Never too early to voluminously read a Jonathan Edelstein timeline.
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Wow, I thought the thread was locked... Wasn't it?
God, this year has really been screwing with me.
It was until I posted a couple of new stories. Which reminds me...
Is there a list of US constitutional amendments from ITTL?
IIRC :
1-12 : pre-PoD
13th : same as IOTL
14th : recognises citizenship of ex-slaves
15th : incorporates some rights at state and local levels
16th : same as IOTL
17th : same as IOTL
18th : woman suffrage, abolished poll taxes, literacy tests and property qualifications, incorporated the Bill of Rights at state levels
??th : changes the "$20 clause" to a larger amount and pegs it to inflation
As for the status of other amendments to the US Constitution approved IOTL :
20th : Probably still happens, although a different date may be selected
22nd : Could still happen, but I don't think it would, as the two-term precedent has IIRC not been broken
23rd : D.C. is a state here, so no.
24th : Already covered by the *18th.
25th : Honestly, this one should have come earlier ITTL, after Altgeld died in office, so the 18th should logically be the 19th.
26th : Could go either waay, but there would be no direct impetus with no draft in the late 20th century.
27th : Could still happen.
EDIT :
This is my guess :
19th : Presidential succession amendment. Probably has the Senator Pro Tempore third, Speaker of the House fourth, and goes through the cabinet secretaries in a different order from IOTL ; although the Secretary of State is still probably fifth, the Secretary of War/Defense probably is lower down.
20th : Same as the 20th IOTL
21st : The 20 Dollar Clause hot fix
Possible amendments after 1935 : The Bricker, Single Subject, Hatch and Equal Rights Amendments are the proposed amendments that could have been implemented ITTL. The Bricker Amendment would be most likely to have happened in reaction to internationalism in the post-Consensus era (I would say probably in the 1970s), the Hatch Amendment in the 2000s with the growth of dual citizenship, and the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
IIRC :
1-12 : pre-PoD
13th : same as IOTL
14th : recognises citizenship of ex-slaves
15th : incorporates some rights at state and local levels
16th : same as IOTL
17th : same as IOTL
18th : woman suffrage, abolished poll taxes, literacy tests and property qualifications, incorporated the Bill of Rights at state levels
??th : changes the "$20 clause" to a larger amount and pegs it to inflation
As for the status of other amendments to the US Constitution approved IOTL :
20th : Probably still happens, although a different date may be selected
22nd : Could still happen, but I don't think it would, as the two-term precedent has IIRC not been broken
23rd : D.C. is a state here, so no.
24th : Already covered by the *18th.
25th : Honestly, this one should have come earlier ITTL, after Altgeld died in office, so the 18th should logically be the 19th.
26th : Could go either waay, but there would be no direct impetus with no draft in the late 20th century.
27th : Could still happen.
EDIT :
This is my guess :
19th : Presidential succession amendment. Probably has the Senator Pro Tempore third, Speaker of the House fourth, and goes through the cabinet secretaries in a different order from IOTL ; although the Secretary of State is still probably fifth, the Secretary of War/Defense probably is lower down.
20th : Same as the 20th IOTL
21st : The 20 Dollar Clause hot fix
Possible amendments after 1935 : The Bricker, Single Subject, Hatch and Equal Rights Amendments are the proposed amendments that could have been implemented ITTL. The Bricker Amendment would be most likely to have happened in reaction to internationalism in the post-Consensus era (I would say probably in the 1970s), the Hatch Amendment in the 2000s with the growth of dual citizenship, and the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
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Malêverse 2100: The Day of Beginning
“Good morning, Ibrahim,” the datacloth said. “It’s zero three forty-five, second December 2100, thirtieth Ramadan 1524. It’s eight degrees outside, clear with occasional clouds. You have twenty hours and fourteen minutes left to vote in the carbon balance referendum…”
“Khara, shut up,” said Ibrahim, rolling off his futon and fumbling for his clothes. He must have been too tired after iftar last night to take the datacloth off voice. But maybe it was for the best; Antarctic seasons blew his sleep cycle to hell at the best of times, and without the voice alarm, he’d have slept through breakfast for sure.
He’d almost done that anyway. The sun never set here in December, and no one could agree whether to use Mecca, Cape Town or Christchurch time, so the compromise – the consensus, although it had taken plenty of shouting to get there – was that the fast began at four. He had fifteen minutes to shower, pray and eat, and he suddenly wished the damn cloth had woken him at three thirty instead.
