From: Earth Orbital Outpost
To: Galactic Central Command
(note: time spans in this report are measured in Earth orbital revolutions. One Earth orbital revolution corresponds to 4e-10 Galactic years)
Progress report: Human eradication plan
- Strategic Summary
The Earth Orbital Outpost is pleased to report to Galactic Command that the eradication of the creatures termed "humans" inhabiting the planet known as "Earth" is proceeding according to plans. The rapid warming of the planet obtained by the injection of large amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is expected to wipe out most large vertebrates within 40-50 planetary revolutions around the parent star. The planet will be ready for colonization by our species in a few thousand years; when the ecosystem will have been restored.
- The original (1st level) plan
Planet Earth was the object of several preliminary explorations before being selected as suitable for colonization. Upon reaching this decision, the Earth Orbital Outpost was set up with the purpose of facilitating the colonization task. The Outpost proceeded to study the planet, finding that it is dominated by a species, known as "humans", which has appropriated most of the planetary ecosystem productivity. Individually, humans turned out to be highly intelligent and it was soon clear that the species poses an important obstacle to colonization. A necessary step for colonization was therefore their eradication. The decision was reached also upon the consideration that, if left to themselves, humans were likely to reach a technological level sufficiently high to become a nuisance at the Galactic scale.
Several plans were developed to carry out the eradication program. It soon became clear that sterilization with neutron beams, carried out by the Galactic star fleet, was possible but expensive and, besides, humans were rapidly reaching a technological level sufficient to produce a significant opposition. Instead, it was found that humans could be eradicated at a much lower cost by warming the planet at temperatures high enough to make their survival impossible. That could be accomplished by exploiting the human habit of burning fossil carbon materials in order to obtain energy. According to initial observations carried out about a hundred revolutions ago, just letting humans to themselves would lead them to inject in the atmosphere sufficient amounts of greenhouse gases to cause a warming intense enough to destroy most large vertebrates.
In previous reports, we were pleased to describe that the plan was working. 50 revolutions ago, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere had already picked up a trend of rapid growth and it was calculated that it would lead to the collapse of the ecosystem in less than a hundred revolutions. However, as mentioned earlier on, humans turned out to be remarkably intelligent and the brightest of them were able to identify and understand the ongoing process (that they usually referred to as "global warming.") Humans built up a sophisticated planetary monitoring system and created theoretical models of the atmosphere. At that point, they embarked in a planet-wide effort to stop global warming by curbing fossil carbon burning and deploying non-carbon based energy sources.
Having observed this development, it was necessary to alter the original plan and intervene more directly in the eradication task, although still doing an effort to avoid the enormous costs involved in deploying the Galactic fleet.
- The 2nd level plan
Stopping humans from taking measures to avoid destroying themselves turned out to require a quite modest effort - completely within the resources available to the Earth Orbital Outpost. This result may be surprising and, indeed, some members of the Galactic Command had expressed doubt on being able to convince humans - individually very intelligent - to continue actting in ways that were leading to their destruction. Nevertheless, we succeeded in accomplishing this task.
The key element of our action has been the study and the exploitation of the human information network, that they call "the Web." It is a sophisticated planet-wide information system that has been fundamental for humans in developing their understanding of climate and diffusing this knowledge with their decision makers. However, we found fundamental flaws in the functioning of this network.
In particular, we found that the network is dominated by "super-nodes" which show a higher level of connectivity than most nodes. These super-nodes are called by humans "media" and sometimes "mainstream media". Surprisingly, we found that the supernodes are managed by humans who are quite unable to understand the basic elements of the functioning of the Earth's ecosphere. Even more surprisingly, we found that the humans in charge of these media nodes make no effort whatsoever to check that the information they diffuse corresponds to physical reality.
We also found that the humans in charge of managing the media supernodes are easily influenced by other groups of humans which are called "lobbies," whose role is not easily understood by us. We believe it has something to do with the abnormal interest of humans in a virtual entity that they have created and that they refer to as "money". Although the characteristics of this entity are obscure to us, it seems that humans (especially males) care about being associated with large amounts of this virtual entity and this, in turn, seems to have something to do with the behavior of human females. In any case, we were able to penetrate the human computing centers which produce this "money" and appropriate large amounts of it for our purposes.
In practice, it was sufficient for the Earth Orbital Outpost to take control of a small numbers of leading human individuals; whom we refer to as "avatars." This task was accomplished mainly by our control of large amounts of the above mentioned "money" entity. Using money, the takeover of these minds turned out to be extremely easy: we found little resistence on their part and no evidence that our operation was detected by other humans. Our avatars carried out several tasks, mainly providing the media super-nodes with fake data that contradicted the results of the previous scientific investigation on the degradation of the ecosystem.
A special operation that turned out to be extremely successful was to break into the database of one of their best scientific organizations (called by humans "climate research unit") and diffusing internal data exchanges all over the network. This operation generated considerable confusion among humans as it highlighted several uncertainties in the research; something typical of scientific investigation but that, apparently, most of them are not familiar with.
Assessment of the present situation
The takeover of the human information system (the "Web") by our human avatars was completely successful and we have been able to turn it into an instrument for our purposes. We are pleased to report that most human leaders have been turned into avatars under our direct control or are completely confused about the issue of global warming. It has been possible to relegate the discussion on this theme to only some minor clusters of the information network. All attempts carried out by humans to diffuse it outside these clusters are met by aggressive denial (humans turn out to be extremely aggressive for reasons that to us appear futile).
As a consequence of our takeover of the information network, all attempts of humans to stop the ecosystem destruction have been halted and appear unlikely to be restarted any time soon. The amount of greenhouse gases being emitted in the Earth's atmosphere keeps increasing. That is creating a rapid rise of temperatures, as confirmed by the recent observation of the near complete melting of the North Pole ice cap, a planetary feature that had been existing for several million years of planetary history.
