There is a revolution happening, even as we speak. Maybe the year 2012 will be remembered as a period of uniquely great change, or, maybe, just maybe, our current rapid rate of change is destined to become a permanent part of the human landscape, though its hard to imagine how.
How much faster can humanity change? And for how long? Our life spans are lengthening dramatically, our physical size is increasing rapidly, our level of education, largely due to computers and the genaral increase in human knowledge, is rising rapidly as well.
Change is cyclical. Football players won't keep getting bigger n bigger, forever. Likewise, the human population won't keep growing, and human life spans lengthening, indefinitely.
If aliens are watching us, as I suspect they are, they surely find us fascinating. How could they not? After all, in the blink of an eye the human species has evolved from the stone age into the computer age, amazing technological advance in a remarkably short period of time.
That, if nothing else about us, should be sufficient to attract extraterrestrial attention. We are obviously highly intelligent, creative, complicated, and fascinating creatures. At least, we are to me, and, I suspect, to everyone else.
We are, in a word, worth preserving, and for the sake of argument let us assume that we, but only we, can preserve ourselves.
The human population has more than doubled in the past 40 years, nations like China and Russia have utterly remade themselves, politically and economically, much to their credit, and medical, agricultural, and computer sciences are exploding with new knowledge.
Its fun to watch. It makes one want to live a long time. A friend of mine swallowd a bottle of aspirin in 1975, when he was 22, but then panickily eliminated the poison from his system when he suddenly realized that he wanted to stick around just to see what would happen next.
He's still around, and I'm glad he is. A lot has happened since 1975.
When I was a kid, in the nineteen sixties, I thought that in the twenty first century I would be flying in my car, or maybe visiting the moon or Mars, all the while conversing on my wrist watch. Space flight was an american passion during the nineteen sixties, and computers were on the verge of becoming the passion they are today.
I also thought I would be living in a paradise world which had eliminated hunger, poverty, disease, and war.
Everyone who has ever tried to predict the future has been wrong, way wrong, dead wrong, with all due respect to Nostradamus, Edgar Casey, and our current fine crop of future forecastors.
Oh, many people have made predictions which turned out to be remarkably accurate, and it seems plausible that there are ways of sensing the future - but accurately and clearly presenting the future in great accuracy and detail, in a comprehensive manner - that seems beyond human capabilities, at least, currently...
But the revolution, the frantic rate of change in this world that we see every day...wherever it leads us, it will be to places we can't even imagine now, but will arrive at soon enough. We only know two things: that the future is ours to shape, and that there are many options.
by Bob Bond
Please scroll down for the other articles in today's issue of The Truthless Reconciler! Thanks!
No comments:
Post a Comment