This article is classified "Partly real, partly fictional"
INTRODUCTION:
So you've got your eye on a nice little planet. It is covered in luscious,
green plants, wide oceans and has a lovely atmosphere (78% Nitrogen, 21%
Oxygen, 1% Argon). The only problem is how to get rid of the irritating
ape-descendants with the digital-watch fixation.
This article tells you how to do it in no more than a couple of millennia.
It will make a bit of a mess of the biosphere, but that should clear itself
up in no more than a millennium or two.
You're hooked, right? "How do I start?" you ask yourself. Well, you've got
an advantage in working with a primate species with a big enough brain to
grasp abstract concepts, and much of its behaviour implemented in software
-- we will be adapting the behaviour later on. The opposable thumb and
tool-using ability will be useful later too.
This article will first discuss some of the potential obstacles in
extinguishing an entire species and consider possible ways around these
problems. (It is important to take into account the checks that prevent
species of animals from habitually destroying themselves.) Next, we shall
concentrate on providing the main groundwork for the project, setting up a
global financial system -- a free economy -- and some of the effects which
this will have. Finally we discuss how one should deliver the final, fatal
blows to the human race.
CONSIDERATIONS:
The theory goes like this: no individual human or small group is able to
destroy the whole race. And trying to have every small, tribal group
individually precipitate its own demise (by destroying its habitat) is
also doomed to failure since:
1) To get any group of animals to destroy their own habitat is
very difficult, since to be a natural habitat, the animal must
be adapted to living there. To destroy one's environment is to be
maladapted to that environment. This suggests we should move
people around and put them in unfamiliar and alien surroundings.
2) The groups which do destroy themselves leave any remaining,
non-destructive groups, (however few) to prosper and multiply; we
must get the entire race to cooperate in its downfall -- form
one vast corporate juggernaut of destruction!
3) An individual or small group is most likely to notice the
damage they are doing; it is only by effectively isolating cause
and effect for long enough that the damage can become effective
and permanent. The dog can keep on biting the hand that feeds it
as long as it doesn't go hungry.
METHOD:
The method we are going to use is to set up a Global economy. A system of
monetary transfer which encompasses the planet, and which is rigorously
enforced and promoted by every major group of humans.
Money abstracts wealth and provides a standard unit of currency which has no
values attached to it (there is no such thing as `good' or `bad' money).
Moreover, an economy engenders specialisation. The producers produce and
the consumers consume. The consumers pay money to the producers, so the
producers try to create as much of the product as possible as cheaply as
possible; the consumers try to obtain as much money as possible and buy the
cheapest goods possible. Goods -- food, clothes, housing, water, air -- all
flow through the system to the merry jingle of profit.
With a class of specialist producers providing the bare necessities of life,
the system can afford to keep specialists in other areas: teachers, makers
of luxury goods, scientists, priests, prostitutes, soldiers; where there is
money, there are professions. In a small tribe with no financial
organisation, individuals spend their time hunting for and gathering food and
tending their young; in an economy, by contrast, individuals spend half their
time making money (by selling a product or service) and the other half
expending it (buying and using other products and services).
The implications of this system really are enormous. We are starting to
breach some of the problems outlined above:
2) The promise of commerce (and therefore, profit) tends to bring groups
together. In addition, groups which can support professional armies tend to
prevail over groups with no full-time warriors. As the lure of profit is
strong, and military power persuasive, we begin to see large nation-states
emerge, through conquests military and economic.
In time, the natural trade barriers between even these vast states begin to
crumble.
1) As countries and economies get bigger, one can observe the enormous
movement of people and goods within them. Cities, created for protection
and commerce, introduce vast numbers of people to a lifestyle which is
increasingly remote from the realities of the world -- from food production
and water source; from the plants and animals which provide clothing; from
the rocks and trees which are building materials.
