"Surviving progress" "In defining progress," "I think it is very important to make a distinction between good progress and bad progress." "I mean, things progress in a sense that they change." "Both in nature and in human society there apears to be a clear trend towards increasing complexity." "As change proceeds, we tend to delude ourselves that these changes always result in improvements." "....from the human point of view" "SURVIVING PROGRESS" "We are now reaching a point in which technological progress and the increase in our economies and our numbers threaten the very existance of humanity" "WHAT IS PROGRESS?" "What is progress....." "I think..... mhm." "That's too hard question...." "When I think of the word 'progress'..." "Progress will not come easy, it won't come quick, but today we have an opportunity to move forward" "It seems we are stuck in this trap for the last 200 years, since the industrial revolution where we think progress is more of the same, like:" "we should make our machines better and get more machines but we've been doing it for 200 years, so doing more of that is not progress" "We're like stuck in this like a record......" "Things are start out to seem like improvement or progress" "These things our seductive, there seems like there is no downside to these but when they reach a certain scale they turn out to be dead ends, more traps" "PROGRESS TRAPS" "I came up with a term 'progress trap' to define human behaviors that sort of seem to be good things, seem to provide benefits in a short term but which ultimatly leed to disastear, because they are unsustainable" "One example would be going right back to the old stone age the time of when our ancestors were hunting mammoths" "They reached a point, where their weaponry and hunting techniques got so good that they destroyed hunting as a way of life through the most of the world" "The people who discovered how to kill two mummoths instead of one had made real progress, but the people who discovered that they can eat very well by driving a whole herd over a cliff and kill 200 at once" "had fallen into a progress trap they'd made too much progress" "Our phisycal bodies and phisycal brains as far as we can tell have changed very little in past 50 000 years" "We've only been living in cizilization for the last 5000 years ...at the most which is less then 0.2% of our evolutionary history" "So the other 99.8 we were hunters and gatherers and that is the kind of way of life that made us" "We are essentialy the same people as those stone age hunters" "What makes our way of life different from theirs is that culture has taken off at expotential rate and has really become detached from pace of natural evolution" "So we are runnig 21st century software, our knowledge, on hardware that hasn't been upgraded for 50 000 years" "and this lies at the core of many of our problems" "All of this is because our human nature is back in hunting-gatherig era of the old stone age where as our knowledge and technology, in other words, our ability to do both good and harm to ourselves and to the world in general" "has grown out of whole proportion" "One thing to remember, of course, about human mind is that it's not that fundamentaly different from, say, a brain of a chimpanzee" "Most of the human brain, the basic structure of the brain is much older than human species" "some of it goes back to backteria some of it goes back to worm, some of it originated in first mammals some of it within the first primates, some of it in first human beings" "Very little however changed in the last 50 000 years" "And so most of what we do, we do with hardware components that are much older than any of the problems that we face" "When I first began to study chimps" "I thought that the task was to just map out more and more simularities to find the areas of cognition that hadn't been studied yet and simply show that chmps were just like us" "WHY" "You can imagine teaching a small child to stand up a block up right and you can teach a chimp to do the same thing 'oh I set up a block here, set up a block here, I can see everything, its very, very clear'" "'and i get a piece of fruit for doing it'" "But what happens when you introduce a small subtlelity into the situation when you trick them and make the block off center just that the block keeps falling over" "Well, the chimp will come in, set up the good block set up the block that we've tricked them with but then it falls over" "Well the chimp can see that it's not the way it's supposed to be so they try again, and they try again and they move it to one place, and they move it to another place" "and they keep trying to get it to stand up beacause they know what is supposed to happen" "But they have no understanding or no inclination to ask why" "What unobservable part of the situation is causing that block to keep falling over" "The young child will enter set up the good block try to set up the block that we've tricked them with but when it falls over, well first they'll try again then maybe try again, but very quickly they'll turn it over, feel the bottom of it, shake it," "try to concern what unobservable property of that block is causing it to fall over" "That's the fundamental, core difference, I belive, between humans and chimps that humans ask why, we're constantly probing for unobservable phenomenon to explain the observable" "It's what's driven us to discover gravity, it's what's driven us to probe into the misteries of quazars," "and it's the