I don’t really disagree with you to any extent at all, however, for the purposes of furthering my own thoughts, and perhaps yours and others, may we engage in some socratic discussion? By that I will make clear I mean I will argue with you from a contrarian point of view simply to evoke your constructive response and to exercise my own ability to question that which I generally accept.

I would submit that we are prisoners of our technology and yet, we implement it in the most haphazard and irresponsible of ways. Education is a kind of ponzi scheme, it produces only a small fraction of people with any depth of knowledge or ability out of the vast pool that is available. This produces a lack of technologists, scientists and people of other disciplines with something positive to contribute. Hence we end up with technologists that may not be particularly skillful, diligent, or even attentive to their tasks.

There seems to be an argument in some circles that the solution to the inadequate application of technology is to use less technology. Without implying that you have suggested such a thing, I have to wonder how exactly that is supposed to work? I have to correct myself, instead of ‘use less technolgy’ I should say ‘rely less on technology’. I am not quite clear what the difference there is but I am striving to be precise.

You are quite right that it is a somewhat remarkable feat to have survived without a nuclear holocaust for low these 55 years. But the threat is not gone. The posture of confrontation between the US and Russia has changed some, but there are still more than ten thousand nuclear weapons ready to be used. I think they could destroy civilization. They might even be able to destroy Homo sapiens, but life will adapt. So the only issue respecting this technology is self preservation, and also perhaps in other contexts as well.

Think for a moment how much effort was devoted to the development and maintenance and creation of delivery systems for nuclear weapons. The figure has to be trillions of dollars. I have to ask the question, what would the world be like if instead of squandering all that effort on weapons, we had devoted it instead to harnessing the fundamental physics of energy exchange and developing safe, and efficient nuclear energy to power the whole world? We would leave the oil in the ground for the most part, we might extract a small amount for feed stocks to be replicated for materials production. We would have no need to sully the landscapes with wind farms, or solar panel fields instead of native plants. We would not need to dam our rivers. Ultimately, given the freedom to experiment and explore we might even be able to shed the earthly bonds of nuclear energy and tap it directly from that huge fusion furnace that blazes away 93 million miles from us. Is it not even slightly ironic that the whole of earth’s ecosphere depends upon photosynthesis and that the source of energy is the nearby star we orbit?

On the supernatural insights matter I was just being cautious, I always prefer not to uselessly offend. I have the suspicion that the Caro-Kann is a defense in chess but that is just a guess.

You may be right that the global population has become more rational in your lifetime, there is some evidence for this in terms of the demographics of China and India for example, but there are also counter examples where regression rather than improvement is the rule. Unfortunately, for all appearances, the US is in regression. Realistically, a vapid schill like Palin could not exist for a day in a rational world. So I have considerable trepidation for your children. I earnestly hope I am wrong, but I strongly fear what we have seen so far is as nothing to what will be visited upon all indiscriminately, when the consequences of willful ignorance make themselves felt.

The future is upon us, tomorrow is today, too much is happening to manage it all.

There will be more and worse failures. Ironically, there are already a multitude of unsung failures haunting the periphery of our individual narrow fields of view.

I’ll say one last thing, I know it is unsettling and even a little manipulative to take a very negative point of view, to argue the worst case so to speak. But it is a useful exercise. If you do not anticipate possible problems, you are unprepared to deal with them when they arise. Indeed, nothing is certain. But some things become in the ordinary course of events, inevitable.

I do derive some hope from the fact that we, as a species, survived the first fifty years of the Atomic Age. Clearly, we are not out of the woods yet, but still, whew. Maybe we aren’t completely insane. Just possibly, we can ratchet down the aggregate size of the world’s nuclear arsenals to a level where a maximal nuclear war would just destroy civilization, as opposed to all mammalian life.

Your reply allows me to infer what you mean by the “supernatural insights defense”, and I’m happy to say that I don’t play that defense. The Caro-Kann is about as adventurous as I get. While I generally feel that religious faith is a good thing when it helps people to live happier lives, it can become a problem for the rest of us if some group decides that their particular faith is prescriptive and indisputable. As citizens, all we can do is to try to keep such individuals out of high political office.

I’d say that in my lifetime, the influence of rationality has gotten globally stronger, although there are certainly local examples where irrationality is as bad as it ever was. I’m cautiously optimistic that my kids will be able to have decent lives.

All we can do is keep going, do our best to do right, and, as you say, remember that there is no certainty.

” We are a plague on this miraculous planet.”

Yes, yes we are and the is the ultimate crux of the problem. There is much irony here as well. Of those organisms that exist on this green and blue earth, we are the most sentient, the most well provided to foresee our own futures and the futures therefore to some extent of everything else, and yet we defy all logic by ignoring the obvious. There are simply too many of us.

I would offer one small reassurance though it is not consoling form the view point of humanity. Life on earth is astoundingly resilient and adaptive. We will not destroy it. We may well destroy any number of superbly adapted and elegant organisms, we may well render the entire northern hemisphere a radioactive wasteland but life will not succumb. We will succumb.

