Hope for the New Year.

The illo for “All the Songs”―assembled by me, actually, using elements courtesy of Liam Andrew and Dai Mar Tamarack.

Not too long ago—back before Covid took me out for the holidays— I attended the BUG’s latest fiction launch, sharing drinks with a horde of her fans and students from all walks of life. One such fan was a journalist, with whom the conversation turned to environmental apocalypse and the various ways it might yet be staved off. (This was only fitting: the BUG’s new novelette—“All the Songs”, in Fusion Fragment—is the most hauntingly beautiful celebration of Human extinction you’re ever likely to read.)

The journo had grave misgivings about my suggestion that, for starters, the lot of us could just stop breeding. If you’re only including the childless, she pointed out, you’re going to be having a very small conversation. One might argue that her own, somewhat more outwardly-directed solution— guillotine the plutocrats—suffers from similarly limited appeal. (Although maybe not. It’s hard to find fault, for example, with Luigi Mangione’s approach; since those ironically-named “health care” CEO’s clearly aren’t bothered by either the deaths they’ve caused or by next-of-kin tramping around with protest signs, it seems only systematic to test whether the prospect of ending up dead themselves might motivate a change in behavior.) In either case, it seems pretty clear that the time for conversations— small or large— has pretty much run its course. It’s all just talk.

Behold, the New Year:

The nuclear codes are about to move back from the hands of the doddering old fool into those of the stumbling demented tantrum-child. The Democrats— having repeatedly characterized Trump as a “fascist”—are now in the awkward position of enabling a “smooth transition” to said fascism because that is how the Great Democracies work.

Ukraine is fucked.

Gaza is even more fucked (not that this is much of a change from Genocide Joe’s regime, admittedly).

The chances of nuclear war are higher than they’ve been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Most importantly (with the possible exception of the whole nuclear war thing), the environment is fucked. 2024 closed out as the hottest year not just in recorded history, but in the past 125,000 years. We’ve been consistently over 1.5°C for a solid year now, notwithstanding the Hope Police’s strident insistence that we really haven’t blown past that threshold until we’ve done it for a bunch more years. Carbon emissions continued to increase in 2024 (although I’m certain that they’ll start to come down once the Orange Imbecile puts his Drill Baby Drill policy into play).

Mix in the various plagues and pandemics still doing the rounds (even if most jurisdictions have stopped releasing data on such things because if you admit we’re still in the throes of a pandemic you might have to be seen to do something about it, and the The Economy won’t stand for another shutdown) or waiting in the wings; the S’Asian flash floods and the Mexican killer heat waves and the firestorms and droughts raging from California to Australia; the revelation that traditional carbon sinks such as the Amazon and the Arctic are now net carbon producers; and the ongoing catastrophic extinction rates of all those thousands of species we really don’t give a shit about because they sure as shit were never Made In God’s Image—put all that together and the year we just crawled out of was pretty much the worst ever.

And yet, looking forward to what’s coming this year, 2024 represents the last of The Good Old Days. We’re headed for 2.7-3.1°C by century’s end if current trends continue. Current trends will not continue, of course. As of January 20th, they’re going to get a lot worse.

If any of you can find any legitimate good news in the face of all this—and I’m talking about reasonable cause for hope here, not some feel-good story about rescued hedgehogs or found cats—by all means let me know. Don’t bother mentioning the plummeting cost and improving economics of renewable energy[1], though, unless you include strategies that don’t turn the planet into a moonscape from mining the requisite minerals. (Apparently it would take half the world’s current lithium production and twice the world’s current cobalt production just to electrify the UK grid. Now scale that up to the rest of the planet). Don’t feed me fairy tales about giant pie plates in the sky, designed to reduce solar input without requiring anyone to give up their super-yachts or private jets. In fact, don’t talk about any technological fix that won’t fall instantly afoul of Jevon’s Paradox, that will be sold as a way to Buy Time To Save The World but really end up as just another excuse to do fuck-all. Talk to me about behavioral solutions. Give me hope by showing me evidence that Humanity can change its nature.

Because honestly, the only hope I have now can be found in the fact that the Earth has already endured five major extinction events— and that new, gloriously-diverse biospheres have always evolved in their wake. It may take twenty million years after we’re gone, but the Earth will shake off this disease. It will recover.

The only hope I have is that the biosphere will survive long enough for us to go extinct.


  1. Which, fun fact, still hasn’t put a dent on fossil energy production, instead merely adding to it.



This entry was posted on Friday, January 3rd, 2025 at 1:10 pm and is filed under In praise of biocide, politics, rant, scilitics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

158 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Sally McBride
Guest
Sally McBride
1 month ago

Yeah. Pretty sure we’re fucked. But the ball of rock, and some bacteria and so on, will still be here! So, Yay.

Thorn
Guest
Thorn
1 month ago
Reply to  Sally McBride

I’m a deeply optimistic man; I suffer from the Panglossian delusion that it might have some pigeons, foxes, and weeds on it too!

Diego
Guest
Diego
1 month ago

Whatever fuckery we end up offing ourselves by, I hope the octopus make it through okay. Maybe crabs too, because they’re funny.

Thorn
Guest
Thorn
1 month ago
Reply to  Diego

I’m holding out hope for the corvids, though I admit it miiiiiiiiiiight be a tad tricky for them to evolve dextrous extremities on limbs that have already evolved for flying.

Diego
Guest
Diego
1 month ago
Reply to  Thorn

I can imagine a silly, weird post-apocalypse in which octopus domesticate crabs and use corvids as messenger ravens ala GoT. Bonus points if they develop politics (polpitics?).

Dammit, now I wanna run Numenera again so I can do more campaigns involving the octopus queen

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Diego

Considering all the radioactive and chemical pollution that’s going to result from the collapse of civilization, it’s very unlikely that anything but protozoa survives. And I’m not sure even about protozoa.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Could I ever imagine that one day I’d call Peter Watts too optimistic?

Jack
Guest
Jack
1 month ago
Reply to  Diego

Totally. I looked for a Green Porno vid on crabs but came up empty handed. Thought you might like these if you haven’t already seen them.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xsUrhfz9niM
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cngiRHrCd6A

Jack
Guest
Jack
21 days ago
Reply to  Jack

Apologies, not sure those links work. One was of Isabella Rossellini playing a squid and another of her as an Angler fish in her Green Porno series. She did a bunch of skits and they’re all delightful. I can see why she and David Lynch got together once upon a time. Lynch RIP. I’m going to miss your weirdness.