same thing that drives us to probe into misteries of each other in our every day lifes" "'Why does she keep doing that?" "'" "'Why does he keep behaving like that, he must think this, he belive this, i don't understand...'" "'Why, why, why, why...'" "So the upside of the human capacity that asks why, to continuously probe behind apperiances and to try to find out how the world really works is we develop fabulous new medicines, fabulous new therapeutic techniques to take care of people," "we invent the whole cascade of modern technology" "But the downside is that we invent the whole cascade of modern technology." "Arguably we are the most intelectual creature that ever walked on planet earth" "So howcome then that so intelectual being is destroying its only home, because we only have the one home." "Maybe one day people will be on Mars, but at the moment we've got planet earth" "We are destroying, we are polluting, we are damaging the future of our own species which is very counterproductive from the evolutionary perspective." "This capacity that seems so wonderfull to us, ability to ask 'why' the very ability that defines modern science as a double-edge sword" "If humans go extinct on this planet" "I think what's gonna be our epitath on our gravestone is:" "'Why?" "'" "We have the ability to think into the future but most of our mechanisms, most of our brain mechanisms evolved before we had any ability to think forward to the future and when it made some sense for decisions to be short-term" "A lot of our brain mechanisms, what I call ancestral mechanisms or reflexive mechanisms are tuned to making snap decisions, right away, like fight or flight you see a lion, either you're gonna fight or you gonna run" "no time to think about long-term consequences and that's good when we're stressed about something immediate that we can deal with, for example but those very systems that work by reflex are not so good at cooperating with these more modern systems, deliberative systems" "that allow us to make long-term decissions, and say is this good for me, is it good for my society, for my planet" "NOT ENOUGH PLANETS" "Between the fall of the Roman empire and Collombus sailing it took 13 centuries to add 200 milion people to the worlds population now it takes only 3 years" "A simple thing like pasteurization, the warming of milk so that the bacteria are killed and the control of smallpox" "Things like that have led to a great boom in human numbers" "Overpopulation, which no one really wants talk about because it cuts that things like religious believes and the freedom of individual and autonomy of family and so on is something that we will have to deal with" "We probably have to work towards a much smaller worldwide population then 6 or 7 billion" "We probably need to go down to a half of that or possibly even third of that if everybody is going to live comfortably and decently" "The other side of this problem and prehaps the more dangerous side is" "the footprint of the individuals at the top of the social pyramids who are consuming the most" "Somebody in the U.S. or Europe is consuming about 50 times more resources then a person in a place like Bangladesh" "If China is going to reach the level of consumption of the U.S. or Europe it's very unlikely that the world could support the addition of billion consumers at that level" "I'd say in China, maybe 200, 300 million people are affluent they could afford a lot, all that we can in the west in India ca. 200 milion, so you add up this affluent segments of population" "in these developing countries but still what you come up with is no more then one and half, maybe two bilion people" "So there is still five bilion people waiting to tap into these bonansas of plentifull food, cars, decent housing, right education for their children" "So the potential demand for resources is immense" "For thousands of years, you know," "China has the longest continous civilization in the world" "And it is only in the recent period of time when the european countries started to industrialize that China started to lag behind and therefore, you know, between the First Opium War in around 1840 all the way to 1978" "China went through a rollercoster of great humiliation, wars, agression of foreign nations" "Japanese agression against China, Civil War, collapse of Qing Dynasty, great cultural revolution, chaos in China that's when Deng Xiaoping reemerged in 1978 he basicly pointed out the only correct path" "We need to go out to the path of growth and China needs to modernize and insutrialize and I think that's, you know, a beginning of China's correct development onto a right path" "NATURAL CAPITAL" "Some people have writen about, ehm, natural capital, the capital that nature provides which is the clean air and clean water the uncut forest, the rich farmland and the minerals, the oil, the metals," "all these things are the capital the nature has provided and until about 1980 human civilization was able to live on what we might term interest of that capital or surplus that nature was able to produce the fruit that farmland can grow without actually degrading the farmland" "or the number of fish you can put out of sea without causing the fish stocks to crash but since 1980 we've been using more then the interest so we are in effect somebody who thinks he's rich cause he is spending the money that has been left in his inheritance" "not spending the interest but eating into the capital" "The last time I visited the New York