The shower was easy. The datacloth – damn it to the tenth generation – had learned Ibrahim’s habits well enough to know that he’d want to do that first, and by the time he got to his feet, the sound of rushing water had already started and steam was coming from the stall. The hot water shocked him awake and it took only a moment to wash clean, and then he threw on the clothes he’d dragged from the dresser and stirred some lingonberry and sea-buckthorn into last night’s fufu for sahur. That done, he knelt vaguely to the north and said a quick fajr – a perfunctory fajr, his mother would have told him, but she wasn’t here – and walked out the front door. It was three fifty-nine.
Outside, the sun was low in the eastern sky and the breeze carried the smell of the sea. After the heat of the shower and the closeness of the apartment, the air felt fresh and bracing. Ibrahim would never have imagined, growing up in Ilorin, that he would go outside in eight-degree weather in only his street clothes, but unlike the summer’s endless days and the winter’s unrelieved nights, he’d long since become used to that. Eight degrees with the sun in his face felt life-giving, and the bright colors of the apartment blocks and the berries and ornamental mosses in the community garden made it more so. The earliness of the hour was forgotten; he was alive to the world.
He turned left at the main street, past the assembly-field at the Plaza of Pines with its moss border in the blue, green and white of the Consistory Environmental Section; past the low public buildings and university campus in airy arctic-modern style; through the tangle of warehouses and garages that ringed the port; and finally to the docks. The Sea-Gardener was waiting at the end of one of the Consistory piers. His graduate assistant, Wojciech, was also there, running diagnostics.
Wojciech looked up at the sound of Ibrahim’s footsteps. “Everything green,” he said. “The kids will be here in a few minutes.” And then, after a moment’s pause, “did you vote yet?” He didn’t even wait for Ibrahim to shake his head before saying, “Me neither. Can’t seem to decide.”
“No one can,” Ibrahim answered. He knew that wasn’t true – more than three billion votes had been recorded already – but then he realized it was true of the people in his section and most of those he knew in similar sections elsewhere. The people like him – the ones who actually worked maintaining the carbon balance day to day – were having the hardest time deciding whether to change it.
“We know how much this will cost,” Wojciech said – Wojciech always could read his thoughts. “Keeping the climate where it is costs a tenth of the world’s GDP. How much more to change it back – but how much not to?”
That was it in a nutshell, wasn’t it? The referendum question was simple enough: should it be the goal of the Consistory Environmental Section to restore as far as possible, no later than 2200, the climate that existed prior to the onset of anthropogenic climate change? But both alternatives carried the potential for enormous costs, not all of them in money.
He started to say something – Wojciech seemed to be looking for a serious answer – but was cut short by the sound of children’s voices. A dozen of them were coming down the dock with the day’s duty teacher, Maryam, in tow. The younger ones were running and chattering with excitement even though they must have been up since three. Ibrahim knew the students competed to be assigned to the Sea Gardener on their public-work days, although he wasn’t vain enough to think it was because of him.
He greeted Maryam as the children swarmed up the gangway and found their favorite vantage points for departure. The two of them had been at the university together for a couple of years; they’d gone different places during their Wanderjahre, but they’d both fetched up here at around the same time, and for most of the past month, they’d seen each other at iftar. She returned the greeting and finished herding her charges aboard; he double-checked the diagnostics and made his way to the controls. He made sure that Wojciech had finished untying, checked the time on the bridge readout – four forty-two – and cast off.
Outside the harbor, the boat swung north up the coast. Ibrahim let his eyes rest on the carpet of hairgrass and yellow pearlwort flowers that started a kilometer away, rising past stands of feral berries to rugged, mossy cliffs. There were snow-capped mountains in the distance, but the cliffs and strand had none; this part of the peninsula had been ice-free in summer since before Ibrahim was born, and the lines of glacial erosion were starting to be replaced by runoff channels. For forty years, since the climate had stabilized, it had been the Consistory’s policy to keep it that way. Now that might change…
“I voted yes!” said one of the students – Catherine, he remembered, one of the second-years. He wondered for a moment if the school had held a mock vote, but then he recalled that the age threshold had been waived for this referendum. And why not? This wasn’t an election for town council or world chamber or the governing board of the Antarctic Legatum Humanitatis – it might set the direction of the planet for as long as the students were likely to live. For Catherine to have a vote almost made more sense than for Ibrahim to vote on a project whose end he would never see.
“How come?” asked Maryam. She was never one to miss a chance to teach, Ibrahim remembered.