Derryl
Guest
Derryl
1 month ago

The biosphere will survive long enough for us to go extinct. Just what that biosphere looks like is another question, though, and the fact that the feedback loop for greenhouse gases will continue for centuries or longer after we’ve breathed our last is… well, listen to me, starting to sound like you.

Bren
Guest
Bren
1 month ago

I remember a thing I heard a while back, “who does this plot of land truly belong to?”

“whoever can actual ‘hold’ it…”

long time fan btw.

Bren
Guest
Bren
1 month ago

I keep getting duplicates, dunno why..

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Bren

My messages appear only after a huge delay, and this website doesn’t show anything to confirm that they were actually posted when I click “Post comment”.
Whoever made this website, they aren’t any good at software engineering.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

It’s simply strange that it doesn’t even confirm that the comments were posted. In any case, it shouldn’t be like that.

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

you ever considered going the substack route?

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Ah, ok. I thought you could post your stuff for free on substack as well.

Leszek Ciesielski
Guest
Leszek Ciesielski
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Substack is very big on saying whatever the fuck their creators want… to the point of defending neo-nazis using their platform. For quite a few users, that’s a tad too far. For me personally as well.

Fatman
Guest
Fatman
1 month ago
Reply to  Andrei

It will notify you that you’re posting a duplicate comment even if your original comment isn’t visible yet. A blink-and-you-miss-it red flag pops up.

Thorn
Guest
Thorn
1 month ago
Reply to  Bren

The lack of any confirmation that your comment got submitted is probably a factor, at least for some people. I’ve certainly clicked the post button more than once a few times.

zenAndroid
Guest
zenAndroid
1 month ago

By the way, and I’m sure a lot of people here have heard about this; but i find r/collapse a really interesting place to read at times; especially LastWeekInCollapse’s posts, very very well researched, every week, a new post is released that goes through the beautiful news and happenings of the world, and when the year is over, there are some extra posts; that compile the whole year (updated to actuality, i believe), the last one i’ve yet to read is the one about Diseases (yey): https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1hs49s8/last_year_in_collapse_disease_2024/

Don’t read r/solarpunk though, that will ruin your day

Egg Syntax
Guest
Egg Syntax
1 month ago

I suspect your first instinct will be to dismiss this*, but hear me out; this is my research area, FWIW, so I’m probably at least not making the most naive errors here.

Whether or not we consider it true intelligence, current AI is already accelerating scientific research, both with special-purpose tools like AlphaFold and with general-purpose LLMs (some recent papers: 1, 2). Importantly, this holds true particularly for AI research itself. As a result, we’re likely to see AI capabilities rapidly accelerate, and there’s no particular reason to expect human-level intelligence to be a cap on that.

IMO there are two most-probable outcomes of that with respect to the climate:

  1. As you’ve recently linked to Geoff Hinton saying, there’s a substantial chance that AI kills us all.
  2. Rapid advances in science and technology result in a solution to climate change, eg far better carbon capture technology. I think that a substantial majority of humans would like to see the environment flourish as long as it’s not expensive or personally inconvenient, so a truly good technological solution would probably be adopted.

In either of those cases, climate change is no longer the central crux for the future; either we get a good solution or we all die (and stop emitting carbon in the process).

There are a few ways this could fail, for example:

  • The current approach to AI stalls out. That seems unlikely for various reasons I can go into if you’d like.
  • We all die in a way that also does irreparable damage to the biosphere. This one does seem pretty plausible (and is part of why I’ve shifted my focus fully to AI safety research).

Hopefully it’s clear — given that I’m pointing to ‘everybody dies’ as one fairly likely class of outcome — that I’m not just telling a Pollyanna story here. Nor am I a booster for the tech industry; I’d personally advocate for regulation to slow AI development way down until/unless we have better safety solutions.

But on net, I think it’s non-trivial reason for hope. I certainly don’t think we’ll see behavioral solutions, at least not until the effects of climate change start to bite much harder, and at that point it may well be too late for humanity although, as you say, hopefully not for the biosphere.

I’m happy to dive (much) deeper into all this it it would be helpful.

* Why do I suspect your first instinct will be to dismiss it? There’s a small but noisy chorus of academics (mostly linguists) convincing people that current AI approaches can’t possibly be intelligent because they’re not embodied or grounded in a language community, and so can’t actually be understanding or using language at all. For many smart, well-informed people who are reasonably suspicious of Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing, those arguments seem compelling. But the best evidence suggests that they’re just mistaken; I’m happy to point to some of the reasons why if that’s of interest. Another reason is arguments that we run out of compute or electricity, but algorithmic improvements are resulting in 3x more efficiency per year, so that wouldn’t be likely to slow things down for too long (and also the frontier is plausibly shifting to approaches like inference-time compute that aren’t just about scaling up the standard training).

Egg Syntax
Guest
Egg Syntax
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Thanks for the thoughtful response!

from what I’ve read LLMs are hitting a plateau because they’ve already digested the internet and are running out of new training data (which as I understand it is vital for further progress).

There’s necessarily some uncertainty around all this stuff because the big labs are keeping quiet about exactly what they’re doing (and open models are somewhat behind). That uncertainty seems to often get filled by industry journalists speculating wildly; the recent spate of articles about how scaling has stopped working has been an interesting example of that IMHO. My main reasons for expecting scaling to continue:

  • I tend to trust Epoch’s analyses, and even at the low end of their estimate, there are another few OOMs of data to be extracted from the internet.
  • Although the research has been mixed, I think the balance of evidence (eg 1, 2) suggests that models can train on (model-generated) synthetic data without suffering the sort of collapse of quality that early synthetic-data approaches did.
  • Even if the standard pre-training approach did cap out, there are an increasing number of other approaches, in particular applying more compute at inference time (like o1), that substantially improve capabilities by building on top of those pre-trained models .

And while I’m absolutely on board with the idea that things smarter than us can see solutions our baseline brains could never conjure up (hell, half my fiction is based on that premise), physics itself imposes a hard limit on what even god-like intellect can accomplish.

Yeah, totally fair. My intuition is that there must be technologies for dealing with the climate that are many orders of magnitude better than what we’ve got currently, but I don’t have any evidence for that (or any particular expertise) and I definitely see how reasonable people’s intuitions on it could differ.

So far at least, AI seems to be contributing far more to the problem than to any solutions, 3X annual efficiency notwithstanding.

Totally granted. My guess is that we’re not too far from seeing some important upsides (a couple that seem important to me are Diamond-Age-ish lifelong tutors for every kid, and company / emotional care for the lonely elderly who don’t currently have any better options (obviously that’s far from an ideal solution for the elderly, just seems much better than the status quo)). But environmental upsides, if they happen, seem further away.

