A monster that’s always there
October 24, 2018 2:50 PM   Subscribe

 
No, it won't kill all of us. Just a sufficient number to make sure we are no longer messing with the environment for a while. Billions upon billions will certainly die but humanity itself will prevail. We are, after all, a highly adaptable species existing in every corner of the planet. But civilization? Not so much...
posted by jim in austin at 3:44 PM on October 24, 2018 [8 favorites]


Why not?
posted by Artw at 3:47 PM on October 24, 2018


Billions upon billions will certainly die but humanity itself will prevail.

Oh, OK, phew, I was worried for a minute there.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 3:52 PM on October 24, 2018 [20 favorites]


"We are, after all, a highly adaptable species existing in every corner of the planet. But civilization? Not so much..."

Such hubris! We've only existed as a species for a very short time, civilization even shorter. The world and universe got along for most of its existence without us and will do so long after us. There are also several events that could make us extinct long before climate change gets it's chance to try.
posted by GoblinHoney at 3:52 PM on October 24, 2018 [5 favorites]


Such hubris! We've only existed as a species for a very short time, civilization even shorter.

About 250,000 years ago there were no more than 10K breeding age humans on earth. Now we number more than 7,600,000,000. We are a plague, an infestation, a virus. Leave enough of us alive and we'll be back with a vengeance. What we call civilization is, however, an artificial construct. It can vanish without a trace and still humanity will persist...
posted by jim in austin at 4:39 PM on October 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


jim in austin: the model you're describing is certainly true of natural systems, but doesn't necessarily apply to systems where there are nonproductive members of a society and stored wealth.

Both massive-scale dieoff (with eventual recovery) and extinction are plausible scenarios in models where these variables are introduced; and because such systems are chaotic (that is, tiny differences in initial conditional snowball into large differences in outcomes), it is hard to know which scenario is likely for humanity.

So, um, don't be so sure.
posted by ragtag at 4:42 PM on October 24, 2018 [7 favorites]


Main thing we need to do is keep track of all the rich people bunkers. Extinction is for everybody.
posted by Artw at 4:56 PM on October 24, 2018 [18 favorites]


jim in austin: the model you're describing is certainly true of natural systems, but doesn't necessarily apply to systems where there are nonproductive members of a society and stored wealth.

I'm simply talking about the species Homo sapiens. A bug stuck on a pin in a museum collection. Whatever that species may have accomplished to date is excluded, including any notion of society or civilization, when considering its possible survival in the future...
posted by jim in austin at 4:56 PM on October 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Well, some people are born optimists I guess.
posted by Artw at 5:09 PM on October 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


There's still the chance that Godzilla will get us first.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:34 PM on October 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


Main thing we need to do is keep track of all the rich people bunkers.

Good idea. Rich people would be a valuable food source when they inevitably try to come out of hiding.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:47 PM on October 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


We're not the first, the dinosaurs died out, but wait, they didn't have youtube prepper instruction videos!
posted by sammyo at 5:49 PM on October 24, 2018


Walt Disney was a shortsighted fool. He should have been preserved in amber.
posted by rokusan at 6:02 PM on October 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


Circling back to the article (which I have now read *pats self on head*), the Sea of Corruption from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (which is less an individual monster and more an entire ecosystem) did a nice job, I thought, of a climate-change-like monster: it only became more destructive the more violently you tried to stop it.
posted by ragtag at 6:32 PM on October 24, 2018 [7 favorites]


People who think the human race will survive, if reduced, should consider this: when agriculture collapses and billions begin to starve, with the accompanying wars and collapse of states - do you think the nukes *won't* come out?

It'll solve global warming for whatever relict species humans don't manage to eat, poison, or starve, though!
posted by tavella at 6:54 PM on October 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


”Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” — Mark Fisher
posted by octobersurprise at 7:53 PM on October 24, 2018 [13 favorites]


The nukes might throw up enough particulate to temporarily counter the CO2 so there’s a bit of an upside.
posted by Artw at 9:26 PM on October 24, 2018


The nukes might throw up enough particulate to temporarily counter the CO2 so there’s a bit of an upside.

"This is Howard Handupme. Goodbye."
posted by Mogur at 4:37 AM on October 25, 2018


My money's still on the corvids to take over after us. They're smart, they're everywhere we are, and they're carrion eaters.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:27 AM on October 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


Go for broke: Bacterial slime on an ammonia sea as all that is left.
posted by Artw at 6:39 AM on October 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


Artw I think there's a song in that!
posted by aspersioncast at 6:53 AM on October 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


The one thing people seem to take for granted when it comes to climate change is that, once the Earth settles down into whatever new climate regime comes after this one, we'll still have a breathable atmosphere.

Unfortunately, that's not guaranteed. In fact, I've come to believe it's unlikely, mostly due to research I've been doing on how deeply affected we are by mildly elevated levels of CO2 and ozone. Plus there's the whole problem of the organisms that produce oxygen dying off.

We take our air for granted to the point where it's the go-to metaphor for things we take for granted. But we live in a tiny bubble of gases clinging to a sphere that's hurtling through space, and the only reason we can survive in it is that we evolved to thrive in a particular mix of gases that's the result of an incredibly complex ecological equilibrium that's been stable for a few million years.

Now that the equilibrium has been broken by the release of millions of years' worth of stored energy in a couple of centuries, the mechanisms that make the atmosphere we breathe are dying off. Every forest fire, every marine heat wave, every drought not only compromises the atmosphere we breathe now, it handicaps the planet's ability to generate atmosphere in the future.

I think the billionaire bunkers that everyone loves to fantasize about destroying are the only hope our species has of surviving this. We need to learn to create habitats that can support us even when the air outside isn't fit to breathe.

And we haven't got very long.
posted by MrVisible at 7:43 AM on October 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


Really interesting article, "the bramble" in particular.
posted by Baeria at 9:43 AM on October 25, 2018


The article raises a good problem about the purposes of monstrosity.

One interpretation of monsters is that they are warnings of something radically wrong with the world (even a local world, like a town). Vandermeer's flying toxic bear (!) is a good instance of this.

Another view is to see monsters more literally connected to the larger horror. I'm thinking of the sneaky critters from The Bay, which both represent ecological crisis while embodying a real one quite well.

I don't think any monster has really caught on for representing climate change.

PS: we read Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 recently, and one interesting reader response was that there wasn't a clear and major villain. Fwiw.
posted by doctornemo at 5:09 PM on October 25, 2018 [4 favorites]




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