Category Archives: science

About spirituality and sausages

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There’s one great sentence in Harry Potter books, saying something along the lines of “never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain”. This sentence came to my mind when I was thinking about why all the spiritual schools and disciplines, abundant in late 19th and throughout the 20th century, seem to have failed.

If you don’t see the connection, I’ll cite another example, of some tech pundit whose article I read on the web somewhere, who said that the reason why Steve Jobs opposed the idea of making a bigger iPhone was that he misunderstood the reason why iPhone was popular in the first place: it was the phone with the biggest screen. Essentially, he got it right, but didn’t understand what exactly made it right. Then he got it right again with the iPad, and still didn’t understand what it means: that people love well made touch devices with big screens. When Apple decided to act independently after his death and made bigger iPhones, they sold the biggest quantities ever. So basically, you can have a very smart and innovative person who got things right twice in the same device group, and still managed not to see what was it exactly that made those devices great. He also didn’t see what made the first GUI devices he made such failures, because he was in love with the concept, and he was right, the GUI concept was great and all our current computers use it. The problem is, this concept doesn’t work well on a machine with 128 K RAM and a 400K floppy drive. It starts working well on a machine with a 100 MB hard drive, 4 MB RAM and a 80386 processor, which is Windows 3.11 generation of hardware. Before that, the GUI machines were technological demonstrators at best, too weak to be actually useful. The problem with Steve Jobs was that he stubbornly insisted on his vision because he saw that those machines were the future, and tried to force the future into existence by force, before its time. Bill Gates, on the other hand, was much smarter. He, too, knew that the GUI machines were the future, but he also knew that the contemporary hardware was too weak to make the system work properly, and he knew that because his team wrote all the software for the first Macintosh, and he knew what tricks they had to pull off in order to create the pretense of a functional machine. It’s not that he had a choice between MS-DOS command-line interface and a Mac-like GUI and he chose MS-DOS; he chose the Mac-like GUI. It’s just that he was smart enough to know that the contemporary hardware can’t pull this off, and he chose to implement the thing that ran efficiently at the moment. Basically, the difference between Steve Jobs and him was that was in touch with the reality of the situation, while Jobs was so blinded by his vision that he decided to yell the facts into submission, and, as a result, was fired from his own company because he simply refused to see reason.

The analogy with spiritual teachers and teachings is clear. When something works for them and they attain results, they seldom understand why it worked. They usually try to reproduce the process they themselves went through, with students, and it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. As with Steve Jobs, they sometimes fail spectacularly, and sometimes they succeed spectacularly, and in both cases it’s quite possible that they don’t understand the process enough to be able to tell why. Their charisma can lead others into great things: great failure, or great success.

I don’t exempt myself from that. Sometimes it took me a while to stumble around until I figured out why something works, and why something else doesn’t. The problem is, you can’t always wait to have all the answers in order to start doing things. Sometimes you need to sail across the Atlantic with a shitty sail boat, little or no navigation, and stumbling into America by accident, thinking it’s India. Sometimes you domesticate a wolf and it turns out to be a great idea when he kills someone who tries to kill you while you sleep. Sometimes your wolf kills someone’s child and domesticating it appears to have been a terrible idea. However, when you move in uncharted territory every mistake you make is better than staying safe and doing nothing, because it improves the situation for those who will eventually follow in your footsteps. We don’t remember Columbus as the idiot who hit America while trying to reach India. We remember him as the great explorer who discovered America.

It would be all to easy to criticize the mistakes and failures of all kinds of spiritual researchers, explorers and teachers, but realistically, physics didn’t exactly start with getting things right, either. It started with all sorts of bullshit and getting things completely wrong, but improving with each iteration, and it’s now all to easy to forget impetus and phlogiston and alchemy and Ptolemaic geocentrism and all kinds of failures.