In my experience, that group doesn’t really appreciate how bot-like most Human cognition is

A short piece on this that I love is Sarah Constantin’s ‘Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences’.

godlike beings who show up in the nick of time and say “You’re fucking things up, so we’ll take over to save your asses.”

Yeah, absolutely agreed that it pattern-matches that (although in my preferred future they’re less independent godlike beings and more non-sentient problem-solving tools that are really good — not that I think AI sentience is impossible, but I’d like to see us steer clear of it until we have a much better idea what we’re doing). At the same time, I think that’s the direction that the evidence points.

I’m not saying it can’t happen. I am saying we probably shouldn’t be relying on it as Plan A.

Absolutely! If our species of ape didn’t suck at coordination we would have done the sane things like cut carbon emissions quite some time ago. But that reasonable Plan A just looks to me like it’s going to fail badly since we do in fact suck at (among other things) coordination.

Reasonable cause for hope, though? Like rolling a D20 and saying Hey, there’s as much of a chance we get a natural 20 as any other number? Sure.

I know. I just don’t have anything more hopeful to offer.

Egg Syntax
Guest
Egg Syntax
29 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Ha, nice!

FWIW, if it’s ever useful to you to talk more about current and future AI and AI safety,via zoom or email or whatever, please don’t hesitate to reach out (I assume you have my email via the comment form); I’d be 100% happy to serve as a resource. I can’t claim to be a world-class expert or anything, but as a researcher in the field (focused on AI safety) I’ve got a pretty decent knowledge base.

kaslkaos
Guest
kaslkaos
20 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

oh, wow, fly on the wall here, seeing you two minds get together and have a conversation…it…is…breathtaking, thank you, words worth reading.

BytePusher
Guest
BytePusher
17 days ago
Reply to  Egg Syntax

I believe that LLM’s overall impact is net negative.
It often hallucinates facts that don’t exist and omits important facts (because it can’t distinguish important from non-important). Any information that it generates has to be re-checked thoroughly; but the only thing that it actually excels at is very fast generation of texts that look meaningful at the first sight. And this already has become a severe problem on Q&A websites.

BytePusher
Guest
BytePusher
16 days ago
Reply to  BytePusher
Anonymous
Guest
Anonymous
1 month ago

The best hope is probably for exactly what you said: “the lot of us could just stop breeding”. The demographic transition seems to be faster and more durable, and in more places, than I think pretty much anyone expected. Covid and associated global shortages seems to have only accelerated it. If that keeps up there’s a chance – not while you or I are alive, but for the future – that things might slow down.

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
1 month ago
Reply to  Anonymous

why would this make a difference? The problem is not the mass of individuals getting by on a bag of rice a day, but the small minority enjoying their great Western lifestyle – full of holidays abroad, fruit and veg all year round, streaming entertainment, and so on.

Anyway, population rates have been decreasing that many countries now will face significant population decreases in the coming decades. So what? The problems started when we already at 5-6 billion. Even if we do stop breeding, 8 billion is way over our planet’s ecology to sustain. £ billion is probably too much if you want to enjoy your steaks, holidays, video games, etc.

Controlled giga-death might be a possibility, but I for one have no idea how that could possibly go peacefully enough to keep current industrial civilisation from collapsing anyway.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago

> for starters, the lot of us could just stop breeding

> CEO’s clearly aren’t bothered by either the deaths they’ve caused

You don’t mind if I call a spade a spade? It looks like you have to decide what you actually believe. If you believe that we have to reduce world population, this guy was doing the right thing (even though for all the wrong reasons).

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

> I think you’re confusing numerical kill count with environmental impact

Yes, I mean those CEO’s (particularly Brian Thompson). You blamed them for deaths caused by them rather than their personal environmental impact.
So, I didn’t confuse nothing.

> exponentially greater environmental bootprint than the rest of us

I can easily imagine that one rich guy has worse environmental impact than hundreds of average people, or possibly thousands. But exponentially, i.e. indefinitely? That doesn’t sound feasible to me. I’d like to see some sources.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

I never heard anyone using “exponentially” this way before. Normally, it means that growth accelerates quickly.

Speaking the language of science, even if we use 2 as the base, someone who has 100 times more money than you would have 5.3762343e+43 bootprint than you. And that means the number with 43 zeroes. I’m sure that this is not true.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

> all the scientists I’ve ever known have used “exponentially” the way I’m using it now

Biologists?

> If someone consumes ten times as much energy as I do, they’re consuming exponentially more.

My buddies Cambridge dictionary and Merriam-Webster dictionary told me that this word is used as I used it – to describe accelerating growth/increase.
They know nothing about the use of this word for comparing values. Your definition must be something very colloquial or simply incorrect, and definitely not the way how this word should be used.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

> “Exponential” can be used to describe growth

Thanks a lot that you allow me to do that, after all. /s

> exponentially greater

Google Scholar shows about a million results for “exponential growth”, and about 10 thousands for “exponentially greater” (and most of those results imply growth more or less indirectly anyway). I think this does show what the right way to use this word is.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

> It’s English.

Dude. The dictionaries say that the primary use of this word is to describe accelerating growth. Correctness of the usage of this word to compare things that don’t increase is very questionable.

> A language I’m beginning to wonder if you’re fully conversant in.

Nothing’s impossible, it’s only my second language. But to prove that I’m wrong, you have to demonstrate something better than your expert opinion of a marine biologist.

> Which means you believe

Looks like you didn’t understand a single word.

This search shows that your phrase is used in scientific publications extremely infrequently, and even less frequently using the meaning that you think it has.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

However, we digressed.

> The top 1% of carbon emitters have per-capita carbon bootprints 1000 times greater than that of the bottom 1%.

That’s very possible, give or take. However, let’s imagine that those 1% were stripped off all their expensive toys at the gunpoint (and sent to eco-Gulag to grow trees). How much this would change the summary value, what do you think?

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

> and given your understanding of “exponential”, I’d be afraid to guess

Apparently, better than yours – see above. Don’t celebrate your victory when you haven’t proven anything yet.

> But given that the richest 10% of the planet is responsible for half (49%) of Humanity’s carbon emissions

Other sources give results as low as 25%. But I feel generous today, so let’s assume that it’s 49%.

I hate privileged bastards as much as the next guy, but let’s be objective – this can’t solve the problem. It can’t even buy us time. In fact, killing all the top 10% as you suggest would only accelerate the collapse. So, the idea of eco-Gulag looks more appealing to me.

