Are we or have we always been teetering on the edge?

[Phrak]

Do you ever feel like the next days news is akin to the next installment in a TV drama, or the next strip in a comic series?

Are you confusing news with Entertainment TV's next installment to better their Nielson ratings?

 

[Phrak]

Tipping Points

"tipping points"...

I'm always impressed when these new catch phrases enter our lexicology. The inventor should get a lifetime paycheck, compliments of his peers, for inventing a word-pair scare-phrase that has managed to do what 1000 of his colleagues haven't managed over their entire global warming careers.

 

[Pattonias]

Historically, I think that the closest we actually came to literally ending life as we know it on the planet was the Cold War. Since then it seems that we can't find something so threatening that we can worry together as our parents and grandparents did not too many years ago.

 

[WhoWee]

As I'm reading my morning news stories, I can't help but feel like everything is slowly building up to some sort of great climax. That everything is getting so bad or so good as the days progress eventually everything has to maximize or peter off, before everything becomes incredibly boring or collapses.

Has it always been like this? Can some of our older (more experienced) PF members tell me whether or not it was always like this?

Should we be looking out for some major catastrophe or life altering event?

Aliens?
Anti-Christ?
Nuclear War?
World War?
Total Economic Collapse?
Mars Colonization?
People evolve a third arm?

I mean does it ever really peak or should I just buckle down and expect to always be told that everything is about to be the worst it has ever been?

I know that this is kind of light-hearted for the political forum, but it is also a little heavy for the GD forum. Even though I am asking in a little off-color way, I am asking a serious question.

In the political forum, the "climax" is an election. The next meaningful one is in 2010 (bye, bye big spending Congrespersons) and the "BIG CLIMAX" will be in 2012 (bye, bye Obama). Otherwise, life goes on - regardless of whatever Hollywood (or your favorite stock broker) is selling.

 

[DrClapeyron]

Are you confusing news with Entertainment TV's next installment to better their Nielson ratings?

I would. Was Dan Rather physically incapable of reading the news?

 

[Integral]

Does anyone 'need' to get from NY City to Sydney in 3 hrs? About 20 or so years ago, I heard arguments regarding benefits of hypersonic air travel - benefits for business people flying between Europe/N. America/S. America/Asia. I doubt anyone needs to do so, but folks with lots of bucks like to get to places quickly - e.g., Concorde.

...

Why fly. When I was working for HP we, as technicians, had regulary scheduled meeting with our peers in Singapore. We had access to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videoconferencing"
It was just like sitting across the table from them.

 

[Integral]

I doubt that. I don't put much stock in the singularity.

I think the winners of the interesting times award goes to those who were born in the last part of the 19^th century. Most of them were born on a farm, just like their parents, their grandparents, their great grandparents, and so on. The world was changing back then, but that change was slow. They entered this world in a horse-drawn era and a few left it at the dawn of the space age. In between, they lived through two world wars and some nasty pandemics. They were teetering on the edge. We are not.

How true.

My grandmother was born in 1886 to a Mormon family living in Bowie Station Az. That same year they finally cornered Geronimo and sent him in chains to the east from Bowie Station. When she was 7 her family moved to Montana, she walked pretty much all the way. She passed away at age 88 in 1975 having seen technology go from horse and carriage to man on the moon.

Personally I think the '60s were hopeless and on the edge. We went through endless race riots, the death of JFK, endless antiwar riots, the death MLK, the death of RFK and the ever present cold war. Seems to me the free love and drug culture of the end of the decade was a natural response to the tragic times we endured.

However today I think I feel more hopeless then I have since then. In the 60s I was a teenager full of excitement for the life ahead. Now I am pushing 60, out of work and very concerned for the life my grandchildren will have. It bothers me to be part of a generation of idealist which swore to change things for the better. Instead, we have left what is potentially and environmental disaster for our descendants, we have sucked all of the easily accessible fossil fuels from the ground and burned them for spring break on Daytona beach. Of course here I mean spring break on Daytona break as an analogy to our wasteful ways.

 

[mheslep]

...