“My mother says it’s for the animals,” Catherine answered, “and the sea.” Ibrahim, still looking out at the coast, nodded silently. Those were the reasons for a yes vote that he, too, found most persuasive. Temperatures and carbon dioxide levels might have stabilized, but that didn’t mean the planet was done changing; sea levels were projected to keep rising for another fifty years, and just because the elephants and big cats and apes had barely made it didn’t mean that the world had stopped losing species. And in a world where biodiversity was wealth…
“But what about the animals and plants that have adapted to the new climate?” Maryam pressed, and there was the most persuasive case for a no. The natural environment – the human environment too – had just survived a major disruption; what would a second one in the space of two centuries do? Would a hundred-year timetable be enough to cushion the impact, or would returning to the baseline kill as many species as leaving it had done?
“And what about the life where there was none before?” said another of the students. Yes, that too was something to consider in a place that had been green for only half a century, and even more so as the Sea Gardener drew closer to its destination. Below Ibrahim now, visible through shockingly clear water, were the vast beds of seagrass that had been introduced here – that had been engineered here – to sequester carbon. And on the coastal verge, now only three hundred meters distant, the inlets that threaded through the penguin rookeries were a tangle of low, woody plants whose genetic stock included both Arctic willow and temperate mangrove.
He anchored the boat at the first of the day’s inspection sites. “Suit up!” he called, and the students ran to the diving-suit lockers as he went to get his own. This was why the children fought for this assignment, and it took only a moment before everyone was assembled at the rail.
“All right,” Ibrahim said when the excitement had died down. “Who can tell me what we’re looking for?”
One of the sixth-years, Mei, raised her hand first. “Dieback?”
“Yes. You’ve got the historic figures for all the marine animal populations in the suit display – if any of them are declining, we need to know. We also need to make sure the penguins and seals have a path to their hunting grounds. That can change every year, so if they’re not here, we need to know where they’re going. Anyone else?”
“Changes in the water?” asked Catherine.
“Yes, all that carbon the seagrass is trapping has to go somewhere. Your suits can test that too – look for any changes in the pH, oxygen levels, nutrients… And make sure you’re all back here in thirty minutes. The water temperature is minus two, and even with the suits on, you can get hypothermia if you stay much longer than that. We’ve got all your locations, but we don’t want to have to pull you out. You understand?”
The students chorused their assent, but they didn’t really care about the water temperature; they wanted to explore. And Ibrahim couldn’t really blame them. There was an initial shock of cold as he followed them into the water, but it went away quickly – nothing could really be cold to someone who’d worked a season on the winter maintenance crew at the highland solar farms – and once it passed, he was conscious only of the swaying forest of seagrass and the fish swimming through rippling green-tinted light. These waters had always been rich with life, and it had adapted well to the grass, which was now food source and dwelling-place.
He swam to the bottom, twenty meters down; here, decaying seagrass supported mats of bacteria and the sea-worms and krill that fed on them. Some of the bacteria, too, had been introduced from the Arctic to minimize the release of sequestered carbon when the seagrass decomposed, and Ibrahim ran his tests to make sure it was doing so. A couple of readings were slightly high, but within the range of random variation and well within acceptable levels; he routed them to the Environmental Section database but without any alarms.
So much effort, balancing the native species with the invasive ones and the engineered ones. This was no longer really a natural ecosystem or even a garden; it was a factory, and it would have to become even more of one if the referendum passed – at least until the climate restoration was far enough along for these waters to become icebound again. But maybe, if the vote passed and the project succeeded, it would be possible to let go…
Or would it, even then? A line that the other Ibrahim had written – the ancestor that Ibrahim was named after – came suddenly to mind. It was near the end of The Silent Ones, just after their speech had been restored – I have learned so many things for which our words were not made. The past was a lost country; to restore it was to go from one arbitrary point to another, and the force of all that had happened between then and now would push it inexorably onward.
Ibrahim wondered what his ancestor would have thought of the referendum. Was the arbitrary point of a century ago worth returning to, and which way would the weight of change move it from there? But there was no way to ask. The other Ibrahim was two hundred years dead, cut down at twenty-two by an Afghan sword at Saragarhi, and the idea that the climate was in humans’ power to change would have seemed to him like purest fantasy.
But he might have known how to approach it, at least. The dead Ibrahim was more of a Belloist than the living one, and far more of a mystic; he had instinctively understood the world as community, and his fascination with movement would have told him which way that community could run and which way it would stumble. Without that instinct, though, how could anyone know? By letting everyone in the community speak and counting their votes, Ibrahim guessed, and that just brought his question back to where it began. I have learned so many things for which these words were not made.
