From: fly@acsu.buffalo.edu (Paul D. Fly)
Newsgroups: alt.society.futures
Subject: Re: hmm....
Date: 19 Nov 92 16:58:19 GMT
Organization: UB

In article <1efb2tINNcg5@zeppo.uccs.edu> jmward@redcloud (Joel M. Ward) writes:
>	Besides, i think in any given part of history, there would be a 
>tendency to think that "this is the most turbulent part of history ever!"

Yeah, I have given this thought, but I think the case for it Being
Different this time is pretty strong.  Actually, "turbulence" isn't in the
picture (yet), as it seems to me.  The reason it seems different to me this
time is that the "trends" we can see and are so familiar with all seem to
be exponentail in nature.  You could say they were equally exponentail in
the 1500s (say the trend of population increase), but the nature of an
exponential curve is that it IS dependent on where on it you are.  Its easy
to twist statistics to a given viewpoint, but exponential increase is
exponential increase.  And there are many trends, such as pollution, that,
if the curve is conintued in along the path it has been taking, more or
less, for the last 500 years, it cannot help but result in a major crisis
of some kind.  

I'm not saying the End of the World is coming, just that some kind of major
change is.  I see three basic (and exhuastive and mutually exclusive (I
*think*!)).
	a. The End of the World as We Know It:  Which includes many
possibilities, ie, extinction of our species, OR, trancsendance into
another reality, OR some other equally fantastic thing.
	b. Crisis and Collaspe:  The system of our global society is
stressed beyond various thresholds all simultaneously and the system
breaks.  In fact, some Gaiaists (is that a word?) point out that the system
of the Earth itself may pass critical thresholds of tolerance and collaspe.
The result of this might not be the extinction of our species, although it
would certainly entail the extinction of most species (and one could say
THAT process that already begun).  And a complete change in the system of
global soceities.
	c. Transformation of Societal Progress: (for lack of a better
term...).  This would be the case where things do not collaspe, and the
destructive trends are leveled off or stopped.  I tend to see it as a graph
of "progress" (as we commonly think of the term) as exponentially
increasing and then exponentially leveling off (not sure what the
mathematical term for this type of curve is).  This is the scenario in
which many of the trends of the last 500 years (population increase,
pollution increase, natural resource use, rate of species extinction, etc
etc etc) are discontinued or radically leveled off.  They may be leveled
off by other trends that "replace" them (ie, fusion power decreasing
pollution?  Although there certainly it heat pollution, just an
example...), but it still constitutes a Major Change in the trends of the
last 500 years in which we are all comfortably predictive of continued
"progress".  

Imagine alone what would be required to slow the exponentially growing
demand for energy!

>Think about how stable society is now (assuming
>that you consider that way it is now stable).  It was also quite stable in
>The Roman Empire.  Then Rome fell.  Think about how *those* people felt??

I think this kind of misses the point.  This is stability vs. chaos that
you are talking about, which is very interesting.  Someone (who's name I
only remember at this exact moment as Green Griffin!) and I are talking
about that in regard to future events, that a chaotic future means one in
which predictions become more difficult.  There is a nice analogy between
the increasing "bifurcation" of Events and Trends today and that classic
bifurcation graph of chaos, where when the rate of bifurcation surpasses a
crtical threshold, there is chaos, out of which a new system of stability
may later arise.  Is it possible to have a chaotic future without a
"collapse"?  That would be interesting.

But I don't think people in Rome felt there was an impending crisis because
of what they were doing.  Rome was stable, but it wasn't especially
"progressing" at a rate many people could take notice of.  Most people
lived the same way for their whole lives.  There were not influxes of
inventions and the like that changed the way people *lived*.  You were a
farmer, you're father was, you're children would be.  The fall of Rome was
a long long process, drawn out over many lifetimes.  It was not a
catastrophic event (although the sack of Rome itself was somewhat the "last
straw", but by that point most of the Western Empire was under German
control anyway, the Emperor had become nothing but a symbol).  Over the
course of history civilizations and groups of people may have felt the End
was near, or a Big Change was near, but it was almost always for religious
reasons.  

Personally, I hope and would like to see a breaking of societal thresholds
and a leap into "chaos", yet without a loss of stability.  Is it possible?
Sounds fascinating!  But I do tend more toward the "we'll work it out,
there will be major changes in the way `things are done', but there will
not be a collapse" viewpoint.  Whatever happens, my eyes are open and ready
for the unexpected (yeah right, and WHAM it comes from left field  :)

Paul

-- 
Paul Fly                      | "Thinking is more interesting than knowing,
fly@acsu.buffalo.edu          |  but less interesting than looking."
v092pxca@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu |    --Goethe
Newsgroups: alt.society.futures,alt.individualism,alt.rush-limbaugh,alt.politics.libertarian,bit.listserv.xtropy-l,talk.politics.guns
From: whitaker@eternity.demon.co.uk (Russell Earl Whitaker)