A Quote by Annalee Newitz
Part of what I wanted to do in my book was point out that we have almost reached the point where we can prevent a mass extinction with the science and technology we have today. We can build carbon neutral cities.
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I would want us to start our quest to survive mass extinction by rethinking how we build cities. Cities should be commonplaces of production, rather than consumption - they should be producing food, and fuel.
This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)
To be fair, if we are having a mass extinction, we're in the early stages of it. I think it's knowing facts like that which has made me less fearful about the future. Mass extinction is a long, complicated process that we are just now beginning to understand - and likewise, we are just beginning to understand how we might prevent one.
Technology is usually fairly neutral. It’s like a hammer, which can be used to build a house or to destroy someone’s home. The hammer doesn’t care. It is almost always up to us to determine whether the technology is good or bad.
The British bombed German cities [during World War II] to keep the workers awake at night. So instead of dropping one bomb, we sent a thousand planes and, yes, we took out the factory sometimes, but we also took out the city. It reached the point where we wanted more efficient ways to destroy a city. The result was nuclear weapons.
My first goal would be to reduce the perturbation in the carbon cycle. That would mean using carbon neutral sources of energy, and changing our agricultural practices to be less disruptive and polluting. I'm not talking about a policy here so much as changing the way our infrastructure works. That's why I'm so fascinated with changing the way we build cities, because they are the most developed forms of physical infrastructure for human habitation.
And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.
When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point.
Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.
In the history of the world, all five mass extinctions have been accompanied by massive climate change, so we are facing an incredibly serious threat. In fact, we are technically in the sixth mass extinction right now, and it is the first mass extinction being attributed to humans.
We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.
I don't think we have reached a point where art really translates into science. Perhaps for some people, having good visuals can help translate into science.
Nothing lasts forever. But—especially as it seems to me cities and humans are symbiotically and inextricably bound at this point—I hope cities have a good, long run. Plus, cities are beautiful creatures in their own right; and as with us, their vulnerability and ephemerality are part of that beauty.
After a certain point is reached the numbers cease to matter, and all that remains is the faceless mass of a crowd.
I don't think there's anything, any threat out there today that anyone can point to, that justifies placing an entire population under mass surveillance.
My point of view is that science is essentially private, whereas the almost universal counter point of view, explicitly stated in many of the articles in the Encyclopaedia, is that it must be public.
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