Even `wild' areas and countryside become increasingly urbanised: roads are
built for transporting goods and staging posts and roadside cafes grow up
along the roads. To provide the essentials of life to citizens of our
booming economy, specialists spring up to grow and harvest the raw
materials, farming vast, treeless plains, planting foreign and maladapted
plants, spreading toxins and defoliants, breeding other animals into
perverse and unnatural shapes, quarrying enormous holes in the ground and
uprooting, slashing and burning entire ecosystems.
If this sounds like a perverse and unlikely path for Mankind to take,
remember that...
3) They won't feel the effects at once.
After all, the human population represents only a small proportion of life
on the planet. There are plenty of natural resources and plenty of ways to
exploit a particular resource (fertile ground, say) well past the stage at
which it ceases to be naturally sustainable (by using fertilizers and
weedkillers for example).
Fortunately, our encroaching civilisation has invested in scientists who
have plenty of time to invent things like pesticides, and a medical
profession which can devote its time to patching up the victims of wars and
urban life and rediscover the benefits of a balanced diet. [`Civilised'
diets are notoriously deficient in nutrition, since it is easier for farmers
to concentrate on only a few different types of crops; fewer than the
varieties in which primitive hunter-gatherers indulge.]
Technology becomes increasingly responsible for feeding, clothing, watering,
housing and disposing the waste of the ballooning human population,
effectively masking the fact that by this time it has become completely
unsustainable, like Wile E. Coyote still running, unaware that he has run
off the cliff and is about to plunge to the desert floor.
There may still be time for him to scramble back, so it probably better to
drop a proverbial anvil on his head before he gets the chance...
PUTTING THE BOOT IN:
It may sound like we have a winning formula here, but there are a few things
we have to do to push the species over the edge completely.
Representative democracy:
Ideally, our megasociety should have really bad leadership towards the end.
For the final environmental apocalypse, world leaders must consistently
ignore all the warning signs of impending doom and encourage the exploitation
of their natural habitat to carry on apace. There is propaganda to be
manipulated, industry to be encouraged, dissenters to be suppressed and a
public to be kept contented and ill-informed.
What better way to achieve really bad leadership than to put a bunch of
total incompetents in charge? And ideally, the population of this massive
global economy should want to be governed by their leaders. This is
actually possible! Organise a system by which the public think they are in
charge. Specifically: restrict publication of information to those with
enough money and have ruling officials elected.
Public elections are an excellent selection method for really bad leaders.
Unless the public are well informed (which they cannot be with the press and
media governed by market forces), only candidates who answer to certain
criteria can achieve power:
a) Since they depend upon public goodwill to be elected, they must
relentlessly push populist and short-term policies, policies which
ignore real issues and seek to reassure and comfort their voters.
Similarly, our politicians can be relied upon to follow fashions
and fads closely, changing their policies on the whim of the
popular media.
b) They must cultivate their own image and power over that of
competitors, ruthlessly covering up scandal and stabbing colleagues
in the back when necessary.
By this method you can be sure that only the rich, power-hungry and ruthless
become powerful leaders.
Fast science/technology:
Science, the systematic investigation of Nature, must speed up. Likewise,
we should aim to shorten the time between a scientific discovery being made
and this new discovery being put to use. The reason for this is that with
technology becoming increasingly powerful, hastily implemented science has
really great potential for causing massive damage.
Of course, only a pretty sick society would condone the marketing of
immature and untested science (nuclear energy or genetic engineering, for
example) before the risks are fully known. It goes almost without saying
that if there is a financial imperative, in the money-driven society we are
building here, such haste is difficult to prevent!
So instant technology is offered by the scientific establishment while
development and research into new areas accelerates and engineers today are
busy selling what was the cutting edge of research yesterday.
Of course, some of the problems which this science produces will be noticed,
and when the pressure from an angry public becomes greater than the pressure
of the corporations' backhanders, a government must do something. Thankfully
the `solution' will usually be just more instant scientific panacea; new
illnesses are treated with newer medicines and the science continues on
apace.