By the way, it’s not “them”. You’re one of those 10%, too. Considering your citizenship, profession and age, it’s very likely that you are in top 5% of the richest people on the planet.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

> the same way I’ve seen it used by every scientists I’ve ever encountered in all my decades in academia

Apparently, those scientists never use it this way in their scientific publications, or you misunderstood them. I can imagine that they use it in beer talk, though.

Anyway, it looks like you lost track. The way how I used this word _is_ correct, and in fact it’s the _primary_ way how it should be used – see the dictionaries. Only correctness of _your_ way to use it is a subject of debate. If you really want to prove that I’m wrong about that (rather than just argue about nothing), a link to a single credible scientific publication where it’s used your way would be perfectly enough.

> That’s my background. Yours remains unclear; do you actually have some formal quantitative background

My education and work is in computer science, and in particular a few years crunching numbers for stat reports. And decades in biology definitely isn’t something that gives you much authority in questions related to maths.

> Either way, you seem strangely over-invested in such a pedantic point.

Said the guy who keeps on arguing even when I agree with your numbers.

> On the other hand, I’ve never owned a car. I don’t generally eat endotherms (and only rarely ectotherms). I spent the vast majority of my adult life living in small apartments, and when I finally moved into a small standalone bungalow (in my fifties) I shared it with three other people, so it didn’t represent any kind of reduced-density living standard.
> … Pretty sure you can’t.

That may sound like frugal life for Canada, but it’s still wealthy lifestyle in comparison with many other countries. Try sharing your small apartment with a few other guys. Bonus points if you hate each other, and more bonus points for sharing your bedroom with them. Eating vegan in Canada probably costs our planet more than eating meat.
So, I’m not impressed.

By the way, talking about shrinking the population of the planet – theoretically, how much do you think would be enough?

Last edited 30 days ago by Peter Watts
Mariusz
Guest
Mariusz
27 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Misery by King is, after reading this exchange, a picture of a paradise. Paul Sheldon was just asked to write a book. Just imagine the hammer-smile Misery arguing with Paul the way we have seen here… Sheldon would have killed himself with that type writter 🙂

anon
Guest
anon
1 month ago
Reply to  Andrei

“Normally, it means that growth accelerates quickly.”

It only means this if attached to a verb like “grows” or “increases,” e.g. “the rate of change increased exponentially.” Saying an environmental footprint is exponentially greater than another isn’t the same as saying that an environmental footprint is growing exponentially.

Fatman
Guest
Fatman
1 month ago
Reply to  anon

All correct, but the Dunning-Kruger is so strong in this one that explaining mathematics won’t make much of a difference.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 month ago
Reply to  Fatman

Don’t be a toady. I’m sure that PW is a grown adult and can speak for himself.

Fatman
Guest
Fatman
30 days ago
Reply to  Andrei

Oh, I’m not basing my opinion on this post alone. You generally display a healthy level of self-confidence. It’s not the first time you’ve gotten hung up on a Big Word and proceeded to define/use it however you feel it needs to be used.

I find it amusing, maybe even admirable. You make your own arguments – don’t let silly things like facts get in your way.

Thorn
Guest
Thorn
1 month ago

I’m not sure why you’re so hopeful another sentient being could pull this “civilization” malarkay off better.

From the way I understand it, competition from fast-expanding species will drive more restrained species to extinction, and the chaotic nature of natural environments makes slow planning for delayed gratification a hard sell.

And we all know that evolution isn’t survival of the fittest, but death of the inadequate. The only traits selected against are those that get you killed within a span of a generation.

Perfectly fine if you’re in a natural environment, red in tooth and claw, where there’s fuck all leeway for a faulty batch to slip past QC.

Not when you’re dealing with a climate collapse,a one-time event that takes multiple generations to set up and can’t be stopped when it gets going.

It seems to me highly unlikely to me that a species would be able to reach the level of technology that allows it to greatly influence its planet without also developing the sort of mind that would ensure its self-destruction.

A pretty grim thought but I can put a neat spin on it- I’ve solved the Fermi paradox! I’m sure that thought will comfort me as I die unloved, unmourned, and unremembered when the other shoe drops.

Thorn
Guest
Thorn
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Ah fuck, my poor phrasing catches up with me again. Musta’ had the word “civilization” stuck in my head from reading a substack about ecological overshoot (https://predicament.substack.com/ for anyone interested) that throws the word around a lot.

I guess by “civilization” I was referring to any assemblage of organisms capable of greatly influencing its environment via conscious choice?

Hunter-Killer
Guest
Hunter-Killer
1 month ago

I once interned at a company that is developing a promising carbon capture technology. The only catch is that it was only good for at capturing CO2 directly from emissions sources. I had a chat with some of the lead engineers about Direct Air Capture (DAC) applications, and phrases like “inlet size of 4km2” were spoken completely straight-faced. 420+ppm might be terrible for the climate, but it’s a real pain to sift out of the air in any great quantity.

…Sorry, you were hoping for good news?

Chrome Lord
Guest
Chrome Lord
1 month ago
Reply to  Hunter-Killer

Even kids shows roast the hell of all this carbon capture scheme, episode “Christmas crusaders” of TTG.

Phil
Guest
Phil
1 month ago

“Gaza is even more fucked (not that this is much of a change from Genocide Joe’s regime, admittedly)”

The war in Gaza ends as soon as Hamas returns the hostages (what’s left of them) and surrenders. At present, a Jew walking through Gaza unarmed is a dead Jew, in the same way all those Jews at a music festival in Israel are dead Jews.

If the Israeli’s were trying to commit genocide then they would have to be highly incompetent, which they are not. They are engaged in a conflict against several groups of people all of whom would, if given the opportunity, kill every Jew on the planet. Those groups would commit genocide if given the opportunity. They cannot be given that chance.

“Me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, my cousin and I against a stranger,” is not a Hebrew saying. It is Arabic, likely Bedouin, and is a partial explanation of why this region of the world seems incapable of creating democratic governments.

Fatman
Guest
Fatman
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

“If someone sneaks into your home, rapes and kills members of your family, and then runs back to Vancouver, you are completely justified in hunting them down and taking them out.”

You forgot the part where that “someone” is in fact sneaking into their former home, which you acquired through pillage and murder, having broken multiple multilateral agreements in the process. But otherwise an apt comparison.

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
1 month ago
Reply to  Fatman

I would also add that revenge implies a power differential. The weak are rarely capable of exacting revenge on a more powerful attacker.