With a start, Ibrahim realized he had been underwater for twenty-eight minutes. He surfaced carefully and swam to the boat as quickly as he could, but not in time to avoid the children’s laughter.
“Yes, I’m the late one,” he said. “I need to listen to myself better. Go warm up – it’s an hour to the next site.”
There was more laughter at his expense, but the students hurried below, leaving only Wojciech and Maryam on deck. It was ten after six and Wojciech reached for the coffee-maker, then remembered who he was with and faltered.
“Don’t let us stop you,” Ibrahim said. “And the way you make coffee, just the smell of it should last me until iftar.”
Wojciech looked to Maryam to see if he had her permission too and, satisfied, started the brewing. “Did you find an answer down there?”
“I think I at least found the question.”
“Maybe you’ll decide after dhuhr,” Maryam said.
Ibrahim nodded. They’d probably be back in port for dhuhr, and he wouldn’t have to hurry it as he had hurried through fajr. He might be in the right frame of mind after, and he wanted to cast his vote before the Eid began.
Or maybe he was there already. Maybe he had found an answer, or at least his answer. He would wait until dhuhr, but he didn’t think he’d change his mind.
The only way the world could go was onward, and he hoped humanity had learned enough.
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I've had a long day, Jonathan, and I needed this. You always deliver the humanist goods. Thank you.
Thanks, y'all. I briefly considered calling this update "Green Antarctica," but that would have been both plagiarism and inappropriately nightmare-inducing.
@Somebody-Someone, sorry I missed your question about constitutional amendments when you first posted it - I'll answer after work.
@Somebody-Someone, sorry I missed your question about constitutional amendments when you first posted it - I'll answer after work.
Using the same title as another work isn't plagiarism, I don't think, without other greater similarities. Even if you're doing it knowingly, it's more of a jokey kind of reference than anything else...
This looks about right. In terms of presidential succession, I suspect that Altgeld's death generated discussion but not a great deal of urgency - after all, the election had already happened, an acting president was named under whatever version of the Presidential Succession Act was in effect at the time (probably the 1792 one, as there would have been no need to change it up to then), and so the general feeling would be that the system worked. Maybe there was a commission that eventually fizzled, with the issue of presidential and vice-presidential disabilities and vacancies being revisited only after some later crisis.
OTOH, Altgeld's death would prompt a 20th Amendment-type reform, because there was no more practical need to delay the inauguration until March 4, and a long transitional period under an acting president would be seen as risky. Maybe that would be the 18th Amendment ITTL, moving the change of term up to January 1, with the civil rights amendment (as you say) being retconned to the 19th.
As you say, no need for the 23rd or 24th.
I think there would eventually be an equivalent to the 26th even without a *Vietnam War - IOTL, the idea of lowering the voting age to 18 had been gaining support since the 1940s, and was driven not only by the draft but by changing norms of political participation and of young people's role in public life. The 18-year voting age happened in a lot of other countries IOTL around the same time as it did in the US, and in most of those countries, Vietnam wasn't a factor. I'd anticipate that this would happen around that time ITTL as well, with the breaking of the Consensus and the second civil rights era providing the impetus. The question is whether the age would be reduced to 18 or to a lower number.
27th - depends on whether there's a scandal or a populist revolt involving congressional salaries, and also on whether someone "rediscovers" it, which IOTL happened in a pretty random way. I'll flip a coin - tails, so no.
I also don't think there would be a fix for the Seventh Amendment civil jury clause. American cultural conservatives ITTL love juries - they're a localist, grass-roots form of justice, and a check on excessive professionalization of the courts - so they'd resist changing an amendment that essentially guarantees juries in all federal civil suits, and I doubt there would be a sufficient number of lawmakers who would see this as enough of a problem to fight over.
I'd agree about the Bricker Amendment, and the ERA probably passes during the second civil rights era as you suggest, but I think the Hatch Amendment happens earlier given that there was no immigration pause ITTL. There would probably also be an amendment at some point to change federal legislative elections from FPTP to a system more suited to multiple parties - multi-member House districts with proportional representation in states with more than one representative, ranked choice/instant runoff in Senate elections and states with at-large House members, possibly proportional allocation of electoral votes. (The electoral college itself has survived, given how useful it has proven for coalition-building ITTL and given that its inequities have been reduced by a larger House and the eventual abolition of winner-take-all.)
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Good call there!