It is clear that the Earth's system is heading towards a tipping point where rising temperatures will trigger a series of phenomena which will lead to runaway warming and to the total collapse of the ecosystem, even without further human generation of greenhouse gases. We have been monitoring the system evolution using climate modeling programs developed by humans, which turned out to be very sophisticated. According to these models, the tipping point could have been already reached or, in any case, will be reached within a few planetary revolutions. Therefore, we expect that the eradication of the human species could be fully accomplished within a few tens of revolutions.
Recent developments and recommendations for the future
Even though the Earth's climate tipping point is likely to have been reached, humans could still, theoretically, react with various countermeasures, such as restarting with the phasing out of fossil carbon burning, deploying non carbon energy sources, shielding the Earth from solar radiation, and so forth. In order to succeed, however, humans need first to regain control of the planetary information system. Our avatars on the planet report ongoing human efforts in this sense, perhaps triggered by the observation of the melting of the North Pole ice cap.
Given these recent developments, the coming planetary revolutions will be critical for the success of the human eradication plan. The Earth Orbital Outpost will keep the situation under strict and continuous monitoring. We do expect difficulties, in particular with our avatars. Their physical integrity cannot be guaranteed if their role in the eradication plan is discovered by humans not under our control. Nevertheless, they have done their job and their loss will not change the rapid evolution of the Earth's climate system.
Assuming that things continue to move according to plans, planet Earth will soon be free of humans and of most large vertebrates that could be a nuisance for colonization. We shall therefore proceed with the second part of the plan, which consists in cooling down the planet by deploying space mirrors. Subsequently, natural processes will re-absorb greenhouse gases and restore the planetary ecosystem in about one thousand planetary revolutions. At this point, the planet will be ready for colonization by our species. Ships with colonists are expected to arrive in about ten thousand revolutions from now. Then, a new planet will be added to our Galactic civilization!
End Report - The Earth Orbital Outpost
(note: this post was inspired by Isaac Asimov's story "The Gentle Vultures" - 1957)
Ugo - you provide a delightful example of that fine old line by Persig that "Hypotheses are an infinite resource." Given that there are a sizeable number of people convinced by some people - and by virtual persona bots - of the diversion-propaganda of Haarp operations' attempting to poison or cool or heat the planet, no doubt the alien-colonization meme could find a whole new constituency of believers.
ReplyDeleteOn one point I find the eradication team's report strangely coloured by a shallow human propaganda about tipping points - when it would of course be plain to that team that the feedbacks started with Water Vapour Increase around 1800, followed by Albedo Loss, Fertilized Peatbog Decay and Ocean Sink Decline in the '50s and '60s, and then by Permafrost Melt, Forest Loss and Soil Desiccation in the '70s, '80s and '90s, with the recent emergence of Methane Hydrates Melt. From a planetary perspective there is no single tipping point worth the name other than the date, now decades past, at which the problem outgrew the possibility of its commensurate mitigation by Emissions Control without recourse to both the Carbon recovery and Albedo Restoration modes of Geo-E.
To test this assertion, consider just how many decades of continuous warming after 2050 would be provided by a best case of Emissions Control - say of near-zero by 2050 - that would then be exacerbated by the loss of the cooling fossil sulphate parasol due to the ending of our fossil sulphate emissions. Those decades of warming would be driving the eight Major Interactive Feedbacks [MIFs] listed above far beyond the point of fully offsetting our best case of emissions control. This prognosis was inadvertently confirmed by the recent PNAS paper on Albedo Loss warming (due just to arctic sea-ice decline) from '79 to 2012 being equal to 25% of that from the period's anthro-CO2 output of about 64 ppm. Note that this is just one driver of just one of the eight MIFs.
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ReplyDeletePersonally I think we need to put the blame for the obstruction of the requisite global climate treaty squarely where it belongs, on Cheney's policy adopted by Obama of a 'Brinkmanship of Inaction' on climate against China. In 2012 it was reported that Asia faces intensifying droughts within 10 years that will threaten regional and potentially global food security. As shortages begin to bite, it is entirely predictable that civil protest in China will be inflamed by heavy handed policing (the only sort they seem to know) thus pushing the nation towards chaotic regime change and the end of its bid for global economic dominance. When you consider that maintaining US global economic dominance has been the paramount bipartisan policy priority since WW2, and then consider just what risks and massive costs the US accepted for decades in breaking the USSR's bid for dominance, the adoption of a policy that generates the climatic destabilization of the opponent's food supply is not at all far fetched. - When the US has massively greater food production per capita it was really quite predictable as a neo-con strategy.
The mass of Obama's actions (both of omission and commission) form a large, clear and otherwise inexplicable body of evidence that the policy has remained in operation since he adopted it from Cheney in March 2009.
The fact that Cheney worked very closely with the reviled Edward Teller on SDI under Reagan, and that Teller then wrote the seminal paper on sulphate aerosols Geo-E in '95 as a means to control global warming "should that one day become desirable . . ." provided the requisite exit strategy for the policy and thus a further dimension of confirmation of its intentional operation.
Personally I fully support the Global Commons Institute position of "Climate Justice without Vengeance" as a matter of practicality - but until the US policy is overthrown by its exposure to the public and the resulting outcry, there is simply no prospect of the justice of commensurate action on climate. Thus I hope that you may consider the analysis above carefully to see whether it may comprise the necessary new, unifying and energizing focus by which the hundreds of millions of climate-concerned may find a common voice that is both accusatory and implacable.
In years of searching I've yet to see anything with one tenth of its potential, but if there is perhaps some better focus I hope you'll propose it clearly, as the ends, not a particular means are my central concern.
All the best,
Lewis