I used to read Scientific American with interest and wonder. My favorite column was The Amateur Scientist because it had so many neat experiments and projects. Now, it is mostly with sadness and incredulity that I occasionally glance at it on the newsstand. I don’t bother subscribing or even buying it for an interesting article TAS article anymore. They’ve lost their way.
Grist magazine wrote on July 24th:
What would the world look like without people?
This is the latest in a series of Saturday GINK videos about population and reproduction (or a lack thereof).
In honor of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which we recently profiled, here are two videos showing what would happen if we humans suddenly up and disappeared.
I’m shaking my head as I watch this SciAm video, they have an animated musclebound synthetic person as the spokesman wearing a SciAm t-shirt. Yes, it’s that bad. They seem to forget where they came from and who they cater to.
Of course there’s the obligatory “global warming” mention, still going strong after 1000 years, turning NYC’s central park into an African jungle, complete with elephants.
And it’s not just Scientific American pushing this stuff. Nat Geo (another magazine I used to enjoy) also has a video out on the topic that looks like…like…oh heck just watch it, I can’t even describe it.
In both SciAm and the NatGeo videos they destroy the statue of liberty. I guess either they dislike what it represents, or they have so little creative talent that they have to borrow from the famous scene with Charlton Heston from Planet of the Apes, the original human decline disaster movie.
It’s fine by me if the people at Voluntary Human Extinction Movement want to recuse themselves from Earth, and I’d be totally OK if SciAm, and NatGeo met with extinction, but please, leave the rest of the human race out of your plans. I notice that the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is still around, so much for leadership.
Me? I’m going to celebrate life.
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As usual you have said it all!
When I here this sort of *%£$??! it reminds me of that dialogue from the film “The Aviator”. The young Howard Hughes is dating the equally young Katherine Hepburn, who takes him to her family “seat”, was it in Boston? Anyway, at lunch KHs mother has the line something like “we don’t worry about money here, we’re all Socialists”, to which the young HH responds, “that’s because you have it!” or words to that effect. Is it me or are the wealthy youthful classes having a tinge of social (ist) concience about being so wealthy & advantaged, so that they deflect attention from their wealth & lord it over everyone else that we should make huge sacrifices in life for Mother Earth whilst they enjoy woops I mean struggle to maintain her energy budget at huge cost to ourselves, whilst they promise they are working hard & tirelessly to save planet Earth for themselves woops I mean the children? You know,the very poor people like Prince Charles, Sir David Attenborough, Sir(its only a matter of time) Tony Blair, Sir Jonathan Porrit, Sir (its only a matter of more time) Albert Gore, etc etc, who all came from very humble beginnings, rising only off the backs of others. Perhaps I should be more lenient to Sir David, having met him, (he was inaugurated as a Doctor at a nearby university at which I was an official guest, that’s all) he at least is just well intentioined but misguided, well I think he is, although he is undoubtedly a Socialist elitist! All the doomsayers are the well off & stand to benefit from their own predictions & more importantly, their own investments!!!!!!! The new fuedal system is awaiting in the wings, me thinks! It is good for people to point out the folly of mans’ way at times, the troubles come when they start to do something about it!
In my opinion, if you think SA is bad you should, or probably should not, take a look at New Scientist. I currently subscribe to both but will not renew when the time comes.
Come on have some sympathy. Science has come to a somewhat dead end. Remember star trek …. a future where we would all be flying through space boldly going …
Well the closest we got to that was Concorde and that is now long dead. We’ve been talking about going to Mars for decades and even if it were worth the money (which it isn’t) who’d want to fry themselves in cosmic rays just to land on Mars, and then more than likely find the budget cuts don’t run to bringing them back.
As for National Geographical, it used to be a Magazine for the intrepid explorer. But where’s there left to explore that doesn’t end up you meeting an English speaking native wearing designer jeans and carrying a mobile phone?
There is still science to be done, but not the exciting ground breaking stuff that thrills the readers of Scientific Amercan. It’s largely boring, teamwork stuff often playing second fiddle to an engineer who is tackling real problems and where science is just another tool in the engineers toolkit. As for geography, there still are places to explore, but usually they are already filled by people and the research is being done by some big multinational trying to sell them something.