Thinking about the 2100 global referendum, my first notion of how I'd vote myself was to favor stabilizing things as they had settled by that late date, on the theory that on a geologic and evolutionary timescale, fluctuation in climate is probably necessary to maintain high levels of species diversity, but overall in the Anthropocene it becomes human responsibility to sustain that, which can be done in a world of stabilized climate by using appropriate zoning of heavy human impact to partition off numerous mini-niches with limited points of contact between them--allowing them to be totally isolated would be bad, but providing some "ventilation" can as it were simulate equivalent diversification through time-dependent changes, while avoiding mass die-off generally. It is more convenient for the steward species, ourselves, to maintain a predictable range of weather and fixed sea levels, etc, and humanity along with what elements of the ecosystem survive the crisis has adapted to the new normal.
Against this though, is a longer term perspective, particularly framed by the fact that Earth has been in a glaciation-dominated era for quite a few millions of years lately. To what degree is the deep cycle between glaciation and brief interglacials important to the overall health of the planet? We might guess not very, this is a recent circumstance presumably due to the combination of continental configuration walling off the Arctic ocean with limited but substantial outlets, and ongoing cosmic cycles relating to cyclic variation in Earth's axial tilt, eccentricity, and annual correlation between perihelion and hemispheric season. Previous to this Earth was warmer overall, which gives confidence to the "stabilize it as it is now" position that being warmer than the norm in most of the current interglacial is not dangerously close to runaway greenhouse feedback based mainly on rising levels of water vapor--water being the main greenhouse gas actually, and vapor pressure at the surface which presumably drives what percentage of Earth's lower atmosphere is infrared-gobbling water vapor being very highly dependent on surface temperature. Nevertheless before the whole recent block of millions of years where glaciation of high northern hemisphere latitudes became the norm 90 percent of the time, Earth was warmer, and yet no runaway greenhouse. (Also the previous interglacial, the Eemian, was notably warmer than ours, and if the semi-stablized climate suite of 2100 is no warmer than that, one can have great confidence that even with moderate fluctuations to somewhat warmer, there will be no runaway greenhouse, assuming that gases uncommon without human intervention are not introduced into the mix anyway, or rather managed to low and acceptable levels).
But the glaciation cycle does raise some big unknowns, as of OTL 2020s knowledge levels anyway; presumably in Malê-verse 2100 a lot more is known to science about the details of the mechanism of the glaciations than we know of here and now.
What I expect that knowledge to reveal is that the glacial cycle, majestically predictable though it is, is shepherded by remarkably subtle cusp events, rather than being very strongly determined. On pre-Anthropocene Earth, the determinism was strong enough that the cycle would repeat reliably, but it could well be that the greenhouse heat retention levels governing the semi-stable status quo of 2100 are significant enough deviations from the natural baseline that despite the cosmic forcing of shifted heating patterns that hitherto have resulted in Fimbulwinter and the icing over of the high latitudes, that instead the global climate, under these same cosmic forcings, would stumble into a completely unknown and therefore, even in 2100, unpredictable sequence. It ought to be possible to put some bounds on it with 2100 knowledge, but those bounds, as well as verified science can set them, might have to be so wide that it becomes very uncertain what the outcome would be if Fimbulwinter does not come.
Also, of course, to do more than delay and actually prevent Fimbulwinter, the overall heat trapping might have to be higher than the 2100 status quo, and I certainly--well probably!--would vote against risking even higher heat trapping. If the glaciation is bound to come, it has to come. This means of course that 2100 status quo cannot be maintained, and the high latitudes, especially zones recently warmed up to be more overall hospitable to human inhabitation, must go into the glacial cycle and be evacuated (barring domed over moon colony type settlements designed to minimize impact on the natural process of ice sheet formation) along with huge swathes of geography densely settled for centuries, or even thousands, of years before people had any reasonable basis for thinking they affected climates.
I suspect Fimbulwinter would be avoided if average temperatures were raised moderately-though one should never be too simplistic with climate modeling; it could be the higher temperatures actually amplify and accelerate the onset of high latitude glaciation instead of forestalling it.