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

yes, that’s true. I believe Scott Atran is a great reference for that. However, I was thinking of revenge more on the scale of the current Israeli response in Gaza than on a more personal level.

Phil
Guest
Phil
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

I guess we’ll have to remain on opposing sides on this one. I see it differently (and differently from Amnesty and another organization not named above from which I’ve redirected long-standing monthly donations because of their positions).

Ashley
Guest
18 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

I would not call the war in Gaza genocide–”the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.” I know others will disagree strongly. Rather, It’s an atrocity-on par with the Battle for Stalingrad where over three months of fighting resulted in a 100,000 on each side.

The 41,000 casualties in Gaza since October 2023. If the IDF and Israeli leadership were intent on Genocide, then these are, quite frankly, Piker numbers.

Which is not to say that what is going on is not horrific, but history tells a different picture than the hyperbolic media that’s all about controlling the narrative by creating outrage.

All I want is World Peace, but our nature makes this impossible.

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
1 month ago
Reply to  Phil

That’s really funny, new-Nazis also use the same argument about why the Holocaust never happened. Look at all the Jews around, they say, the Nazis would have to have been highly incompetent.

At the very least Gaza is an attempt at ethnic cleansing, and it’s not the first time Israel has tried that against the Palestinians. Any particular reason you think history only started on October 7?

Phil
Guest
Phil
1 month ago
Reply to  Greg Guy

I’m aware of the history. How far back do you want to go?

Regarding recent history, nearly everyone living in that region was born after 1948.

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
1 month ago
Reply to  Phil

How about as far back as when a bunch of European colonists decided they had the right to push other people off their land because their favourite superstition told them they were entitled to it?

The K
Guest
The K
30 days ago
Reply to  Greg Guy

>decided they had the right to push other people off their land because their favourite superstition told them they were entitled to it?

So, any land dispute between humans ever, everywhere, but in particular in the Levant?

I think it is a bit naff to set a cut-off date after which you can say “Now from here on, every attack on our land is an unjustifiable atrocity, everything else in the past never happend, and if it did, it was good and right”. Regardless where you set that date, or which sides argument you want to strengthen with it. If you want to go that route better go back to the very first recorded human migrations id say.

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
23 days ago
Reply to  The K

Ah, yes… always the whataboutery whenever Israel is concerned. You of course feel the same way about the Holocaust too, right? After all humans have been exterminating one another since forever so making a big deal about Auschwitz is ‘a bit naff’?

Phil
Guest
Phil
1 month ago

I don’t see how the journo’s counter that, “If you’re only including the childless, then you’re going to be having a very small conversation,” makes sense. Why would you only include the childless in the conversation? A family with six kids could hear the appeals for reduced population and advise those kids not to have as many kids as they did. Also, most people in their early 20s who live in developed nations are childless, and would be a potent group to have in this conversation before they age, and have kids. Admittedly, it may be too late to save future generations from hardship, but that too seems like a reason not to procreate. What am I missing here?

On a related note, I continue to have some trouble reconciling your (eminently defensible) view that global population needs to contract, with your concern about “the various plagues and pandemics still doing the rounds.”

Phil
Guest
Phil
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Ah, yes, very small group. All I read these days is people worrying about low birthrates undermining our ongoing economic Ponzi scheme. Conversations should expand the anti-natalist group, but I expect that expansion to severely lag events.

Zack
Guest
Zack
1 month ago

As this article shows, even back in 2019 people were aware that renewables take an ungodly amount of environmentally destructive resource extraction to pull off: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/06/the-path-to-clean-energy-will-be-very-dirty-climate-change-renewables/

Over at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Devereaux describes the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as basically being a refusal to recognize that change was possible. The Romans kept fighting each other in civil wars from the third century on, but because the empire was still standing and had stood for so long they were sure that it could never actually end, so they made minimal efforts to address the problems this inflicted on the empire over time. It was a mentality they had up until the point it actually ended, and in many ways even beyond the end, as they were sure they could restore it.

I can’t help but feel as if we treat our fossil fueled industrial civilization this way. It has been so successful and has expanded for so long, that we think its problems are ones we can deal with over time and not seriously address now. What depresses me is that most people will keep saying that if we just exploit the environment a bit more we will eventually be able to save it, and will probably keep saying that as the climate starts to undergo shifts even larger than what is going on now.

Chrome Lord
Guest
Chrome Lord
1 month ago
Reply to  Zack

[Nuclear energy apologist grunting in a distance]

Zack
Guest
Zack
1 month ago
Reply to  Chrome Lord

Personally, I am a big believer in nuclear power as a way to both get energy and reduce gases that contribute to climate change. But despite all of the research that has been poured into nuclear power plants, so many have either been decommissioned or construction on new ones is so slow that I can’t take it seriously.

Diego
Guest
Diego
1 month ago
Reply to  Zack

Tangential: This popped up in my feed, and seemed interesting:

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24337140/hydrogen-tax-credit-nuclear-power

That said, I am horrendously uninformed on the subject, and can’t really opine either way on whether this could be positive or not (the article does seem to mention different issues involved in this); FWIW I hope it does end up tilting the balance a bit more in favour of cleaner shit (and if not, well bah humbug, then!)

Chrome Lord
Guest
Chrome Lord
30 days ago
Reply to  Zack

I dunno, it kinda happenes when all investment into sector is being garrote wired by the uninformed.

The K
Guest
The K
1 month ago

Ah, another blog post like a rain of searing pitch blend directly onto my mood. Well, since you are pretty much right every time, what can i say?

Except for the part about “Genocide Joe”, if you think Gaza cant get much, MUCH worse, just wait for what Bibi will do now that his pal Donny is in office. Hoh boy. The orange menace will be DELIGHTED to help his friend out.

Meanwhile here in Europe governments are collapsing left and right to get replaced by far right Putin stooges. Perhaps this time around, Austria will “Anschluss” us germans, heh. And i am not looking forward to our own elections in February.

At this point i just hope the show will go on for another few scant decades in some capacity. Doesnt really matter anymore who or how many we guillotine (or not), industrial civilization will collapse and megadeaths will happen. No fairy tale aliens or magic AIs will save us, that is eschatological thinking similiar to the christian rapture, just couched in “science”. If by some miracle, AGI arrives all it will be able to do is to tell us how fucked we are.

I do think our biosphere will be fine in the long run, though. Sure it may take a few million years give or take, but it will bounce back after that nasty fever for certain.

Jack
Guest
Jack
1 month ago

We know what the solution is. Switch everyone back to whale oil.

