Just a short post today.
I recently found on the internet a fairly interesting doomer book called "Apocalypse When" by a professor named Willard Wells. He references someone named Carter and I wonder if this is the Carter of the famed Carter Catastrophe. I'm going to debunk it but I won't go into too too much detail because the incorrect assumptions are so glaringly obvious as to be laughable.
Basically the gist of the book is that this professor has supposedly calculated the probability that civilization will crash and the probability that humanity will go extinct.
Most of his assumptions are actually quite reasonable except two.
1. The more civilized you are the more likely you are to go extinct.
2. The higher level of technology you have the more likely you are to go extinct.
In fact his thesis seems to be that the survivability of the human race ultimately depends on a major catastrophe that wipes out a large chunk of the population and thus in theory removes the man made extinction events which will wipe us out entirely.
He seems to be ignoring history. Primitive peoples are remarkably unable to deal with natural disaster and he seems to be saying that primitive peoples will survive just by being spread out, because they don't have any other advantages.
In fact archaeological evidence shows that human beings have been around as homo sapiens for at least 200,000 years and pre-humans have been around for 2 to 3 million years.
His assumption, however doesn't hold up though because he's basically saying that a large human population sustained by artificial means is more vulnerable to the rug being pulled out from under it than a sparse primitive civilization does.
70,000 years ago there was a large volcanic event that virtually wiped out the entire human race (which probably numbered around a quarter million to a million at the time) and reduced it to some 2,000 individuals. I make that a 98% wipeout worst case.
Now let's consider a scenario like "the road" whereby all crops and food animals are gone. Civilization collapses of course and almost everyone starves (not the cannibals eeek!). Even here, however, civilization is clearly superior to primitive states because of storage technology. All over the planet there are stores of canned goods and seeds et cetera. Moreover there are also stores of *knowledge* in the form of libraries et cetera. Any putative collapse isn't going to go all the way back to primitive times since the infrastructure, the seeds et cetera is *still there*. Thus any so called collapse of civilization is simply a delay until civilization pops up again. But civilization in and of itself generally increases human wellbeing, not decreases, so short of a scenario whereby the entire planet is converted into gray goo (which has also been debunked elsewhere) any putative man-made disaster isn't going to do much worse damage than the event 70,000 years ago and in fact is very likely to do less. I'm including, by the way, a full scale nuclear exchange and nuclear winter et cetera in this. Not everything would be destroyed and especially not knowledge. There is civilization and knowledge *everywhere* on this planet. Civilization will be very resilient to destruction.
So, sorry doomers, I don't buy it. It's a nice book but it's basically doomer porn. For the record, according to the assumptions, we have 72 years left until DOOOOOOM. But then again we are facing olduvai doom RIGHT NOW according to the dieoff crowd and we are facing limits-to-growth doom in about 15 years.
It makes me laugh though it really does. It's like the global warming doomers. Allegedly all co2 being added to the atmosphere can only cause *bad things* to happen and good things never happen. If you design your model to say one thing always then obviously you're going to get the result you want. But a model is not in fact a scientific experiment. It's an animated hypothesis with built in assumptions and is not valid for testing science AT ALL. One example is that global warming will cause everywhere to get drier and thus crops will fail et cetera and WE WILL ALL DIE. Sadly for those raving fruitbars it turns out that increased carbon dioxide in the previous super greenhouse actually made things wetter. Hmmm. I'm thinking that will in fact *increase* the crop growing range and allow us to grow more food. So now we will have to deal with all the tornadoes et cetera that this will cause. Well duh. Build *underground*. Anyways I digressed.
Basically neither us as a species nor our civilization is doomed, though the doomers themselves are all sweaty praying for our destruction.
Ain't happening.
A big fart in the general direction of the doomers. I will now go back to ignoring you again.