But what would the climate be like then? One characteristic of glacial periods I never guessed at I learned here at AH--that empirically speaking, local climates, not just in high latitude zones near the major continental ice sheets, but everywhere in the world, or anyway in a decisive majority of human-habitable zones, were measurably more variable than during the interglacial. This has been offered, pretty convincingly in my opinion, as an explanation for why it was not possible for agriculture to be invented by any human group anywhere in the world during the previous glaciation, whereas once the world shifted over to interglacial conditions, widespread sets of people all around the globe, with no plausible means of communication with each other, all of a sudden started inventing agricultural packages, based on entirely different staple crops raised in a great diversity of circumstances and with very different methods. It makes sense if we grant the premise, demonstrated to be empirically true in at least some locations where core samples or similar methods leaves a trail of material evidence, that climates shifted more rapidly in the glaciation. If that were in fact the case, globally and not just in some regions, then of course it would be difficult for a crop precursor to be evolved by gatherer-hunter unconscious selection to become a candidate for a staple crop--the processes that pre-adapt a wild plant variety to become responsive to human cultivation and yield superior nutrition to justify these efforts would be curtailed when the climate shifted and a variety that worked in the previous few centuries is now at a disadvantage in the new climate conditions. Whereas if climates then stabilized so that such major local changes would take thousands instead of hundreds of years typically, then such pre-adaption could pay off and offer the opportunity for communities to shift from gatherer-hunting to reliance on cultivation, with all the mixed consequences that brings.
By that thesis, it was only possible to found what we call civilization within the past 10,000 years of the current interglacial.
Now the question is, if a human-warmed Earth does not in fact develop Fimbulwinter and ultimately (after a great many tens of thousands of years) the thick broad continental ice sheets, does that mean interglacial style relatively stable climates remain the norm? That is, did the snow cover and eventual ice sheets in the high latitudes somehow cause general climate instability all over the globe, and in their absence, with winter snow melting every summer, will world climates from pole to pole remain fairly stable century to century? Or was the global climate instability caused by something else that would still be true even if the world is warmer and no ice sheets form, leaving places like northern Canada or Siberia more hospitable for human settlement and agriculture as far as overall averages go, but with more drastic swings between climate conditions such that a tract in say the Yukon alternates between being tundra and forest land on a time scale of just centuries? And all around the world, in places that OTL historically have been infertile that the warmer general conditions render on average more fertile, along with places that simply remain on average hospitable, will each microclimate fluctuate more drastically and rapidly, alternating between drought and deluge, with climates too unpredictable for any traditional crop package to be useful for more than a handful of generations?
In such a world, if our species were introduced as gatherer-hunters, they could not invent agriculture any more than OTL they could in the tens of thousands of years of the previous glaciation, never mind whether the lands that are potentially fertile on average are more or less numerous than during the interglacial.
Now that we humans have already invented agriculture, and indeed over thousands of years developed technology giving us global reach, we could better maintain overall production despite rapid local microclimate change of course. Cultivators are no longer desperately hungry and poorly educated peasants tied to the land; everyone is heir to high technology and offered high education, and so when a climate that was good for growing wet rice suddenly dries up, it is possible to simply educate the cultivators to switch to some kind of wheat or sorghum or maize or whatever does well in the new climate, while elsewhere in the world, places that used to do all right with dry conditions are suddenly getting flooded with unheard of rainfall that just yesterday shifted in can switch to growing the wet rice. If deep drought makes a former breadbasket valley essentially unable to produce any crops to speak of, too dry even for herding, the population can be evacuated and solar power cells set up in the new desert. And so on.
So even if Earth is doomed to go into general instability just because of deep cosmic forcing of subtle interactions of day/night cycles and patterns of global heating, regardless of whether there are ice sheets over Canada and northwest Europe or not, such a global civilization as shown here in 2100 can survive it; they just have to dance a little harder. And this becomes the norm for the next 100,000 years of course, but sustaining high tech civilization a fraction of that time might lead to humans having powers almost inconceivable to us today.
But I would want to know what climate science has to say about the coming climate in what ought to be a glacial period when Earth is too warm for glaciation to actually happen. If in fact the cause of global instability prevails despite there being no ice sheets, perhaps the range of instability poses threats buffered OTL previously by the fact of the glaciation; perhaps runaway greenhouse doom due to regions of Earth fluctuating to high temperature extremes impossible in the face of the glaciers becomes too probable to risk. Or some other form of climatic vicious circle that again the glaciers would damp out if they existed can be shown to be extremely likely. One might respond to that with massive forcing engineering--with shading parts of Earth with orbiting solettas for instance, and brute force them away, and perhaps by subtle manipulation of net insolation stabilize the climate shifts and guarantee by engineered means a long Eden of Eemian like warmth and fertility.
But perhaps the case against risking the possible failure of such engineered survival is strong, and if so--Earth should stick to the tried and true course of going through a regular glaciation again, and human activity should then shift toward the tropics and expand in time on the continental shelf land that slowly thickening ice sheets in the north will gradually release from the sea as its level drops. In other words, we should then vote to return Earth to its pre-Anthropocene diverted path, and face the coming glaciation within the next handful of thousands of years (if that long, the Fimbulwinter is in fact coming pretty close by historical pattern of Interglacial durations!)
