A metaphor

[openspace4life]

Humanity is crammed onto the Titanic, which is barrelling toward an iceberg. The iceberg is still far enough away that only a few sharp-eyed people can see it in the dark. Some of those people are banging on the control-room door, yelling at the captain to change course. So far, he's turned the wheel a few degrees to port, but we don't know if he did that because of the iceberg or because he was planning to anyway. It's not enough, of course, though he may not realize that. Maybe he thinks a glancing blow to the iceberg would be no problem, given all the engineering that went into making the ship "unsinkable."

Even if he does turn the wheel hard over, the massive inertia of the Titanic is such that it may not be able to change course fast enough. So some other sharp-eyed people are making the rounds of all the passengers and crew, trying to get them all to move to the port side of the ship and heel it over some to help it turn faster. Many of the people they talk to complain that this could capsize the ship and kill us all anyway. They may be right, but it's definitely the lesser of the two dangers--even though there aren't enough lifeboats, by a factor of millions.

What does the iceberg represent? Well, here's the list of possibilities I've come up with so far:

1. Depletion of clean water supplies.



2. Massive crop failures due to global warming, topsoil depletion, a defect in a genetically-engineered crop species, or an unexpected side effect of the extinction of a wild species.



3. Deadly global pandemics resulting from global warming and populations displaced by rising sea levels.



4. Collapse of electricity grids due to accelerating rises in oil prices. This would make it very difficult to produce fertilizer, or to provide fuel for most vehicles, including farm equipment.



5. The catastrophic failure of a misguided attempt at solving global environmental problems using a quick, cheap technical fix, such as J. Craig Venter's plan to make genetically-engineered carbon-dioxide-eating microbes.



6. Total economic collapse and/or global thermonuclear war resulting from any of the above.