Quite a few years ago, now, there was an American chap – I can’t remember his name – who played some great jokes on the public. One was a campaign to have cows, sheep etc wear clothes to cover their nether regions to avoid offending people; another was to hold the International Sex Olympics with medals given for technique, stamina etc. He fooled some gullible people and the rest had a good laugh. This Voluntary Extinction Society sounds right up his street. Are we sure it isn’t him?
Why do I get the feeling that this concept of “world without humans” will morph gradually into “world with almost no humans, except for a small number of the carefully chosen”.
More and more I see the academic community heading towards a concept of obliterating humanity to leave only those that “deserve” to survive. I think if you read Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” you will see the subtle (and not so subtle) message between the lines. Imagine, we are paying many of these scientists to come up with exactly the tools they need to destroy the rest of us.
Hmmm, would make a good script for a movie. Just don’t end it with the Statue of Liberty sunk in the sand….
The funny thing is that if the VHEM get their way, (or some of the non voluntary guys invent their killer bug), and the human race ceases to exist, it will probably take less than 100k years for some other ape to fill the gap left by our demise for an intelligent species.
Even if the self-hating lunatics decide to murder every creature with an opposable thumb, even down to the last little marmot on Madagascar, it might only be a million or so years until some other species filled the gap.*
So, poor old Gaia gets a reprieve from nasty intelligent creatures building roads and factories and skyscrapers for a very short time, (geologically), and then it’s back to normal.
Of course, if Gaia sticks with us, and we keep, (or recover), our nerve, then she can join us on a trip to the stars where we can build habitats to suit whatever her whim.
Why do these suicidal cultists have such a lack of imagination. (Or is that a tautology.)
*I favour the bears to fill the gap, but others reckon the pigs might fit the bill.
Like a lot of regular readers from the ’80s and before, I gave up on SA long ago. I recommend swapping to American Scientist.
http://www.americanscientist.org/
And New Scientist has become the para-military wing of Greenpeace. I treat it as if it were dusted with bubonic plague spores.
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There is a large slice of the Green movement that hates everything that Western science, technology and society stands for. That is why they denigrate every achievement in the West as raping the planet, and champion every ‘achievement’ in the developing world as being so superior. (The developing world lives in ‘harmony’ with nature – ie, they are dirt poor, often starving, frequently disease riddled and without any control over their destiny).
I am not surprised that these magazines now champion the destruction of the West. They have literally been trying to achieve this, politically, for the last 20-30 years. Every policy has been finely tuned to ensure that the West gets poorer, less cohesive, overrun, and less able to defend itself – let alone progress technologically.
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From the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement:
Q: Are humans the most important species on Earth?
Another test of our importance is to ask how well Earth’s biosphere would get along without us. The higher a species is on the food chain, the less important it seems to be to the survival of that chain.
This error is well known in philosophy circles as “flatland”.
In a sense it is the same error that comes from scientific materialism. Everything only exists if we can measure it scientifically, and if we can’t measure it scientifically, scientific materialists assume that it doesn’t exist.
So, human love and affection doesn’t exist to these people. You can’t measure the love capacity of a frog. You can’t measure the love capacity of a human being. Instead they just step back and look at ecosystems and resource consumption and population numbers. They do some calculations and decide that, given the number of bugs in the world, it would have been better that Shakespeare, Newton, Lao Tzu, The Buddha, your best friend, and my mom, had never have been born.
They will never recognise the value of human life because they already ignore entirely our very human natures, our intelligence, our ability to care, our creativity.
No animal has created societies as large and complex and unified as humans. No other animal has done that. Humans have achieved nation states and democratic societies after tens of thousands of years of development. That’s 300 million people all paying taxes to help each other (in principle). Meanwhile, crocodiles, in their hundred million year existence, still only know how to chomp and kill.
Yes there are many humans, and maybe there are too many, but that’s the new challenge. It is a sign of our successful evolution beyond tribal warlordism, where any human from another tribe was fair game for a kill.
The irony is that these people are asking us to care about the planet, when they specifically ignore human’s ability to care, our depth for love and compassion.
In their calculations, human’s tremendous congintive ability to care for not just me and my blood kin, but for the whole nation with equal rights, and freedom for all, does not exist!
They say humans have little value, and yet their very ability to pose the question, “how do I care for the planet?” is itself a product of deep value and ethics.
No other monkey ever did that.
