How many children will you have? — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

Philosophy and other Silliness

How many children will you have?

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	Oscar Wilde said:[quote]We are all of us lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars[/quote] We may look to the stars, but we are currently no closer to attaining them than a monkey is to reaching the moon by climbing a tree. Besides, we don't succeed without hardship - wars have sparked the greatest advances in medicine and technology, not peaceful endeavour. With ever-increasing population sizes (and densities) there is an ever-increasing need to increase food supplies, deal with mounting waste, and find land to build on. Unfortunately, as is evidenced in the vast numbers of people in poor societies who die for want of a little food or medicine, society is not balanced, and while some of us gorge upon the 'successes' of our respective countries, others reap only the waste and deprivation we leave them. The only successes we should be concerned with right now are the radical reduction of waste, and efficient energy production and usage. 'Reaching for the stars' is a wasteful and expensive endeavour in itself, that diverts great minds and powerful industries away from the solutions to our current predicament. It doesn't help that we're all living longer. Medical science seems geared to prolonging life at any cost, despite the inevitable degradation of health that leads to the long-lived becoming a further (and patently begrudged) drain upon society. We pump them full of preservatives, then lock them away somewhere we don't have to look at them - living graveyards full of wasted experience, where a whole generation of learned lessons is forgotten in a haze of prolonged dementia. Anyway, what use will landing a few astronauts on a distant planet be to the vast hordes of hungry, poisoned humans crawling around in the dust and filth of a dying race? We need to seriously pull up our socks and think about making dramatic changes to the way we live before we can even entertain the idea of surviving into the cosmos. Einstein's always good for a quote:[quote]The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.[/quote] Einstein truly believed that mankind was capable of amazing feats, but he had little faith in the heart and wisdom of man. How far wrong was he? We are geared toward comfort and accumulation of wealth - oceans and air be damned if we can't have a bigger telly than Mr. Jones! We show such a great propensity for war. If only we could show the same capacity for truly beneficial advances that we show for sheer mass-homicidal inventiveness, we'd be generating clean energy, producing clean food, recycling every last ounce of waste, and every last man, woman and child would be fed and healthy. Instead, we encourage ignorant and backward beliefs, build weapons, and shit on our neighbours. We're in the stone age when it comes to advances in society. Now, I'm no eco-mentalist - I just truly believe that humankind is poisonous to the environment (and to itself) and will continue to be so while it continues to shrug off serious concerns with 'never mind, none of it'll matter when we're flying around in space ships'. The Earth has no issue - it'll shake us off like a seasonal virus, and the environments we make hostile to our very lives will simply be re-adapted to something less human. The ticker doesn't tick for the Earth, but for our place upon it. We should be worrying about our future as surviving beasts of Earth, not God's emissaries to the stars. It is estimated that the Sun has ~5bil. years left to shine. In less than 2bil. years, it will have boiled the Earth dry. One way or another, we have a good billion years to worry about jumping ship. Perhaps we should put plans to do so aside until we've figured out a way of surviving the next couple of centuries. Eventually, at this rate, our needs will push us into a new dark age. The stars will be forgotten in wars over religion, land and wealth, and the human spirit will necessarily be oppressed by those who believe they know best in the fight for survival. If God isn't enough to suppress the will of man, then the fear of terrorism will do. When that fails, perhaps the fear of an extra-terrestrial enemy will help get us under the boot. Whatever it takes to keep us fighting, and to maintain the balance of power and wealth in favour of our beloved malefactors, will be done. Unless we change substantially, we're doomed to repeat history. Loading...
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