The K
Guest
The K
28 days ago
Reply to  Jack

But after we hunted the whales to extinction, the world will plunge into a shapeless void! Ive learned that from playing “Dishonored” so it must be true!

Jack
Guest
Jack
27 days ago
Reply to  The K

Easy peasy. Go back in time via the slingshot maneuver, grab a few whales and bring them into the future to avoid the shapeless void scenario. I saw it on “Voyage Home.”

I often wonder if people appreciate that one of the reasons the planet still has whales is because hydrocarbons enabled us to stop using that energy source. We get 4.5 years of free labor from every barrel of oil. One barrel of oil =5,700,000 BTU =1,760 kWh converted to work =700 kWh.

I human =0.6 kWh/day of work. 700/0.6=1,166.667 or 4.5 years of human work.

Too bad it’s thrown the planet out of energy balance. Official stats on Copernicus Data for 2024 show us at 1.6 degrees centigrade above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline.

https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-2024-first-year-exceed-15degc-above-pre-industrial-level

Berkley Earth posted 1.62 C. So we’re zooming past the 1.5 we were never supposed to cross.

I recently learning about quadratic trend lines and the acceleration is accelerating.

Looks like this sucker is going down.

Lars
Guest
Lars
25 days ago
Reply to  Jack

We still have whales despite the use of fossil fuels.
The number of whales taken after the adoption of motorized whaling vessels greatly exceeds the number taken when whalers relied upon the wind. Industrial, petroleum-based whaling was well on the way to wipe out most mysticete whale species in the 20th Century. What saved the whales that we have left was international agreements to stop whaling.

Jack
Guest
Jack
24 days ago
Reply to  Lars

I see your point, international agreements were critical. I assumed that resource substitution played a significant role in easing some of the pressure, allowing nations the luxury of enacting conservation measures. But that’s not really the case at all.

I’ve done some reading and you’re right and I’m wrong. “Old commercial whaling was based on the key technologies of the sail ship, the rowboat, and the hand-thrown harpoon. Whales were chased by rowboats launched from shore or from sail ships, caught by hand-thrown harpoon, and killed by lance or spear. Only a few types of whales could regularly be hunted successfully by these methods. Importantly, fast-swimming whales could not be caught by sail ships and rowboats. Additionally, since whales, once killed, needed to be tugged by the rowboat to shore or to a sail ship, whales that tended to sink once dead were impractical and unsafe to catch. For these reasons, of the baleen whales, the family of right whales (which includes bowheads) was the main target.”

Why Petroleum Did not Save Whales https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023117739217

I enjoy this blog because of commentators like you. I need to do more fact checking of my assumptions.

Lars
Guest
Lars
24 days ago
Reply to  Jack

Thank you. That’s a very civil response. And I appreciate the link.

Tim
Guest
Tim
30 days ago

>Ukraine is fucked.

YouTube is full of videos “Побег из Украины” (“Escape from Ukraine”). Deserters fleeing to Romania are now considered heroes because they had the courage to escape from the “concentration camp” built by Zelensky. The Poles are seen as enemies because they hand Ukrainians back over to Ukraine. How different it is from the picture in 2022!

Tim
Guest
Tim
30 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Peter, it’s not my take on anyone, it’s just facts. You are a researcher, so make a research.

Tim
Guest
Tim
30 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

You are attacking the messenger instead of addressing the situation on its merits.
To be honest, I didn’t expect this from you. My bad.

P.S. I have provided facts in a commentary from different e-mail (that you have supposedly banned).

The K
Guest
The K
29 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Astonishing that not even niche blogs can possibly escape the rusbot propaganda machine. Gotta hand it to them, they have that skill down stat.

Fatman
Guest
Fatman
29 days ago
Reply to  The K

You guys seem to be overly trigger happy when it comes to blaming rusbot propaganda. I’m more inclined to believe these people are “useful idiots”.

There are plenty of embittered losers in the “West” full of hatred for a “Western society” in which they accomplished nothing despite having every privilege imaginable. Since their failure at life can’t possibly be their own fault, they find succor in vague conspiracy theories with ever-shifting goalposts.

Consequently, anything that is perceived as inimical to modern civilization (e.g. Putinazism) is cheered on as “good”, “positive”, or “desirable”. It permits the embittered “Western” loser (EWL) to indulge in masturbatory fantasies of widespread societal breakdown from which they and their ilk magically emerge as some sort of winning side. As right-wing ideology becomes more dismissive of reality (whatever you believe is true) and intellectually incoherent, it broadens its appeal beyond the usual lumpen-culprits and into “surplus elites”.

It’s got nothing to do with Putin, or with Ukraine, or with Russia. Or even immigration, or housing, or the price of eggs. It’s just angry losers hating. Because what else are they good for?

The K
Guest
The K
28 days ago
Reply to  Fatman

Ah, you are probably right. I admit a failure of precision on my part, tbh i use “rusbot” just as a shorthand for not only certified state actors fanning the flames of malcontent but also for the type of person you describe.

The former are, after all, “infecting” the latter via the internet almost like the zombie computers in a botnet.

Max
Guest
Max
30 days ago

All that stuff sounds kinda important, but is there any chance of a new novel from you this year?

Talon
Guest
Talon
29 days ago
Reply to  Max

Max is asking the real questions here 🙂

Kurt
Guest
Kurt
29 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

This is the reason I keep coming back here.

Max
Guest
Max
28 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Awesome!

CHIMP
Guest
CHIMP
28 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

So there’s some good news for 2025 after all!

Jack
Guest
Jack
28 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Have you explained why you call the series Sunflowers?

Vteam
Guest
Vteam
25 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Is there no hope whatsoever? Not even a hint? We are not blessed with the luxury of the deep time to patiently wait for its fullness, y’know.

Jack
Guest
Jack
13 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

At the risk of being bratty, you do have a penchant for naming things after starfish— Asteroidea, Crown of Thorn Starfish so I’m thinking the Sunflower Sea Star…a Star among Stars.

Evgeny
Guest
Evgeny
28 days ago

There is no hope anymore. Putin has finally banned YouTube, which was the only joy, and will definitely take on VPN protocols. Crazy old man Biden has finally introduced even more sanctions, which will of course hit ordinary people, not oligarchs. And Trump will not be able to stop the war. Even more repression, censorship and poverty. I have no opportunity to immigrate. This hell will continue endlessly. I really want everything to just burn in a nuclear fire. Of course, it would be good if your other novel came out before that, lol. And the end of William Gibson’s last trilogy.

