I’ve had a number of thoughts rolling around my head lately and they’re somewhat related so here goes.

I’m going to start with a depressing headline and URL: Civilization will end in 2050. Ok, perhaps that’s more of an alarmist headline than anything else. I posted this elsewhere, and some folks correctly pointed out that this could have been written by Thomas Malthus over two centuries ago.  And it’s true; prognosticators have predicted the fall of humans since probably before recorded history.  How many of us recall in the last century alone predictions of world-wide famine, a world-wide ice age, comets smashing into us and other horrible events.

Some were prevented, such with the Green Revolution. Some were corrected with better data or a better understanding of the data. Some where just… nuts.  That said, some predictions can be made with 100% certainty, even if the bounds on the actual circumstances are fuzzy. I’ve been giving this particular nugget a lot of thought.  Since I’ve passed that magical (at least to humans) mark of a half-century, I’ve given more thought to what I call my expiration date. It’s a fact. At some point I will cease all biological functions and will be dead.  I can’t escape that. Every day the odds increase a very tiny percentage.  So, I am predicting my own death, most likely sometime in the next 1/2 century. There’s a very slight possibility it could be tomorrow, and a much greater chance it could be 40 years from now, and based on current medicine an absolute certainty 80 years from now.  You’ll note I hedged that last one. It’s quite possible in the next few decades we figure out how to extend the human lifespan by decades if not centuries.  But I’m not counting on it. And even then, there are no guarantees I’m not hit by a driver while biking or some other catastrophic event.

That said, right now I’d say the odds are decent I’ll be alive in 2050. And almost certainly my kids will be (and very likely I’ll have grandkids by then).  So, am I worried that the world will end in 2050? Yes and no. For one thing, there’s time between now and then for a lot to happen. But, as we get closer, it’s going to be harder and harder to forestall the impacts of higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans. Yes, to be clear, I believe the evidence supports that humans are greatly impacting the climate via CO2 and other emissions.

But I’m also optimistic that we’ll work harder, especially as things get worse, to stave off the most pessimistic scenarios. But it won’t be easy and the longer we wait, the harder it will be.

While anecdotal, I’ve already seen the impacts in my life, earlier springs, caves that once held ice year round no longer do, less snow in the winters, etc. It worries me. But I also still have some hope.

That said, an analogy that’s been rolling around in my head that isn’t 100% perfect but fits me as a DBA.

Many of us in the SQL server community have started a long running transaction, only to realize we’ve brought the server to a halt. In other words, no other user can access their data until our transaction is complete. We can abort the transaction, but if we wait too long, that can be a far worse solution than trying to stop it early on. For the non geeks, in other words, if our transaction is going to update 1 billion records and we realize 5 minutes in that it will take 10 hours, we can abort it and it should take about 5 minutes to rollback to the original state. This means we’ve only brought the server to a halt for about 10 minutes. However, if we ignore the problem, and keep pretending it’ll go away and we wait say 9 hours and then finally decide, “oh what the heck, let’s try to fix the problem now” it might take another 9 hours to rollback. In other words, by waiting to long to resolve the problem, instead of being 10 minutes, it can be 1080 minutes.

In other words, the longer you wait, the harder it can be to recover. I think that’s where we’ll be at by 2050. Whether or not I’m still alive (though I plan to be!)