In the 1990s, I was on a mailing list that contained a mishmash of all kinds of spiritual practitioners, loosely described as experiencing Kundalini phenomena. What was striking in this group was that you had people with completely different and opposing ideas about what’s going on, what is good and what is bad, and they looked quite similar, going through very similar experiences and experiencing similar forms of mental and emotional instability. Essentially, you had pagans, shamans, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, atheists and Christians experiencing weird shit, which for the most part went against their beliefs about what’s supposed to be going on, with very loose consensus about the proper way to approach it, and with 90% of the participants being quite mad at least part time. The weirdest part is that sometimes people with craziest ideas and weirdest spiritual practice had great spiritual power, and some people with intellectually coherent and sensible world view were spiritually sterile or actually quite fucked up. Things didn’t fit neatly into an orderly pattern. I certainly don’t fit into an orderly pattern about what spiritual people are supposed to look like, or how they are supposed to do things. I am too much of a scientist to be liked by spiritual people, too much of a spiritual person to be liked by the scientists, I don’t seem to conform to any typical pattern, and I don’t even have the ordinary frame of reference for evaluating success and failure of spiritual efforts. I don’t even have the ordinary understanding of truth and reality; I basically couldn’t care less if you believed in talking unicorns that fart rainbows, as long as your inner spiritual concepts associated with that are something I see as useful and uplifting. I also don’t care if you have all the right answers and can name all the right Gods and gurus, if you’re an asshole.

When I say that the problem is that people seldom understand what works and what’s shit, I mean it quite literally. It isn’t about knowing the right God and surrendering to the right guru and practicing the right technique. Sometimes, it’s about having the right attitude, even if it looks all fucked up. Being a fanboy of a comic book superhero can sometimes be spiritually more useful than all the Jesus bullshit that most Christians do. It’s about the actual quality of the spiritual vector, not about what you think it is. What matters is the direction and magnitude. What imagery you use in your head is secondary; you can pray to Batman, for all the fuck I give about it. Sure, it makes sense to clear your head and organize things in a sensible manner, and I guess I’m the prime example of success in that area, but the thing is, people who like the end-result of my thinking would probably lose their shit if they knew how I got there. It’s like sausages: you wouldn’t like eating them if you knew how they are made. One of the main reasons why I managed to figure out so much about how things work is because I experimented with shit so weird you wouldn’t believe. One of the techniques that I did was to go through the entire emotional spectrum, shade by shade, and explore the inner workings of my energy system with each shade. And I mean it quite literally when I say entire emotional spectrum. Die as a slave under a whip. Kill a slave for fun. Be impaled by the Turks. Disembowel prisoners. Be disemboweled and cut to pieces. Torture people. Be tortured. Rape, be raped. Be a pregnant slave girl who is routinely raped by some warlord’s gang and who falls in love with her captors. Be the warlord who beats his henchmen into submission. Be the submissive henchman of a warlord. Be a clerk doing a boring job in his boring life because he always made all the safe choices. Have a wonderful life that’s a fulfilment of all fantasies. Have an average life full of bad things with occasional good things. Have a terrible life that’s agony and failure. Be immensely wealthy. Die in squalor. Deepest depression, slight depression, melancholy, indifference, slight pleasure, profound joy, bliss when touched by spiritual beauty. Be that spiritual beauty that invokes blissful love in others. Explode as the whirlpool of light that grants liberation and knowledge. Be God.

It’s not a linear thing, it’s not about some predictable, stuck-up pattern. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re doing and you succeed, because your heart was in the right place. Sometimes you do all the right things and you end up in flames, because your heart was in a very wrong place. Sometimes Satan seems to be all about love and forgiveness and sometimes God seems to be distant and insensitive, but the surest way to know you fucked something up is when you’re not regularly surprised by the shit that keeps popping up.

Laughter and ridicule

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There is a common prejudice that laughter and ridicule are a positive thing, in that laughter makes one feel better and helps one overcome situations that would otherwise overwhelm him, and ridicule exposes that which is worthy of contempt and thus serves a positive purpose.