Stock Exchange was in 1980 and the mood sure was different than" "Government with its high taxes, excessive spending and overregulation had thrown a wrench in the works of our free markets" "With tax reform and budget control our economy will be free to expand to its full potential driving the bears back into permanent hibernation" "That's our economic programme for next four years, we're going to turn the ball loose" "The world is this big." "It's not this big and it can't be this big" "It's just this big, it's a finite sub" "Instead of thinking that nature is this huge bank that we can just.... this endless credit card that we can just keep drawing on" "We have to think about the finite nature of the planet and how yo keep it alive, so that we too may remain alive" "And less we conserve the planet there isn't going to be any "the economy"" "The ice-age-hunter is still us, it's in us" "Those ancient hunters who thought that there would always be another herd of mammoth other the next hill shared the optimism of a stock trader, that there's always gonna be another big killing on the stock market in a next week or two" "If you are watching the earth over the last 5 or 6 thousands of years and you're speeding up your film what you see is civilization breaking out like forest fires in one pristine environment after another and after a civilization has arisen as it burnt out natural resources in that area" "than it dies down and another fire beaks out somewhere else" "And now of course we have one huge civilization around the world which we have to confornt the possiblity that the entire experiment of civilization is in itself a progress trap." ""When will the economy turn around?" "yeah"" ""I'm not an economist, but I do belive we are growing and I can remember this press conference"" ""saying about recesion as if you were economists"" ""I'm an optimist, I belive there is a lot of positive things for the economy"" "Faith in progress has become akind of religious faith a sort of fundamentalism rather, like market fundamentalism that have just recently crashed and burned" "The idea that you can let market leap is a delussion just like the idea that you could let technology leap and it will solve the problems created by itself in a slightly earlier phase" "That has become a belief very simular to religious dellusions that caused some societies to crash and burn in the past" "A SHORT HISTORY OF DEBT" "Written records go back about four thousand years and from 2000 BC to the time of Jesus it was normal for all of the countries in the world to periodicaly cancel the debts when they became too large to pay" "so you have Sumer, Babylonion, Egypt, other regions all proclaiming these debt cancelations and" "the effect was to make a clean slate so that society would begin all over again" "This was easy to do in a society when most debts were owed to the state it became much harder to do when enterprise and credit pasted out of the hand of state into the private hands, into the hand of an oligarchy" "and the last thing that they wanted was to have a king that would actually cancel the debts and restore equality" "Rome was the first country of the world not to cancel the debts" "It went to war in Sparta, in Greece to overthrow the governments and kings that wanted to cancel the debts" "The wars of the first century BC ended up stripping these countries of everything they had." "Not only they stripped the temples off gold it's stripped the public buildings, it's stripped the economies off their reproductive capacity it's stripped them of their works it made a desert out of the land and it said: "a debt is a debt"" "The collpase seems to have been closely linked to ecological devastation which led to also social and economic and military problems" "In the early stages of the Roman Republic you had a fairly egalitarian land owning system" "the peasents had access to public land but as the Roman state became more powerfull and the lords the generals" "began to apropriate public land for their own private states" "more and more peasants became landless at the same time errosion was serious problem, so bad that" "some of the Roman ports sillted up with top soil that have been washed down from fields into the river" "Archeologists have been able to astabilish how badly degraded much of Italy was by the fall of Roman empire and how it took a thousand years of much reduced population during the middle ages for fertility in Italy to rebuild" "What was absolutly new in a Roman Empire was irreversible concentration of wealth at the top of economic pyramid and that what's progress has ment ever since" "Progress has ment: "you will never get back what we take from you"" "That's what brought on the dark age and that's what threatens to bring dark age again if society doesn't realise that if it lets the wealth to concetrate in the hands of financial class this class is not going to be any more intelligent in long term" "in disposing of the wealth then predecesors were in Rome, and other coutries" "Well, the term oligarchy, sounds a little esoteric it just means a small groups of people that got a lot of political power based on their economic power" "We like to think that the U.S. is much more democratic, much more spread out, in terms of who has the power and oligarchy is something ussualy associated with relatively poor countries but that view has to be updated, because we've got an essential part of that problem" "of that structure in the United States