by Chris McGinty
A while back, I had a thought I thought was pretty funny, “I’ve seen no evidence that I’m not immortal.” I later heard a Steven Wright joke that was similar in concept that is funnier:
“I intend to live forever. So far, so good.” – Steven Wright
This plays into the fallacy that if it hasn’t happened yet, it will never happen. I think the reason I’m worried so much lately is because as a society we’re really playing around with a bunch of stuff that could potentially be really bad for us, but we keep acting like it’ll never happen.
There’s another quote that I feel like was George Carlin, but since I can’t find the quote, I’m going to have to paraphrase and possibly misattribute it. If I find the actual source, I’ll come back and edit:
“1 and 3 people die of cancer, but people will say things like, ‘It’ll never happen to me.’ Meanwhile, you have a 1 in 25 million chance to win the lottery and people buy tickets and say, ‘someone’s got to win.'”
I feel like that as a society we’ve gotten to a point that is somewhere between those two extremes. People keep smoking, because they haven’t got cancer yet. We’ve known for decades now that nuclear weaponry could end us all, but we’ve just continued to put off de-escalation for a safer time. We’ve seen political coups and moves toward authoritarian rule, but we don’t think it could happen in [insert name of country where that could never happen]. We’ve studied all the crazy extinction events that could happen, but we’re doing more to protect against asteroids than we are about resource shortages and environmental damage. There are people out there who believe that we need to actually double the population to expedite progress, while ignoring all the red flags of that progress. Most of us aren’t prepared for a time where solar flares could knock out our digital and online infrastructure, because Y2K turned out not to be an issue.
The point is that there’s a potential fallacy to this type of thinking that everything has been fine up to this point, so of course it will continue to be fine. I believe in the concept of “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst” to a certain extent.
There’s another quote from Falco’s “Der Kommissar”:
“Dreh dich nicht um, schau, schau,
der Kommissar geht um!
Wenn er dich anspricht
und du weißt warum,
Sag ihm: ‘Dein Leb’n bringt dich um.'”
Now that I think about that, I should run it through Google translate:
“Don’t turn around, look, look,
the inspector is dying!
When he speaks to you
and you know why,
Tell him: ‘Your life is killing you.'”
Or as it was translated for the After the Fire cover:
Don’t turn around, oh oh oh
(Ja ja) Der Kommissar’s in town, whoa oh oh
And if he talks to you, then you’ll know why
The more you live, the faster you will die
If the human race is to die, then every moment that we live is getting us closer to that moment. The question is whether we will use each moment to delay the inevitable. Let’s take the climate change concept as an example since there is still some question about whether or not it would have the effect of an extinction event. But also, because I can make a relatively clear point about it. But mainly, so I can get a real George Carlin quote into this bad boy:
“The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!” – George Carlin
Years ago, I was in an argument about recycling. I was told that even if we didn’t recycle, we have enough known resources on the planet to keep producing for over 100 years. My question was, “How many years would we have left if we hadn’t started recycling programs back in the 1930s?” That date is questionable, because the true move towards recycling was in the 1970s and then into the 1980s where it hit its stride. But the reason for the 1930s date has more to do with the Waste Reclamation Service by the US military for World War I and similar programs for World War II.
Let’s say for a moment that climate change isn’t going to kill us, either ever or for a long time. My simple question is, “Why don’t we just do the stuff that we know will help the environment anyway?” I brought up Y2K earlier and depending on who you talk to, all the Y2K preparedness either did little to nothing, or is the reason we didn’t experience a lot of inconveniences when 2000 rolled around. Either way, it set us up for a future where we protect against obsolescence, even if the world wasn’t ending in 2000.
Whether it’s our personal lives or on a societal level, I believe we should be looking into the future and asking, “What kind of disasters might we face?” And then, even if we never face those disasters, “What can we do to avoid them?”
When I started this post, I was actually going to bitch about AI again, but the idea went in a different direction, so I’ll write the more “AI is going to kill us” focused post another time. The original title I had was “Technology and the ‘It Hasn’t Killed Us Yet’ Hypothesis.” I needed a title that was more apt, so I came up with “On Preparing for the Worst.” It was at this point that I realized this could give me a “brought to you by…” moment. Nathan created a Be Prepared! deck of cards on emergency preparedness last year and it is for sale. I’ve seen it and it’s a decent product. It’s a sort of “gets you thinking” kind of thing and has good practical advice. You can learn more about it at the link above. One of these days we’ll get the Jack in the Box sponsorship, and I can finally write all of the obesity and diabetes posts I’ve got chambered.
Chris McGinty is not a prepper, not in the extreme sense of the word, but he is a blogger who feels at least a little prepared for the future.