I disagree. I think both laughter and ridicule are neutral, in that they can both be good or evil, depending on the circumstances.

Laughter might help people to overcome difficult situations, but personally, I can’t remember ever having such experiences. What did help me overcome difficult situations was either faith, or trust, or someone’s helping hand. I actually find it more helpful to endure difficult situations by admitting their gravity, crying and asking Gods to help me. Laughing in the face of a difficult situation looks more like denial and madness, an attempt to portray a lion as a sheep in order not to fear him, but a lion remains impervious to such mental fuckery and will eat you regardless. I find it more useful to cry for help and beg for a gun, than to pretend that I’m not facing a real lion. Laughing might help you not feel afraid, but it will not help you survive. It’s the opposite of helpful. The Jews in Hitler’s Germany had two options: optimism or pessimism. Those who chose optimism imagined Hitler as a silly character who can’t really hurt them, and those who chose pessimism fled Germany and Europe in general, and made a new life for themselves in America. We know how that turned out for each group. As I said, optimism and laughter can indeed make you feel better and safer, but it doesn’t actually help you solve any problems. It’s a form of putting your head into sand and hiding from reality, and is not all that far from madness, at least the way I see it. What does help you is to acknowledge the gravity of your situation and seriousness of your problem early on, to invest all your powers into solving the problem and asking for all kinds of help in order to increase your chances of overcoming the problem. If you still fail, at least you didn’t die in denial.

Ridicule is similar, but different in that it isn’t directed at oneself, but others. The role of ridicule is to present the object of ridicule as small, unworthy and contemptible in the eyes of the audience; essentially, it’s a form of social manipulation. When used in order to put emotional accent on the conclusion of an argument, essentially by applying tar and feathers to someone whose arguments were soundly defeated, it can be legitimately used in the context of a debate, but when it is used as a substitute for arguments, in order to manipulate emotional responses of the audience when arguments themselves fail to convince, it is a grave logical fallacy and a form of demagogy.

Let’s see some examples of proper and improper use of ridicule.

Let’s say someone is stating that the Earth is flat. Proper use of ridicule is to state that this person obviously didn’t travel much, because if he did, he would notice how the constellations in the southern hemisphere differ from those in the northern hemisphere, which, combined with the evidence of daily rotation of the sky proves we are on a sphere. This form of ridicule uses a strong argument to disprove a fallacious thesis, and then uses the obviousness of the argument as evidence that the person making the fallacious statement is stupid. Essentially, ridicule is corollary to the conclusion, and not an argument in itself, which is why it cannot be considered a form of ad hominem fallacy. Ad hominem would be “this person is an idiot, which is why his argument is false”. A corollary of the proper conclusion is “the argument against the thesis is x, and since x is rather obvious and straightforward, this person is an idiot”. Such argumentation serves the useful purpose of encouraging one to perform thorough examination of one’s arguments for obvious errors before expressing potentially idiotic theses in public.

