I have long been a believer that the technology we are developing will enable us to grow and adapt to any changes we are making to our environment.
Be it space travel so we can expand and get away from the limits Earth puts on our growth, enhancements to our bodies so we can survive in environments outside the ranges we currently need to meet, the way we grow and process food and many other similar ideas. Ideas totally rejected by a rather noisy few whingey whiney people who think we should all go back in time, put the genie back in the bottle and start killing ourselves off but excluding them of course as they are priests for the newest religion on the planet.
I’ve met a few people on my travels that believe technology will be our saviour, most don’t even think about it until you talk to them and put a few facts on the table while the priests actually started indocrinating our children via our dismal education system. They can’t add up in their heads or work out percentages but they know exactly who is to blame for the earth being devoid of life in 50 years time and what sacrifices we have to make to extend that for another few years. Praise the messiah, and it is not Obama this time.
So, it pleases me immensely that an article in the New Scientist, usually full of Climate Change, overpopulation and other whingy whiney theories has a simple article from someone with similar views to myself.
I am not alone. It is a bit of a relief actually for a while there I was not so sure.
Alison George makes some good points and if taken in isolation, in a perfect test tube world, are valid. He point that there is an adaptability, a networking solution which can overcome vicissitudes and adapt to the new challenges is a good one.
Don’t get me wrong – I vastly prefer your optimistic [you'd call it realistic] belief that technology can win through and there is a lot of evidence to support it. Many times the doomsayers predicted the end and it did not come.
Two things in the equation which can’t be ignored though are the agenda of people who wish the doomsayers to be right for the profits to be made from it and some bizarre sense of global destiny – they need to be factored into Alison’s argument too.
The other is the metaphysical and I smile to see “rationalist” reactions whenever I introduce that. It ranges form dismissal to apoplexy and yet there are observable phenomena which need to be factored in, not least in the biological adaptability Alison refers to.
“Her point that …”
James,
I don’t forget those that follow the doomsayers. The blog tagline is ‘if Politics doesn’t doom us first’ I think that factors it in.
Now the guy who wrote that article pointed me to another article I liked which said
“In twenty years, [renewable] sources will have failed economically, leaving renewable energy to be remembered as the energy equivalent of sub-prime mortgages. “