January 25, 2016   |   0 comments

Frank Landis gives his first ever interview about his book Hot Earth Dreams: What if Severe Climate Change Happens, and Humans Survive?

What will the Earth look like if severe climate change happens, and humans survive? It’s not an easy question to contemplate, let alone answer. If severe climate change happens, the Earth will continue to warm for centuries after we’ve exhausted our fossil fuels. Civilization will shatter, the great artworks and monuments vanishing as cities fall into rubble and coasts disappear beneath rising seas. There will be mass extinctions, coral reefs and ice sheets will vanish, and the survivors will migrate to new homes and habitats for generations as the climate continually changes. Only after hundreds of thousands of years will the climate to return to what we currently consider normal.

As things stand, this is our most likely future. Terrifying as it sounds at first, it’s a future that’s fascinating to explore. It’s crazy, then horrible, then tough, and then increasingly strange. How much of our language and culture can survive? Hundreds of thousands of years from now, will future humans still look the same as us? Weaving together the latest scientific research on climate change, mass extinction, collapse, and evolution, Hot Earth Dreams speculates about a deep future that lies beyond the simplistic scenarios favoured today, presenting a profound challenge to those who insist that humanity’s future must be either imminent and total extinction or some utopian fantasy fuelled by ever-advancing transhumanist technology.

Hot Earth Dreams
http://heteromeles.com/
The first five chapters of Hot Earth Dreams
Short YouTube film mentioned during the show

Bumper music: Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’
Tangerine Dream ‘Desert Dream’