1984, 26 years on...

I sit writing, wondering what the future holds...

The UK elections are taking an interesting term. I say "UK" (as in United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), although Fascist States of Britain might be more apropos. It is now next to impossible to move about without being subject to surveillance. You don't know when or where, but you will be watched. Of course, in foreseeing Big Brother, George Orwell didn't count on computers, which mean that it won't be long until you will be constantly subjected to surveillance, by an "infallible" machine, rather than randomly by a human. Of course, it won't take much, apart from a few relatively minor technological innovations, to have the computers monitoring to start making judgments about what you are doing - move a bit too sneakily, be a bit too shifty, be monitored away from your normal haunts, and you will be tagged as engaging in suspicious behaviour. Terrorism laws being what they are, suspicion equals guilt. The technology isn't that far off - there are plenty of experimental systems that can monitor body language to some extent.

How long until sentencing becomes the domain of the machine, too?

How long until a computer cannot process why anyone would state "Two plus two equals five", an illogical statement becomes a capital crime.

Not that 2+2=5. What is important is that a person is free to say it, even if they are wrong. Of course, that does not prevent someone from pointing out why it is wrong.

Once, a few years ago, I was doing night shift work. Normally, I would get too and from by motorbike; this particular night, I was walking the few kilometres home, along a major road. The weather was fine, and I enjoy a late night walk - I find bright light irritating. A walk during the day is tiring, a walk at night refreshing. I was stopped by the police, wanting to know why I was out late at night, where I was going, where I had come from. Of course, I had an answer that could be checked, but if I had just been out strolling, I could have found myself being questioned for several hours...

Back to the UK elections... one media mogul has been visible, tampering with opinion poll results, disposing of the ones which do not point towards his favourite candidate.

In the United States, many groups are openly voicing dissent and speaking of civil war; no doubt quite a few of them are quietly planning for it. No doubt, the same media mogul is adding fuel to the fire.

Is this what happens when most people have entertained themselves into a collective coma?

I sit, writing, listening to Richard Wagner, thinking...

The Value of Ethics, part 1

Questions of supplies have raised other thoughts - what are the ethics of post-apocalyptic survival? Particularly in regards to preparation

For example, I've been looking into various plants that I could get, as well as thinking about those that are a lot more difficult to get...

The easily obtained, legal plants aren't a problem - except when it comes to watering, fertilising, ensuring they get the right light, are grown with the right temperature regime. In an underground shelter, that all obviously harder than it sounds. Seeds are good - but take a long time to grow to into productive plants. And a tree that needs a couple of hundred hours of chill to set fruit and one that is frost sensitive are difficult to grow in the same region.

But... of more interest are the plants that are difficult... Cannabis sativa is an obvious one. Its fibre is suitable for ropes, clothes, making plastics, yet most people consider only the pharmacological use. Or Papaver somniferum - again, anyone attempting to get some gets questions from various authorities or, worse still, visits from local... special interest groups wanting to take possession, with or without your acquiescence. Never mind your efforts to keep enough alive and growing for future use.

Let's face it - even Nicotiana tabacum is legal to have (prepared), legal to consume, but in most places illegal to grow. Even if you have a specialised interest in gardening... It may not be the most obviously useful plant, from a restarting society point-of-view, but it's definitely an important one. It has more use as an item of trade than anything else, particularly when you need resources that you would have to spend time and energy trying to acquire - especially if you'd have to fight for them otherwise...

So... the questions of - how ethical is it to break the law for a circumstance which might not (in the eyes of most people) happen?

Give me land, lots of land...

I have been looking over land in the local area. As much as I am happy living, and working an acre, with access to a few more if necessary, any sizable shelter will need a bit more space to work it properly.

If you aren't forced to evacuate underground, then the more space you have, the more food you can grow. It's more to work, but more people you can support. There are many things worth considering - does the land have a creek or at least some sort of water, for example?

If you have to evacuate underground, then there are whole new considerations. Are you going to build horizontally, vertically, or both? Vertically takes a lot of very good design, takes up less ground area, with much higher costs; horizontally makes any building works more obvious, is easier to do, takes up more ground area... less shielding against radiation. A combination has some of the benefits, some of the problems.

Of course, a workforce who can do this (or at least arrange this to be done) makes the task easier... Of course, you have to do things in a way that local government won't notice, or worry about, or that curious people won't poke there nose into, but...

Prices of around $1 million for a few hundred acres are high, but would be worthwhile investment for a group... Even if an investor was to front most of that in order to ensure their survival, accepting the face that they need support.

