>>Anyone who counts on the power of Nature or Technology to heal the wounds of mass extinctions, may find
themselves waiting several million years for meaningful results.
A Masterful essay. I'll elaborate on this last sentence however.
Nature, yes; that'll need millions of years to find and fill a new homeostasis. Technology, on the other hand...
I believe that Humankind finds itself at a cusp, a time of Crisis.* Great danger, yes, but unimaginable Opportunity. We are at the edge of an unprecedented circumstance: the feedback of consciousness into evolution!!!!! How big is this? Consider the short-term goals of genetic engineering, once it progresses to become a craft. Removal of genetic disease from our DNA. Selective importation of desirable traits, like good memory, no need to exercise, disease resistance, effortless capacity to thrive in zero-g. Charles Sheffield and Greg Bear treat of these possibilities in their fiction. My fantasy of gasfruit fits in here. Biotech should be a way that humans can enjoy a continued exponential growth of their energy use and living standard while actually decreasing the size and depth of their collective footprint on the globe. Imagine steaks or shrimp grown in culture from engineered plants. Is this still carnivory? When that happens, I too will become vegetarian. A crop can be designed to yield a universal fruit-of-life which constitutes a totally balanced diet. Flavor it subtly of pizza, and even Alexa's family can have me over and watch me eat it! This imagined crop will of course grow very densely; perhaps each apartment in the projected arcologies (huge environmentally-contained structures where tens of millions live and work, allowing a genuinely good life while reclaiming the suburbs as parks&wilderness) will grow its own staples. The key is energy, boundless supplies of it and very efficient technology which will remove the requirement to waste too much heat from inside these big buildings.Bottom line: the new technologies will have progressive environmental respect built in.
All this should take 300 years tops.
After that, progress is hard to extrapolate because of the Wild Card: self-aware individuals feeding back into the design of their next generations. An explosion and radiation of myriad new physical forms of Human is not beyond imagining. And I embrace this as a good thing: getting our eggs out of just one basket.
I hope this isn't too manically incomprehensible!
*The Chinese ideograph for "crisis", I am told, is the pairing of "danger" and "opportunity" sorta like a German compound word. |