Instead, we have left what is potentially and environmental disaster for our descendants, we have sucked all of the easily accessible fossil fuels from the ground and burned them for spring break on Daytona beach. Of course here I mean spring break on Daytona break as an analogy to our wasteful ways.

Environmental disaster? Surely you have some notion of how much cleaner the US air and water have become since the days of your grandmother, even your mother?

There's a small but historic stream that meanders all through the area not far from my home,~10 miles from the city center, for which the history is well known. As of 150 years ago the stream was in active use for mills and refuse, and by 100 years ago it was completely ecologically destroyed and loaded with toxins. After WWII with residential development the industrial demands softened, but no cleanup took place and run off and erosion worsened. Finally ~40-50 years ago attention began to be paid to clean water and today the water is fish-able, holds trout, with little or no trash observable.

Likewise nearly every tree was cut/logged out of the area by 1900 for fuel etc, making the area resemble the plains and not the east coast. Now looking down from a 15 story building in the same area, one sees in many directions a nearly continuous tree canopy completely obstructing the ground and residential dwellings.

 

[Integral]

So you do not see cllimate change as even a potential disaster?

 

[Pattonias]

So you do not see cllimate change as even a potential disaster?

You know I have speculated as to whether we are concerned with preserving the Earth or concerned with preserving ourselves. (This is a topic for another thread, but I will say my piece.)

Surely our motivation is to preserve our home on this planet instead of "saving the Earth" as it is often put. I bet if the Earth had a mind of its own, and it did not consider us to be a pinacle of its evolution; the Earth would like nothing more than for its surface to become inhospitable and kill all of us off of it. Thus giving it space to start over again.

The Earth has no problem with mass extinction. It certainly doesn't care, one way or another, whether or not each and every species on the planet continues to exist. This concern is a man made feature. We have to be the only creature in existence that actually are concerned about the other creatures on the planet that don't directly contribute to our own food supply and survival.

I don't think I really had a point with this statement, but this is what your brief post made me think of Integral

 

[Ronnin]

Times are a changin. Just last Saturday I was trying to find some cartoons for the kids to watch only to find that the networks don't seem to do that anymore. I was crushed seeing something I once waited all week for had now been displaced by even more crappy daytime programming. I guess we'll have to eat our Cheerios without them now.
I believe mankind is meant to toil. Everytime we fix something we break something else in the process. I think this may be God's devine form job security.

 

[mheslep]

So you do not see cllimate change as even a potential disaster?

I suppose I have to allow nearly anything with the modifier 'potential' in front of it. You mentioned it as something to be 'very concerned' about; in the context of other problems - no climate change doesn't rank. Environmentally, land use and water use are more of a concern to me. Societal and economic issues concern me even more.

 

[Integral]

You know I have speculated as to whether we are concerned with preserving the Earth or concerned with preserving ourselves. (This is a topic for another thread, but I will say my piece.)

Surely our motivation is to preserve our home on this planet instead of "saving the Earth" as it is often put. I bet if the Earth had a mind of its own, and it did not consider us to be a pinacle of its evolution; the Earth would like nothing more than for its surface to become inhospitable and kill all of us off of it. Thus giving it space to start over again.

The Earth has no problem with mass extinction. It certainly doesn't care, one way or another, whether or not each and every species on the planet continues to exist. This concern is a man made feature. We have to be the only creature in existence that actually are concerned about the other creatures on the planet that don't directly contribute to our own food supply and survival.

I don't think I really had a point with this statement, but this is what your brief post made me think of Integral

Absolutly, I have no concern for life on Earth or even human life what I believe is way more fragile then most is our civilization. Once we lose it there is no recovery.

 

[Integral]

I suppose I have to allow nearly anything with the modifier 'potential' in front of it. You mentioned it as something to be 'very concerned' about; in the context of other problems - no climate change doesn't rank. Environmentally, land use and water use are more of a concern to me. Societal and economic issues concern me even more.

So you are concerned for your life style, I am concerned for my 4 grandsons.

 

[mheslep]

So you are concerned for your life style, I am concerned for my 4 grandsons.

Not mine (so much), my children's.