"Out of position" (EDIT: Maybe part 1?) in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

When you have not been writing, it is like drowning. You remember having broken the silvery surface up there, but whenever you try you can’t quite seem to reach it.
You withdraw dully into the nonspecific depths.
Perhaps you have become a deep-sea creature, you think…
… a compromise thought about the water that’s becoming so familiar in your lungs.

There’s some relationship to a level of loneliness I do not like to think about.

Let’s try some sort of daunting, depressing thought.

Do you ever think about the people a thousand generations in the future?

I do.

About the people a thousand generations down the road.

You don’t even have to think about that specifically. - UNLESS you dismiss them. They are real - as real as your desk. We must take them as being that real, that certain.

Consider: Unless we go extinct, there will be people a thousand generations in the future. That much is just logic. (A thousand human lifetimes from here, but I’m trying not to break my reader’s stretch function. So I’ll say generations.)

And - “unless we go extinct”: Human beings do not just “go extinct”. Extinction is a total statement. You’re saying no one survives, no group or society scrabbles out anything, despite everyone’s and everywhere’s trying, and the causes and the process would be so involved (and the ultimate in misery) that that would be all we’re talking about, and should be.
So, if we do NOT wave our hand carelessly and say, with zero activation of specific imagination, “oh, we’ll be extinct long before then…”

A thousand generations from now. People. A fact. So certain that you may as well say they do exist, that they are there. As factual as the people you see now. Every bit.

They’re there.

Which presents us with certain problems.

People in the future may not be doing very well. Certainly not as well as they could be.

Now, we do have to approach this carefully. To again raise the extreme obvious: We know nothing about them. We don’t know their history, their situation, and we certainly don’t know about the state of science or about technological advancements over that time (the ones that have been realized or the ones that have proven chimerical or impossible or too difficult to realize). We only know those people are (will be) there, and we should assume we know as little as possible. But that doesn’t mean we can hazard nothing.

We can say certain things about their range of options - the differing ranges of options they may have. That we may affect.

For example. There is one specific kind of resource limit that appears to be tougher than just about any other. It’s a dispersal problem. It was talked a lot about in the late sixties and early seventies.

High-density resources, when extracted and used, and perhaps re-used, gradually get dispersed by the activity. Some percentage of any basic material, at any given point in time, becomes so dispersed by our activity, in such a low concentration, that it becomes uneconomic or impossible to go and gather it again. This adds up.
(Note that this means “uneconomic or impossible” in terms of any given technological level, whatever that means under that level and at that point, ultimately at any point.)

(This can be compounded, in the course of things, by practical social “impossibilities”. It might - this is frequently mentioned - be economic to mine dumps and landfills for some things or for many; landfills may be relatively concentrated sources. But can you do that when subsequent development has built valuable properties - city districts - all over the land?)

(And do you have a social system that can make sticky choices and can actually proceed to implement them? Or do situational inconvenience and politics combine to make a bog - while things proceed? Does this problem sound familiar?)

The problem is pretty logically inexorable. (Shorthand simplification metaphor: If there is enough iron scattered through the sand along eight hundred miles of beach to make one fishing boat, is it possible to make a fishing boat out of that iron?)

Sufficiently magical technological development can be imagined to outflank this, but let’s keep a grip on what we are actually saying. “Some things easy; some things hard.” Technological advancement is not a magic wand; it is a time-landscape of tricksy efficient use of a real universe with a gradually discovered fixed shape. It won’t turn out to be possible to do everything that’s hand-wavingly imaginable. And it won’t turn out to be practically possible to do everything that is in some sense theoretically possible.

And, mind you, our current scientific pictures of the world are looking pretty solid at this juncture. They contain many surprises yet to come, but the broad structures are testing reliably, and they have become very detailed. Already.

So it is legitimate to see foreseeable constraints as constraints that must in fact be planned for.

If we are interested in making sure - or increasing the odds - that the human race does as well as possible for as long as possible (that it has at least a chance or the choice of doing well)… ideally as far out as those people a thousand generations from now… then there are some things we could do.

This is me coming into Prosebox hoping I’ll think of something to write about and discovering that I did, in fact, make a start somewhere in the last few (few?) months and it’s still sitting here. I think I will post this beginning as is - just to have SOMETHING posted - and doing so might guilt me into continuing the thought.
Spoiler: It will involve the objective of recycling, the real activity, versus what has actually happened with recycling - the nature and niche and role and behavior it has found. Even what has happened to the conception of its objective.
More abstractly, and more generally, it will involve
1. the long-term value of long-term investment and long-term thinking about investment, which is pretty obvious;
2. the danger of using just “what develops as time goes on” to find out what is “realistic” (when unrealistic and natively extremely genuinely difficult MAY BE WHAT YOU NEED);
and 3. a look (with deep terror) at how the way things work (both markets and, on the level above, political economy) to reconcile ideal/objectively urgent priorities held in society’s awareness with what everyone is already doing.
I won’t make it to optimistic. I’d love it if I made it to useful. Mostly I’m just scared by what I think I see in the world.

Meanwhile I have some thoughts on this Christmas here that I guess should be written out separately and soon.
And - wow, I’m clicking Publish on something in Prosebox!

Last updated December 13, 2021