The Stark Solution

Without going into the rest of the book, there is something I always have found grating in Ben Elton's novel "Stark". Perhaps it was his intention to have it irritate, perhaps it was his way of killing everyone off...

The end of the novel is very bleak, ending in everyone dying - the good, the bad, the innocent. The way the novel's Baddies die off is the one which could seem to be, with a bit of hindsight on their part, easily prevented.

Simply, the mega-ultra-rich who are the antagonists escape the destruction that they have headed (with the complicity of everyone in the story), die by suicide. They have orchestrated a massive survival program, yet only to choose to save themselves. They take no technical personnel, no workers, no scientists, not even any entertainment people. One or two try to take people of a more... intimate entertainment strain, one even assigns a person's weight, space, and spot to his supply of heroin.

Their continued, collected selfishness fails to notice that the only company they will have are the people that they most despise - each other. By various means, they kill themselves - with the Earth dying in the background.


It's irritating because not only is it so stupidly preventable but because, human nature being what it is, it is easily likely that that would happen.

No man (or, indeed, woman) is an island. Time and time again, it has been shown that individuals or small groups have a harder time of surviving than larger groups do - particularly in harder environments. If you want to rebuild civilisation (or build a new one), you can't do it as a single person, you need a group. There is too much to do to do otherwise.

I'm slowly working on the numbers, but it could quite easily be a half to a third of people needing to be workers, entertainment, and so on, a third to a quarter scientific, engineering, and technical; the rest the traditional "upper" classes. Of course, there would likely be children - needing resources, space, education but not adding to the workforce for several years.

Case in point - farming vegetables and grains is a labour intensive process. It can be made easier, but still requires work. I've moved to growing food trees and bamboo - I don't have the time at the moment to do much more.

The Lament of An Engineer

The more that I have considered the issues, the more I have come to accept that this endeavour is like sending humans out into space to create a new colony somewhere...

Consider... You can easily imagine the mission taking several years. You have to ensure that any biosystem that you put in place works - and can handle a few false starts. You have to ensure that you have all the equipment you need, or can make or improvise the things you suddenly find you do. You need as big a knowledge base as possible. You have to ensure that your power supply won't leave you in the dark, or in the cold, or suffocating. You have to have a vessel large enough to do all this, protect its occupants, and get where it's going.

All of this is the technical side of things, and costs a lot to do.

You need to start with a population of people that can get along, has the combined knowledge and experience, and of a size large enough to buffer against losses and protect against inbreeding.

Increase the population from 4 to 400, the costs escalate dramatically.

Ideally, you also don't just send one mission, you have a few.

Each time you add a colony, add each mission cost to the list...


The technical side of things, I can do. I am unashamedly a bibliophile, have post-graduate training in Engineering and Science... various fields, various levels of training, enough to bluff or at least see very interesting things. I hobby farm, so am learning all the things involved in keeping plants productive and alive, am slowly (as time and money allow) putting together a hydroponic system, slowly adding solar, and will add other methods, again as time and money allow. The technical side of things, I can do.

It's the raising money that I'm no good at... Finding people rich enough to convince that this is a worthwhile pursuit - and then convincing them that they need to supply the money... As for convincing people... While I am often the one people turn to when they need to know what to do, I am not blessed with the silver tongue that gathers them around in the first place.

Putting the species "to sleep"...

A two year old boy cries "Please, daddy" as his father tortures and beats him to death.

A group of young "men" terrorise and torture a disabled woman.

In some countries, people believe that the way to get rid of AIDS is to have sex with virgins.

A junkie comes in and, after frustrating me with my trying to find out what she actually wants and my walking away, tells me that I should be nice and happy.

Sometimes it doesn't take much to make you conclude that perhaps the species needs to be thinned out a bit.

Humans have no real threats other than ourselves. Our ingenuity has allowed us to get rid of most of the animals that threaten us. Our ingenuity and our beliefs have done so - no-one has proved that rhino horn or tiger penis does what "traditional" medicine claims, yet plenty of rhinos and tigers are killed where Viagra would be better.

The only predators humans have are ourselves... and you would have thought that, by now, we'd have worked out how to cooperate. But, no...

There was a psychological experiment done many years back, where the population of a large cage of rats was allowed to grow. The rats had all the food and water they required, yet the colony broke down as the stress of such a high population in a confined space drove them insane. Perhaps that's what's happening to people...

Things are quiet at the moment, "investigations" seem to have dwindled. In world news, it is the quiet before the storm - you feel as if things cannot build much more before they overflow, but keep building they do.

Others have noticed this, although they tend to operate more on a prophecy level than on taking note of what's happening... I write that and I wonder - what's the difference?