CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Damned if We Do and Damned if We Don't

Thursday, June 12, 2008

this entry brought to you by folk implosion, "serge"


I look at the reports of global warming, and how things are much worse regarding it than we originally thought, and if we don't get carbon gasses down immediately the consequences will be drastic. I feel like we, the human race, are going to pull through, because we are resilient creatures. But on the other hand, I wonder, how long are we going to make it as a species? The dinosaurs were around for much longer than we've been. And the dinosaurs were enormous. I suppose the size of the creature and its relative ability to go extinct don't necessary go hand in hand, but if you think about it, we're just these little things. And every thing's life span is finite. Everything will eventually go away, to be replaced with something else. Who's to say we won't last another two generations? Who's to say that our shelf life isn't incredibly short? Why should we assume that just because we've evolved beyond every other creature on the planet that we should outlive everything before us? Who is to say that our own intelligence won't be our folly?

Isn't that fucking depressing? I don't think the world is going to end with me. I'm going to die of natural, non world-ending causes. But my children or my grandchildren-- to think that there's a chance that I can't say for certain that they won't be wiped out along with the rest of the human race is frightening beyond belief. I am in fact a firm believer that there's never been a point in history where we went for any period of time without being on the verge of catastrophe, yet we always pulled through. I mean, take the cold war and the nuclear scare. There was a very real chance the planet would have been wiped out. But that didn't happen because all the parties involved maintained cool heads. It didn't have to happen that way, but it did.

In this case, say everybody cools their heads and says, holy shit, we have to do something right fucking now. And let's say we do. But what then? What if there's nothing to be done? What if we all make the wrong decision? What if we decide on one thing and it doesn't work? Take for example, ethanol. Just two years ago it was being touted as being this course-changing fail-safe that was going to make sure we live through until a better technology comes along. Turns out ethanol is awful for the environment. Science got it all wrong. It's probably going to get turned around before any real huge damage is done, looks like we're going to catch it on time, but that's a good example. What if we didn't know ethanol wasn't the answer until more damage had been done? What then?

It seems like when there was the imminent threat of nuclear disaster, where the planet could get wiped out, we had one option: cool our jets. Encourage everybody else to cool their jets, and hope that everybody's jets remained cool. In this case, we have so many potential options to save ourselves, but most of them are inevitably going to be the wrong answers. We're only going to get a few rolls of the dice before our time runs out, and if we sit around taking too much time thinking about it, time will run out anyway. It's going to be like Homer Simpson in the Nuclear Power Plant when the plant was going to melt down. It might end up being "eenie meenie miney mo", in which case we'll just press "mo" and hope for the best.

It seems like we're damned if we do and damned if we don't.
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with love from CRS @ 11:25 AM 

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