Improper use of ridicule is to use one’s own ignorance and ignorance of the audience as an emotionally charged argument against a valid thesis. Examples of this are unfortunately abundant throughout history; Kepler was mocked by Galileo for stating that Moon’s gravitational influence causes the tides. People who produced meteorites as evidence of extraterrestrial origin of meteors were mocked by Lavoisier. Tesla was mocked by Edison who tried to suppress Tesla’s invention of highly efficient alternating current in favor of his direct current. Jewish physicists were mocked by Hitler and his propagandists for inventing relativity and quantum theory, which didn’t sound “right” to the Nazis. Everybody who expresses support for eugenics or racial differences is immediately labelled as “Hitler” without any kind of argument provided. Essentially, it is used to dismiss an argument by emotionally labelling it as either ridiculous or evil, by association. The problem is, everything can be portrayed as ridiculous. To an ignorant person, Al Gore can be portrayed as over-the-top silly for stating that he took initiative in creating the Internet; an informed person would know that before his “information superhighway initiative”, Internet was an academic curiosity at best, without commercial value to the broader public. He saw the potential and knew what infrastructure needed to be built, and he saw to it; essentially, he deserves more praise for the existence of Internet as we know it than any other person, but he is ridiculed for it because people can’t believe that a single person could be so far-sighted and important. To use an even more shocking example, Jesus was mocked and ridiculed in his suffering and death, because “he called himself the son of God” and “because if he was God, why doesn’t he come down from the cross”. It is very important that we never forget those arguments, because they sounded valid to those who said them, and probably to the audience as well, and we now see them as cringe-worthy, in hindsight. Mockery is a terrible thing, because combined with ignorance, it is a terrible weapon against truth, courage and independent thought, and I am therefore highly skeptical of it. Mockery is like an idiot with a hammer, breaking priceless porcelain and bragging how it was trash to begin with, or he wouldn’t be able to break it. It is the favorite weapon of stupidity against challenging and difficult ideas, and the fact that it can occasionally be used against idiots and stupid ideas doesn’t fully redeem it. I don’t see it as a weapon of mass destruction that must never be used, but more as candy, that can be served after a proper meal of rational arguments and evidence, but never as a substitute. It’s sweet when used in moderation and properly, but misuse it and the consequences can be grave.

Empiricism vs. rationalism

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I learned one important thing a few years ago.

It doesn’t matter if something sounds convincing, or if it makes sense.

It doesn’t matter whether something sounds weird, improbable or tenuous.

It doesn’t matter whether something dovetails nicely with the currently held beliefs.

It doesn’t matter whether there is sufficient reasoning behind something.

The only thing that matters is whether it’s actually true.

Let’s take an example of a platypus and a unicorn. Platypus is a monotremate mammal that lays eggs like a snake and has a duck-like beak. However unlikely or improbable it sounds, it’s real because it actually exists. Unicorn, however, sounds quite reasonable and plausible – a horse with one horn. There’s no reason why it couldn’t exist, but it doesn’t. It’s completely fictional. A platypus exists because it exists, and unicorn doesn’t exist because it doesn’t exist. There’s nothing else to it, no Platonic or Aristotelian issues, and reason doesn’t even play a role. The only thing that plays a role is existence of an actual being and evidence of that existence.

I don’t believe in things because they are reasonable or they make sense. I believe in things because I am presented with evidence of their existence. Reason and sense are something I use in order to arrange evidence of things that exist in some order that doesn’t drive me crazy, but the part where I use reason in order to make sense of things is actually most likely to be false and revised. That’s because reason is mostly glue that fills the parts of the puzzle of reality from which the actual parts of the puzzle are missing, and I need something to hold it all together and present it in a meaningful way.

That’s the main problem of rationalism vs. empiricism; rationalism assumes that things that are true will make more sense than the things that are false, but empiricism is primarily interested in evidence, and only when the evidence is there can it afford to ask about meaning.

It makes sense for me to speculate why a platypus exists, because it exists. I don’t give a single fuck about unicorns. Yes, weird and apparently improbable things sometimes exist, and sensible and probable things sometimes don’t. That tells you more about poor applicability of mind for establishing reality, than anything else.

War as a thermodynamic phenomenon

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When people think about hurricanes, they think of them in context of bad weather. I, however, think of them as a thermodynamic phenomenon of cooling the ocean, which accumulated too much energy from the Sun and, in context of seasonal change, releases the excess via entropy into the atmosphere until thermodynamic equilibrium is established.

People also think of war in terms of bloodshed and conflict of nations and ideologies and interests, but the more I think of it, I think of war in terms of a sociological hurricane – a thermodynamic phenomenon of equalizing energy potential (wealth and control of resources) of different groups of people in a situation when current distribution of resources doesn’t match the balance of power between the groups.

