Ice

What you’re looking at is a geological formation called Dry Falls, in the Sun Lakes-Dry Falls state park in my home state of Washington. The Dry Falls are a series of escarpments and cliffs near Grand Coulee, deep in Eastern Washington’s channelled scablands region. These are four hundred foot high cliffs in the middle of the desert, how did they get here? What secrets does this terrain hold? What can the strange rock formations and alien landscapes of eastern Washington state tell us about the future of our planet?

During the end of the last ice age, a massive amount of glacial ice in continental Europe and North America melted away. During the period from 25,000 to 10,000 years ago, the Laurentide, Cordilleran, and Fennoscandian ice sheets completely melted, leading to a 120 meter rise in the global sea level. The rise in sea levels from this melting is estimated to have averaged in at roughly one meter per century while being augmented by two intense periods of melting between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago, and between 11,000 and 9,000 years ago.

While the current consensus among paleoclimatologists is that this melting was relatively gradual and steady, occurring at a linear rate over the course of 15,000 years, there is some evidence beginning to surface both in our current ice sheets and in the geologic records on the last one, that a gradual and linear melting rate is not what we should expect to see going forward.

In this post, I’ll look at recent melting trends in Antarctica and Greenland as well as at paleoclimate data from ice and seabed cores to propose a model of continental ice sheet collapses as rapid and potentially cataclysmic historical events which we should be aware of as potentially civilization destabilizing. Most of our current population, our largest cities, and most of our power and industry facilities, are all located in low lying areas susceptible to coastal flooding. If the water levels rise at a rate faster than can be mitigated by a slow withdrawal from the coastline over the course of many decades and centuries, it could cripple human civilization and bring an end to our current way of life.

The first piece of evidence to note here is that the geologic record of the last ice age is littered with superfloods and seemingly cataclysmic sea level rise events. Water topped over earthen berms and flooded into lowlying areas, Doggerland and Sundaland vanished beneath the waves and the Bering Strait cut Asia and North America apart. These events have left scars on the surface of the Earth which you can see from space, you just need to know what to look for.

This is the North Fork of the Toutle River as it flows across the soft dried mud and ash of the Mount Saint Helens lahar zone, I provide this image just to given an example of stream braiding, the lahar zone gives a nice canvas on which you can really see how the water carves all these winding channels through the surface material. This happens in rivers around the world though, there are dozens of examples of this sort of river braiding I could show you. The important thing to note here though is the scale of this landform. The lahar zone is less than a kilometer across, and we can see roads and trees and houses at this level of zoom.

So now lets zoom out and look east across the Cascade range.

This is the channelled scablands from far above. At the height which satellites orbit, the mass scouring of hundreds of square kilometers can clearly be seen. braids tens of kilometers across and hundreds of kilometers long draw tracks across all of eastern Washington before spilling into the Columbia River Valley to flow onward toward the Pacific. This event, or events, geologists aren’t sure, is referred to as the Missoula Megafloods, and was the source of the Dry Falls pictured at the beginning of this post. At their peak flow, the Dry Falls were twice the height of Niagara Falls and five times the width. So much water poured into the Columbia River that it backfilled and flooded most of the Willamette Valley.

According to current consensus, these massive floods were caused when a proglacial lake formed in what is now Missoula, Montana. The leading theory is that a fifty mile long ice dam formed across the Clark Fork River which caused the waters of the receding Cordilleran Ice sheet to back up and pool around Missoula. This presents the first problem with the current consensus and is where a rather peculiar group of individuals become involved.

There are a group of slightly kooky geologists and historians who call themselves the Catastrophists. They hold that a moderately advanced civilization in North America was destroyed during the Younger Dryas period around 12,000 years ago and have found all sorts of interesting things to lend credence to their theory.

The Catastrophists looked at the story of the Missoula Megafloods and said, “That doesn’t work.” They pointed out that an ice dam the size of the one proposed cannot possibly have held back the amount of water under the head pressure that Glacial Lake Missoula was under, long enough for the lake to each its maximum historical depth of over 600 meters. Glacial Lake Missoula is estimated at having held 2,500 cubic kilometers of water, and the catastrophists say that there’s no way that could have happened with an ice dam triggered outburst flood, the ice would give before that much water could build up.

