Last Chance to See... Homo Sapiens Sapiens

I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

-Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

Douglas Adams and his insights are truly impressive, all the more impressive when you think of the fact that he hid them within delightful comedy science fiction stories. Something he revisits frequently is the insufficiency of our current point of view. We mistake our limited little view of the world for the objective truth and act as though we are infallible as a result. We have catalogued the system errors in our thinking, our seeing, our perceiving, our deciding, and still we pretend that somehow THIS TIME, we've got it right.

We are going to be wrong. Let us have the grace and dignity to protect ourselves and our world from our current mistakes and our future inevitable mistakes. Let us have the humility to build adaptability into our decisions, so that future  children can correct the mistakes we did not expect to make a little easier than our parents have made it for us.

We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.

-Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

Douglas Adams: Speaking through Dirk Gently

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.

-Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency


"What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"

This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself.

-Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Douglas Adams 5

The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth - when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass - the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another - particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.

-Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams 4

We don't have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it.

-Douglas Adams


The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful. And ... the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.

-Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams 3

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

-Douglas Adams

Resource List from Workshop: Escaping Ground Zero

Resource List

• Genus Rex (Our Page): www.genusrex.com (This list is reprinted here)

• National Emergency Response System: http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/prg/em/ners-eng.aspx
• Wildfires of Note: http://webmaps.gov.bc.ca/imf5/imf.jsp?site=pub_fireinfo
• Wildfire Management Branch: http://bcwildfire.ca/Situation/
• All Current BC Wildfires: http://bcwildfire.ca/hprScripts/WildfireNews/Fires.asp
• One Second After: The Official Website: http://www.onesecondafter.com/
• EMP Commision: http://www.empcommission.org/
• Jeff Rubin Article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/jeff-rubins-smaller-world/wikileaks-reveals-imminent-saudi-oil-peak/article1908385/
• Jeff Rubin Article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/jeff-rubins-smaller-world/is-nature-trying-to-tell-us-something/article1951546/
• GetPrepared.ca: http://www.getprepared.gc.ca/index-eng.aspx
• Disaster Response Routes: http://www.th.gov.bc.ca/popular-topics/driver_info/route-info/disroute/disaster_response_routes.htm
• Vancouver Disaster Response Routes: http://www.th.gov.bc.ca/popular-topics/driver_info/route-info/disroute/disaster_response_maps.htm
• The Effects of Radiation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kiev-UkrainianNationalChernobylMuseum_15.jpg
• Details of the Fukushima Power Plant Evacuations: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/16/fukushima-workers-evacuate-radiation-spikes
• Hurrican Gustav and Evacuation: http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20080830/news/808300290
• Evacuations in New Orleans: http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf/2008/08/11_million_people_evacuate_sou.html
• Southwestern China Evacuations: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/05/30/china.earthquake/
• Evacuation in the Czech Republic: http://www.nato.int/eadrcc/floods_czech_republic/report_2002_111.pdf
• Refusal to Evacuate: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4835186
• Refusal to Evacuate Continued: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4834156
• The Magic Marker Strategy: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/opinion/06tierney.html?ei=5090&en=9673a9d11f3210a0&ex=1283659200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
• Simulations of Panic: http://angel.elte.hu/~panic/
• The Internaional Emergency Management Society: http://www.tiems.org/
• EU on Influenza: http://ec.europa.eu/health-eu/health_problems/avian_influenza/index_en.htm
• Pandemic Flu: http://pandemicflu.gov/
• Influenza Research Database: http://www.fludb.org/brc/homeExtraPage.do?decorator=influenza&extraPage=separate
• The Pacific Ring of Fire- Earthquake and Volcano Zone: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Pacific_Ring_of_Fire.svg
• The WTO Protests in Seattle, Zombie Outbreaks in the Pacific Northwest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WTO_protests_in_Seattle_November_30_1999.jpg
• Tectonic Plat map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg
• New Orleans after Katrina: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KatrinaNewOrleansFlooded_edit2.jpg
• WHO Pandemic Phases: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/WHO_pandemic_phases.png
• The World Health Organization: http://www.who.int/en/
• Past Pandemics: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4381924.stm
• Geoscape Vancouver: http://geoscape.nrcan.gc.ca/vancouver/earth_e.php
• Neil Strauss, Bug Out Bag: http://www.neilstrauss.com/fliesian/bugout.html
• More Neil Strauss Information: http://www.neilstrauss.com/fliesian/proceed.html
• Gear Patrol's Bug Out Bag: http://gearpatrol.com/blog/2009/05/04/bug-out-bag-aka-ultimate-survival-kit/
• Survival Blog: http://www.survivalblog.com/

Douglas Adams 2

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.

-Douglas Adams