today." "People who have all this economical power were in financial sector, it was Wall Street" "Wall Street became really powerfull, they use that power to buy influence in Washington get more deregulations, so to get more of the playfield shaped in a way they wanted which is no governement intervention, no restrictions on what they wanna do" "That'd enable them to make a lot more money which bought them more political power and this went on for considerable period of time until of course there was an enormous crash" "But basicaly you come to us today on your bicycles after buying girl-scout cookies and helping out Mother Teresa telling us: "we are sorry", "we didn't mean it", "we won't do it again", "trust us"" "Well, I have some people at my constituancy that actually robbed some of your banks and they say the same thing!" "They're sorry, they didn't mean it, they won't do it again, just let'em out." "Do you understand that this is a little difficult for most of my constituants to take that you learned your lesson" "The bankers can't stop themselves" "It's in their DNA, in DNA of their organizations to take massive risks, to pay themselves ridiculous salaries and to collapsse." "And the more that reasonable, responsible people at the center and the left and the right see this, the closer we'll get to constrain the power of these, out of control, factual oligarchs" "It's not a mistery, it's not a suprise, we know we have crisis every 5 or 10 years" "My daughter called me from school one day and said:" ""Dad what's a finansial crisis", I tried to be funny, I said:" ""It's something that happens every 5 or 7 years", than she said:" ""Why everybody is so suprised?", so we aren't, we shouldn't be suprised" "I read scroll on the wall somewhere, that everytime history repeats itself the price goes up" "If you look at the increasing complexity of civilization what you can see is that towards the end of classic Maya period it is the enormous amount of effort put to build palaces and temples that were controlled entirely by nobility and from which, what I imagine, the peasantry was excluded" "just as ordinary folks are excluded from gated communities in many countries today and one imagines also that therefor the people at the bottom were becoming more and more disenchanted with the rulers as they felt that the social contract, that had once existed," "that the rulers were the mediators between the gods and themselves and would help them get good weather, good crops and all that as they saw that begining to break down and their rulers in effect loosing touch with the people who they claim to represent" "it's the pattern I think we can see a lot in the modern world now" "Every society in history for the last 4 thousand years has found that debts grow more rapidly that people can pay" "the problem is a small oligarchy of 10% of the population on the top to whom all of these debts are owed to" "You want to annule the debts to the top 10%, thats what they're not going to do" "The oligarchy is running things." "They would rather annule the bottom 90% right to live then to annule the money thats due to them they would rather strip the planet and shrink the population and be paid rather then give up their claims" "That's the political fight of the XXI century" "DEBT PUSHERS" "Our job on Wall St. was to balance the payments of economies for Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1960's" "My first job there was to calculate how much debt could third world countries pay and the answer was, well, how much do they earn, and whatever they earn, that's what they could afford to pay in interest" "our objective was to take the entire earnings of a third world country and say, ideally, that would be all paid as interest to us" "Look, don't give me a hard look story, I hear them every day and quite frankly they bore me" "The facts are simple: in 1973 this bank gave you a loan and you still haven't paid it back" "Admittedly you paid back the inital sum, but not the interest which to date amounts to nine times the amount origianaly borrowed" "Nine times so you better get your act together, times are tough, and we all having to clamp down" "and don't look at me like that, this is a bank, not a charity" "The number 1 costs for foreign lending through some of the multilateral associations" "IMF or World Bank is the death tomb on the continent" "We can look at the support of the dictators that took place thirty years ago from 1960 till 1997, of a brutal dictator." "He was given humengous loans." "Everyone knew he wasn't using that for the population he was propped up as one of the biggest leader in the whole african continent" "While your country is young, only 10 years of age that it is had a period of progress in that period," "which has been an example for nations throughout the world" "You have moved forward economicaly, you have estabilished unity in your country and you have a vitality, which impresses every visitor when he comes to Congo" "What is interesitng is all the money and plunder from all iternational debt is found in western banks, so as he was removed from power the money never returned to the Congies" "The population didn't have access to medical services didn't have access to adequate education, living wage and calculating up to date, now Congo has 14 bln dollar debt structure and the weight where the people do not benefit and human cost is so high" "In Congo we have 6 million deaths since 1996" "Rich countries lend, so