Instead, the Catastrophists propose that glacial lake missoula wasn’t a long term lake, but formed temporarily as a result of water flowing in from further north pooling and backfilling around Missoula as it interacted with the chokepoint in its flow along the Clark Fork River Valley.

The Catastrophists also have other evidence of rapid melting which they have found from seabed cores. Most of the seabed is composed mostly of decaying organic material, crushed up tiny organisms that rain down to the bottom in an ever present snow. However, there are notable strata lines within seabed cores, which contain mostly rocks, pebbles, sand, and other inorganic debris. These layers are called Heinrich Events, and it is believed that they are caused by large masses of icebergs breaking off, carrying rocks and sediment with them, and then dropping these bits of rock and sediment as they melt away. All of these things come together, according to the catastrophists, to seemingly support their theory of a cataclysmic event during the Younger Dryas period, 12,900 years ago.

So the Catastrophists look at all the data for speed of melting, heating from sunlight, atmospheric C02 levels, and conclude that the melting just happens too fast to be explained without an outside source. They claim there simply wasn’t enough energy available for the math to work out unless you added a bunch of extra energy from somewhere outside the climactic system.

The solution to this problem, they say, is that around 12,900 years ago, a comet or asteroid struck the top of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, triggering a massive pulse in melting which we observe in the form of megafloods and Meltwater Pulses and Heinrich Events. The evidence for this is shaky, but I sincerely hope they end up being correct. And they might actually be, late last year a 19 kilometer wide impact crater was discovered under the Hiawatha Glacier in Greenland. This impactor, if it occured at the right time period, might actually be the catastrophists smoking gun.

However, I am not particularly confident that they are correct. Because it’s under a glacier, we don’t yet know how old the crater at Hiawatha actually is. It could be significantly older than 12,000 years, and if it is, than we’re once again left with too much melting to fit our model and no discernible cause. The currently dominant theory is that a combination of increased insolation on the glaciers and high C02 levels at the time caused their final retreat and collapse. However, the effect seems to have exceeded the cause and the extremity of the events, especially the large pulses of meltwater, seem to imply some other mechanism was present. 

Without invoking some outside event like a volcanic eruption or an extraterrestrial impact, the only explanation we’re left with is the ill-understood climate feedback mechanisms which we are currently engaged in setting off en-masse.

The impact theory is in some senses comforting. We have big telescopes, we can see into space now, in theory, if we knew an impact event was coming, we could prevent it. If it takes an impact to cause a catastrophic melting and sea level rise event, then we’re mostly safe from it happening. If the melting was caused by an impact, then it means our current climate models which estimate around a meter of sea level rise by the year 2100, are largely accurate. 

But if these melting spikes were not caused by an impact, then it means something on earth which we currently do not understand triggered them. Something caused the ice sheets to suddenly and rapidly destabilize and release a large quantity of meltwater over a relatively brief period. If such an event were to occur today, the effects would be globally catastrophic. If an event caused a one-meter sea level rise over the course of a few years, it would render many of the world’s coastal cities uninhabitable. 

Scientists have posited that the West Antarctic Ice sheet, which is sitting on bedrock below sea level, could potentially experience a catastrophic collapse event if sea water was able to access the roots of this glacier. Although computer models have been unable to construct the timeline of events in detail, the possibility remains that the entire ice sheet could collapse over a period as short as a few years, which, if the entire thing went, would lead to 6 to 9 meters of sea level rise, enough to submerge a large number of urban cores around the world and utterly remake coastlines. 

The possibility of this catastrophic melting event is often left out of the climate change conversation, with the assumption being that melting will be a nuisance and force the eventual abandonment of low-lying areas or construction of new seawalls, but is not an existential threat to civilization by itself.

