Ahhh… Saturday morning.
We have blue skies for a change, and the standing water in the backyard seems to have finally been absorbed by the hard clay just beneath the lightly tethered grass. (It’s beyond me how anything can grow in clay….)
One would hardly expect to ponder the possible end of the human race on such a morning, eh? Or any other morning, for that matter… yet that’s evidently what folks are doing:
The famed British astrophysicist and best-selling author has turned to Yahoo Answers, a new feature in which anyone can pose a question for fellow Internet users to try to answer. By Friday afternoon, nearly 17,000 Yahoo Inc. users had responded to Hawking.
Hawking’s question: “In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?”
According to CNN, a typical Yahoo Question garners 6 or 7 answers, but by the time I hit “Submit” this morning, the number had grown to just under 20,000. Dr. Hawking’s question has evidently hit a nerve…
Here’s what I said:
Sustaining the human race will require true globalization — a much different proposition from the surface-scratching technological version we’ve experienced thus far.
Humans are creatures of habit. We’re in chaos (imho) partly due to massive resistance to change… and we’re very early in the process. Technology has been the catalyst for this, but to date the cultural exposure has been superficial; we’re only globalized as “us” vs. “them”.
Without intimate knowledge of one another, we see, but do not understand — and thus do not value. Without major attitude shifts, the future will find us more xenophobic and nationalistic… or (worst case) reduced to scattered pockets of survivors, eking out existance and scrabbling over what’s left. I don’t think the worst case scenario is imminent, though.
Massive population shifts to intermingle and expose, an accompanying infusion of capital to develop the “third world” continents and countries, a renouncement and focused exorcism of intolerance, and ultimately, a more homogenous global society… all of these are going to be necessary to sustain humanity on this planet.
So… how do you think we’ll save the world?
I’ve thought about this question all day, and I can’t keep it to a simply answer because I keep debating with myself about the question. The question ignores the idea of there being a world so awful or chaotic that 6 billion people are either all killed or reduced to only a few million within 100 years. This is hard to picture not for the sadness, but just for the reality of it to me. Maybe I’m just not that realistic about what is going on today, or maybe i’m just more of a ”glass half full” type person. But I cannot imagine something bad enough other than the will of God to wipe us out.
So I guess my answer is that we’ll save the world because there are so many of us.
Assuming that by ”save” you meant preserve our world in something similar to its current numbers and quality, then I tend to think less optimistic about humans and see history as evidence that: 1) People will always destroy something on our planet, and something will always need saving. It is not possible to remove the actions of human survival from the earth. 2) Some group of people will always be at war, or working up to war with some other group of people. Even points in history when the US has not been at war in some form with someone, other countries were.
With history in mind, and today’s 6 billion people, I’m curious if the chaos of the human race is actually the same today as it has been for a long time.
Whoever answers this question correctly will win a Nobel.
Barring an act of God or the sun burning out, the human race will always be around.
I suspect that the real question to answer is, what will be the quality of life for those who survive? Will billions live in poverty and suffering and eeking out an existence in a hazardous, depleted environment?
The rich are getting richer. Our global society is becoming increasing consumer driven. When the economy of China starts ramping up to the pace of consumption that the U.S. is at, what will happen to the world? Where will the jobs be? Who will be the people who get rich from that trend?
Interesting… part of the reason that homo sapiens as a species is so successful is that it is adapable – it can change to allow it to survive in whatever environment it finds itself in. It is able to survive on both meat and plant life as food, it is able to manipulate things in the environment to aid it in its mission of survival (e.g. making animal hides/plant fibers into clothing, creating tools out of stone and metals.) At the same time, we are very resistant to change internally – as you said, we are ‘creatures of habit’. Quite a paradox, that – we are loath to change ourselves, but we can adapt our environment (or things in it) to help us to survive.
I am thinking that part of the reason we don’t like change is that it sets off the stress hormones – and as we are finding out, an overabundance of those hormones is not healthy for us.
So, how do we ‘save the world’? Well, I am not sure we can – but, I am reminded of the story of the boy, the beach, and the starfish. Like the boy, maybe we should simply strive to save ‘this one’. If we each save ‘one starfish’ – maybe by making one less trip, or turning off the lights we don’t need, or saying “Hi” in a cheerful tone to a stranger we meet while walking down the street, or donating blood, or…
The possibilities are endless.
~EdT.
EdT — your “save one starfish” is probably as good as it’s going to get, at least in terms of our individual ability to make an impact.
Interestingly, as all of you noticed, “save” is not “sustain”. I struggled, too, with the distinction in Hawking’s question, because I agree — the human race itself will be around, however diminished, for quite a while yet.
What, exactly, would we try to sustain? Just at the moment, there are any number of aspects of the current human condition — globally, socially, and politically — that I’d just as well leave in a round file.