I trust Andrea's judgement up to a point so - provisional predictions from this afternoon's conversation:
Civil war in the US and the UK in 2028?
We have passed some ecological tipping points so - a billion dead in thirty years?
The species will survive but will have to rebuild?
Our Chaos will last longer than that of the Technic History?
In 1960's sf, most futures had spaceships in the twenty-first century, a few had post-nuclear-war survival. Anderson, of course, had both and also combined them. Maybe our future, later in this century, is post-ecological-catastrophe survival? I am glad to have a daughter and granddaughter now but wonder what they will have to endure.
"'Oh, God, the young, the poor young!'"
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), p. 6.
"'The tough and lucky will survive...'" (ibid.)
Poul Anderson and his fictional relative, Robert Anderson, discuss:
"...the probable shape of the future..." (ibid.)
We remember HG Wells' title: The Shape Of Things To Come. That is always on our minds both in sf and in reality.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Civil war in the US/UK in 2028? That strikes me as sheer hysteria!
I do not think our Time of Chaos can last as long as Technic Civilization. If nothing else I believe advances in technology will enable a single power or alliance of powers to conquer/unify Earth. Perhaps within a century.
Ad astra! Sean
I meant will our Chaos last longer than the Chaos in the Technic History timeline?
"ecological tipping points"
Some of them due to the increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere & ocean due to burning of fossil fuels.
From reading "Why Nuclear Power has Been a Flop" by Jack Devanney, I am quite convinced that the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model of radiation is badly wrong and that using it for regulation of nuclear power greatly increases the cost of nuclear. LNT assumes no repair of radiation damage so a given dose of radiation produces the same harm whether it occurs in a few seconds or over decades. LNT was pushed through mostly by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s.
This leads me to imagine an alternate history in which LNT never gets followed so nuclear electricity becomes & remains cheap (about $0.03 per kWh in present US $ according to Devanney). So from the later part of the 20th century almost no fossil fuels get used for electricity generation. Probably nuclear starts getting used for industrial process heat also. For transportation nuclear would be directly used only on ships, but electricity from overhead wires would be worth using for railways & trolley busses.
So in this alternate history even with no consideration given to the externalities of burning fossil fuels, we get far less CO2 emitted, so less warming & less ocean acidification.
I can also see political benefits since some of the most authoritarian regimes (eg: Saudi Arabia, Soviet Union/Russia) got/get most of their funding from petroleum/gas sales.
Kaor, Paul and Jim!
Paul; That clarifies what you meant. I think our Warring States era will last longer than 2045, which was approximately when "The Saturn Game was set. The pre-Technic Time of Chaos had ended or subsided by then.
Jim: Absolutely, the anti-nuclear hysteria of our lifetimes has been a global disaster! You reminded me of Robert Zubrin's strong defense of nuclear power in his book THE CASE FOR SPACE.
Ad astra! Sean
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