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Stephen Hawking Asks The Internet a Question
An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Stephen Hawking received about 15000 answers to a question he posted 2 days ago on Yahoo Answers. His question was 'How can the human race survive the next hundred years?'." I imagine you can do better than 'It Can't.' How would you answer Dr. Hawking's question?
We have to stop being a desposable consumerist society. I.e. we have to live more simply. Now I'm not saying that we all need to be organic gardeners who tailor their own clothes and live directly off the land. I'm very much a metropolitan technologist, but I think that consumption purely for the sake of consumption is our biggest problem. The real question is if the market can correct this or if the market will dig such a deep hole that it doesn't react until the shit hits the fan.
good ol' pandemic. A real nasty beast of a bug.
Kill off a couple billion, and we'll be good to go for a while.
What?
Humans are like cockroaches. We've infected every corner of the globe, and we're not going away. However, if we are to survive and prosper for the next century and hopefully longer, there's going to be some big changes. My boyfriend and I were talking, and following the depletion of oil resources (and not before), we'll see a massive centralization of cities, mostly on coasts, and a move towards renewable energy sources. Cars will never go away; they have too much momentum (no pun intended). But when this happens, we'll see much more of a community feel, as everyone will be in much closer quarters. The massive towers in Dubai and Kuala Lampur (sp?) are good examples of this, and will propogate into the next century as we won't have the finances to get around. Cities like Los Angeles will become a thing of the past, as it will no longer be feasible to have your suburban house with a white picket fence. With this, we'll see a lot of changes. Society will be permanently altered. But as Gloria Gaynor said, "we will survive". If we want to extend ourselves to Mars and the moons of the gas giants, we'll need to perfect the biodome, to be able to live independently. Interstellar travel is out of the question, and always will be. We should give up on it and focus on going to Mars, Europa, and some of the other moons. -sigh-
I don't thin there is any way we will be living in space in the next 100 years. Also, I don't think moving is the solution to our problems.
I don't see us all moving to other planets, moons and space communinities, I just see an extension and survival of Man through that avenue. This planet will be exhausted at the rate of consumption.
It's like the drug addict who thinks that moving away from the city will solve their drug addiction. The problems we have aren't a result of where we live, but how we live.
And it's energy, per capita, which is mostly How We Live. It isn't just the SUV guzzling gas, but the appliances at home and all the goods we purchase which require energy to manufacture, package and distribute. The USA is consuming commodities at a blazing rate, but China with it's vast population will match that in short order. Economics will play a part, as China and India consume more goods and energy the costs (as they are already doing in most goods) will rise and reduce consumption simply because people won't be able to have it all anymore, but choose from fewer things which are important to them. The big adjustment is going to be when petroleum runs scarce. Everything will change as the cost of petrol increases. Sadly, there will also be increased competition for land as is expected much low lying lands will flood thanks to the warmer climate.
Be wary. Wars are waged more over competition for resources than any other reason.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
and you'll find a huge disparity between the 5-10% or so at the top of the comfort scale, and the rest. Right now the Western world (most of the US + Canada, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea and the Commonwealth) comprises that 5-10%. Guess what? It won't stay that way for too long, it never does. The best you can hope for is a good five hundred to thousand year run, and I think Western civilization might be nearing the end of its spectacular five-century sprint.
Pick any period in human history, and you'll also find a large number of people actively working to cause the end of their particular civilization.
Why is Iraq's fabled "land between the two rivers" a dry dusty desert?
Why is North Africa, the ancient Mediterranean's breadbasket and father of great cities, hardly able to grow enough food to feed its own populations?
Why did the Chacoans up and suddenly disappear after claiming so much of the harsh American Southwest for their cities and farms?
Why did the ancient Mayans leave their cities that required so much labor to construct in the middle of a jungle?
Humans can have an amazing impact on their environment, but it's easy to forget that while we appear to be the masters of Nature. But the two work on completely different timescales.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
Maybe, up until this point, man could not survive without religion. Marx proposed as such and considered God the ephemeral parent of an immature society. Thus maybe the fact that religion has not gone extinct is an indication that society would be far worse without it. Perhaps a world in which people cannot police themselves needs a "god" and fear of eternal rebuke in order to keep them in line.
For the record, I'm not religious or even a believer, but I do think that much of human civilization follows a similar paradigm to evolution. Things exist for a reason - or did anyway... because they served a function. If religion is this opiate that the masses need, and it is abolished, what do we replace it with? Meds?
un burrito me trampeó.
The counter problem is that we have different religions that are willing to kill huge numbers of other humans if they are not a member of the same religion.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Most of the issues and coping strategies folks have been bringing up are reasonable, albeit relatively short term concerns. It appears to me, however, that these concerns miss the point - a 100 year timeframe is much different than a 20 year one.
...
I suggest that the human race will survive the next 25 years or so by muddling along in its time honored traditions barring, of course, some unforseen global catastrophe. Problems like overpopulation, environmental degredation, warfare, disease, global warming - these are serious problems but problems the human race has shown itself to be capable of dealing with as long as one is not overly concerned about collateral damage. And when looking at something like the survival of the human race, a few billion here or there kind of falls into the noise.
