Introduction: The Future lies Ahead – So What?

Since the present crop of world leaders, these founts of wisdom, politicians, dictators, leaders of giant businesses, bloodthirsty gangs of warriors and their fanatical religious leaders, together with plain, ordinary folk like you and me are soon to depart this world, hopefully to greener pastures, I think it’s only proper for those of us who are leaving family, and younger friends, children and grandchildren behind us, to look them in the eyes and give an honest appraisal of the legacy we are leaving them with, which could be the most significant event, or series of events, in human history.

And what, you wonder, might that be? Medicine? Great, but new plagues keep popping up, like a dog chasing its tail. The electricity grids? Large, modern cities could hardly exist without them, the same goes for water supplies, and the not-as-glamorous sewage systems. Transport – cars and trains and boats and ‘planes? The electronics revolution? – Huge. But we’re missing something here: I didn’t say it had to be for the good, consider this – we have spent the greater part of our lives living in an era that has invented one, and allowed the development of another, phenomenon, either or both of which threatens to send us back to the stone age, or maybe beyond, if we don’t improve our behaviour towards each other, individually, nationally and internationally.

Look your grand-kids in the eyes and tell them about that!! But its true, I’m not saying it’s definitely going to happen, but we’ve got the means to make it happen, and the threats and behaviour of some of our present leaders make it seem like it’s just a matter of time before it does.

1. The first and most immediate threat is nuclear war, and as I’m writing, we are in great danger of this happening. If it does, the lucky ones near the centre of a nuclear attack won’t know anything about it. Among the survivors further out, many will be so badly injured they will wish they hadn’t survived. An outcome which has gained some credibility is that a mini ice-age would occur because of all the dust directly from the nuclear explosions plus the vast quantity of smoke in the atmosphere, caused by the combustion of the fossil fuels in storage facilities being ignited by the bombs, could block the sunlight for an unknown time

About the only thing I can think of at the moment and which would not be practical for many of us, is to live as far as you can away from big cities, military bases, large industrial and mining centres, and build an underground shelter in your back yard!

2. The second threat, global warming, is a very different story, climate change always has been and always will be with us, it’s a natural phenomenon. To avoid confusion, global warming should be viewed as that part of global temperature variation which is caused by human activity, such as burning vast amounts of coal, oil. gas and so on, separated out from the natural variation, and this has been tricky, giving scope for denial. But this is changing as measurements on a global scale are becoming ever more accurate, and the deniers are in retreat. The warming is slow, but it’s getting faster: If steps are not taken to reverse the trend and slow it down it might trigger a process called thermal runaway, which I won’t go into detail about now, because the latest science about this is that it’s unlikely, but it’s something to keep a wary eye on, because, if it happened, it could be worse than nuclear destruction of our civilisation, it could mean a barren, rocky Earth, too hot for any kind of life.

If you’re old and emotionally tough enough, you can get a realistic picture of these catastrophic events from the dozen or so climate change, and more than 20 nuclear attack movies made. The only one I’ve watched all through, “The Day After” has particularly realistic scenes of both the attack happening and the widespread devastation for many miles around the day following the attack.

These are the choices that we ageing dinosaurs are dying and leaving you to deal with: a quick death for the vast majority, followed by (if you’re lucky) years of stone-age living in caves, followed by a long and miserable return to a civilisation technically advanced enough to be able to do it all again, or the other possibility, a temperature increase sufficient to cause food shortages that could lead to widespread starvation, and possibly heat death, for all life on Earth.

We thought we could live a life of ease, on and on,

Exploiting the seas, cutting the trees,

depleting the planet as much as we please,

But now there’s a growing sense of unease,

that if we don’t fry, we might well freeze.

So, at present we face a unique and difficult situation, humanity has never before had the ability to destroy, not just ourselves, but possibly most, or even all, life on Earth. Some responsibility!

Yet we seem to be in denial, so I’ve decided to spend my last few years trying to give some hope to my kids, grand-kids, great grand-kids and other peoples kids, and some encouragement, and some incentive to try and do something about it – but what? That’s why I decided to start this blog, because:

You are young,

and we old dinosaurs will soon be gone,

please try to do better than we’ve done!

Time to face up to it, I don’t expect to win any popularity contests for saying what I feel compelled to say, but here goes:

Nuclear weapons. They are a good place to start – why? Because the other big threat, climate change, happens fairly slowly, it is taking decades for the sceptics to start grudgingly admitting what the Insurance companies already know: more frequent and stronger storms, more temperature records being broken, etc. But for now at least, there’s not the threat that these events will destroy life on Earth any time soon, so we’ve got time to change our energy sources.

