Monday, May 11, 2015

Thinking about the future.......................

The Huffington Post asked ten science fiction writers to offer their thoughts about the future (with a scope of ten years!).  Some of them are pretty interesting - read it for your ownself here.   Of course, I do have a bone of two to pick.  For instance:

So what might be new and different in the next 10 years? We can start by asking what’s already beginning to feel old. And what feels old (to me) is our political and economic discourse. Here we stand, on the brink of a global climate catastrophe and embedded in an emerging oligarchy armed with a surveillance apparatus of unprecedented reach and power, discussing politics in terms Victorian philosophers would have recognized. There is a tinderbox of unmet expectations and frustrated idealism out there, and a genuinely captivating new political or economic idea -- good or bad -- could start a global conflagration.
Mind you, I believe the climate is changing.  That is what it does.  Only us human types, having inhabited this lovely planet for only a few eye-blinks of its existence, get offended if the weather is not exactly like it was when we were teenagers.  Have we forgotten that the ever lovely Licking County, Ohio has been visited by glaciers twice in the past 100,000 years?  (Information on the most recent one can be found here.) The odds are excellent that another one will eventually visit, and there is nothing we can do to stop it - no matter how much carbon dioxide we put in the air or what the computer models say.  My whole problem with the "climate change" folks is their contention that warming will be a catastrophe.  It may well be a boon, allowing our shared planet to support  much more life.  Their  reliance upon computer models discounts the adaptability and cleverness of us pesky humans.  We should remember that friend Darwin never really talked about the "survival of the fittest," but rather the survival of the most adaptable.  For recent history, that has been us.  

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