called, "developping countries" a big wack of "money"" "Debt is incurred on behalf of people who have nothing to do with it and don't know anything about it" "Then they are expected to pay the price by scraping off their livelihood turning it into money" "Giving it to somebody else..." "Howcome the money given to common benefit of the people use some of the funds to make sure that there are strongest against secesion in the country protecting against human rights violation, so many other issues that we face but these funds are not used for that because whatever is given" "they tell you specifically what project you have to use it for and mainly is usually mining projects to get access to resources" "DIGGING HOLES" "You can relate to the destruction of the rainforest in Brasil directly to the Wall St. and London financial sector the story begins in 1982 whe countries couldn't pay their debts any more and the result is that Latin American coutries generally stopped paying because they said" "we're already paying all of the balance of payments surplus we have to the banks we don't have any money to import, to sustain living standards we don't have money to import, to build new factories to pay the debt" "so the IMF at that point said:" "Don't go bankrupt!" "You have an option, you can begin to sell off the public domain you have plenty of assets to sell to pay us you can sell off your water rights, your forests, your subsoil mineral resources, you can sell us your oil rights" "and so Brazil, Argentina and other countries began to sell off their resources to private investors and private investors bought these resources on credit." "MARINA SILVA" " FORMER MINISTER OF THE ENVIRONMENT, BRAZIL" "RAQUEL TITSON-QUEIROZ" " ENVIRONMENTAL POLICE OFFICER IBAMA" "ENITO BEATA" " SAWMILL OWNER" "They're cutting down the rainforest, they're emptying out the economy they're turning it to a hole in the ground to repay the bankers, that's the financial buisness plan that's how it ends up because the bankers goal is take their money" "and begin digging holes in another country and empyting out that country that's the global financial system." "The economists say: if you clearcut the forest, take the money, and put it in the bank you can make 6 or 7%" "If you clearcut the forest, put it into Malysia or smth you can make 30 or 40%" "So who cares whever you keep the forest, cut it down, put the money somewhere else when those forests are gone, put it in fish, the fish are gone, put it in computers" "Money doesn't stand for anything and money now grows faster then the real world" "Conventional economics is a form of brain damage" "DAVID SUZUKI" " GENETICIST/ACTIVIST" "Economics is so fundamentaly disconnected from the real world it is destructive." "If you take an introductory course in economics the professor in the first lecture will show a slide of the economy and it looks very impressive, you know, raw material, extraction processes, manufacture, wholesale, retails," "with arrows going back and forward and they try to impress you because they think that they know damn well" "Economics is not a science but they're trying to fool us into thinking that it is a real science." "It's not." "Economics is a set of values that they then try to use mathematical equations and all that stuff and pretend that it's a science" "But if you ask the economist in that equation where do you put the ozone layer where do you put the deep underground aquafiers of fossil water where do you put topsoil or biodiversity, their answer is:" "Oh, those are externalities" "Well, then you might as well be on Mars" "That economy is not based in anything like a real world" "It's life that filters water in hydrologic cycle it's microrganisms in the soil that create the soil that we can grow our food in nature performs all kinds of services insects fertilize all of the flowering plants these services are vital to the health of the planet" "economist call these externalities." "That's nuts!" "Unlimited ecoomic progress in the world of finite natural resources doesn't make sense" "It's a pattern that is bound to colapse and we keep seeing it collapsing but then build it up because there are these strong vested interests we must have buisness as usual and you know, you got, the arms manufacturers, the petroleum industry, pharmaceutical industry" "and all of this feeding into helping to create corrupt governemnents who are putting the future of their own people at risk." "You can imagine lilies growing in a pond" "Lilies grow very rapidly, they double every day they're going to cover the whole surface and there won't be any way for the fish getting oxygen and all the life is going to die in the pond that's how rapidly things can grow." "One day you are half full of lilies and the next day you're dead." "You could say that today we're at the point in which the lily pond is half full the life is being snuffed out of national economies and the debt goes on doubling how long can it do it." "It has one day to go." "All the civilizations of the past and, I think our own, only seem to be doing well when they're expaning, when the population is growing, when the industrial output is growing and when the cities are spreading out" "Eventualy you reach the point at which the population has overrun everything" "The cities have expanded over the farmland the people at the bottom begin to starve and the people at the top loose their legitimacy" "and so you get hunger, you get revolution." "Now, one scary thing