Let’s test my hypothesis on the example of two world wars. I am yet to see the satisfactory explanation of the First World War. Nobody seems to be able to tell the root cause. They can tell you the unimportant stuff, they can tell you how the events themselves unfolded, but none of it explains why the great colonial powers felt such a strong itch to go into war, jumping on the first casus belli that presented itself as if war promised more than peace. None of it makes sense – the Austro-Hungarian empire, for instance, was seriously itching to go into war, for which it was the least well prepared of all great powers. Germany was better prepared, and it too itched to go into battle against Russia before it grew unstoppably powerful due to its ongoing industrialization, and yet the end result of the war was a near-destruction and humiliation of Germany. Austro-Hungary didn’t survive the war – it broke apart and its constituents started their independent lives as unstable, immature states, whose erratic behavior seems to have boiled over into the second world war, and the process doesn’t seem finished even now. What are we seeing here, since it doesn’t seem to be motivated by obvious self-interest? We have a war that transformed the society and yet none of the parties involved seems to have benefited from it; all seem to have been disrupted and brought out of balance as a result.

As an alternative explanation, I came up with modernity. You see, the most significant aspect of modernity is change of the entire energy-structure of society. Prior to the explosion of science and technology, the entire society was solar-powered, in a sense that you had land on which you could grow plants, and domesticated animals which fed on those plants, and the amount of resources available to the society was more-less constant and determined by the amount of people who worked on the available land with primitive agricultural technology. Those people were treated as a basic resource that came with the land, and were divided among the warrior class which used force to conquer and dominate. Political power was measurable through the amount of agricultural land populated by serfs, that a nobleman controlled. Each nobleman could directly control only as much land, and the pyramid of power was established, with lower-tier noblemen who directly controlled the serfs who in turn controlled the land, and higher-tier noblemen who had lower-tier noblemen as underlings. The higher-tier noblemen were subjects to a king, who in turn was subject to the highest entity of civilizational cohesion, for instance the Pope. As long as the basic energy source of the civilization remained constant, this was a stable system.

However, with the ascent of technology, industry and free market, the energy structure of society changed, and it became possible to acquire wealth by means other than top-down distribution of force-acquired solar-powered resources. Inventors, industrialists and bankers acquired wealth that rivaled and soon greatly surpassed that of feudal solar-powered structures; the social leverage, essentially wealth, that was created with the invention of the steam engine or the mass-production of high quality steel, or fractional distillation of petroleum, or electricity, or artificial fertilizers, changed the entire energy structure of the society, while the entire social system relied upon an obsolete hierarchy that was established in the pre-industrial age and was ill-suited to handle the needs and challenges of modernity. This is why the entire society boiled over in order to establish a new thermodynamic equilibrium, a political and economic structure that was better suited for the open-ended energy model. One example of that is the abandonment of the gold standard of currency and adoption of the fractional reserve fiat currency, which is able to create new money based on GDP in order not to artificially constrict the economy of the state. This is absolutely necessary when you have a situation where a Rockefeller or a Tesla can invent an entirely new open-ended energy model which creates an extreme amount of new wealth that is not covered by the gold reserves. Unless you want to artificially appreciate gold and thus give the owners of gold reserves an unfair and undeserved amount of wealth, you need to grow the monetary supply by the amount that at least equals the growth of the real economy, and in fact anticipates further growth. Furthermore, you need to acknowledge that nobility no longer controls significant enough portion of the economy to warrant their special status, and political control of the country must take the new balance of power into account.

I see the two world wars as hurricane 1 and hurricane 2 of the same season, where the second one continued where the first one failed to finish the process of achieving thermodynamic balance. Whenever a group of people controls too much resources for the amount of actual power their wield in the current state of affairs, there will be a violent conflict that will establish the real state of affairs. An example of this is the conflict between the Europeans and the native Americans, who controlled too much land for their state of technological and military power, and were therefore wiped out in order to establish a thermodynamic equilibrium.

