Ask A Genius 1002: The Erin Session
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/05
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So this is from my friend, Erin. She’s the weird farm horse girl. I worked with her for a decent amount of time on that farm. So she asks, “How feasible is living on a floating island made of recycling when your region eventually floods?”
Rick Rosner: I have no idea. I could think about it. I know that as the oceans rise and start flooding places like New Orleans, southern Florida, and lower Manhattan, huge amounts of money will be spent on movable sea walls because they already do that for part of the Netherlands. These walls can be raised during storms to keep the seas from overtopping into low-lying cities like Houston. How many billion people worldwide might be subject to displacement from rising seas? There are huge fortunes to be made by the companies that offer solutions. In my book set in the future, I’ve got one company that offers squads of robots who go under and mine your island. They dig into the earth underwater.
In swarms of thousands, start jacking up the entire island. I think that’s a possible tech solution for the future. It’s like a floating garbage island that harvests—a ton of plastic debris is floating out there. And if you could stabilize it. Maybe you don’t make it a floating island. Maybe you tow it over to islands engulfed by rising seas and use it as a landfill. There’s certainly a role for it, though, if it’s mostly plastic. I don’t know that you want to live on an island made of plastic or a landfill made of plastic because it’s going to out-gas and poison you over decades. But somebody will try to do something with it along those lines.
Some composite materials where you stabilize by spraying them with foam that turns them into a solid-ish structure. What else could you use it for? But yeah, it’s one of a bunch of possibilities. And the possibilities will be a combination of high and low-tech. It’s low-tech to say, “Oh, just build a wall to keep the ocean out.” It’s high-tech to make that wall into a gate that’s a kilometre long.
That can be swung into position in 12 hours when there’s a storm coming. It’s low-tech to say, “Take that floating garbage island and build on it.” It’s high-tech to come up with a way that works. But yeah, it’s a possibility. We’ve got microplastics everywhere. I think the last article I saw was that men have microplastic fragments in their penises. So if you can build structures that are giant sieves that sequester all this plastic and then come up with some way to use it, there might be money in that because all the solutions or most of the solutions to climate change, the most successful ones, are going to make somebody money. They won’t be just pure government intervention and rulemaking—next question.
Jacobsen: She asks, “What are your serious thoughts on universal basic income?”
Rosner: Something has to happen. There’s still a lot pressure on the labour market. There’s still a labour shortage throughout much of the world. Part of it is demographic, but people have fewer babies, which means fewer workers eventually. But instead of talking about a three or a four-day work week, I heard talk. I wasn’t paying much attention, like a day or two ago, about people being forced into six-day work weeks in America because of a labour shortage. So far, I don’t know; 50 years ago, people predicted labour shortages because of tech and robotics. But it still needs to arrive in a lot of the world. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t coming. And yes, we must figure out something like that—universal basic income. I’ve talked about how it doesn’t have to cost much or supply much in terms of cost. In that way, tech continues to make a lot of life’s necessities cheaper. So is it socialism or communism when you give people the things they need to survive, but the stuff doesn’t cost anything? It’s some new weird way of being that I call computism. It’s not capitalism. It’s not communism. New economic systems are being created by computing technology—the end.
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