Thinking about this is keeping me awake very late tonight. This is part one of two.
We have the Fukushima mess in Japan. If you’ve been reading the alternative press, you know by now at least three of the four active reactors have been in full melt-down since day one. The people responsible for fixing this knew it and lied about it. They have steadfastly refused to do what might have worked because it costs too much money. So now we have two months of toxic radioactive materials spewing into the air and the entire Northern Hemisphere will never be the same. But the worst part is what has been leaking into the Pacific, much worse than what has been drifting on the winds.
Radiation damage to life will not create new and dangerous adaptations; it inevitably sickens and kills early. There is no safe dosage of this crap, and some it will persist beyond human occupation of this planet. In a few years we will see some nasty results in the waters near Japan, where this stuff has the highest concentration. However, the entire Pacific Ocean is going to become a radioactive sewer with no end in sight. That’s because neither TEPCO nor any government agency will do what it takes to staunch this flow any time soon.
If you’ve been paying attention, you also know the Gulf of Mexico will be another kind of sewer. You may know the well they capped with so much fanfare was not the one spewing the most oil. The alternative news sites made much of the coordinates reported by the submersible robots showing two distinct sites, and all the noise was about some older well, leaking indeed, but hardly on the level of the one which exploded. There is now no trustworthy news about the one which was a petroleum volcano; that information was shut off.
What we do know is the vast ocean of dispersant has turned the Gulf Shores into a toxic swamp threatening to all life, particularly human life. Those who haven’t already fled stand a good chance of dying in the next few years. Now we have a vast layer of sunken oil on the sea bed, which has been aggravated by the flooding of the Mississippi River. All the flooding has swept up agricultural runoff, industrial runoff, and urban sewage, all in quantities no one can calculate. Look for news of these things to slowly be choked off.
That’s because the Internet is under attack.
On the one hand, the boundary between cellphone networks and the Internet is going to disappear. That is, in terms of the entertainment and commerce, we will see as much as the economy will bear. The economy is another issue. The point is, the part that makes money will get bigger and better. Meanwhile, the actual transfer of useful information will fade. This business of freewheeling, anything-goes communication is all but dead. Never mind the direct and publicly announced censorship. The best sources are under attack, and this will only get worse, with servers crashed and burned, domains confiscated, funding cuts, and DNS sneak attacks which route traffic to other places. What’s left is now being copied and cataloged wholesale by the NSA and other security agencies, and so-called restrictions based on law and court rulings mean nothing at all. They have yottabytes of data and Net traffic analysis already.
It is possible a more geek oriented network of sorts will continue, with only the more technically literate able to operate with any degree of freedom. They may find a way to piggy back on what remains, using some new protocols, or find another way of keeping the real Internet alive, but for most of us, surfing our favorite alternative news sites will become increasingly difficult.
Now on to part two…