If the entire West Antarctic ice sheet was to collapse over a five year period, it would lead to a global crisis as populations were forced to relocate and cities were rendered unlivable. In many ways, the predictions that the ice sheets will last for centuries more and take a thousand years to melt away are overly optimistic and based on older and less accurate models of past climate events. A recent paper has provided evidence that melting may not be linear in nature but exponential, and if recent trends in accelerating melting are extrapolated out, we could see multimeter sea level rise within the next fifty years.

This would not by itself be an X-Risk, but would represent a major case of cranking up the pressure that humanity is put under, and make other X-Risks such as nuclear wars and pandemics more likely. It is my opinion that the possibility of catastrophic ice sheet collapse should be carefully considered and studied as a real possibility. It’s unlikely we could prevent such a collapse from occurring, but by anticipating such an event we may be able to save many lives and livelihoods.

Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon

Epistemic Status: Endorsed
Content Warning: Neuropsychological Infohazard, Evocation Infohazard
Part of the Series: Extinction

See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.

It was a bright and sunny Monday morning. Air raid sirens had sounded through part of the night and again closer to dawn but as the sun rose into a clear blue sky, the calm had returned. People had begun going to work and children had just started their days at school when a new star was born 1,900 feet over the city of Hiroshima. 

At 8:15 am on August 6th, 1945, An American B-29 bomber nicknamed the Enola Gay dropped the Little Boy nuclear weapon on an unsuspecting Japanese metropolis. Forty-five seconds later, 70,000 people were instantly incinerated as a mile wide atomic fireball vaporized the center of the city and sent shockwaves filled with radioactive debris radiating outwards for miles in every direction. The blast ignited a firestorm that would burn for much of the day and destroy what little of the original downtown had survived, churning the air with radioactive dust and ash. 

In the following days’ American president Harry Truman would issue a dire warning to Japan: 

The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in the first attack to avoid insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and unfortunately thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately and save themselves from destruction.

Having found the bomb, we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbour, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretence of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war; in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans. We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us. …

Japan did not surrender. Three days later, on August 9th, Soviet tanks began to roll into Japanese occupied Manchuria, while in Japan another fireball would obliterate the city of Nagasaki, instantly killing another 40,000 people. The death tolls from injuries and radiation exposure from the atomic weapons would continue ticking upwards for months, and although the true death counts may never be known it is estimated that between them the two bombs killed on the order of 220,000 people by the time their grisly work was done.

A world already shattered by thirty years of global war looked on in shock, awe, and horror as the deadly flower of atomic weapons blossomed in anger for the first and only time in the history of our species. World leaders talked about the possible end of civilization if these weapons continued to be brought to bear, and on August 14, three days before the next bombs were scheduled to be deployed, Japan finally surrendered. 

Despite the best that has been done by every one—the gallant fighting of military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people, the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest. Moreover, the enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects, or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our imperial ancestors? This is the reason why we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the joint declaration of the powers.

With that, the deadliest conflict in human history was brought to a close. 75 million people were dead, over half of them civilians who had either been caught on the crossfire or who suffered from famine, disease, and deliberate acts of genocide. 

Between the first and second world wars, the death toll was around one hundred million. One hundred million people dead in thirty years. These were conflicts unlike any the world had seen before or would see after. There has not been another global war since.

This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.

What does it take to fight a world war? Where does the willingness to march forward into the surety of death come from? What makes a leader willingly throw their nations into so terrible a battle? 

Alfred Korzybski described the world wars as a result of technology escaping from humanity, accelerating in development faster than human morality, wisdom, law, or economics could keep up, and then snapping and rebounding back into equilibrium in the form of mass violence and death. 

The rebound from the first world war set the stage for the snap that led to the second world war, and when the second world war ended, the world nearly stood poised to begin yet another massive conflict, this time between the United States and the Soviet Union. 

But technology continued to march forwards. The atomic bombs were dropped, and everything changed again. While there has not been another rebound since, Korzybski’s warning continues to ominously ring from the church steeple. In the 75 years since the end of the last global war, the tension has slowly increased, like a fault line under ever-increasing tectonic pressure. 

However, this technological tension was not the only decoupling which allowed the world wars to occur. There is another factor in the willingness to wage a global war that must not be overlooked. 

This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.