about the moment we're in is that for the first time there is kind of only one system" "so if the whole thing goes down, you won't have what you've had in previous eras of epic collapse which is that even if one civilization goes down and it may take a while to recover there are other robust civilizations that can be guardians of progress" "ROBERT WRIGHT" " AUTHOR OF NONZERO:" "THE LOGIC OF HUMAN DESTINY" "In that sense some of the things that have been reassuring in the past about progress don't necesserily apply to the current situation 'cause once you get to the global level you've only got one experiment working" "That's just the inevitable combination of its growth ever since the stone age and there were waystations like the Roman empire and now here we are and more and more people, we're in the same boat and they face problems and either they will solve them together or suffer together" "possibly on a catastrophic scale" "ESCAPING THE TRAP" "We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history" "our genetic code still caries the selfish and agressive intincts that were survival advantage in the past but I'm an optimist" "STEPHEN HAWKING" " THEORETICAL PHYSICIST" "If we are the only inteligent beings in the galaxy we should make sure we survive and continue" "If we can avoid diseaster for the next two centuries our species should be safe" "We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years" "Our only chance of going through survival is not to remain on planet earth but to spread out into space" "I was at the conference a few years back with George Lukas and he came up and said there is only two hopes for humanity." "Either we find another planet to colonize after we've destroyed this one or perhaps your technology, meaning what we are doing with genetic code, might allow us to transform ourselves" "or other aspects of the planet where we can continue to live here" "J. CRAIG VENTER" " BIOLOGIST / CEO SYNTHETIC GENOMICS" "We're here to celebrate the complition of the first survey of the entire human genome without a doubt this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by human kind" "We are announcing today that the first time our species can read the chemical letters of its genetic code" "For the last several years my team has been sailing around the world looking for all the species in the ocean, the microspecies, on filters and we isolate all the DNA, all at once from all of them" "I have a novel way of looking at these genes" "I've use them as the design components of the future" "It's mind-bugging concept, even though we're doing it everyday, that we can simply start with four bottles of chemicals, write the genetic code and change the genetic code of species, basicly developing new species and we can try and find ways to make fuels that other people haven't even imagined" "we can do this with novel source of food we're limited only by our imagination and whatever biological reality is" "when we consider trying to replace oil, we use bilions of gallons of oil a year it's a, I can't even, i think I have pretty good imagination, envision what a billion gallons of oil is" "making a bilion gallons of oil from invisible microbs is a certain leap of faith in fact that's how we proceed in science." "Instead of writing software for computers, we can now write software for life" "By changing and taking over evolution, changing the timecourse of evolution and going into deliberate design of species for our own survival" "at least gives us some points of optimism that we have a chance to control our destiny" "We're here today to announce the first synthetic cell" "This is the first self-replicating species that we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer." "GODS R US ?" "One of the challanges that faces the human species is we're more and more in a position of acting like gods" "it has been true for a while because we have the ability to change the climate for example this is gonna be even more true with genetic technologies we're gonna be able to manipulate other species ad eventualy ourselves" "We're gonna be in a position of controling our own faith in a way that no creature has ever, you know, in bilion years on the planet had an opportunity to do." "I once wrote a poem in which a mad bishop said" ""a man became god, became greater than god, and the godhood of man"" "I do not see anyone living in this materialistic society as being anything like god" "I don't know what god is, but in my wildest dreams I would never conceive of god or a god as being like a modern human being in a materialistic society" "We're anything but godlike, I think the challenges are so overwhelming to all of us" "that we're all trying to use whatever new tools we can to try and change the future" "Synthetic biology is a progress trap par exellence" "JIM THOMAS" " ACTIVIST/AUTHOR OF THE NEW BIOMASSTERS" "Biologist have pointed out that whese engineering aproach is all very well and that engineers can try to treat life as it was some kind of computer engineering substrate but ultimatly the microbes are gonna end up loughing at them the life doesn't work like that." "I think the problems that we're seeing now whever we are talking about hunger, massive inequity, when we're talking about climate change or the loss of biodiversity have been driven over the last 200 years by a system of overproduction of stuff" "and overconsuption of stuff and that's being inflated and inflated and inflated to a point where there