Choosing Futures
image: Fred Freeman
Our future is a bummer…or it is the greatest chapter of human perseverance ever written.
We are in the midst of one of the most amazing developments in history. It’s the information age, and our dependance and connection to it is only going to deepen. In the next twenty years, information gathering systems will proliferate as entire cities become data collecting entities in themselves. Individuals will continue to carry smart devices and wearables. When we are ready and as Ray Kurzweil predicts, it will become normal to upgrade our intelligence by merging our biology with future tech.
On the scale of human history is seems just minutes ago that industrialization launched our world out of an agrarian mode and into unprecedented population growth. Of course it also brought with it all the ills of our current moment. As industrialization was our salvation from tedious manual labor so too will the information age be our salvation from a teetering climate. We simply have to choose our future.
It is easy to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of our global predicament and it is difficult to choose positive action in the face of it. But I argue in support of the words of Albert Ellis; "The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny."
There are countless (not actually countless, but many, many) articles and websites devoted to the gravity of our predicament. Reading them can quickly strike a blow against your courage to act. There is however, one glaring omission from all of the doomsday hype you can find out there; we have the data and information systems to guide our actions. This is no small thing. Pat yourselves on the back humans! Our planetary ecosystem is known to us in ever increasing detail. This level of detail has allowed us to build predicable models of a balanced ecosystem and therefor we have a roadmap to get there. We merely have to do the following:
Keep Calm
Trust in Science
Take action
Vote for the politicians who have courage to do the same.