@flug

flug@midwest.social · edit-2 1 year ago

I haven’t read it myself but by pure luck I happened to read a piece by Henry Farrell today that had his take on the book:

These ideas were turned into novels by Vinge himself, including A Fire Upon the Deep (fun!) and Rainbow’s End (weak!). Other SF writers like Charles Stross wrote novels about humans doing their best to co-exist with “weakly godlike” machine intelligence (also fun!). Others who had no notable talent for writing, like the futurist Ray Kurzweil, tried to turn the Singularity into the foundation stone of a new account of human progress. I still possess a mostly-unread copy of Kurzweil’s mostly-unreadable magnum opus, The Singularity is Near, which was distributed en masse to bloggers like meself in an early 2000s marketing campaign. If I dug hard enough in my archives, I might even be able to find the message from a publicity flack expressing disappointment that I hadn’t written about the book after they sent it. All this speculation had a strong flavor of end-of-days. As the Scots science fiction writer, Ken MacLeod memorably put it, the Singularity was the “Rapture of the Nerds.” Ken, being the offspring of a Free Presbyterian preacher, knows a millenarian religion when he sees it: Kurzweil’s doorstopper should really have been titled The Singularity is Nigh.

Not having read the book myself, I can’t say if I agree with that or disagree. But there it is, for your consideration!

flug@midwest.social · 1 year ago

You can see my extended explanation above, but in short it was due to a glacial moraine outburst flood upstream, releasing two-thirds of the water of Lhonak Lake in one go. The lake was known to be at high risk of bursting the moraine.

The lake itself was caused by glacial melt due to global warming, first appearing in the 1960s. The bursting of the lake this summer will almost certainly be traced to the record high temperatures recorded this summer, which led to an increase in size of the lake and overtopping the moraine that held it in place.

This article has satellite images showing the recent growth of the lake and then the recent release of most of its waters:

https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/sikkim-flash-floods-lhonak-lake-isros-satellite-images-show-how-sikkims-lhonak-lake-burst-caused-floods-4450175

flug@midwest.social · 1 year ago

And, why did they not have some kind of early warning system set up to give them more notice of the breaching of the Lhokan Lake moraine? The moraine was known to be in imminent danger of breaching.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X21001914

flug@midwest.social · edit-2 1 year ago

The way this (completely predictable and preventable) man-made disaster is being covered is both ridiculous and infuriating.

Every news outlet is dutifully reporting that a "cloudburst" over Lhonak Lake led to a "flash flood" which then (somehow?!) took out a 25,000 crore ($3 billion) dam in a brief 10 minutes.

So here is a "cloudburst" and a "flash flood": https://youtu.be/FJOpZF_4b-w?si=fqZ31FGJVy5xx5JT&t=463

What happened in Sikkim is emphatically NOT a simple little cloudburst nor a simple flash flood.

What is really was: A huge glacial-moraine dammed lake that first appeared in 1962 and that has massively grown in size the past few years - all due to global warming - finally breached the moraine. About 2/3 of the water of the lake poured through the breach in a short while.

Pro tip: That is not a "flash flood". That is a glacial lake outburst flood - which, given the size of the lake, is several orders of magnitude larger than a simple flash flood caused by a thunderstorm.

This massive bolus of water then struck the massive, $3 billion Teesta 3 dam at Chungthang, 60 meters high and just recently completed, washing it away in 10 minutes flat and causing an even LARGER flood due to the dam breech and loss of the entire, massive reservoir. This released an additional 5.08 million cubic meters of water to wreak havoc downstream.

So a few points:

None of this is a "cloudburst" or a "flash flood"
Rather it is a completely foreseeable and preventable man-made disaster
The danger of the bursting of the Lhonak Lake moraine has been well known for quite some time
That danger must have been well known to designers of the Teesta 3 dam, yet they clearly made the decision to do nothing about it
The creation and growth of Lhonak Lake starting in the 1960s is due to increased glacial melting clearly attributable to global warming
The recent growth of the lake is, likewise, clearly attributable to increased global warming
The bursting of the glacial moraine at the end of the hottest summer in recorded history can scarcely be coincidental. The lake was visibly growing in size just in the very recent past.
Again, this was a well known danger in the region and the decision to do nothing to ameliorate the danger - while actually moving ahead with projects downstream that only multiply the risk - can only be attributed to some combination of negligence and incompetence.
Heavy rains in the region only added to the problem - but from heavy rain alone it is very hard to imagine the bursting of the Teesta 3 dam, which led to the major flooding, damage, and death.

In short: Don't blame the cloudburst. This was an entirely human created, human caused, disaster that could have been averted, or at least greatly minimized, with by relatively simple means and a little bit of foresight.

Not all news outlets are blaming the disaster on a "cloudburst":

So why is every mainstream news outlet in India erroneously referring to the disaster as a "flash flood" caused by a "cloudburst"? It took me literally 2 minutes of googling to find out the actual cause.

flug@midwest.social · 1 year ago

This is a really great interview