Longtermism - it's a gas

 

It is weird, to me, that philosophers and pundits think of “human extinction” as some kind of rapture. Would it be bad, would it be good?  There's a typical example in Aeon which is so high minded it leaves the mind completely.,

The go-to people regarding human extinction are not philosophers. The go-to people are engineers especially in petrochemicals. I want to say: read a book! Specifically, Alan  Weisman’s The World Without Us. Weisman, unlike such sage philosophers as William (best friend of Elon Musk) Macaskill and Derek Parfitt, actually noticed a few things. For instance, “one of the most monumental constructs that human beings have imposed on the planet’s surface. The industrial megaplex that begins on the east side of Houstaon and continues uninterrupted to the Gulf of Mexico, 50 miles away, is the largest concentration of petroleum refineries, petrochemical companies, and storage structures on Earth.”

This was written in 2007. There are probably larger concentrations that have been built since then. Anyhooo … what happens if there are no humans? Things go back to groovy nature? Fat chance. “Huge pockets of gas in the Gulf of Mexico or Kuwait would maybe burn forever. A petrochemical plant wouldn’t go that long, because there’s no much to burn. But imagine a runaway reactin with burning pllants throwing up clouds of stuff like hydrogen cyanide. There would be massive poisoning of the air in the Texas-Louisiana chemical alley. Follow the trade winds and see what happens.”

 

The particulates in the atmosphere could “create a mini chemical nuclear winter “They ould also release chlorinated ocmpounds like dioxins and furans from purning plastic. Andyou’d get lead, chromium and mercury attached to the soot. Europe and North America, with the biggest concentrations of refineries and chemical plants, would be the most contaminated. But the clouds would disperse through the world. The next generation of plants and animals, the ones that didn’t die, might need to mutate in ways that could impact evolution.”

All the human extinction movies that treat the industrial structure in which we all live – the gaspipes, the electrical plant, the nuclear plant, etc. – as a mere stage set for zombies and teenagers seem to have been adopted by “serious” philosophers pulling numbers for the possibility of human extinction out of their serious assholes and pondering them. It is as though philosophy has taken the spot that used to be inhabited by “experts” on “security” in the OOs, with their infallible advice about intervening in the Middle East and the life – although of course said experts never learned a word of Arabic. Similarly, the longtermist and existential risk crowd seem to think they move around smoothly in the natural world. They should ponder the more than five hundred salt domes underneath the Gulf of Mexico where we are storing our chemical shit.

This is, incidentally, one of the great effects of neoliberal culture – the distancing and detachment  from production. The overthrow of an ideology that spotlighted labor – Marxism – has drastically removed the spotlight – but not the labor.  The only production allowed in our entertainment is software tech. In reality, though, production has just been repressed in our collective unconscious. Nobody gets dirty daily on any tv sitcom anymore. But in reality, it still happens, and billions depend on those dirty handed wretches.  

As for the clean-hand crowd, palling around with oligarchs – I don’t have a word hard enough, succinct enough in my vocabulary of contempt to throw at them. Although I’ve been through trends in my life, and I know longtermism is short term.