The future, from different angles

I have tried to keep this blog a weekly affair, but I was so crazily busy last weekend that I just couldn't find the time to do it anywhere. Hopefully this is the return to normal regularity.

What has kept me so busy is looking at the future from different angles. The first angle is computer modelling. As the readers of my blog know, I've been working on an extension of the "Limits to Growth" model. If you are interested in such things, it's been recently published in The Oil Drum:

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5145

The other angle has been the local angle, trying to get an event where different speakers will talk about "The future of our city". Wednesday and Thursday last week I was talking with two different girls that said they knew how to organize these things, yesterday I was talking with the Buddhist Engineer trying to iron out some of the details. The closer the date approaches, the more I dread it. I'm obviously out of my depth here, I have no idea of what I'm doing, and what's worse, nobody else is really being massively helpful. If this turns out to work fine, I'll be the first one to be surprised. How is one supposed to change the world with a bunch of totally clueless people?

By the way, on the local angle, I completely agree with the commenter that said: "Something like transforming a lawn into a garden or putting a solar panel on your roof is an overt political statement that keeps communicating to the neighbors 24/7 unlike trying to drag them into a showing of What a Way to Go." Only thing is, some people don't have gardens, or can't put a solar panel on the roof for a number of reasons. The whole point of Transition is finding ways around these problems. For example, the Food Group are doing a project called "Grow your neighbour's own" that is about joining people with gardens and no will to grow anything on them, with people that want to grow food in gardens but have no gardens. And the coordinator of the Energy Group keeps saying that we need to find ways of producing practical results. And the Buildings Group/Network (they don't know how to call themselves) are trying to work out how to make an apartment block energy efficient, which needs the collaboration of all the owners of flats, the landlords, etc., etc. So the whole point of getting organized is about doing things that are difficult to do on your own. Unfortunately, we also get the kind of people that don't even understand what it is to get organized, and the kind of people that think that getting organized is getting political, ie screaming at somebody else "Solve the problems!" while doing nothing. In short, we have a rampant lack of useful skills, and I'm no exception (see paragraph above).

The final angle has been science fiction. In case the two things above weren't keeping me busy enough, I had promised to write a story, which I haven't done for ages. But once I had promised, I had to do it. I wrote a classic doom story, but it meant to have a message of hope at the end. Except that it looked too much like horror to sound like hope. Oh, well. My blog readers, you be the judge:

Finally, the trapdoor opened again. Maureen was carrying a jar full of red sticky liquid. There was a lot of that same liquid staining her shirt. She didn't say a word. For some reason, nobody did.

Anna took the jar from her bloodstained hands, carefully washed the outside before opening it. She filled half a baby bottle, mixed with water and shook well. You could have believed it was tomato juice, the way she did it, so matter-of-factly. Then she gave the bottle to Cat.

Cat's hand was shaking a little, but there was a cool determination on her face. When she gave it to Downs, she sucked hungrily. She probably likes the salty taste, thought Luna. There was a collective sigh of relief. Luna hadn't even noticed she was holding her breath until then.

Watching a baby fed with blood was frightening. Downright frightening, how desperately people cling to life. Society may collapse, berserkers may roam the country trying desperately to kill and destroy any place where there is a degree of comfort and order. But no matter how hard they try, how much wreck they leave behind, people will do whatever it takes to keep going. Whatever the berserkers did, they were doomed to lose. We are terrified out of our wits by the berserkers, thought Luna, but it's them that should be afraid of us. They are the ones fighting a war they can't ever win.

Downright frightening, how desperately people cling to life.