Not so with nuclear weapons. These deadly devices can now be delivered, for example, from their launch sites in Eastern Russia to their targets in say, California in about 30 minutes Doesn’t allow much time for negotiations, does it?

These have to go, if all the world’s armies formed two opposing groups in a full-on nuclear battle, we are used to hearing that it would be the end of mankind, but, as with climate science, the research on this nightmare keeps changing. And the present indication is that it would a terrible tragedy, but according to the latest predictions would “only” kill a few billion, say about half, of the worlds 8 billion humans!

So real nuclear disarmament must happen soon – why do I say real? There are fewer nuclear bombs in the world today than there were decades ago – true? Yes, well, a bit true.

A nuke is a nuke, with all it’s pieces in place and ready to be sent on it’s deadly mission in a matter of minutes. So what some countries do to keep their numbers down is take some of them apart, and store the pieces in hidden bunkers or similar, and, magically they only have a half or a quarter the number of (complete) bombs they had before. Politicians on both sides are no doubt quick to claim victory for this “disarmament”!!

So, to be real, disarmament has to be witnessed and verified by trustworthy inspectors, with the authority to go wherever they think these disassembled bomb parts might be lurking. And politicians have to get real and stop trying to kid themselves and us.

The most concerning part of this is that each nuclear armed country most likely has a significant proportion of its nukes ready to launch at short notice, possibly somewhat less than an hour, meaning a response by what’s left of the attacked country’s missiles could be launched about two hours from the beginning of hostilities.

The main part of the war could be over in a few hours, leaving a significant part of our “civilisation” in smoking ruins.

All the above means that it’s better to concentrate our efforts on reducing the worlds stockpiles of nukes. If we can help a little to achieve this then we could move on to try and do something about climate change.

Climate Change. This one is fraught with problems; supplying around 8 Billion people with energy, mainly by burning fossil fuels listed here in order from bad to less bad: Coal, Oil, and Gas, burning these three is the main cause of human induced climate change.

A steady reduction of population is urgently needed to give Earth’s over taxed life support systems, including the climate, a chance to recover.

Any tendency for falling numbers in an economy is met with a frantic response from economists to “correct” the situation, ignoring climate change and all other factors such as the social problems of overcrowding, increasing cost of housing, increasing scarcity of fresh water, failing fisheries, desertification, the resurgence of plagues, which we almost had under control, and increasing crime as food shortages become more severe.

There is hope. In Western style Democracies, where people are allowed to think for themselves, smaller families are becoming normal, and this should be encouraged by government incentives to hurry up the process, instead of met with panic.

In the last years of the 20^th century, scientists of various disciplines got together and made estimates of how many people Earth could support sustainably. Real long-term sustainability, not the tailored-to-please-the-government kind, and there is some consensus that the number is between two and four billion, that’s between a half and a quarter of today’s roughly eight billion.

That’s all for now, a thoroughly depressing outlook I know, however that’s not my aim, in my next few contributions (I plan to write about twice a month) I’ll be bringing you some suggestions about how we can help save the World from such a dismal future.

What have we got to lose? – everything, what have we got to gain – maybe a little easing of the widespread sense of hopelessness, or maybe a lot.

I’ve got an idea that might work, at least it’s something we can try, maybe we can even make it fun to see how far we can take it.

Interested? – you’ll have to wait for a week or two ’till I’m ready to launch it. Meantime I’m interested if you’ve got any ideas, comments, or corrections. Send them to me, please. I’d be overjoyed if you could prove I’m being too pessimistic.

So, here’s the thought I had, hope you find it interesting, and remember, it’s got a serious purpose, if this brings the seriousness of the situation we’re in to just a few hundred people, I would consider it worth the time I have put into it so far, but I hope some of you will help me and together we should be able to do a bit better than that.

Suppose I send the link to this blog to, say, two people I know, and who I think would not only be interested to read it but could be persuaded by what I have written here to send the link on to two (more if they want to) like-minded friends…..and so on.

As a matter of interest, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the mathematics involved, suppose I send links to this blog to two people I know, call this level 1, (2 links) and who each pass the link on to two of their friends who do likewise, level 2, (4 links) If this procedure went one step further, (level 3), there would be 8 links, just one more (level 4) and there are 16 links ..etc… do this 32 times then add ’em all up and you’ll find the grand total of links is 3,298,427,256 – which is a sizeable chunk of the world’s population. That’s a bit much to handle, so let’s just deal with english language speakers first!

