Can the Planet (and Humans) Survive Technology?

[NickB79]

http://news.yahoo.com/planet-humans-survive-technology-155036821.html

WASHINGTON — Charles Dickens could have been talking about the 21st century when he wrote the lines: "These are the best of times, these are the worst of times." Technology can extend human life and take us into space, but it is also destroying the environment and threatening the survival of other species and humanity.

Moving forward, what parts of nature should humans preserve? What will the future look like? Will we develop a stable, long-term relationship with technology? These were some of the issues a group of scientists and humanists tackled yesterday (Sept. 12) in a symposium held here at the Library of Congress.

"The hallmark of the human species is great adaptability," said David Grinspoon, theBaruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress chair in astrobiology at the Kluge Center, who led the conversation.

The question is, he said, "Can we keep it going?"

[gtar100]

1. It all depends on how it is being used. Right now, the uncaring merchant class has the upper hand in

determining how technology is being used. Their concern is profit, not sustainable practices. So in this regards, humanity will not be able to survive the technology because it's controlled primarily by the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

The planet, however, has a far greater timeline to deal with and could probably do a decent job of cleaning up after the humans have been removed. But it's probably a safe bet that we've left our mark on this planet up to the time the sun consumes it. Our last traces will probably be the incredibly toxic uranium dump sites.

Glad they are asking these questions, though. We don't stand a chance if we don't recognize what's wrong.

[PamW]

5. How so?

gtar100 states:
Our last traces will probably be the incredibly toxic uranium dump sites.

We aren't making an "new" uranium; so any place we bury uranium, we are just putting back material that we got out of the ground to begin with. Even so; we put it back with better isolation barriers than Mother Nature had.

So in that sense; we are actually improving the situation over what Mother Nature did.

Uranium is one of the most uniformly distributed elements in the Earth's crust.

If you did up a football sized area to a depth of 6 feet; practically any where on Earth; you will recover several kilograms of Uranium.

PamW

[hunter]

2. I posted my thoughts in my journal...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023666366#post4

Humans will probably survive, but for billions of people alive today it would be best to achieve some kind of balance now rather than later.

[pscot]

3. If 'what part of nature should we preserve' is

one of the questions floating around in your head, I would suggest you have an incomplete grasp of our situation. We're crowding out every thing that doesn't satisfy our immediate survival needs. Population keeps growing. Our carbon burn keeps growing. Soon enough, humans will comprise the entire biota. Our 'choice' is the same choice that a rock rolling down a hill has. Like Miley says, we just can't stop.

[azul]

4. Technology needs to be better directed.

"There's an immense need for a planetary narrative," said paleoanthropologist Rick Potts -from the article above.

Our culture, our growth on this planet is mainly the result of war technology. The life on the world that we inherited depends now on turning all the technological efforts into balancing populations and preserving species. To use resources and time now to selfishly slay one another beast fashion is criminal. To not direct all efforts of business and people toward some population balance is also criminally foolhardy.

We happen to have now the young technology of the genetic code. We might have a fighting chance if only we could stop fighting and notice that the species dropping around us mean real trouble.

[GliderGuider]

6. How do we replace one global narrative with another?

"There's an immense need for a planetary narrative," said paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Program and curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History. We also need moral responsibility, Potts added.

Potts likened the lack of responsibility to "the tragedy of the commons," a concept in economics in which people disregard the depletion of a shared resource, acting in their own self-interest rather than that of the group.

The question of whether we will survive in the face of an increasingly technical culture comes down to what is meant by the term "we."

Humans have made a division between the natural world and the human world, Potts said, "but the evolution of human culture is a natural phenomenon."

Human physical, social and cultural evolution until now has been based on a narrative of separation, a story of dualism that has become more and more explicit as we developed over the lat 50,000 years. Technology is inherent to this narrative. We use technology to manipulate the world, to adapt it to our needs, and to increase the amount of energy we can use, in order to create ever larger and more complex physical and social structures.

We cannot survive without it, and in fact may have become symbiotic with it in a civilization that looks more and more like a cybernetic, techo-industrial Matrix. Technology allows us to decimate the natural systems of the planet faster and faster as we tear them apart, using the useful bits for our own purposes and throwing "away" the rest.

Can we replace the current global narrative of human domination with one of whole-life cooperation? Replace the world's capitalism with some form of Deep Eco-economics? Replace material progress with restraint?

No, we can't.

So it goes.

[ConcernedCanuk]

7. No.

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CC