Leaving the World

MY BIRTHDAY is next month, and I will, amazingly, turn seventy, so, I have recently been thinking a little about what kind of world it will be when I die. Actually I have been doing that, thinking about the future, my entire life, and like everybody else, I have always been wrong about it. The thought occurs to me that the world we live in now is becoming increasingly similar to the one which will exist when I leave it, which is of course inevitable, but not necessarily desirable. When I was a kid in the nineteen sixties I predicted that by the year two thousand we would have a city on the moon, and one on Mars, and would be preparing to send people to the stars. By the far off science fiction year of twenty twenty five, I predicted, we would all be flying cars and visiting other solar systems. I do not think, however, that I foresaw cell phones and personal computers. Neither did anybody else. Before I die - and I have always said this - I would like to know the answer to the question of whether there is any other intelligent life in the universe. Its beginning to look like I won't. However, we do know now that there are billions of other planets circling other stars in the universe, and that fact in itself tends to point towards life. I would also like to have a pretty good idea, before I die, of whether the human species, and all life on Earth, is going to survive climate change. As of now, it seems to me, kind of up in the air" - it could go either way. I'm starting to think that we humans will soon develop a technology for removing carbon from the atmosphere, and that this technology will save us. I also am tending to believe that the people who want to stop usig fossil fuels will eventually prevail over those who do not. They are, after all, on the right side of history. Whether humanity ever actually establishes permanent human habitats in space and on other planets is another prescient futuristic issue. Ever since I was a child, I have wanted that to happen, for some reason. Obviously, it hasn't happened nearly as soon as I thought. It does, however, still seem to be a possibility, especially if governments and united nations get involved in it. For the future of humanity, in all areas of endeavor, to be relegated exclusively under the control of multi billionaires and big corporations does not seem to be the healthiest way of managing the future, some might agree. Perhaps the most frustrating fact of modern society is that there is more than enough food to feed all of humanity, and yet, people go hungry and starve. We know we can feed people; let's just do it, as we say. I never would have imagined that, as I approach the end of my life, there would still be so much damned violence and war in the world. That there is a massive ongoing land war in Europe in the twenty first century is astounding and disgusting. As of this moment, unless we reverse climate change very soon, our children and grandchildren are gong to have to deal with extreme climatic conditions, even as the climate is becoming extreme right now. Maybe our descendants will think of a way to remove all the plastic from our bodies, and the land, water, and soil of planet Earth. Good luck. I am sufficiently homo sapiens-centric to hope that the human species survives long after my death. Well, it seems to have almost survived my entire life, and that's something, its a start. I can assure you,that in itself is a virtual miracle. I remember ducking under my school desk to hide from atomic bombs.