Where are we headed?
I don’t mean next week or next year but the next 1,000 years.
Of course, opining on the future is conjecture unless, that is, I could get my hands on a Time Machine and report my findings.
Seriously, though, what will it be like in 3022?
It hardly bears thinking about unless you’re a science-fiction writer but the portent of now would suggest it will be a lot worse — on so many levels.
Some say, and I wouldn’t demur, that we (i.e. humans) won’t exist. I’m not so sure given our adaptability and ingenuity but certainly I don’t see the world, as it then is, supporting 10 billion people. As for Gaia, I dread to think about the level of degradation, pollution and exploitation we’ll have wrought in the name of progress!
Again, like so many subjects that have heaved up and weighed me down over the past 12 years (the time expired since I first left legal practice — my epiphany if you like), this one doesn’t get much air time and neither is it one that I’ve ever heard discussed around the boardroom or the dining table. I think that’s a mistake much like the fact we run scared whenever anyone wants to talk about endings, limits and death — especially that last one.
It’s only my opinion but it’s a mistake of epic proportion not to think about the long term. And it’s not like we’ve no point of reference; namely, look what we’ve done since the start of the Industrial Revolution. No, I don’t mean all those technological and scientific advances but how we’ve wrecked the earth. If you multiply that effect by five (5 x 200 (the start of the Industrial Revolution, say) = 1,000), you can start to see just how bad it’s going to get. Five times more heat; five times more destruction of the natural world; five times more plastic in the food chain etc.
It’s at this point I need to pause and reflect again on the anti-natalist message that seized me by the scruff of the neck some two years ago. Here’s a quote from one of its leading contributors:
“A charmed life is so rare that for every one such life there are millions of wretched lives. Some know that their baby will be among the unfortunate. Nobody knows, however, that their baby will be one of the allegedly lucky few. Great suffering could await any person that is brought into existence. Even the most privileged people could give birth to a child that will suffer unbearably, be raped, assaulted, or be murdered brutally. The optimist surely bears the burden of justifying this procreational Russian roulette. Given that there are no real advantages over never existing for those who are brought into existence, it is hard to see how the significant risk of serious harm could be justified. If we count not only the unusually severe harms that anybody could endure, but also the quite routine ones of ordinary human life, then we find that matters are still worse for cheery procreators. It shows that they play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun—aimed, of course, not at their own heads, but at those of their future offspring.” ― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
Pretty heavy stuff, right?
But he’s got a point, hasn’t he?
If you could know or at least reliably know what awaits the next few generations qua the Anthropocene, would you still have or want to have children?
And just to be very clear, this is exactly the conversation I’ve had with my wife ex post facto the fact that we’ve brought three children into the world.
In the end, like so many of my musings, I have zero expectation that anything will change and instead we’ll carry on in exactly the same vein until the point of no return.
Take care.
Julian