Two Great Flavours
Apr. 16th, 2005 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicollIt seem likely at some point in the fairly close future we'll need to re-arrange how we produce energy [1]. We also no longer really need rural or suburban cultures to the extent we have them: how can we use the one to make the other economically unsustainable while maintaining advanced and wealthy urban civilizations?
1: This is not the same as "We should embrace some luddite-inspired, human-hostile low-technology lifestyle that dooms our children to short, painful lives of brutish superstition." If I wanted that, I'd move to the Chlamydia Zone. We can increase our use of energy on Earth by several orders of magnitude before the oceans boil, so there is no reason for the human population to settle for anything less than an upper class Western lifestyle.
Of course, there are those who would be uncomfortable on an Earth that was even moderately populated, who would see even a few hundred billion people as unendurable. I propose that Antarctica be set aside for them to frolic in low population density utopia. Because high technology would introduce the risk of urbanization, I further suggest that nothing invented after 1800 be allowed in, to preserve their cultural purity.
1: This is not the same as "We should embrace some luddite-inspired, human-hostile low-technology lifestyle that dooms our children to short, painful lives of brutish superstition." If I wanted that, I'd move to the Chlamydia Zone. We can increase our use of energy on Earth by several orders of magnitude before the oceans boil, so there is no reason for the human population to settle for anything less than an upper class Western lifestyle.
Of course, there are those who would be uncomfortable on an Earth that was even moderately populated, who would see even a few hundred billion people as unendurable. I propose that Antarctica be set aside for them to frolic in low population density utopia. Because high technology would introduce the risk of urbanization, I further suggest that nothing invented after 1800 be allowed in, to preserve their cultural purity.