Mariusz
Guest
Mariusz
27 days ago

I am listening to radio programme about Poland First King ad his sons… The year is 1025 Second King Chrobry is a fellow from Martin’s books. COuntries were in constant economy mode of pilage and war, kings needed to cheat, kill ( brothers, smaller princes of local fame) I am hearing how historians are speaking about those times like in yesterday CNN news. How Church was the ally of the Polish monarch and how people were striking back against this configuration in 1000 A.D.

Loren Eiseley writes about human of the future. Peter go read his: The Immense Journey!!! How we need less vulgar and agressive humans, the ones that handed axe changed it for machine guns, and that is part of the problem. Human nature have not changed but it must and will if we take a closer look to what technological advancement promotes in the behaviour of poor, decent(sic!) masses. I have heard a journalist in Poland that stated that normal folks from Ukraine are thankful for the help they received from us and how inteligentia(sic!) is constantly spitting venom in the media about Poland…

The change will come from poor, normal folks, but it will be too late and too small of a move. So yeah, I battle with my conscience, go with the world riding the bomb or be decent human outside of economically driven logic of the marker eating people alive…

Good news, I am re-reading Echo and starting Rifters trilogy after the newest Witcher. Being Pole obligate 🙂 (English is not my native tounge, while checking the spelling I have found this – beeing means sticking your dong in people. )

Skyler
Guest
Skyler
25 days ago

maybe another glimmer of hope for The Biosphere To Come can be seen in the radiotrophic Chernobyl fungi that would hopefully survive and thrive even if/when we let the kiloton balloons start going up

Mariusz
Guest
Mariusz
24 days ago

I did not know where to put it so I decided to paste it to the newest post. It is a script from Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex episode 4 from 2002. Togusa speaks to an informer:

Fukami: Nah, it’s no big deal. Anyway, you’ve got other sources. You’ll find out one way or the other. Truth is, we’ve got a new material witness. Looks like he led us right to the guy we’re looking for.
Togusa: You’ve had lots of other witnesses that led you nowhere.
Fukami: Yeah, but this guy’s different. He’s got reason to talk. Plus, our suspect has a beef against Serano.
Togusa: Serano?
Fukami: Serano Genomics. First micromachine company hit by the Laughing Man. They were also the first one we investigated.
Togusa: So, you must be close to arresting the suspect?
Fukami: Yes and no. The top brass is sitting on the fence. We’ve got lots of circumstantial evidence, but they want more. Our orders are to catch him in the act so that’s what we are trying to do.
Togusa: How’s that done?
Fukami: Interceptors.
Togusa: Interceptors? We got a briefing on those things about 3 months ago. New micro-surveillance technology. They just legalized it.
Fukami: That’s them. Plant them on a suspect and you can see everything he’s doing from his point of view. Plus, they’re good for three months, so we don’t even have to tail the guy. You just wait till he goes to the doctor or hospitals then you pop ’em in, he never even knows they’re there. Then we record and analyze everything he does. Hell, when he takes a piss, we can measure the trajectory.
Togusa: Huh? What did you just say?
Fukami: Hm? I said measure the trajectory.
Togusa: That’s it.
Aramaki: Now, it makes sense. Interceptors.

Mariusz
Guest
Mariusz
23 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

I am glad to hear I have an ally in my fondness. Arise – I am rewatching it from time to time, mood for it resurges, I have Lunar-tide relationship with that iteration of Gits.

p.s. I have returned last year to reading also SF – must be hitting 40 thing. 50/1039 books on my ereader done. Duckduckgoing authors, Bradbury dead, Bishop dead, Wolfe dead… Gibson is scheduled with his 3rd Jackpot for 2025, I just hope they do not keep his last book waiting for his death… Last one was in 2020.
I hope you won’t be helping wikipedia to complete the list of dead authors 😉 Take good care of yourself and as a treat I post here a title of a Michael Bishop’s story. I think the premise will interest you.:

Life Regarded as a Jigsaw Puzzle of Highly Lustrous Cats. It was first published in Omni in 1992.
Synopsis
As a prisoner is interrogated, he is subjected to electrical brain stimulation, causing him to randomly re-experience all his cat-related memories.

Meow!

Vteam
Guest
Vteam
23 days ago
Reply to  Mariusz

You really should’ve attached some kind of warning to this recommendation. I was not remotely emotionally equipped to deal with this, and chances are I will never be. This is way, way too sad to be read on a cold evening in January.

Ocean
Guest
Ocean
23 days ago

>>>We’ve been consistently over 1.5°C for a solid year now

>>>If any of you can find any legitimate good news in the face of all this

Looks like you figured it out yourself, no? We’re at +1.5 degrees, and nothing bad has happened. Nobody even noticed.

On a tangential note, are there any climate-related arguments about Russia? I need some solid points. Whenever I talk about climate change with my friends, all I hear is, ‘Oh, so it’ll be warmer in Moscow? Great! And our permafrost regions might finally become livable! Can we aim for +5 degrees, please?’

Ocean
Guest
Ocean
23 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

I am disappointed by your rudeness.

Try harder at what? Examples of the disasters that you mentioned are not consequences of global warming, as far as I understand. Hurricanes are an ordinary thing in the USA. Cities burn occasionally; it’s more of a failure of urban infrastructure and services.

You also ignored my question. If you don’t want to talk with me, just say it, and I will never write here again. Why waste our time on insults.

Ocean
Guest
Ocean
23 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

I see. I wish you all the best and hope you will manage to finish Firefall with grace. Farewell.

The K
Guest
The K
22 days ago
Reply to  Ocean

You know, if nothing else i admire the boldness to come on this blog and flat out deny the effects of anthroprogenic climate change. I really dont know what you hoped to archieve there, but our hosts patientce with that kind of willfull ignorance/stupidity has run out years ago. The data is out there, you can read all the relevant papers yourself.

I for one have certainly noticed how many “once in a century” disasters we had worldwide in the last decade alone, and climate change is just ramping up right now.

The one great thing about ACG and physics in general though is that nobody will be able to ignore it in the mid- to longterm, no matter how ignorant, sheltered or blinkered one is.

Unless maybe you are part of the super-rich oligarchs that have prepared lavish underground bunkers, but something tells me that you are not part of that class and will fry with the rest of us.

Pica
Guest
Pica
23 days ago

We have cellphones now. A panopticon. We can alter our memories by having AI repaint our photo albums. Wen can make people obsess with a virtual “career” by having bots cheer them on. So we can alter the beeHiveOur.. And as the red dead bulb ring forms around the equator and empire think comes back, regional nuclear exchange was always inevitable- and nuclear winter and climate change chancel one another out? Optimiasma

Dorofey
Guest
Dorofey
22 days ago

goodbye eukaryotes

Alexis
Guest
Alexis
21 days ago

it looks like we might actually get the rifters trilogy environment by the 2050s…

Dennis
Guest
Dennis
20 days ago

Cause for hope?

