Nevertheless, we have every reason to suspect that too many "tipping points" -- both environmental and geopolitical -- will be reached in so short a period of time as to render the current milieu (already groaning under its own unattended bulk) inoperable within twenty to thirty years.
Why the pessimism? Climate change, for one. We've failed to address the issue when we could have been laying the groundwork for a sustainable infrastructure. Yes, we still would have suffered the brunt of super-hurricanes and record-breaking summer heat, but at least we could have mitigated against a future of unrelieved climatic brutality.
Instead, we've elected to cling to the sugar-sweet fictions of pundits such as Michael Crichton, for whom reality is a putty deftly twisted in the hands of power-hungry illusionists. This amounts to nothing less than collective paralysis. At the very least, it's a stinging harbinger of our willingness to turn away from the obvious.
But an environmentally ravaged future Earth is the least of our worries. Aside from the attendant mass extinctions and drowned cities, desertification promises to spawn a fierce wave of human violence. At least now we can rest assured that our enemies have enough to eat and drink and the resources to fuel their infrastructure (if only barely). The world we're creating won't be nearly as forgiving. Desperate people do desperate things -- and the worrisome proliferation of nuclear weapons recasts Cold War nightmares in a caustic new light.
This could well be our final century. But I agree with Stephen Hawking: If we can begin to migrate into space -- and reap the rewards waiting for us there -- we will have ensured a certain immortality. And there's real reason to hope we can create a "back-up," whether on the strange gray shores of the Moon, the mysterious wastes of Mars, or both. Indeed, stark environmental realities, exacerbated by a surging population, have made space migration imperative for a long-term human future.
3 comments:
I suppose you could look at it this way: If we stay on Earth, we're goners. If we attempt to colonize space, taking all possible realistic precautions, at least we have as chance.
Our whole problem is that we ARE still following our ancient primate genetic inheritance of intra- and intertribal dominance and submission -- the whole "Alpha Male" thing and its corollaries. In fact, the primate drive for dominance (a.k.a "will to power") probably accounts for 90% of the cultural shitheap in which we find ourselves mired.
Which is partially why I have no fundamental problem with robots inheriting the planet (see new essay).
I'm part of a team writing a mag about the end of the world and I've just started an apocalo-blog to cover the news of the various dooms.
Cool! Consider yourself "sidebarred."
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