The Bounds of Hearing
I was trying to write something for that Grist contest about imagining climate futures but it seemed altogether too positive and sooo this is what happened instead.
They had tried nearly everything and were about to set off a mass launch of particles, they were about to try a thing they’d only sort of tested. There were protests about what the particles would do to the air quality and petitions running into the miles with signatures but a large part of Bangladesh had already washed away and the Midwest was a few years from irrevocably becoming a desert so they had to, didn’t they? They’d converted as much of the system over from fossil energy as they could but they couldn’t quite get there, frankly there weren’t really enough rare earth metals, and things were getting worse for more people all the time.
When everyone had reached a Novocain numbness from all the op-eds urging immediate decisive action while they continued to drive to the same places and were unable to do much more than shuffleboard through the work day, a solution was posed. Not two weeks before the first planned particle launch, they received a copy of a paper that’d been out for a few months. It was one of those incidental mistake discoveries that the researcher was never looking to answer but they understood the import of the data immediately and so did the recipients, before they even finished the abstract. It was one of those observations that seemed nearly stupid upon reflection, ludicrous that no one had noticed it before. After that all the impossibility of the target goals, the doomsday clock and the decade ‘til the apocalypse countdowns fizzed into ridiculum in the face of the new results. There was a clear cause and all anyone had to do was enforce the findings.
The clarity of the study didn’t bring any flying car utopia into being or anything, but having an understandable possible solution to the most dangerous looming catastrophe in recorded history made a lot of other apparently intractable challenges suddenly seem more straightforward. Being able to predict the endpoint of global sea rise pushed a number of governments, including the European Union and a number of countries along the coast of the Indian Ocean, to demarcate no-build zones and to help re-settle people who lived there to other locations. Having some idea of how far malaria was likely to spread put a number of countries in southern Europe in a position to track and treat for the relevant vectors and to partner with countries further south to distribute drugs and new vaccinations, bringing down the global malaria burden by half within a few years. Putting some bounds around how bad things could get showed there was a limit to the other nagging abscesses of the green world.
With the push to address concrete questions, more and more people who were accustomed to being assigned meaningless work were recruited to do tasks that were truly necessary. They had less reason to be infected with inchoate anger while sitting near-idle in front of a device connected to the internet, broadly speaking, so although trolling is still a hobby, it was largely defanged as a source of radicalization a few years in, people just got too engaged in what they were doing. Lots of folks were and remain angry about the wrongs they perceive around them, but even so, a series of suboptimal financial decisions and a shifting of social priorities turned Fox news into the t.v. equivalent of a local a.m. radio station within a few years.
The automation of nearly everything turned out to be not quite as bad as everyone thought when the rents were scaled. I personally spend a good deal of my day reading. If you like sports, you can do that for a few hours instead of sitting in an office chair and pretending to work. People still need to do the essential daily things but now they can go about them unhurried. I think a lot about those I lost during my youth who would get a kick out of this, I wish they were here, I wish it every day.
Some fifteen or eighteen years after everything changed, the time from youth to middle age or so, the time from middle age to elderhood, it seems beside the point to explain the finding that led to all this since pretty much everyone living knows about it, even small children. However, it has become difficult to find a general explanation of a common-knowledge fact about the world, it has started to seem folkloric and received, so it is worth revisiting what happened.
So there was an engineering research group that was studying fuel efficiency. They had an engine lab where they ran tests under different conditions. One junior researcher was getting unexpectedly great results and the director wanted to make sure their results were reproducible, so he asked a more experienced group member to do the same experiment a few times to see what happened. The experienced researcher had worse results than their junior every time. He obsessively isolated every factor in the experiment and couldn’t reproduce the results. The experienced researcher was about to accuse his younger colleague of fabricating results but decided to ask to do the experiment together, with the younger one leading, to see if there was something he had missed. The younger person did the experiment under observation with no deviation from their stated protocol and got the same excellent results. Their colleague was mystified and frankly felt a bit insecure. He was concerned that his technique had been trash all these years and scrutinized everything while performing the experiment again and again, putting off his other projects to resolve what was happening. In a snarky aside to himself, the only difference he could think of, after weeks of obsessive testing, was that he played music during his experiments, and on a lark, he turned it off during one run and was suddenly able to reproduce his colleague’s brilliant results.
From there it slowly became apparent that the frequencies emitted by recorded music helped create many of the greenhouse gases associated with fossil fuel combustion. The experienced researcher largely founded a whole new field around music and climate change, and he was able to make a career out of it, incidentally, when careers were still things people did. The necessary actions, unfortunate though they seem to many of us, were clear, but stopping emissions bought enough time to get ahead technologically, to sequester the excess carbon that was already present and to finally implement cleaner energy sources like we’d been jawing about for ages. I remember how older people used to talk a lot about how different society was before the internet and how fast everything changed after they had it, but in less than a decade, society headed off its biggest cataclysm and stopped talking about websites and social media because it suddenly became such a small going concern. It happened so quickly and so much more easily than anyone planned, and so inevitably no one who didn’t live through it can now imagine the threat we faced then.
I was a young adult when it happened, so I remember how laughable it seemed at the time and how it was ridiculed by everyone. I was skeptical myself and remember some of the derogatory things I said about it at the time, but in the end, the results were simply inarguable. I can remember how radio DJs were joking about it up until there stopped being DJs. It’s hard to explain to younger people now what recorded music was like. It’s still possible, of course, to play unamplified music in small settings because it’s harmless, but the idea that people were celebrity musicians, that they toured to perform music in sports arenas, that the musical history of humanity was available on a memory stick, it seems as unbelievable and horrific as primitive surgery to the younger generation. No one college-aged or younger believes you when you say you used to watch late night talk shows with musical accompaniment on t.v. You could be talking about your 8-track.
I admit to missing that premade music. Before recording eradication was organized in earnest we still listened to our old music files in secret for a while, until the government started issuing recording detectors and we had to give them up. After computers and phones all started coming with pre-installed music blaster software, enforcement was no longer necessary, and people who were born after that time don’t even miss it. I can still hear the greats in my auditory memory, and sometimes I hear radio hits from my youth in my dreams. Our grandparents would never believe how popular it has become to post very detailed musical notation online that people can use to cover old remembered recordings at home. They would think we had gone backwards.
It was worth it, though. We were able to buy enough time to finally get real good batteries to work and make coal obsolete. We still use a little oil in our cars but the elimination of recorded music has made it possible to continue living a modern life. Stopping emissions provided enough of a margin to get the restoration programs off and running. The forest and agriculture ones are ongoing, obviously. Because there are still some fossil fuels in play and because we don’t know the full consequences, even with all the improvements we’ve seen in recent years, we still can’t count on bringing recorded music back just yet. I really hope it becomes possible again during my lifetime, but since people born in the last couple decades don’t have an experience of it, maybe it won’t. Maybe the physical albums they saved in museum vaults won’t be brought out again, but I hope they will.
I wouldn’t try to tell anyone who might be reading in the future that everyone is going along with all of this after well, all of human history. There are plenty of people who refuse to believe any of it. Given how long people denied burning fossil fuels were a problem, you can imagine how common it was up until fairly recently for people to have underground recorded music parties. There was a brisk business in denialist bumper stickers, some of which played music. With advances in technology, all of that has become especially untenable in the past few years and you rarely hear about music busts in the news anymore.
A good thing that most people can agree on coming out of all this is that we’ve had to largely let go of the notion that working diligently is the way to solve every problem, because sometimes, simply paying attention to what is happening around you is what you always needed to do.
