What would it take for humanity to have a thriving long-term future on a thriving, healthy planet?
How can humanity avoid short-term disaster so we get a chance to build that future?
These questions have occupied me since 1974, when I realized something disturbing: the ruins of great civilizations are all around us.
Sooner or later, civilizations collapse
Today’s global civilization is doing the same things that contributed to the collapse of previous civilizations:
- Intensive agriculture that depletes the soil over large areas. (About 30% of the excess carbon in the atmosphere comes from soil damage.)
- High population that keeps growing.
- Large-scale environmental damage.
Previous civilization collapses affected regions. None threatened humanity with extinction. Today, human impacts have become so large that we have damaged the Earth’s ozone layer… raised ocean acidity by 30%… and started to affect Earth’s climate. Worse, technology has added new threats that might destroy humanity, such as nuclear weapons and biotechnology.
And yet…
Humanity has great potential
We are the first species on Earth to achieve our kind of intelligence, language, and technology. With today’s great wealth and rapidly improving technology, people today are uniquely position to solve problems that previous generations and older civilizations could not.
Instead of trashing the environment the way previous civilizations did, today we have the opportunity to renew and enhance Earth’s ecosystems, so that the nature functions better with us than without us.
As the very first self-optimizing intelligent species, humanity has the choice — and the moral imperative — to act as big sisters and big brothers for other species. We can protect other species in ways they cannot now protect themselves. We can give them a thriving Earth to live on, and a future worth living in.
Eventually, humanity may help some of our fellow species achieve intelligence comparable to ours.
Eventually, humans and our allies may reach the stars.
Humanity’s future could be vast and glorious
If humanity can make it through this dangerous time — a time when our technological power exceeds our wisdom — our future may stretch millions of years or longer.
Just as people today do things that were unimaginable to people living just a few hundred years ago, our descendants will achieve things that are unimaginable to us today.
Here, at the beginning of the age of high technology, we have already eliminated scourges that plagued humanity for all of human history, such as smallpox. We have already done what 10,000 years of humans thought impossible and developed means for ordinary people to fly… to communicate instantaneously around the planet… to live more than double what used to be the average lifespan. We have even lifted people into space.
What age-old problems will humanity solve tomorrow? In the next decade, the next century, the next thousand years? Just as people in AD 1020 couldn’t imagine this world, with its amazing technology and possibilities, today we can’t imagine how great the world could be with 1,000 years of further progress.
Life-extension technology is advancing fast enough that you may get to personally see 150, 200, even 500 years into the future.
Is it going to be a future you want? A future you would want for the people you love?
Ensuring that we build a flourishing future is my lifelong focus.
Next: Part 2: Big questions about humanity’s long-term future