So my vote in 2100 would depend very heavily on what current climate science predicts the coming glacial period should be like without the actual glaciers. If dangerously unstable, then we have to be conservative and figure Mother Nature knows best, regardless of human notions, and perhaps focus on lowering the population resident on Earth in line with overall predictions of lowered productivity in a normal glaciation. (Whether this is done by agreeing to have human population as a whole shrink by a planned policy of birthrates below replacement levels, or by migrating the surplus of humanity off Earth to Solar System space colonies and perhaps beyond, is a detail--based on Jonathan's general canon I suppose the latter is what to expect).
On the other hand, if it seems that even in the subtly different conditions of insolation and seasonal heat cycles that the coming "glacial" age would involve, moderate human engineering can avert any major climate instability and/or the instability that emerges naturally is tolerable, then I vote for stabilizing the climate at the warmer new norm, and maintaining it indefinitely.
Never thought I would contemplate over long-term environmental and wildlife ethics in an AH board, but this timeline has pleasantly surprised me. I would be the person who would fume forever over the consequences of this vote, putting my choice at the last moment.
This is the ethical thinking that drives both the referendum and the Consistory policy it seeks to challenge - the climate is in human hands, and therefore, humanity has a duty to manage it responsibly. There are disputes over whether and to what extent humanity's needs should have primacy over those of the planet at large, but most factions recognize that there's no real conflict of interest - biodiversity is wealth, so damaged ecosystems impoverish humanity as well. The goals have a broad consensus and the argument is mainly over how to achieve them - the Consistory's position is roughly the one you stated above, while the activists who succeeded (after a twenty-year effort) in putting the referendum on the ballot believe that both human and nonhuman life are still optimized for pre-Anthropocene conditions.
I'm certainly no climate scientist, whether by the standards of the Malêverse in 2100 or those of OTL in 2021, but I strongly suspect that the microclimates of the glacial periods exist only because of the glaciation. Continental-scale glaciers are basically moving mountain ranges, and as such, their advance and retreat over century-long time scales adds a lot of chaos to the movement of air masses worldwide. Changes in the points where the glaciers meet the sea might play hell with ocean currents as well. I can, through a glass darkly, envision the dynamics that would create unstable microclimates even in equatorial regions under these conditions. So my gut feeling is that the knowledge available to the 2100 Malêverse would be such that a human-stabilized Eemian (sort of - polar warming in the Anthropocene is already more than the Eemian maximum) isn't seen as anything to fear.
Of course, the scientists of 2100 might also, as you say, be able to put finer error bars on when the next glaciation is likely to occur. Those error bars might be measured in centuries, but if the consensus is 2000 years plus-minus 500, that's still far enough away for even a civilization that's becoming accustomed to long-term thinking to kick the can down the road. The Malêverse might be entertaining referendums on hundred-year climate plans, but the thousand-year plan is still to let the people of that time deal with whatever issues might arise, using the unknowable resources available to them. After all, maybe it will be possible to move all the agriculture to LEO by then, or maybe there will be crops that are genetically programmed to self-engineer in response to climate changes, or there could be even more radical possibilities.
FWIW, I'd probably vote no in the referendum. I have a fundamental conservative streak in my soul (albeit not in a way that term is ordinarily defined today), and in the conditions of the Malêverse of 2100, I would tend to favor managing the new climate in place, with consequences we already know and are successfully dealing with, to attempting, with unknowable consequences, to return to a previous arbitrary point. But there are plenty of arguments that can be made the other way.
If it's any consolation, several billion people in the Malêverse are feeling the same way. But I also doubt that the referendum will be final - regardless of whether the outcome is yes or no, the issue will likely be revisited as the Anthropocene climate continues to develop. If the plan is approved but has unforeseen consequences twenty years in, or if it's rejected but the Consistory's ability to manage biodiversity under warmer conditions proves to be overstated, then another vote might occur. It isn't easy to get a global referendum on the ballot - this one is the first, negotiating its terms took twenty years, and an unbelievable number of entities had to sign off on it - but now that the precedent has been set, a second vote on the same issue becomes a lot more thinkable, and a lot of the procedural groundwork will already have been laid.
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BTW, in case anyone's interested, the population of Antarctica in 2100 is about a million, nearly all of it concentrated in hundreds of self-governing towns and small districts scattered along the coast. The Consistory is the major employer - as stated in the update, the Antarctic coast and continental shelf have become a carbon-sequestration factory [1], and a large work force is required to monitor and manage it [2] - with minor keys in tourism, biological research, and (declining) commercial fishing. Architecture varies; the Scandinavian coastal village aesthetic is most common, but there's also a widespread Arctic-modern style inspired by the indigenous peoples of Siberia and arctic North America, and an eclectic mix of other styles depending on who founded any given settlement.