@Kevin B says:
Even if the self-hating lunatics decide to murder every creature with an opposable thumb, even down to the last little marmot on Madagascar, it might only be a million or so years until some other species filled the gap.
Lets stop funding Nasa then and develop the ultimate doomsday weapon by doing absolutely nothing, a large chunk of rock that will impact earth somewhere in the (near) future.
Also, a creature from the sea might fill the gap, *hint* Octopus.
Nice article. But let’s be fair to Planet of the Apes. That movie wasn’t about human decline. It was about racism and man’s inhumanity to man (and animals, but that’s really a very secondary point). After it became a franchise those involved in getting the original movie off the ground (Heston among them) quickly headed for the exits.
But your point is taken about the iconic value of the Statue of Liberty scene from the original film.
Poor old Sci-Am. My mother used to get it so I read it through my childhood, then bought my own as I progressed into adulthood. Unfortunately Sci-Am moved in the other direction, becoming a comic rather than a serious science publication. Its not even a first rate comic so I long ago gave up buying it. I still get Nature, but fear that is going the same way.
Hear, hear Stefan!
I’ll likely steal most of that at some point in the next year.
And for a bit of light relief on the topic some of you may enjoy one of ten recently banned ads! See http://www.citywire.co.uk/money/10-scandalous-adverts-that-were-banned-from-tv/a416863?re=10370&ea=105886#i=7
Another pertinent movie reference (especially while we’re on the subject of “human extinction”) – Logan’s Run, anyone?
The AGW social movement has turned SA, Nat. Geo, and other formerly respectable magazines into shrill parodies of what they once were.
And their news content and quality has suffered dramatically.
This example of media implosion exists across most media organizations.
The first media outlet that chooses to actually report instead of promote will benefit not only from a recovery of credibility but will also make a great deal of money. People are hungry for real reporting.
Kevin B,
Please offer any proof at all for your assertion that an intelligent species will evolve in about 100,00 years and take our niche if humans go extinct.
That sci-am video (and the entire mag the last few years) come off as if they were written by bored 13 years olds – yell, given what’s happening to economics in the print world I’d bet that they’re in that classic death spiral. Sales fall as old line subscribers pull away due to the unscientific sensationalism, so they try to scare up higher newstand sales by making the cover articles even more sensational – thereby increasing, not decreasing, the long term problem.
Core problem – the people running these mags have no clue as to why this mag was originally successful with it’s target audience, and they don’t care. They’ve bet the farm on global warming and left wing agitprop in general, and when it collapses these magazines will collapse with it. I’d be amazed if any of these are still being published 3 years from now.
I’ve subscribed to SciAm for 40 years and read every issue pretty much cover to cover. It’s still a good magazine but has gone decidedly downhill in the past 20. The tipping point was the hiring and firing of Forrest Mims for The Amateur Science column. Mims was fired because he believes in a living God who created the universe, mankind, and who is author and sustainer of the physical laws that hold it all together. Forrest Mims is a friend of mine and I know from much personal correspondence with Forrest that his religious convictions have never, ever adversely effected his study of nature. If anything it’s just the opposite because for Forrest science is simply the study of God’s creation and he studies it with awe, reverence, respect, and religious devotion. He never preaches but is happy to share his views if queried and is always respectful of differing views in an examplary manner. I should know, I’m an agnostic and am happy to share my views if queried as well. This difference in religious views was never an impediment to friendship or philosophical discussion as I respect Forrest’s views as much as my own, the nub being that I far as I can determine his views might be correct.
I also owe Forrest a deep debt of gratitude as his early work in amateur electronics got me interested in the field when I was a boy. My first computer was a 1977 Altair 8800. Forrest was a co-founder of the company which designed and produced the Altair kit. The inspiration from Forrest led to a wonderful and lucrative career in computer science.
Today I still consider SciAm an invaluable source of information in a broad range of sciences most of which are not politicized to any great extent and don’t carry the stink of bandwagon dogma (climate science) or taint of anti-religious bias (mud-to-man evolution via random mutation & natural selection). It’s easy to recognize those articles and read them with them with a jaundiced eye.
Pathetic and sad it be, that once it was the youth that rebelled against authority, alas the indoctrination over many decades, now has these people of premature bewilderment in positions of people in generations past that would have had discernment and the capability of individual thought.
Sad to say, that is entirely our fault, for allowing the slow degredation of our education systems to the politically correct fools , who are the usefull idiots of the brave new world. The people of our new world are delusional, they are totally controlled in their mind by the edicts of the gurus.