The Second World War and its aftermath allowed modernity to run its course and try to fulfill its promise, and when it mostly failed, it resulted in profound soul-searching and often destructive self-criticism within the Western civilization, which is now trying to figure out its fundamental guiding principles and its reason for being; essentially, it is trying to figure out whether it has a mandate, and has for the most part relinquished its dominant role, with inferior savages such as Muslims trying to fill the vacuum created by the Euro-American civilization’s unwillingness to assert itself in ways it previously did. Establishing “life”, without any further elaboration, as the supreme value, is indicative of this abdication of mandate.

To me, all the elements of a social thermodynamic storm are ready to produce an outward phenomenon that will redistribute energy across the system according to the new realities that are yet to fully establish themselves.

The long-term prospects

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I’m going to let you in on a little secret about a doomsday device that threatens with mass extinction of the vast majority of all species on Earth, including mankind. This device has been created 41 million years ago and has been steadily working on cooling the planet down, reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, increasing the temperature gradient between the poles and the equator. It has cooled the planet down so much that the existence of permanent ice sheets on the poles has become the norm for the last few millions of years. Lately, it rendered the climate so fatally unstable, that the Milankovitch cycles, the small variations in orbital eccentricity, axial tilt and precession, have become sufficient to plunge the planet into ice ages – or, considering that we are in an ongoing ice age, we should call those the “glacial maximums”. Inevitably, as the process of global cooling progresses, those small variations will at one point cease to be sufficient for bringing the planet out from a glacial maximum, and further on, it will cause a global glaciation, also known as “snowball Earth”.

This doomsday device is known in geography as the Drake Passage.

drake_passage

To quote Wikipedia, “There is no significant land anywhere around the world at the latitudes of Drake Passage, which is important to the unimpeded flow of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current which carries a huge volume of water (about 600 times the flow of the Amazon River) through the Passage and around Antarctica.”

Some 65 MY ago, due to plate tectonics things started taking place, that gradually rearranged the flow of sea currents around the continents. The Drake Passage was opened 41 MY ago, separating South America from Antarctica. This created a steady Antarctic circumpolar current which is basically a Coriolis-effect-driven heat pump, and you can understand how that works if you imagine a rotating cold vessel filled with liquid, where rotation of the vessel helps the exchange of heat between the two, only in this case the liquid flows outside the “vessel”. The liquid spins inside the vessel due to inertia. It essentially cools warm seawater by exchanging its heat with the edges of the polar continent where it dissipates into space. The effectiveness of this circumpolar current in dissipating the energy from Earth is such that it creates a net-negative energy balance, although a slight one, and creates a long-term trend.

This long-term cooling trend is what drove the evolutionary forces that created our kind of mammalian life, and it’s the trend that will eventually result in a complete global freeze that will produce the final extinction of our kind of mammalian life. This is the reason why there are no longer any large ectothermic creatures around, such as the Titanoboa, why the birds needed to evolve the ability to migrate seasonally in order to avoid the freezing cold of the north hemisphere winter, and why the mammals needed to evolve in order to hibernate. Closer to our time, the formation of the isthmus of Panama some 5 MY ago impeded the equatorial sea currents, forcing them to circumnavigate the continents and thus bring more equatorial heat into the southern circumpolar current. This had the “immediate” effect of throwing us into a Pleistocene ice age, since the global temperature and the amount of CO2 buffering plummeted to the point where Milankovitch cycles could actually have a significant effect on the climate.

long-term temperature trend

The temperature graph of the last 65 MY has a long-term downward trend, and everything else is merely a blip.

The formation of the Antarctic circumpolar current started the long process of climate change that produced us, the creatures of the Ice Age, and it will also produce the end-result of freezing Earth so completely, that it will stay there for hundreds of millions of years, until plate tectonics eventually rearrange the continents in such a way as to produce a net-positive global energy balance and cause a gradual thaw, at which point every form of life we know and are will be long extinct.