really is not in any way reasonable the companies and those of the governements who supported that approach are now saying that they will provide new technologies to continue that consumption of stuff" "that level of production." "It's just not realistic." "ExxonMobil and Synthetic Genomics have built a new facility to identify the most productive species of algea" "How'd you imaigne amazing little criters make crit oil which we could turn into biofuels" "They also absorb CO2." "We are hoping to suplemet fuels that we use in our vehicles to some day help meet the words energy demands" "What is harder mapping the entire genome set that makes up a human being or making algea produce energy?" "Making algea produce energy is not hard but doing it on a scale required to have a major economic and environmental impact is going to be a huge challenge" "but have got partner in ExxonMobil to try and get it to a scale that it needs to be of billions gallons a year" "A lot of engineering is reqired for facilities the size of San Francisco" "I think that they are serious and we're serious." "What we're seeing alongside the development of synthetic biology is a massive corporate grab on plant life" "Literaly speaking that means a grab on land and a grab on seas as well" "Where people have been moved out of land to make way for the growing of plant life that can be transformed into plastics, chemicals, fuels and so forth and what drives synthetic biology is not an attempt to save the planet or help humanity" "but an attempt to increase the bottom line for certain very large corporations" "If we're gonna feed the upcoming nine billion people we can't afford to use our prime crop land for trying to produce billions of gallons of fuel that we use" "What we're doing is writing the genetic code, changing this species allows us to use desert land mhm.. we just need sunlight and CO2 for using this new engineered algea for example" "Synthetic biology in a way, you know, it's frightening but I'm very sympathetic to this on many ways that it will be nice to get a more water efficient plants but still it would still need water" "Greg Venter cannot create a plant which needs no water and no nitrogen or it totaly fixes on nitrogen by sucking it from the air which is....., it cannot go that far" "This does not fundamentally change the game" "What fundamentally changes the game and what people don't want to hear and I'm telling this all the time and people say: "don't talk to us like that because it's just a no-starter"" "but for me this is the only starter: we have to use less." "LIMITS" "The poor people need more." "There is no noubt, there is no discussion there" "If you are average villiger somewhere in Rajastan or Panjab or Nigeria u need more." "Period." "There's a basic human decency that commends you to say: these people need more more clean water, more basic food, more education for their children the discussion goes like before it begins" "but as far as us is concerned we certainly could and should use much, much, much less" "People have been conditioned that things have to always go better and immediately if you say: "limit something", people think this is not getting better but it would be." "It is even a no-starter when you say: you should eat less, you should eat less meat, right?" "Even that is a no-starter." "You should use less electricity, right?" "You should build smaller cars." "I saw the vice-president of GM talking about new GM and one of the journalists asks him: "but your cars are still so heavy", and he says: "yes, we are working on it"" "what is there to work on it?" "!" "?" "There are so many things that we could do." "Not to surrender our stand of living, not to live in gutter, right?" "But we don't need one-and-a-half ton car to go from red light to red light" "People are not willing to go back on these things." "Most of them simply aren't because they've totally hijacked by this material culture" "Let's not underestimate the persuasion, the power of this material culture." "It's immense, it's just immense" "When I've seen so many people being genuinly unhappy that they cannot afford a 50 000 sq foot, sorry, 50 000 dollar bathroom remodelling" "I mean, there is something wrong with that values set ,right?" "'Cause bathroom is a place where you just spend, like, 10 minutes to take shower, brush your teeth so it doesn't have to be very... but, you know, how much money people are.... because I can't...yhm... because we are thinking about redoing our bathroom, right, so.. in my mind... it's very interesting" "for me it's a char because it has to be done, but for many people it's a life-affirming thing, you know." "People are renting storage spaces, right?" "that they will never access, right?" "to store the junk which they cannot store in their 5000 sq. foot homes so do we need that?" "It's amazing!" "eh.... it's, it's, it's....." "This is very difficult to put the geany in the bottle, so everything is defined in this material thinking" "I could make a lot more coherent but it's difficult because if you make it more coherent you make it prescriptive and prescriptions never work, really." "Because I don't have the solution" "I can't say "we should follow this and then it will click and we will live happily everafter"" "so I'm making it deliberatly uncoherent." "I could be very doctrinate, I could be, but you see," "I lived for 26 years in communist society I'm inoculated against any doctriner grand solution, you know, "this is the path, this