I've seen as many Peak Oil scenarios as anyone, and people tell me that I'm crazy for not being paranoid.
I'm not, however. Why? Because I know people aren't going to panic. They're going to make a lot of noise, and they're going to be like boiled frogs, but they won't be running through the streets with their hair on fire. The reason I know this is because... well because we're not panicked now. I have faith in American's ability to reckon with wild economic swings.
I worked in a bank in 1980. I can remember a time when our country had 14% inflation, when the price of gold was over $700. I can remember when the President was shot. I've lived through two stock market crashes. I can remember when a four bedroom luxury home with a swimming pool cost $75,000 in Los Angeles. I can remember when no cars had shoulder belts or dashboards made of anything but steel. I can remember when our country's currency was based on the gold standard, and we took that away.
Depending upon what people believe, we can pull an economy out of our imaginations, and we will never run out of imagination.
The other day, I head a story on the radio about the wildlife that has come back to Chernobyl. It has mutated, but the mutations were not in the reproductive organs of the animals. It made me think of exactly how humans might mutate after a nuclear holocaust. It's something we haven't thought about much, not like we did in the 50s when we fretted about that being our fate. It's hard to imagine that children would not be raised on cartoons about superheroes, all of them originated from some ideas about nuclear mutations on humans. No Godzilla for my kids. So what if we nuked ourselves into a mutated race of humanoids? How would we come out the other end? Like zombies? Or maybe we'd end up with larger brains, or perhaps mottled skin. That's what I thought. It would not be skin color but skin color patterns that set us apart - the Clears vs the Leopards. Maybe some of us would get extremely hairy, or perhaps new eye colors would be the result of our mutations.
We would survive. Not just cockroaches.
According to people who sound like they know:
Multiple metabolic pathways govern the accurate duplication and distribution of DNA to progeny cells; other pathways maintain the integrity of the information encoded by DNA and regulate the expression of genes during growth and development. For each of these functions, there is a normal baseline frequency at which errors occur, leading to spontaneous mutations and other genomic anomalies.
That sounds to me like there are lots of parallel processes going on that make sure mutations don't happen so dramatically. We get cancer all the time - those are mutations, but maybe we are mutating other things all the time as well. Our ears are getting slightly twistier, our fingernail growth is slowing down, our ability to see colors at night is changing. Who knows what all?
Do people actually look the same as they did 400 years ago? Wouldn't we notice? Couldn't we tell? Is there no-one who looks anything like George Washington today? If you've watched television like I have, you'd think that all the hairy chested men in America disappeared after the cancellation of Magnum PI.
And if all that's not quite dramatic enough, how is it that the people who live in Tierra Del Fuego have survived all of this time? Does oil shoick and inflation and mutation not affect them? I think that our concerns about global warming and peak oil and nuclear winter are all a bit overhyped when compared to the real facts about human adaptability. The end of our lifestyle as we know it, is not equivalent to the end of humanity. It just means we'll have to upend our current values; that the rules of our current economies will change.
I'm learning to be immune from such dire warnings, especially coming from people who don't even understand their own teenaged children's music.
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