The left are bereft of new thought or innovation, as has been shown by recent research that shows a deficiency in genes give people the no think for myself problem.
Science is not the only problem, the education system is loaded with usefull idiots, intent on the destruction off the modern world.
It would seem a silent revolution is brewing in the land of the free, as thousands opt for home education, to bypass the propaganda of the collective. I salute these people as they try to maintain a modicum of freedom and truth.
The AGW stuff is only a small part of the insidious march toward a brave new world that controls not just your action and choices, but your very thoughts.
I once read a book called ” Thanks to the Yanks” some decades ago, sorry to put this on you guys, but USA has the only freedom charter in the entire world. We all have constitutions and rules in other countries, but, you guys have one guarantee of freedom that the rest of the world lacks.
Your forbears stated some what, that if the government is doing things against the constitution or the will of the people you have the right to change the government, and the system of governance, to correct the deficiency, including the right to civil incerrection .
This craziness of AGW ,PC and all the other nonsense that is on display, shows a total lack of responsibility and an agenda that is at odds with both common sense and common decency.
The people in charge of the political agenda are devoid of humanity, it makes one wonder when you see them with wives and children. Mayhaps they feel superior and thus the elite that shall be the new brave new world, devoid of the need to feel pity for the peons growing the food to keep them in the manor they have grown accustomed to. [Pun intended]
I am old, soon for the eternal sleep, but I have a future invested in children and grand children. The last decade has been a nightmare for real truth and knowledge. I have had on occasion the need to warn my daughter of the untruths peddled to my grand daughters in the school curriculum. I am fortunate that she not only heeds but is aware also. This month thankfully both grand daughters are attending a private school for unbiased education.
Hope fully for the world these fools will lead by example.
The desk lamp at the beginning of the SciAm video looks like a rip-off of Pixar…maybe Pixar could sue them out of existence.
MikeEE
SA and NatGeo were both a mainstayof my youth; sadly no longer.
Historical perspective reminds us that there in an unfortunate insanity that underlies progress, not contribting to the progress but always present, intentionally working to steer an ill conceived course. As this website so aptly demonstrates, shining the light of truth brilliantly illuminates reality. As my dad alwasy said, “Reality always wins, it’s not if but when.”
You can defeat these people (those who say humans are not important in the grand scheme of things) on their own terms. I had a run-in with Eric Pianca (UT Austin biology professor nicknamed “the lizard man” for his abiding interest in lizards) who is know to frequently state in lectures “what makes you more important than a lizard?”
I told him what. The earth has a finite period of time in which it can support life. Five billion years from now our sun will become a red giant engulfing the earth and turning it into a cinder. If the life that exists on earth is to be preserved in some form (lizards included) and continue beyond that time instead of becoming a footnote in the history of the universe then it will require a technological space-faring species to do it. Life must be relocated to a planet where conditions are either naturally favorable or made favorable (terraformed).
Fortunately such a species exists. It is us. Without us or a species like us the lizards are doomed along with every other living thing.
Curiously we appear to be, for no reason attributable to survival instinct, driven to build spacecraft, telescopes, and lately to seaching for extra-solar planets similar to the earth. If life is viewed on an even grander scale than individual planets and stars it makes sense that in order to reproduce on very long time scales there must be means to move to greener pastures as each host planet inevitably becomes inhospitable. Those living worlds that fail to produce a means of relocation go extinct. If we extend the concept of natural selection such that it operates on planetary scales then maybe we’re just the natural result of that selection working in the past which might explain why we’re so interested in space travel and exploration of universe – it’s an inherited trait critical to long term survival.
That is what makes humans more important than lizards. So there! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Professor Pianka.
forgive the question’s being off topic.
In about 1970 +,- two years one of these magazines published a story / research about a huge solar power system that would deliver the USA’s total power needs. Big boiler and lots of mirrors.
I never read the article, dumb me. I do remember hearing it wasn’t feasible. The strange bit is with all the chatter about solar power, searching for the story doesn’t come up with anything.
“Please offer any proof at all for your assertion that an intelligent species will evolve in about 100,00 years and take our niche if humans go extinct.”
I’ll bet good money that you can’t prove it’s not true!!!!
(and that makes every bit as much sense as your offer)