Many people and even some rationalists will argue that the development of the atomic bomb has made the world more peaceful. They argue that it has brought an end to war, that a future world war could not happen without destroying the world and thus the threat of total global war is diminished. Where have we heard this before? 

There is no one alive today who remembers the first world war, and few remain who remember the second, a number shrinking constantly and which with the new global pandemic sweeping the world may soon vanish completely. 

Gone with them has been the direct experience of living through a world war. No one from the following generations can ever truly understand what it was like to live through those days. Even the baby boomers whose parents told gallant and heroic stories of fighting Nazis were insulated from the true horrors of war. They grew up in a world where the largest armed conflicts were localized brushfires like Vietnam and Korea. Even with the threat of mutually assured destruction by atomic weapons looming overhead like a storm about to break, the people of the following generations still grew up not knowing what a true global war would be like. 

Like the European powers of the last century, we became disconnected from the direct experiences of total war. We dissociated from the realities of a conflict that would pit the full might of industrialized superpowers into one another’s destruction. We have no idea what a global war is like, it is completely outside of our scope of experience. 

Technology continues to accelerate away from humanity, while humanity has lingered in the pre-atomic paradigms of economics, politics, law, and ethics. We are still living in the past and the more time that passes the further ahead of us our technology races. 

Moreover, we have decoupled ourselves from the realities and horrors of our technology. We don’t meaningfully acknowledge the harms they could inflict. We have forgotten how bad war can be, and in doing so, we make ourselves poised and willing to begin one again. It has been a century since the last love battle and enough time has passed, enough generations have passed in peace and plenty, that we have once more grown willing to wage such a conflict. We have forgotten war, but war will not forget us. 

Unless the cardinal concerns of mankind are brought into equilibria by some art and science of human engineering, it is not a matter of if but a matter of when the next snap occurs. When it comes, the next rebound might not be survivable at all. 

Part of the Series: Extinction
Next Post: A Trillion Dead Futures

Jan Bloch’s Impossible War

Epistemic Status: Endorsed
Content Warning: Neuropsychological Infohazard, Evocation Infohazard, World War I
Recommended Prior Reading: Blueprint for Armageddon Part I
Part of the Series: Truth

“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”

In any real look into the past, you realize pretty quickly that things don’t have neat beginnings or simple origins in the vast majority of cases. Historical events are the result of billiard ball interactions among a chaotic conflux of actors and forces, themselves all built out of past impacts and collisions stretching back into the mists of antiquity.

Thus when trying to tell the origin story of the modern rationality community, it can be very tempting to just keep extrapolating backwards. How far back should we look? Do we need to rehash Plato’s Cave and Cogito Ergo Sum? Francis Bacon is credited as the grandfather of science, so maybe we should start with him? 

For the moment at least I’m writing blog posts not thousand page textbooks, and my goal here isn’t to rehash the entire history of scientific and philosophical thought (I’d like to keep this blog post under three thousand words). If you want the entire history of scientific thought, Cosmos is a great place to start and has some pretty spiffy graphics. 

But unlike history, every story and every blog post have to start somewhere, and I think the best place to start for our purposes is with polish banker and railway financier Jan Gotlib Bloch. 

Bloch was born a Polish Jew in Tsarist Russia in the 1800s, and would later convert to Calvinism to protect himself from antisemitism within the Tsarist government. Bloch worked as a banker and would go on to finance the building of rail lines in Russia, as well as penning a lengthy treatise on the management and operation of said rail lines in 1875, for which he: 

was awarded a medal of the first class at the geographical exhibition of Paris, and was heartily endorsed by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society.

But it was Bloch’s later work that would be remembered for. In 1870, The Northern German Confederation would go to war with the Second French Empire. Fueled by fears of the growing power of a rapidly unifying and industrializing Germany, France declared war and invaded in August of 1870. 

The war was only six months long. By September, Napoleon III was captured and the French Imperial Army had been decisively defeated. A new French government was declared and kept fighting, but by January of 1871 Paris was besieged and the war was brought to an end. The balance of power in Europe had fundamentally shifted, and while all the great powers reeled from the event, some saw it merely as a portent for things to come. 

