Fifty years ago, on this day, July 5, 1973, a Nobel laureate called Dennis Gabor gave a speech at Lindau on “The Predicament of Mankind.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 330ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that everyone was running around with a computer, either Malthus or otherwise, proclaiming Limits to Growth or the need for blueprints to survival especially by the year 2000 (odometer years are seductive things). And look, here comes some Nobel Prize winners to stroke their chins and either add to clarity or add to confusion.
What I think we can learn from this
The thing that we should really remember about “Nobel Prize winner X” or a “x Nobel Prize winners sign open letter” is just because they’re really really smart in one particular domain mean doesn’t mean that their self-confidence in that domain, let alone other domains, is necessarily justified. Because for every prescient warning at gatherings like Lindau, there was another one that was completely barking. As Nils Bohr said, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
What happened next
The Lindau lot kept meeting. There have been highlights and lowlights. This year a guy on a manel bemoaned how hard it was for young white men…
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.