You should keep an eye on the scientific community, however. This, by
definition, contains too many free-thinking and open-minded individuals.
You should therefore take pains to make sure that the media ignores the
majority of warnings from scientists (1) -- it may help to do some planning
on this one and to foster mistrust and fear of science at an early stage.
Planting the seeds of fundamentalist religion may help too (any brand will
do).
Make your opponents look silly:
Naturally, dire warnings of death and destruction should be avoided at all
cost. Your society must not become aware of its destruction, because the
nations you have been creating are so technologically sophisticated that they
would be easily able to avoid this natural armageddon if sufficiently
motivated.
Information has a way of making itself known, in time, so the best way to
prevent civilisation from becoming aware of its plight is to make sure that
it doesn't want to know. We are starting from a fortunate position in that
humans evolved in small tribal groups and are emotionally unable to relate to
the notion of global extinction. On top of this is the fact that the global
economy has powerful interests involved in (over)exploiting natural
resources. However you must cope with the fact that some people will
become concerned about the plight of their species, especially since the
evidence is there for all to see.
One of the best ways to make sure that impending doom is ignored is to ensure
that its news is trivialised: you must avoid getting the vast populations
worried at all costs. The fact that these populations are being kept well
fed and watered by the system obviously helps.
Rapid population growth:
One of the best ways to destroy a population's ecosystem is to vastly
increase that population. Fortunately, population growth is practically
guaranteed by wealth, something which our society is not be lacking. Wealth
can afford doctors to prolong life and give babies to infertile parents. And
these new nations with vast farming concerns are more than able to keep up
with demand for food. The huge increases in human numbers and the (farm)land
required to keep them alive can be easily accommodated by amputating more
natural land. (You should make sure, meanwhile, that the population is blind
to the dangers of felling vast areas of woodland, draining marshes and
damming rivers; and deaf to the warnings -- see above.)
Consumer capitalism:
Well, you should have already managed to arrange a system of consumer
capitalism. But ideally we would like to accelerate its effects; to persuade
more people to consume more product, prompting more production, and hence
more ecological devastation.
Are you beset by problems in your scheme to run down the human race? Not
enough consumers buying useless and environmentally-damaging goods? You need
ADVERTISING! Yes! Just implant the seeds of product-promotion in any sentient
population and see the consumption take off! Now there's new improved
Advertising, with Television! Guaranteed to have grasping, materialistic
populations running for extinction before you can say "thirty second product
slot". Try some today!
SUMMARY:
Most of this project is just a matter of prompting the societies along
occasionally -- there's a bit of work to be done to start it all off -- but
mostly the species you're trying to kill will do your job for you. To
recap: you first prompt the indigenous humans to adopt a monetary system,
then later push for embellishments like `representative democracy' and a
consumer culture.
After a few thousand years of hard work, you should be able to sit back and
watch as the human population approaches doomsday numbers (about x billion)
and natural disasters, especially famines, droughts and epidemic diseases
start to decimate the population. Civil wars, tribal and religious violence,
riots, bloody revolutions (and so on) become more common. Eventually the
backbone of civilisation breaks and billions die in the resulting anarchy.
Without the Economy to support them, most starve, unable to eke out a living
on infertile land. Softened by a safe life with excellent medical care, the
inhospitable wilderness and epidemic diseases take their toll on the
ex-civilians of our global economy.
At this point there are still hundreds of millions of surviving humans, but
faced with only limited food and land resources, we can expect most to
quickly dwindle to extinction. Many others, will take the quick way out;
tin-pot dictatorships unleash chemical, biological and nuclear death on other
nations in competing for tiny and shrinking resources. This should quickly
wipe out the rest of the survivors.
There will soon be no sign of Homo Sapiens.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Go figure.
(1) While writing this article I learned that 16000 scientists, a couple of
them Nobel winners, recently submitted an open letter to the governments of
the world, warning of the dangers of the current exploding population.
Nobody seemed to notice. See `Author's note'.