It’s a pity to think that the flowering of a rudimentary intelligence on a small satellite of an ordinary sun should have such a short existence. But perhaps that is the course of most civilizations. Sparks that burn brightly for a few millenia in the vast sea of tens of thousands of millenia.

If we don’t figure out a way to stop breeding an increase of population, we are doomed.

I wrote a reply to you last night but my uplink was lost before I finished it and so I sent it into the ether.

We have actually been living fairly successfully with the threat of any number of dire technologies for a few decades. The worst of all of course are the huge arsenals of nuclear weapons that still exist here and in Russia.

After that we have a handful of other technologies designed exclusively to kill people, chemical weapons, biological weapons. Both science and technology are responsible for the existence of these things.

I think I understand your ambivalence, because after all, no act or discovery or insight is without consequences and it is impossible to foresee every consequence.

The simple fact of the matter is that good technologies with a sound scientific basis will work within some limited context to confront massively complex problems. Because we must push the limits of both science and technology to keep pace with the demands of population, we will always be on the tightrope of a single path to success and myriad means of failure.

It is a grim prospect and a daunting task, made worse by orders of magnitude when howling ideologs claim the great almighty sky daddy whispered the answer into their ears. Those few of us who contend with reality every day know that there is no such thing as certainty.

I choose to see the advancing sheen of oil as a line of millions of laptops, cell phones, cheap plastic toys, plastic totes, discarded tarps, cell phone case covers gone out of vogue and a thousand other petty, unnecessary items consumed by the industrialized world today.

Practically every process used to pump, process and utilize the oil we consume in the millions of barrels daily creates a toxic by product. We have even begun to theorize that polyethylene leaches out artificial hormones that may be interfering with basic bodily development. Revenge of the ancient trees who lived before feeling the mighty ax of mankind.

I am a cry baby. I admit it. Why would God chose to rapture us to heaven to enjoy a new planet created in a new millennium when we cannot exercise proper custodianship of what we have right in front of our noses? The conservatives told us that government didn’t need to govern the corporations. They would do it themselves. Now neither the Coast Guard nor the EPA has the resources to tackle this mess, and we now know (as if we didn’t already suspect) that BP greatly over estimated its ability to handle a leak of this size.

“In an exploration plan and environmental impact analysis filed with the federal government in February 2009, BP said it had the capability to handle a “worst-case scenario” at the site, which the document described as a leak of 162,000 barrels per day from an uncontrolled blowout — 6.8 million gallons each day.” Sunday, May 2, 2010 1:41 PM EDTThe Associated PressBy ALLEN G. BREED and SETH BORENSTEIN

What do the Shell oil folk have to say to that bit of fact from the mouths of BP themselves? I am certain Shell will be more than willing to tell us how they have managed to anticipate and plan for a spill under conditions never before encountered to date by oil producers. They don’t even plan to start small and work there way up, but plan to hit it full bore.

I want to see every last planner on the Chuckchi project at Shell oil on a boat in the Gulf. I want to see them laying out boom by the mile. I want to see them man a skimmer as it desperately tries to keep up with the slag collecting on the booms in the wind driven waters. I want to see them pulling apart the guts of a skimmer platform after it gets clogged up for the umpteenth time. I want to see them pass thousands of bags of oil hand over hand across a thousand yards of beach as they try and beat the tide. I want them to smell the stench of rotten vegetation that has been cooking under a layer of sludge. I want them to hear the voice of the EPA as they yell at you for cutting down too much saw grass because cutting it down removes not only the oil but the natural buffer that protects the nearby nesting grounds from being washed away in the next winter storm cycle. I want them to collapse from exhaustion at the end of a twelve hour day spent pretending that what you have done actually helped, when you know damned well that the only real way to help is by preventing the damn spill from happening.

Again thanks for the appreciation, it is not easy to be reasonable. I too have my points of view that I could pronounce with inflammatory rehtoric, but it would not sway anyone not already predisposed to agree. The ultimate objective of all argument should be to persuade. That seems to be an art that has been lost or forgotten. To me it is just another irony that people today are so uninformed that they cannot distinguish between persuasion and coercion.

In my own profession I have become something of a pariah because I argue for responsible development of necessary projects. It is both ironic and disturbing.

All I can say to you is fight on, and learn as you go what you are fighting for. It is not easy, it is not simple, but it is important.

I hesitate to bring it up because I don’t know how credible the claim is and haven’t the time or ability to do due diligence, but I have seen allegations to the effect that at least one back room deal with the energy suppliers made by Cheney in 2001 was to prevent regulators from requiring blowout preventers on all off shore wells.

It is sad, it is grimly cruel that so much suffering and deprivation can result from the failure of a single technological detail. But it is the nature of our current world.

I am not prone to make predictions, but in this case I will. I predict that BP will resist any full responibility for this catastrophe for long enough to outlive the current administration. And in the end, the horrendous impacts of this incident will weigh only upon the extreme periphery, the thousands of fishermen put out of work, the millions of organisms caught by surprise in a tar pit of transitory nature, the lingering smell of death, long after the crisis is forgotten borne upon a sea breeze.