Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Polar Cities in 500 years? Time will tell...(re James Lovelock)

A blogpost: by Danny Bloom

You know, many people ask me why I am bothering to blog and do media interviews about this cockamamie idea of POLAR CITIES for survivors of global warming in the year 2500 or so. I understand their question. They email things like "your idea is too far in the future" and "it's not gonna happen" and "things will get worse before then" and "who cares about the world 500 years from now?"

But look, just 500 years back, in 1500 A.D., there was no New York City, no Chicago or Vancouver or Montreal or San Francisco, no Eiffel Tower, no Taj Mahal, no Seattle Space Needle, no Shanghai glass skyscrapers and no Anchorage, Alaska ... and no such things as airplanes, cars, trucks, even bicycles! ... no container ships, no Suez Canal, no Panama Canal, no modern London, no modern Paris, no modern Rome, no modern Tokyo or Seoul or Beijing or Mumbai....no Harvard University in Boston, no Stanford or Yale or Princeton......no Tufts or Brown.....

That was just 500 years ago.

So the next 500 years will come on very f-a-s-t, too! It will be 2500 before we know it! Of course, we won't be around, but our descendants will be. Maybe. Hopefully. Prayerfully.

So I want to say here: why not peer ahead, gently, 500 years into the future, toward the year 2500 A.D. and ask, regarding peak oil and global warming and overpopulation -- in 1500, there were less than 1 billion people on Earth and by 2500 there could be over 25 billion maybe !!! -- and try to visualize POLAR CITIES, perhaps, whatever they are called, and not at the poles per se, but in northern regions of the Earth, and in some southern areas, too, such as Tasmania and New Zealand and Antarctica, in addition to Alaska, Canada, Russia, Iceland, Greenland, Norway, perhaps to house survivors of peak oil and global warming's more disastrous "events" -- as a possible ADAPTATION strategy for future generations? Why just try to imagine the future and prepare for it at the same time?

500 years is not that long a time period if you look back. So why not go 500 years forward and peer into the future, just as a mind exercise, as a thought experiment, and use our imaginations?

I think we should be afraid, very afraid. And I also think we should start looking for the fire exits and the lifeboats NOW, planning for them, visualizing them, desinging them, locating them.

2500 A.D. will be here before you know it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

While the white domed marble and tile mausoleum is most familiar, Taj Mahal is an integrated symmetric complex of structures that was completed around

1648.

Anonymous said...

Named after its designer, engineer Gustave Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower is the tallest building in Paris and one of the most recognized structures in the world.[1] More than 200,000,000 have visited the tower since its construction


in


1889

====

The Space Needle is a tower in Seattle, Washington, and is a major landmark of the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and a symbol of Seattle. Located at the Seattle Center, it was built for the

1962

World's Fair, during which time nearly 20,000 people a day used the elevators, with over 2.3 million visitors in all for the World Fair.