“The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its reticle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above? For the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from ground….”
– Walden, Henry David Thoreau
I wrote before that some believe humanity’s end is here.
A different perspective: Darkest yet it gets ‘fore dawn.
Humanity may fizzle under weight of it’s self-inflicted calamities. What I find is how spectacularly inadequate we are at prediction: The cosmos and its purpose are far beyond human comprehension. So too human ingenuity.
That means my guess is as good as anyone else’s. Including the doomsayers. What puts the odds in favor of this post is I’m taking action – as are others – to create a better reality than we have. Until there are too few for viable human reproduction, the task continues.
Escape Velocity
Perhaps pernicious problems are purposeful. Example: our space rockets require tremendous amounts of fuel to escape Earth’s pull. Heavy fuel. Yet our rockets carry that weight, plus the fuel tanks, to achieve Escape Velocity. Beyond Earth’s gravity, excess fuel burned, fuel stages ejected, the ship is free. Fuel is both burden and solution.
Pernicious problems orient humanity to important things. Intractable problems beget unreasonable solutions. Our best and brightest are not on Wall Street, in hedge funds, on trading floors. Those are the duped. The sheep. Our real bright starts are focused on goals that will “shoot [humanity] upward with confidence”. Rooting ourselves firmly in the earth through problems we create, we soon “may rise in the same proportion to the heavens”.
Achieving this escape velocity may be Challenge Number One. But spaceship humanity is fueled and ready.
Humanity isn’t over. We’re just getting started.
Yes, we are inadequate at prediction, but it is a flaw of logic to assume that inadequacy is equal to absolute incompetence. One guess is not as good as another any more than all values are absolutely relative. The guess of those who are beginning to understand complexity is not equal to those who understand all processes as linear. For instance: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-10-10/cusp-collapse-complexity-energy-globalised-economy
I’m not arguing that humanity is incompetent at prediction. I’m saying we often get it wrong. The extremely long article you included (thanks for including it) makes a detailed prediction. Lots of words won’t make it any more accurate in my opinion, now matter how reasoned the words are. I’m prepared to be wrong. So let’s wait and see what happens. Shall we?