The Franco-Prussian war was the first prototype of a modern war, one featuring the use of railroads, artillery, and all the new technology of creation and destruction that had come into existence since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Jan Bloch was fascinated by the war of 1870 and would go on to devote much of his personal time to studying the phenomenon that was modern military conflict. 

No one really knew how any of this stuff would interact with real combat, but everything seemed to point to the idea that the next major war would be unlike anything the world had seen before. Bloch looked at the state of the technology, where things seemed to be going, and penned his most famous six-volume work, originally in Russian and translated into numerous languages, popularized in English under the title Is War Now Impossible? This work would prove to be exactly as horrifying in its prescience as it was in its theories as to the nature of future conflicts. 

In Europe during the renaissance and age of royalty and exploration, war was almost something of a gentleman’s sport. The royals of all the major nations knew each other, everyone was someone’s cousin or uncle or grandmother, the armies would fight out in lines and day battles and then after one side defeated the other the leaders would sit down for tea and enter negotiations and this was for a long time considered a normal and acceptable way to conduct diplomacy between powers. The civilians of these nations would likely not even notice that they were at war a lot of the time.

However, with the french revolution, we see the beginnings of a change in this behavior. The french revolution is the first war to feature mass mobilization, a trend of throwing the entire nation into a conflict instead of merely a small mercenary army. When the European royal powers united against the upstart French republic, they were met not by a small, professional French army but by as much of the french people as could be mobilized. This enormously changed the way wars were fought and forced the rest of Europe to follow suit or be swamped by the sheer size of the French military. Napoleon is famously quoted as saying:

“You cannot stop me; I spend 30,000 lives a month.”

And this was a major change for the European powers who didn’t really want to arm their peasants, that’s how you end up with uprisings. But here were the french conquering Europe with a peasant army and the rest of the great powers were forced into a game of catch up. This is a rather textbook example of a multipolar trap at work. No one can coordinate to stop the escalation of the conflict, and anyone who doesn’t escalate will be defeated by those who do, thus wars become total and we witness the pivot to the start of the modern arms race. 

Moloch! Whose Fingers are ten armies!

Bloch looked at the state of technology, the state of war, and the state of European powers, and concluded that the era of quick and relatively bloodless conflicts as a method of diplomacy was over. War wasn’t a fun pastime of royalty anymore, war was now serious. Wars of the future would be total. They would not be quick and decisive affairs but brutal slugging matches fought until one nation collapsed socially and economically. He saw that the development of rifling, artillery, and machine guns had made cavalry and bayonet charges suicidal and obsolete. He claimed that a future war would be one of entrenchment, stalemates, massive firepower, and massive losses of life. 

Bloch’s book is considered to be partly responsible for the Hague Conference of 1899, which sought to impose limits on warfare and prevent the increasingly bloody looking conflict from playing out as Jan Bloch feared it would. Bloch was even a special guest of Tsar Nicholas at the conference. 

There was a belief, or maybe it was a hope, that because war had become so terrible and destructive, that the only choice nations would have would be to resort to peaceful negotiations. Bloch himself seemed to be something of a proponent to this theory, although he at least seemed to think that peace would still require conscious input and the wisdom of men. He didn’t believe that war was truly impossible, just that continuing to treat war as it had been treated in the past (sportingly) was an impossibility. It was a lesson that would, unfortunately, be mostly ignored by the leaders and military of the time. 

A decade after the publishing of Is War Now Impossible, British journalist Normal Angell published another work along similar lines, titled The Great Illusion. Angell was an early globalist, who looked at the same situation Bloch had and answered Bloch’s question with “Yeah, war is impossible now.” 

Angell’s thesis was that any gains made by war would be so dwarfed by the costs of waging a modern war that there would be no reason to ever fight one. A modern war would destroy the world’s economy, and maybe even end civilization itself, and peace was just so profitable. So war was just not going to happen. You would have to be stupid to fight Bloch’s Impossible War, no one would benefit, so no one would do it. 

Well, as history would come to show, while Angell was correct that a modern war would destroy whole nations and leave economies in ruins, he was wrong about that actually stopping the war from happening. 

Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

So in grade school, we’re taught that World War I happened because all the European powers had entered these complex networks of alliances that drew each other into the growing conflict like dominos falling and no one saw it coming or could stop it. 

Jan Bloch saw it coming, and he tried to stop it. It was a really solid attempt even, but we don’t live in the timeline where he succeeded, we live in the timeline where he didn’t. As the first decade of the twentieth century drew to a close, tensions continued to ramp up across Europe and Jan Bloch’s warning started looking more and more like a dire inevitability.

One of the readers of Jan Bloch’s book was Polish scholar Alfred Korzybski, who asked the very reasonable question: If this was all so inevitable, if everyone knew it was going to happen, then why couldn’t it be stopped? 

Part of the Series: Truth
Next Post: Time Binders

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One Hundred Billion Children’s Sky

Epistemic Status: Strongly endorsed. Pay Attention!
Recommended Prior Reading: Beyond the Reach of God, Two Visions
Part of the Series: Death

The first time I truly saw the night sky was in October of 2018. I was doing work on the CFAR venue in Bodega Bay. My coworker and I were returning for the night from the Home Depot in Santa Rosa. We were coming back over the coastal mountains and heading down for the bay when I noticed that there was a second route we could take, which would take us over the top of the hill instead of around it. I suggested we might get a good look at the sky up there because of how dark it was. 

We stopped the truck between two remote pastures, cows noisily sleeping in the fields nearby, and turned off the lights. After our eyes adjusted, the sky opened up and the whole world seemed to fall away. My perspective seemed to invert, and it felt like at any moment I might fall off the truck bed and go tumbling into the infinite. The more stars you can see, the more depth the sky seems to have. It was no longer a flat ceiling hovering above, it was infinity. 

Carl Sagan once remarked that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience, and I felt that in a way I never had before on that dark night in northern California. I had seen space on screens, I was always interested in science fiction, I intellectually knew the universe was out there. 

And yet, seeing it in this way, physically placing myself as that tiny animal in the context of all that vast stellar machinery altered my view of the world in a way that I still feel ripples forward to this day. 

Over a hundred billion humans have lived on the Earth. One hundred billion pairs of tiny fragile eyes, peering upwards into that strange and unreachable darkness. Most of those people are dead now, their names lost to history, but it was their sacrifices that brought humanity this far; which have brought the stars this close.  

On that night, I felt in my bones the promise held by the night sky. The triumphant vision of expansion and colonization, humanity spreading across the light cone to touch every corner of that sky. The wild, exciting, harshness of the universe almost daring us to claim it, and I wanted it. I wanted more than anything else for us to get that future, to reach out and travel amongst those stars. The same stars that my ancestors saw, and one hundred billion others. 

There are many ways to work towards that future, there are many roles that need to be filled if we are to seek it. The stars will not come to us easily. This is the beginning of a series about a particular role in the work of building that future. 

There’s a lot of traps on the way to a spacefaring society, and some of us are going to have to watch out for them. People who look at all of the worst possible futures, the bleak and dead branches on the tree of possibility, and work to keep humanity off of those trajectories. This is not easy work, it will not make you feel good. Most of the time it probably won’t feel rewarding. It is necessary work, but it is not for everyone or even most people. 

In this series, my goal is to help, direct, and advise one who decides to pursue such a path. The reason this post exists is because nobody fucking takes infohazard warnings seriously. We’re clever monkeys, far too clever for our own good, and when people see infohazard warnings, most of the time they’re simply too curious to let the warning stop them. Well allow me to sate your curiosity and actually explain what these posts will be about to the best I am able so you can make an informed decision about whether or not you want to be exposed to this stuff. 

This series will deal with themes such as the death & extinction of the human race and the facile lies that society relies on to keep running. This stuff will hurt to contemplate. It will not be a pleasant reading experience. I can’t say any more directly than that. You should only do it if you actually want to put yourself into the particular role that is defending humanity against extinction. Otherwise stop reading this before you hurt yourself.

Part of the Series: Death
Next Post: Doors and Corners