Dominiek.com

This will be just a quick post since I should get some sleep.

A little while ago Thomas L. Friedman posted an article in the IHT named Doha and Dalian. Doha and Dalian are an Arabic and Chinese city that are relatively unheard of to most Americans. The article then goes to explain how much energy they use and that all of the energy saving done by model Christian American families is just a waste since these cities 'eat those savings for breakfast'.

I really wonder to what extend we should react to the whole global warming issue. On the one hand there is always this stuck in my mind:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw

But if you witness the gigantic boom of Chinese sky-skrapers and smog-pipes it's easy to give up. We just can't beat this. Also, the Singularity -a predicted moment in time where we transcend biology - can be used as an easy justification for a passivist attitude.

Interestingly, I ban into this article by Vernor Vinge about possible non-Singularity scenarios. Two of these three scenario's are scenario's where we screw up:

This is the scenario where we nuke or nanobot ourselves and slowly die off after our population get's reduced to 80% in one 'afternoon'.

This is the scenario where we try to reach the singularity but fail over and over again, by astroids, nukes and what have you.

Like some people commented the latter scenario is less likely to happen, since we will drain out all our oil and natural resources before the second try.

This means we have only one shot. We will either horribly fail or succeed. 1 or 0

This dude explains it much better by worrying about the extinction of guacomole:

"For the love of God/Allah/Ganesha/et al., save the guaco-taco dammit! Otherwise, we can go ahead and stop talking about colonizing mars or communicating with dolphins because this planet is going to be a major drag."