So is it really true?

Let’s see what we can do

All one needs is send to two!

A successful campaign should result in an increasing number of people who don’t like the idea of our civilisation being destroyed by nuclear warfare, reading this, and using whatever influence they can towards, say a cooperative, world-wide, staged reduction of nukes. Staged reductions like this has been tried before, and can work, but whenever international tensions rise, as they have now, all deals are off, and, and it’s back to the arms race, So added incentives, such as trade sanctions and the like, could be used against countries which resist participation in arms reduction.

We should keep in mind a factor that is going to become ever more important and should work in our favour: As world resources are under increasing strain trying to keep up with demand, and the cost of nuclear weapons is a significant part of national economies, these economies are going to come under increasing pressure, strengthening the case for removing the huge cost of nukes, and their delivery systems, from budgets, to the great benefit of us all.

Here, in case this sounds a bit complicated and grandiose, I will summarise how I hope it will work, it’s really fairly simple:

If you receive this, and like the idea of helping, however much or little, to avert a tragedy for all mankind, send the link to this blog to a minimum of two, more if you like, of your friends (I can’t dictate who you send it to, but would rather not risk annoying recipients of unwanted messages. If we proceed this way, it should always get a welcome reception).

That’s it! – simple, doesn’t cost you anything (depending on the way you send it), and choosing a couple of friends to send it to should only take a few minutes. After that, you can “retire” if you like, knowing that you’ve done your bit!!

This will obviously work best in a properly functioning democracy, where politicians love votes, and if they see a sizeable, and hopefully growing, percentage of their electorate coming to realise what the stakes are, and how real the threat to them and their families is, this will surely result in better government, with policies more aligned with the reality we face.

Don’t even try to have a direct influence on other people’s governments, this is best done indirectly, such as visitors, students or workers from that country who you met while they were studying in your country, but caution them to be careful, we don’t want anyone to get into trouble with their government by spreading radical ideas about nuclear disarmament or making the world a better place for us all!

Speaking of governments, if you’re trying to decide whether it is OK to send this to a resident of a particular country, and you don’t want to risk getting them into trouble, a good clue is the country’s title, If it starts “The People’s Democratic Republic of….” it’s more than likely to have a dictator firmly strapped into the drivers seat, and my advice is forget it, there are other ways to get the message out than to put citizens of such country at risk.

Use a golden tongue, not a loaded gun,

With persuation, not by force,

Will the peace be won.

Well, that’s it, idea No.1 to save the world – I hope at least some of you will like it and give it a try, I’m going to click the mouse now – hope it will be the mouse that roared! – If not, at least trying to save us is a worthwhile hobby, in the opinion of A Silly old Blogger..

Just for a break from the doom and gloom, here’s a recent pic of me re-enacting my mid-life crisis which happened a few decades after my youthful “never trust anyone over 30” stage. This was my grandson’s entry in a photographic competition. I don’t judge people by age these days!

After the first nuclear tests and the tragedies of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagaski, the major countries wasted no time in developing ever bigger nuclear bombs, and means of delivery such as rockets, large, long-range aircraft, and submarines, including nuclear powered ones large enough to carry and launch nuclear armed rockets. For some years tension between the USA and Russia was fuelled by Russian support of North Viet Nam vs USA support of South Viet Nam. This tension between the two military giants increased and culminated in the Cuban Missile crisis in October 1962 when Russia was found to have started building missile launching bases in Cuba, capable of striking most USA cities. For 13 days the world was poised on the brink of an unimaginable catastrophe until an agreement between US President John F Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was reached for the removal of the missiles and launching facilities from Cuba. The World remains indebted to these two wise leaders and it is essential that we should always try to elect leaders of this stature, rather than whoever makes undeliverable promises of wage rises, better retirement packages, and so on. Keep it in mind when voting time comes around.

As we enter the New Year, I am fondly remembering the famous “Flower Power” photograph , taken by Bernie Boston during the March on the Pentagon October 21, 1967, and much later the Paul McCartney concert attended by Vladimir Putin, in Red Square, where the Beatles music was once banned, and Paul played “Back in The USSR” My wish for the New Year is that there could be more iconic events such as these and less sabre-rattling and agression. Peace and happiness to all, The Silly Old Blogger.