It happened already, several times, and every time the continental masses were arranged in such a way as to enable free circulation of sea water around at least one pole. The only time such circulation was inhibited we had the Cambrian explosion of life, and when it was re-established 41 MY ago we had the acceleration of the process of global cooling that started 65 MY ago when the continents rearranged themselves in a way that creates a net-negative long-term global energy balance.

One of the problems with global cooling is that CO2 is more readily absorbed in cold water, and this long-term global trend sinks our atmospheric CO2 into the oceans and thus removes the buffer that would otherwise reduce the thermal gradient between the equator and the poles and also moderate the slight effects that Milankovitch cycles have on global climate. That’s why Milankovitch cycles are of consequence only in the Pleistocene, which is what got me interested in the first place, leading to very interesting findings that I’m describing here.

This short-term increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration that we managed to produce with our high-energy civilization might have bought us some time, by temporarily increasing the climate buffers and reducing the impact of the orbital and axial variations on the climate, but since Earth is a very complex thermodynamic system, where circulation of 3 mediums (magma in the mantle, water and air) and entropy within and between them, solid impediments to circulation, plus solar input and albedo, plus thermal buffers (methane, CO2, water vapour) and accumulators (ice, methane hydrate), produce effects that are impossible predict without a very demanding computer simulation, we currently don’t know what exactly to expect, and as far as I’m concerned, the CO2 input could influence some mechanism in such a way that it actually causes a sudden ice age, for instance by introducing too much fresh water from ice melt into the oceans and thus disrupting the thermohaline circulation. When I watched the movie “Day after tomorrow”, the events described seemed implausible, but after I did some research I actually think it’s one of the most likely scenarios I’ve seen described. The thing is, we don’t know, because it isn’t about logic, it’s about thermodynamics, and you need to know all the variables in order to be able to predict, and one single thing can decide between radically different outcomes.

But this is all short term. Long term, the sentence is death by cold. How long term? In Pleistocene, the climate became unstable. These are in fact the death throes of climate that precede the global glaciation, where Milankovitch cycles are no longer sufficient to produce a glacial minimum, and you get a runaway glaciation. What exactly are the conditions in which this takes place, in respect to oceanic and atmospheric temperature, albedo and CO2 concentration, I don’t know, because that would require a computer simulation. What I do know is what the long-term temperature graph looks like, I understand the underlying mechanism, and I can predict that within a few million years we will have frozen oceans on the equator. But for all I know, there’s another interesting trend, which shows that the dominant Homo species goes extinct in the glacial maximum – Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalensis and others. I don’t see great odds of our industrial civilization surviving an event as disruptive as a glacial maximum, and without industry, and having killed off all the Pleistocene megafauna that would allow at least a moderate number of humans to live off the land if the industrial agriculture fails, I’m not giving us the odds of survival greater than 1% in the timeframe of 50 KY. But of course, for a species to which 1 KY is “eternity” and which no longer has any kind of historical recollection of the last glacial maximum, even those prospects are incredibly long-term.

References:

Impact of Antarctic Circumpolar Current Development on Late Paleogene Ocean Structure, Miriam E. Katz, Benjamin S. Cramer, J. R. Toggweiler, Gar Esmay, Chengjie Liu, Kenneth G. Miller, Yair Rosenthal, Bridget S. Wade, James D. Wright
Science 27 May 2011:
Vol. 332, Issue 6033, pp. 1076-1079
DOI: 10.1126/science.1202122

Role of the isthmus of Panama in global cooling by Gerald H. Haug, Geoforschungszentrum Potsdam (GFZ), Germany; Ralf Tiedemann, Forschungszentrum fur Marine Geowissenschaften, Germany; and Lloyd D. Keigwin, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

65 MY trend of cooling, David Lappi

The Physics of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, Worth D. Nowlin, Jr., and John M. Klinck, REVIEWS OF GEOPHYSICS, VOL. 24, NO. 3, PAGES 469-491, AUGUST 1986, Department of Oceanooraphy, Texas A&M University, College Station