Okay. Maybe. People believe what they are told. That’s a fact. It’s testable and repeatable. We are programmable.

We believe all sorts of nonsense which is demonstrably obviously wrong because we have been told to. Repeatedly told to. Every religious myth. Jews control the world. The Civil War was about states rights. Trump is a good man. Birds aren’t real. Supply-Side economics. Columbus discovered America. Free will. Fate.

Literally anything is on the table. Anything can be mapped into a mind no matter how stupid. There aren’t limits. Recall that castration comet cult. Or all of Scientology. Or virgin birth. All insane on their face.

So, supposed you could program people to just stop with the rapacity. (I have no idea what that looks like as I’ve only lived in NA amongst the “FU I got mine freaks”)
I wonder if these LLMs could be trained to do that. We have these giant world wide platforms. If you can get the people of Earth to believe in an invisible sky daddy, getting them to start pretending that the future is real and dangerous should be a easy lift.

All we need are virtuous media oligarchs…

I’ll come in again..

The K
Guest
The K
18 days ago
Reply to  Dennis

> All we need are virtuous media oligarchs…

I will believe in the virgin birth, supply side economy and self-castrating way before i believe that virtous media oligarchs are possible.

BytePusher
Guest
BytePusher
19 days ago

If a new pandemic kills a large proportion of the world’s population, could this possibly prevent the ecological collapse?

BytePusher
Guest
BytePusher
19 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Very likely.
I wonder how you think people should change, and how this could be achieved?

The K
Guest
The K
15 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

As soon as tech like that becomes available our overlords will abuse it to the max.

Those megachurches will spread a version that will make you SUPER religious (and willing to spend, spend, spend!!!) every time you see a pastor, the agro corps will try to infect you with versions of the allergy that only targets their competitors products and/or selling you a tailored monthly “cure” for their product only.

At the very “best” we would be engineered in some kind of docile consumer slave species to save the planet while our masters were still living it up, yay.

More probable, the human genome and immune system will become a free-for-all battleground for every corp, government,biohacker, activist/terrorist and madman around, like in your books.

To be able to utilize such technology in the way you laid out, we would have to be the kind of species who would already not need it, i guess.

Diego
Guest
Diego
15 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

To be fair, COVID just taught us not too long ago that people will just go and spread this stuff by themselves.

If it was somehow (or was somehow made) transmissible interpersonally, and had mild-enough or misinterpretable-enough symptoms at first or outside of severe cases, then it would already spread massively simply from people who already consume little or no meat mingling normally.

Then again, if catarrhine monkeys are the only ones without the alpha-gal carb to which that makes you allergic, I can well see one one hand monkey meat farming, and on the other, cannibalism poking its head through to come say hi, which is… its own discussion :p

Vteam
Guest
Vteam
15 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

That would take a really specific individual.
On the one hand, an individual that completely disregards ethics of genetically engineering a whole bunch of insects to spread red meat allergy. Disregards the ethics of altering biochemistry of so many people. Disregards the risk of just accidentally triggering some weird, potentially lethal, immune responses. Capable of engineering and spreading “toothless” Parkinson’s disease, while disregarding the risk of it reverting to its “toothed” version.
On the other, an individual deeply concerned about both the ecoethics and human survival.
All this – while having genius-level insights into biochemistry and molecular biology, practical skills to apply these insights and resources to do so.
And, well, the tradecraft – to not be caught before the deed is done.

I’m pretty sure the genre dictates his plans should be subverted by Batman with one second left on the doomsday device clock.

The K
Guest
The K
14 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Id prefer your ethics. The joker would probably engineer something like “Half of you will die if they eat meat, the other half will die if they DONT, only one way to find out.”

Or make everyone into an obligate cannibal or something like that.

In any case, personally i think the risk of rampant genetic engineering going haywire out of sheer disregard for safety in the name of profit seems way higher to me than some AGI endung us all. We dont know if the latter is even possible, the former though definitely is.

But eh, at this point, the possible extinction scenarios will need to take a number and line up in an orderly fashion anyway.

BytePusher
Guest
BytePusher
12 days ago
Reply to  The K

That’s almost literally the story in “The Moral Virologist” by Greg Egan.

BytePusher
Guest
BytePusher
12 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Correct me if I’m wrong.
The first and the last ones are aimed at reducing consumption (and that’s only a temporary measure).

vmPFC lesions are associated with a number of behavioral problems, particularly poor decision making and tendency to not give a shit about the future.

And information about relations between PD and religion is contradictiory.

Diego
Guest
Diego
18 days ago

Somewhat tangential but I just saw this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/19/ministry-of-defence-enlists-sci-fi-writers-to-prepare-for-dystopian-futures

Far as I could tell seems to just have been a one-off webinar (and of course, they report on it 5 days after the fact), but the concept of getting sci-fi writters to consult is neat, if late and of dubious practicality at this stage and considering the way shit tends to be run everywhere (then again, cue the mental image of Peter terrorising a roomful of execs with a baseball bat with “CITATIONS” printed on it in big bold all-caps; I am easily amused).

Лёха
Guest
Лёха
10 days ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

imagine that you are teaching economics, there are students in front of you, you are trying to explain something to them, and at some point you need to say the most ordinary word, which you say at least a dozen times during a lecture, but right now, some… the gear wheels in your brain are jamming and, although you remember the taste of this word, you cannot say it, realizing that the pause is dragging on, you ask that part of yourself that is responsible for vocabulary to quickly give you an analogue of a forgotten word, and after a tenth of a second it gives you this very analogue, which you immediately use without thinking, to the surprise of the students and yourself.
remembering the right word, in the next moment you quickly and deftly correct the current situation, and after that everything goes on a well-established track, but a month and a half later, you catch yourself in the fact that the case is not out of your head and you regularly return to it in your mind .
The forgotten word was “economy”, and the phrase “life support system” that was slipped in by the junior organs turned out to be.
No, I didn’t come up with anything new, it was done before I was born. If someone doesn’t like the text, it’s because I wrote it in Russian. But Google translated it all, that is, the free version of its electronic translator. Sorry if that’s the case. If this was the version that works on Peter’s website, it would be much better.

Vteam
Guest
Vteam
8 days ago
Reply to  Лёха

This is why you actually need the cutesy fucking icons. To react to this shit right here.