Your mission, should you choose to accept it

[james_davis_nicoll]

In an article referenced in an article reference here, Ken MacLeod said:

It's just rare to see stories written about a future that the writer believes in and the reader can get excited about - let alone one they'd like to live in. What we need is a new intellectual engagement with the real possibilities, coupled with a new confidence in humanity's capacity to deal with them.

Outline such a future [of your own creation]. Extra points for not tucking "embrace poverty" into it in one form or another, not creating a backswing setting [1], not praising the virtues of oligarchy or dictatorship and on and so forth. In other words, outline my Nightmarish Future or something equally attractive.

I have a report to do on something that is the exact opposide of MNF so my entry will have to wait until tomorrow.

1: Settings where the author slaughters ninety nine of a hundred people to give his characters more room for their sword's backswing. I think Andrew Wheeler invented the term. He certainly has expressed distaste for settings that as a side-effect wipe out his kids.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Even the relatively minor (on the scale you're discussing) collapse of one side of the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi here in Minineapolis (deaths in the low teens) seems to have resulted in renewed attention to the state of bridges around the country (or, possibly, just to increased reporting of activities that were going on anyway). This seems to support the reasonableness of your hope.

[traviswells.livejournal.com]

I think the I35W bridge collapse points out a problem in how people respond to disasters.
The bridge collapse may have only killed a dozen or so people, but nearly everyone travels over bridges regularly (IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!), and there's always the old tree-dwelling-ape fear of heights to make us vaguely distrust these dangerously-far-from-safe-ground structures. So many bridges are getting checked and worked on because everyone can see this happening to them, even if the number of bridge collapses in recent history is not exactly high. They're pretty safe, you know.

But Katrina flooding New Orleans doesn't seem to have generated that same response. Most people I guess are thinking "Eh, I don't live in a city that's below sea level. Sucks to be in New Orleans, but I'm safe". There are clearly lessons we could be learning about disaster response and preparedness, since the Katrina problem didn't start or end with a lousy levy. Those are more universal problems, not just applicable to seaside towns with questionable foundations.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

There are certainly *lots* of problems with the ape-mind analyzing modern risks.

You don't precisely say this, but I think we're both considering that the bridges might not really be the top priority for that infrastructure investment based on an analysis of the real risks. On the other hand, they're finding things that don't meet the engineering standards in place (not drastically changing the standards and *then* finding things), so it doesn't seem especially wasteful to me.

The bridge thing is universal; everywhere in the US has bridges (though the scale varies; the one that collapsed here really wasn't very long, anybody thinking of the Mississippi down in New Orleans would hardly recognize it up here).

Nearly every state gets some flooding here and there, though. I dunno; partly the bridge was a piece of human engineering, and we expect more of that than from mother nature (who, many of us have realized, is a bitch). And lots of us think it's just silly to build a town below sea level on the coast in a hurricane region.