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BS ‘n’ About…
Tomorrow
We sit at the most critical crossroads in human history. The past 100 years have given us an understanding and command of our world beyond our ancestors’ wildest imaginations. Science and economies of scale are hurtling us into the future at a heretofore-unprecedented pace.
Unfortunately, old habits die hard and old dogs don’t easily learn new tricks. We’re using all this shiny new knowledge to build ever more powerful tools, toys, and weapons, only to use them to fight the same old battles in the same old ways. Left unchecked, business and science will continue to put death and destruction in the hands of every yahoo dictator and self-important politician who can pay for it. Left unchecked, we’ll keep on lying, cheating, and stealing. Left unchecked, we’ll keep on killing. That’s not the recipe for a very promising Tomorrow.
Unless we actively do something to avoid it, we’ll stumble into a WWIII somewhere down the road. Some idiot here or somewhere else will cross the line and the other side will be forced to retaliate. Bombastic rhetoric will fill the airwaves and the other nations of the world will start choosing sides. Einstein said World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones, a fact that ought to be quite obvious to us by now. Yet we evolve toward war, not away from it.
Unless we actively do something to avoid it, Bird Flu, or AIDS, or Ebola, or The Next One, is going to mutate, head for the airport, and wipe out a good chunk of humanity. Along the way, it’ll crash the economies, stir up the old hatreds, and rip apart human interaction on every level. We can’t avoid its appearance. It’s coming. Modern communications and technology will either save us or doom us.
Unless we actively do something to avoid it, we have no chance against Mother Nature. She’s going to keep on throwing earthquakes, tidal waves, twisters, and typhoons at us. If she takes down an L.A. or Tokyo, it’ll crash the economies, devastate a culture, and alter history. As humanity grows more populous and technologically dependant, the effect of natural disasters will multiply exponentially. Modern communications and technology will either save us or doom us.
The pace, the times, and the toys have changed, but we haven’t. We fight over the same old apples, oblivious to the fact that it has begun raining apples all around us. We spend lots more keeping the world armed to the teeth than it would cost to ‘buy-off’ and find long term resolution for most of the world’s areas of conflict. We mess with biological, chemical, and nuclear nightmares. Now we’re messing with our own DNA. Yet we still lie, steal, and kill. We still torture, rape, and pillage. We’re greedy, selfish, and insecure. In many ways we’ve never evolved beyond the savage, superstitious beings that crawled forth from their caves to build the first civilizations and cultures known to us. Might still makes right. The bullies still call the shots. Our souls haven’t evolved enough to be worthy of the powers our ingenuity has harnessed.
History always repeats itself. The Four Horsemen still ride. The fragility of infrastructure required for modern civilization make it imperative that we be prepared ahead of time for their appearance on the horizon, not after the fact. The costs of being prepared will be staggering. We can’t afford to fight both the Four Horsemen and each other. Since war is the Horseman we have most control over, it is our best hope of getting control over the others.
It is easy to assume that tomorrow is going to look a whole lot like today. But history doesn’t work that way. History is driven by the appearance of cataclysmic events and individuals. When things happen they happen fast, and tend to turn Tomorrow into something Today can’t comprehend.
That our Today has no comprehension of Tomorrow, (or Yesterday for that matter), is frighteningly obvious, not to mention just plain frightening. That we’d be willing to re-fight a WWII-scale war with Iraqi Freedom weaponry is beyond insane. That we’d be willing to risk a pandemic when enough vaccine could have been available is criminal. That we live on fault lines and in hurricane alley without serious preparations is utterly ridiculous.
Mankind might be an old dog, but it had better start learning some new tricks. If we take any of the horrors of our past and multiply them by the leaps we’ve recently made, our Tomorrow is going to be a nightmare beyond our wildest imagination. The next Ice Age, Plague, Great Depression, or Adolph Hitler could very well be the end of us. Everything we’ve built could crumble overnight.
Earth’s situation is not unlike that of a spaceship stranded in the vast emptiness of the Universe. And that spaceship is hurtling into Tomorrow at ever-increasing speeds, harnessing ever-greater powers, using up our resources at ever-increasing rates. We, the crew of that spaceship, are in chaos. We need a plan.
Humanity sits at the most critical crossroads in its history. Our new-fangled knowledge gives us a wealth that could be used to completely re-think the way we do things: co-operate instead of compete, share instead of steal, inherently good instead of inherently evil. There is finally enough for everybody. Peace costs less than war. Education costs less than ignorance. Vaccines cost less than mass graves. Levees cost less than rebuilding cities.
Unfortunately, there is nothing in the world Today to suggest that Tomorrow is going to look any different than Yesterday: war, ignorance, mass graves, & rebuilding. Yet our very survival may very well require that it be a day that looks nothing like Today: …a Tomorrow that stands proud of all that we’ve mastered yet humbled by the majesty we still can’t explain. Tomorrow could be a new beginning or it could just be the day after Today.
One thing is certain. Something’s coming. And it’s gonna be big. Common sense says we ought to be prepared for it. What good is all the knowledge we’ve acquired Today, if we just use it Tomorrow to blow ourselves back into Yesterday?
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