Your answer, sir:
Frank Fenner sees no hope for humans
FRANK Fenner doesn't engage in the skirmishes of the climate wars. To him, the evidence of global warming is in. Our fate is sealed.
"We're going to become extinct," the eminent scientist says. "Whatever we do now is too late."
Fenner is an authority on extinction. The emeritus professor in microbiology at the Australian National University played a leading role in sending one species into oblivion: the variola virus that causes smallpox.
And his work on the myxoma virus suppressed wild rabbit populations on farming land in southeastern Australia in the early 1950s.
He made the comments in an interview at his home in a leafy Canberra suburb. Now 95, he rarely gives interviews. But until recently he went into work each day at the ANU's John Curtin School of Medical Research, of which he was director from 1967 to 1973.
Fenner, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and of the Royal Society, has received many awards and honours. He has published hundreds of scientific papers and written or co-written 22 books.
He retrieves some of the books from his library. One of them, on smallpox, has physical as well as intellectual gravitas: it weighs 3.5kg. Another, on myxomatosis, was reprinted by Cambridge University Press last year, 44 years after the first edition came out.
He wrote his first papers on the environment in the early 1970s, when human impact was emerging as a big problem.
He says the Earth has entered the Anthropocene. Although it is not an official epoch on the geological timescale, the Anthropocene is entering scientific terminology. It spans the time since industrialisation, when our species started to rival ice ages and comet impacts in driving the climate on a planetary scale.
Fenner says the real trouble is the population explosion and "unbridled consumption".
The number of Homo sapiens is projected to exceed 6.9 billion this year, according to the UN. With delays in firm action on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, Fenner is pessimistic.
"We'll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island," he says. "Climate change is just at the very beginning. But we're seeing remarkable changes in the weather already.
"The Aborigines showed that without science and the production of carbon dioxide and global warming, they could survive for 40,000 or 50,000 years. But the world can't. The human species is likely to go the same way as many of the species that we've seen disappear.
"Homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years," he says. "A lot of other animals will, too. It's an irreversible situation. I think it's too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off.
"Mitigation would slow things down a bit, but there are too many people here already."
It's an opinion shared by some scientists but drowned out by the row between climate change sceptics and believers.
"Frank may be right, but some of us still harbour the hope that there will come about an awareness of the situation and, as a result, the revolutionary changes necessary to achieve ecological sustainability," says Boyden, an immunologist who turned to human ecology later in his career.
"That's where Frank and I differ. We're both aware of the seriousness of the situation, but I don't accept that it's necessarily too late. While there's a glimmer of hope, it's worth working to solve the problem. We have the scientific knowledge to do it but we don't have the political will."
Hmmm... Political will to do what? Force everyone to drive in eco-friendly cars and raise taxes on electricity and water with 2000%? To hell with climate control, the world needs population control!
Political will to thin the herd.
Evolution works by taking a population to a new level of organization. Its internal divisions, including the Bell Curve of intelligence, remain intact but with a higher starting number. It's like transposing music to a higher note (transposing to a key that you're playing higher up the octave).
If humanity wants to grow, and explore the stars, there will have to be a great tragedy. Interestingly, to commit this tragedy will get us over our fear of death and insignificance. We will finally fully realize what it is to be insignificant, and abandon our externalized vision of God, and accept that we are all parts of God and He wants us to prune his Tree.
Seven billion people... and six weeks later, 150 million who are:
* High IQ
* Productive without being told to be
* Spiritually in touch with nature
* Accepting of life "as it is" without egodrama or dualism
Feeding nearly seven billion people into a giant woodchipper is a horrible thing, but to do it would get us over our fears for our own deaths and our fear of our insignificance. It would become fact. Nothing matters, there is no inherent meaning out there, and we are not held back because we are oppressed. Instead, reality is real! We are animals trying to evolve, and most of us are incompetent.
When the blood drains, we will live in a world where children are born smart and moral to live good lives, and no one worries about the empty sky or empty souls. Death is a sadness like any other, and if we become after death what we were before birth, why care? We are here for the experience and we would not turn it down... even more, there is nothing in us that is exceptional. We are each little slivers of God and if we shape those around the right design, good things happen. The only inherent value is existence itself.
I dream of this day. I see a world of people so afraid they have externalized every value they hold. They cannot say "I find morality to soothe my spirit" so they invent a God. They cannot admit that most people are incompetent, so they invent equality. They fear death so they invent meaningless ways to pretend we are immortal. The result is chaos, stupidity, decay and a ruining of all good things.
If we survive -- big If -- we will get over this with an orgy of murder that will make all past orgies of murder pale in comparison. The Holocaust will be a footnote, and the Nazis will be mocked for being such ineffectual (and anti-Semitic) fags. But this orgy of murder will not be shameful. Instead, we will talk about it like any hard decision. "Yes, I wasn't sure I could do it, but then I'd cleared out all the dead weight and it was like returning to the Garden of Eden"...
Well, more on that later.