A World of Extremes

Submitted by Lindsay
Melbourne Australia!

"Reality is frequently inaccurate"
- Douglas Adams, The Cafe at the end of the Universe

(2/2020) We all know that technology continues to change our lives. We are excited by all the new apps and gadgets while ignoring the things that don’t grab our attention, and we can’t be bothered by all the other crazy stuff like algorithms. But these things rule our lives. They run our bank accounts, our health, social security, applications for documents – nearly every day-to-day thing. Our likes and dislikes are known; we are herded into our special likes, deprived of the wide picture, and made to conform.

Most of us cannot live without this order. We are totally dependant on technology, and we’d be stranded if it wasn’t there or if it stopped working. Even small outages cause havoc, so imagine (no, please don’t. It’s too painful) what would happen if it just disappeared altogether. Society would implode, and the people best able to cope would be those with enough arable land to grow their own food or lived on the seashore. Forget animal husbandry, chicken farming, and synthetics. They all depend on electronic technology.

Could this happen? Yes indeed - in fact, we here in Australia have just had some experience of it. The bushfires that occurred in no less than four widely spread states, (South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales), cover 186,000 square Kilometres, more than the area of Washington state, and bringing it to your perspective, six times the area of Maryland.

Can you imagine that?

The areas are mostly remote, mountainous, precipitous and often difficult to get to by any means. These fires did more damage than anyone can imagine, partly due to the failure of communications. A few hundred power poles down, a few million trees across roads, and some people didn’t know if they had to leave, if the fire was minutes or hours away and how fast it was travelling. Firefighters, (including the group who volunteered from your place), sometimes relied on battery powered walkie-talkies, and it is a miracle that only 28 lives have been lost – so far – because the current and new fires are still burning, even after the 30 to 100 mm of rain in the past two days.

A few towns had generators, and they could still pump fuel and water, but the panic was great and many people who were caught up in the disaster now require counselling. A thousand or so tourists and locals were evacuated by boat from a beautiful town at the furthest point East in Victoria when the roads were closed; they finished up about 300 miles away, not far from where I live, on Westernport bay.

Some other stats: Over one billion animals are dead, and many more will die because their food has been destroyed. Some 1700 houses, and untold numbers of sheds destroyed; thousands of miles of fencing will have to be replaced. Dairy herds had to be been shifted, Tree plantations totaled, millions of feet of timber burnt.

Businesses have no customers; services are spotty, food and water exhausted, though supplies are now slowly getting through. Tourists, a major source of revenue, have been frightened away.

The insurance bill will be enormous, and the government has made about $600 million in funds available, some as grants, some with no interest to help small business survive. There are many heroes, notably the hundreds of volunteers who kept the firefighters fed and watered. More money has been raised by celebrities and the public than ever before – it’s getting close to a billion – which is wonderful.

And this is not a one-off. It will happen again; it will get hotter, we will receive less rain, and the prices we pay for food will keep increasing. This is a picture of now, as well as one of the future, at least in Australia. It will not happen in your country, Europe or the Arctic, but something will. The changes the world is experiencing are unstoppable and the needs of all populations will be so enormous no government will be able to meet them.

Don’t say, ‘Oh, Climate change. Pah. It’s nonsense.’ or ‘I blame politicians.’ If you step onto the road and see a bus travelling towards you at 60 and is ten feet away, do you stop to say, ‘I wonder who made that bus? Or, ‘Ugh, all those fumes?’

No, you try to get out of its way.

The old saying, ‘There’s none so blind as those who will not see’, is spot on. And the blindest of the blind are politicians. Their horizons are too close, their goals blinkered by fear, their ability, never as good as they think, is nothing more than hope.

So if we cannot expect our leaders to stop the bus, whom can we turn to? Strangely enough, it is technology that could be the best solution to climate change in all its forms – loss of water, acidification of the oceans, extremes of temperature and storms - and there are some very interesting things in progress. Will they be in time? Who knows?

But technology cannot deal with the other, non-scientific crunches. The biggest of these is the breakdown of democracy and freedom, with rise of dictators. No dictator has ever called himself that, but they are known by their desire to rule with no restrictions. Which is a pretty good description of President Trump. The next is the economy – all kinds, in every country as they will not be able to pay for the effects of the above. This time it will only cost Australia a few billion immediately, but the effects are going to go on for decades. And our population is tiny. You also have the enormous disparity in wealth that will sink the ship, unless the plutocrats are made to pay for the results.

Timing will be different everywhere – we just happen to be the first – although the Pacific islands began to submerge at least forty years ago, but they are not newsworthy.

Capitalism, communism, coalitions like the EU will have no way of coping with it, and I don’t see a magician emerging who pulls a solution out of a hat.

You have some of the greatest minds in the world. How about asking them for a solution?