The inland population is extremely sparse; other than scientific stations and strictly controlled tourism, the only major human installation is the solar farm on the East Antarctic Plateau (winter lows there might not be much warmer than a typical day on Ceres, but the 24-hour summer days and extreme lack of precipitation make it one of the sunniest places on earth). A few hundred people work at scattered stations on the plateau, about half of whom stay through the winter when the combination of cold, darkness and high winds makes maintenance a nightmare.
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[1] Seagrass and mangrove are apparently even better than forests at sequestering carbon, so if you have thousands of kilometers of newly ice-free continental shelf, you make lemonade and introduce versions that are engineered to survive there.
[2] AIs are also involved, of course, but the Malêverse of 2100 still hasn't developed one with the complexity and intuitive qualities of the human brain, and almost certainly never will.
The inland population is extremely sparse; other than scientific stations and strictly controlled tourism, the only major human installation is the solar farm on the East Antarctic Plateau (winter lows there might not be much warmer than a typical day on Ceres, but the 24-hour summer days and extreme lack of precipitation make it one of the sunniest places on earth). A few hundred people work at scattered stations on the plateau, about half of whom stay through the winter when the combination of cold, darkness and high winds makes maintenance a nightmare.
_____
[1] Seagrass and mangrove are apparently even better than forests at sequestering carbon, so if you have thousands of kilometers of newly ice-free continental shelf, you make lemonade and introduce versions that are engineered to survive there.
[2] AIs are also involved, of course, but the Malêverse of 2100 still hasn't developed one with the complexity and intuitive qualities of the human brain, and almost certainly never will.
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A lovely read, Jonathan, and I enjoyed Ibrahim's thoughts drifting back to his namesake. The depiction of Antarctica was gorgeous, and the integration of the datacloth was better handled than most future tech gizmos that pop up incessantly in stories.
It does make me wonder - in your timeline, as in OTL, there will be some families to whom ancestry is deeply important, and others who don't know anyone past their grandparents. Do you think the overall attitude towards the people of the past is different in their world than in ours?
Shevek, your post as always offered a lot to think about, particularly this part:
The Unabomber might have had a bee in his bonnet about Industrial society, but the real change was the Neolithic Revolution. That's the one before and after line in humanity's time on earth that really makes sense. It might be controversial, but once we stopped being hunter-gatherers, everything that has followed was eventually inevitable. If only we could go back and watch it happen! That was the part of Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch book I found most fascinating - the idea of being able to peer into the past with a historian's eye, not all that mumbo-jumbo AH about a Tlaxacalan invasion of Europe.
Cheers,
Ganesha
It does make me wonder - in your timeline, as in OTL, there will be some families to whom ancestry is deeply important, and others who don't know anyone past their grandparents. Do you think the overall attitude towards the people of the past is different in their world than in ours?
Shevek, your post as always offered a lot to think about, particularly this part:
The Unabomber might have had a bee in his bonnet about Industrial society, but the real change was the Neolithic Revolution. That's the one before and after line in humanity's time on earth that really makes sense. It might be controversial, but once we stopped being hunter-gatherers, everything that has followed was eventually inevitable. If only we could go back and watch it happen! That was the part of Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch book I found most fascinating - the idea of being able to peer into the past with a historian's eye, not all that mumbo-jumbo AH about a Tlaxacalan invasion of Europe.
Cheers,
Ganesha
I doubt the difference between universes will matter much - interest in family history (or lack thereof) is a very personal thing, and the ideologies of TTL don't push one way or another in that direction. OTOH, the difference between the world of 2021 and that of 2100, in this universe and ours, may matter. 100-year life expectancies mean that most children will grow up knowing their great-grandparents and that most people will personally see more of the sweep of history than could be expected in the past. Also, there will be another three generations of mass literacy and mass record-keeping. I was born in 1971 and can trace my ancestry back to my father's great-grandfather, and all I know of him is his name, approximate date and place of birth, and the approximate date of his immigration to the United States. Someone born in a similar family in 2071 will have seven generations of records rather than four, and will be able to find out a lot more about the most recent ones. So a person at the turn of the 22nd century is likely to have more access to family history, which may inspire interest in people who wouldn't be as interested in the records available today.
Of course, there are families and families, and Ibrahim's family has more reason than most to be conscious of its past.
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