be limited and contained.

I do not expect humans to reach the end of the 21st century without destroying their civilizations -- and, possibly, themselves. To avoid that fate would require an effort and ability to pull their act together which humans have never been able to demonstrate in their entire history.

I would be pleased to be proven wrong, of course, but that is unlikely.

...from the hand of an angry Universe which abhors it and is dreadfully provoked
[with apologies to Jonathan Edwards]
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[52ndStreet]

Your solution, the creastion of an oppressive police state seems very probable. Given 9/11, and the
recent Boston bombings,and the Obama administrations attempts to ban assault rifles also to limit
the capacity of ammo clips, we can all see how the United States government is first attempting to disarm the American citizenry first before any attempt is made at establishing an "oppressive police state".The government will first try to confiscate all weapons in possesion of citizens. Which I feel has been in the works for a very long time. We have been bombed, attacked with
commercial airliners, it is only a matter of time before a chemical or biological weapon is used.
One with the ability to kill many thousands of people.

 

[PredFan]

The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

 

[numan]

The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

Indeed, it is.
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[Politico]

Society is not going to collapse. Cetrtainly not in anyone heres lifetime.

 

[numan]

Society is not going to collapse. Cetrtainly not in anyone heres lifetime.

A comment worthy to be uttered by someone enjoying the summer of 1914 -- or by someone living on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD !!

But don't worry -- it isn't August, yet !
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[numan]

'
International Acclaim for Martin Rees's OUR FINAL HOUR

Almost as worrying are the growing risks stemming from error and the unpredictable outcomes of experiments, rather than from malign intent. A recent episode in Australia was a worrying portent. Ron Jackson was a researcher at the Animal Control Cooperative Research Centre in Canberra, a government laboratory whose main mission was to improve techniques for controlling animal pests. With his colleague Ian Ramshaw he was researching new ways to bring down the population of mice. Their idea was to modify the mousepox virus so that it became, in effect, an infectious contraceptive vaccine, and use it to sterilise mice. During these experiments, early in 2001, they inadvertently created a new, highly virulent, strain of mousepox: their laboratory mice all died. They had added a gene for a protein (interleukin-4) that boosted antibody production and suppressed the immune system in the mice; in consequence, even animals that had previously been vaccinated against mousepox died as well. Had these scientists been working instead on the smallpox virus, could they have modified it to become even more virulent, so that vaccination offered no protection against it? According to Richard Preston, "The main thing that stands between the human species and the creation of a supervirus is a sense of responsibility among the individual biologists."

[emphases added]

Well !! That certainly relieves my fears !! · ·

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[numan]

'
By the way, Sir Martin settles a question which has puzzled the politically naive for many years -- the reason for using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He quotes Joseph Rotblat, a noted physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos.

But he chose to leave prematurely when it became clear that German defeat was near, because in his mind the bomb project could be justified only as a counterbalance to a possible nuclear weapon in Hitler's hands. Indeed, he recalls having been disillusioned by hearing General Groves, head of the project, saying as early as March 1944 that the main purpose of the bomb was "to subdue the Russians."

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[whitehall]

'
I have been looking through a book, Our Final Hour, by Sir Martin Rees, the noted Cambridge (not the one in Massachusetts -- the real one) physicist and English Astronomer Royal.

He sensibly writes :

I think the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century....

What happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter.

Long ago, decades ago, long before it became fashionable to decry global warming, I was warning those around me about the fundamental weakness, which overshadowed all others, of modern technological society: I coined the phrase "trigger-effect" to apply to this key danger. Simply, it refers to the truth that as technical expertise increases, it takes a smaller, less expensive, more easily obtainable trigger to set off a series of catastrophic repercussions.

I am pleased that Sir Martin has the intelligence to come to the same conclusion :

...risks plainly can never be completely eliminated. But far worse, they seem set to become more intractable and threatening....the "leverage" that each can exert is increasing.

emphases added

Sir Martin uses the word "leverage" for what I call "the trigger effect", however, I think my phrase is more felicitous and makes the point more clearly.
.

I gotta kind of agree with you on this one numan although the post probably belongs on the conspiracy forum. Some people think that the AIDS epidemic that suddenly appeared in civilization in the last forty years was the result of sub-standard supervision of reckless government funded bio-research. When the genetic code was cracked it was just a matter of time when less civilized societies would try to create microbial and full sized monsters as a self fulfilling jihad suicidal effort to "cleanse" civilization.