is the must, this is the paradigm which we have to follow"" "I'm just totally set agains it, so I'm making deliberatly, kind of, you know, messy, uncoordinated, because that's how life is." "We don't know what path will emerge" "As long as we are living on this sea of afluents and opportunities and material riches" "It's just very difficult to make this individual, voluntary resolutes that are saying "enough", "back"" "I was walking around pointing my finger at everybody, you know, you people, you know, blaming the culture for its consumption finaly one day I came home and air-conditioners were on even though there was no one at home" "and I was like: wait, I've been going around blaming everybody else but the fact of the matter is that my lifestyle requires a huge amount of resources too, so how can I blame other people and I realized that before I go around and try to change other people maybe I should look at myself and change myself" "keep my side of the street clean" "So I came up with this idea that I would live as environmentaly as possible for a year and see how that affected us" "COLIN BEAVAN" " ENGINEER / AUTHOR  DIRECTOR OF NO IMPACT PROJECT" "So we did this No Impact experiment, we did it." "We live in New York, in the middle of the New York City which made it unussual because most people can think of environmental living as some kind of back to tha land thing but of course, back to the land, is not the right idea when it comes to saving our habitat" "if all of us in New York were to go back to the land we would very much destroy the land" "We're not biologicaly consumptive this is not got to do with human nature" "Human nature is to do what everybody else does, that's human nature that we want... and it's wonderfull, it's like:" "I want to be with you, I want to be the same as you," "I want to love you and I want you to love me, thats not bad." "So that's... that's also part of the problem." "I want to be the same as you and you consume so I'm not going to be the first not to consume" "But it also tells us that if we can move from non-consumption to consumption, we can also go from consumtion back to non-consumption." "We need to begin by saying: we're at the end of the failed experiment and it is time to say good bye to it" "An economic experiment, it's a technological experiment that's been going on for couple of hundred years and it's not worked, it's brought us to this point of crisis" "Then we can start sainly and inteligently say how can we live within the real limits that our planet gives us and create a safe operating space for humanity" "Admitedly we've used are brains in ways that are detrimental to the environment and the society but brains are begining to get together around the planet to find solutions to some of the harm that we've inflicted" "You know, we humans are a problem solving species." "We always do pretty well with our back's to the wall" "THA PLANETARY BRAIN" "It's easy now to see kind of a giant social brain or planetary brain 'cause it's in a physical form of the internet, it looks so much like a nervous system, you almost can't miss the analogy" "You might say that there always have been a lot of little social brains around the planet getting bigger, starting to form little interconnections among themselves" "Now more than ever you could tell that there is a unified social brain" "Even if the overall arc of history is toward an expended moral horizon, more and more people acknowledging the humanity more and more different kinds of people, there is always the risk of backsliding and it can be catastrophic." "From a point of view of strict self-interest it is imperative that we make further moral progress that we get more and more people to acknowledge the humanity of one another or it will be bad for pretty much all of them" "If we don't develop which you might call a moral perspective of god than we'll screw up the engineering part of playing god because the actual engineering solutions depend on seeing things from the point of view of other people, insuring that their lives don't get too bad" "because if they do it will come back to harm us so, you know, half of being god is just have been handed to us and the question is whether we'll master the other half of being god, the moral half." "The bad news is the enlightment is sometimes hard to come by because of human nature in some cases, because you know, we've got these kinds of animal minds, desgined for very different environment facing novel problems, so enlightment part is going to require some real education and reflection" "and self-discipline and may not come natural" "I think what we're up against here is human nature, we have to reform ourselves, remake ourselves in a way that cuts against the grain of our, our inner animal nature, and transcend that Ice Age hunter, that all of us are, if you, if you strip off the thin layer of civilization." "We always have been the initiators of this experiment, we've unleashed it but we've never really controlled it." "But now it's more likely that we're going to come to grief because of environmental problems." "If we do, then that is really nature saying the experiment of civilization is a failed evolutionary experiment, that making apes smarter is a, is a dead end." "So, it's up to us to prove nature wrong, in a sense, to show that we can take control of our own destinies and behave in a wise way that will ensure the continuation of the experiment of civilization" "subtitles by 'strg'"