Considering the longer term (25-75 years out) future of the human raises some more interesting concerns
One of the questions I find compelling is how human social, cultural, political, and economic networks will survive and behave in a post-scarcity economy. For about 15 years the inflation adjusted costs of manufactured goods has continued to decrease. Just in time manufacturing, custom fabrication, these trends all point toward a transition to an economy based on 'how to do/build things' rather than 'things' alone. I have yet to see any cogent model of how human networks will adapt to this transition, and I therefore belive that this transition has the potential to be quite disruptive.
Another consideration is how the definition of 'human' may change as a result of technological progress and environmental demands. If anything, I suspect that the answer to the question 'how will the human race survive the next 100 years?' is, in the long term, quite simple.
Change what it means to be human.
Terrifying, and extraordinarily difficult to predict, but in the long run the *only* way species survive is by changing - and the potential for that change to be mediated by technology in humans drastically accellerates the potential timeframe. Some relatively simple changes are already filtering into human culture almost invisibly - laser eye surgery, fairly serious cosmetic modifications, cochlear implants, hair transplants, hair removal, sex reassignment, prosthetics, longterm drug therapies, gene therapy; I could go on and on.
Sometimes the only way to solve an intractable problem is my changing the terms of the problem itself. Just as Alexander the Great trumped generations of philosophers by cutting the Gordian Knot in half instead of untangling it, it may be that the only way to truly insure the long term survival of the human race is by changing what it means to be human.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Alright, this comment of mine was silly.
I believe in God, obviously, so I was set off a bit. I shouldn't really care, though, how other people think. Actions are what matter, after all.
I do agree that religion is foolish; I see it as a way of objectifying God, reducing him into an idol, a utility. And as a utility, religion is indeed unnecessary.
God is just a part of me, though. I don't know WHAT he is as much as WHO he is. He's at the core of who I am, and to deny God would be to deny my own existence. I don't feel any handicapped by this any more than I feel that breathing or a pulse is a handicap, or that my love for my wife is a useless reliance and a weakness.
God and I are good friends. He communicates with me on a daily basis, using events in my own life around me as his vocal chords.
And I doubt mean to make it sound as if I have a special connection that elevates my status, because the way I see it, God is not above me or you. There is no hierarchy, so there is no elevation of status through association.
It's merely an instinct. I tried denying it for years, but I eventually had to come to accept it as intrinsic to who I am. That's the kind of creature I am. Perhaps you are just different sorts of creatures.
I see the scientific, testable aspect of God as being Love. That we can all share, despite our internal universes that define who we are.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
Female literacy is one of the key factors in determining birth rates.
Increased female literacy allows women greater access to information on birth control and also higher statuts in society leading to greater control over reproductive decisions. To reduce population growth teach girls to read. This is an abstract of a study discussing factors impacting birth rates such as female literacy. Here is a little bit more info.
"I'd like for religious people to point out one single thing that religion is needed for, I haven't found one single thing."
I will give you a personal reason, if not for believing in god I would be a violent criminal.
I don't see anything wrong with raping someone, or stealing from them - after all they are just a bunch of meat, with no real existance - they sure think that they are real, but what do I care? They are just a bunch of nerves blinking, no different then a computer. So what if I hurt them, they'll die eventually, and then it's gone, so who cares.
I might as well make myself happy.
But, then there's my religion which says that people have souls, they are real, and eternal. And their soul is no different from mine.
So only because of that I don't behave that way. In fact I'm one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, going far out of my way to help people, because it matters - they are real, and what I do for them actually help a real person, and not just some walking protein.
I hope you don't think I'm a troll, because I'm quite serious. I do know that I'm not the only one who feels this way because I've had other people tell me similar things. I don't know how many people would admit to it though.
I'm usually pretty impressed with athiests who control themself, but at the same time I think thier stupid. Why would they do that? It gains them nothing at all, so they lived a miserable life, and died, seems like dumb thing to do to me.
And don't give me noncense about how helping people is the best way to live a happy fulfiled life - you are just prooving my point, if you are only helping people because it helps you, then you are doing exactly what I said: living for your own pleasure. I just so happens you are helping people along the way, but that's not why you are doing it.
Exactly.
It's not spirituality that's killed anyone, or even faith in God. It's blind faith in humans that say they know what God wants.
No one should ever listen to anyone who says they know what God wants.
Which, in the end, is why I have to go with Jesus on this whole 'religion' thing. Read what he said, and you'll notice he wanted you to do two things: Love God, and love everyone else. That's it, those are the only things you should do in the name of his religion or even not do in the name of his religion.
Yes, Christianity ended up with a lot of trappings of Judaism and Roman pagan stuff, and Paul was pretty wacked in the head on some stuff. But it's not Paulianity or Judairomanchristianity. Don't confuse the message with the way the message was presented 2000 years ago.
Every single thing Jesus said boils down to 'love everyone, including God'. He doesn't say to follow anyone on earth, he has some things that would be useful, like 'feeding widows' and 'don't pretend to be pious and lord it over people', but he's pretty clear this should follow logically from 'loving everyone', and they aren't 'rules'. Any action is okay as long as it is based in love of everyone, or at least not based in hate or jealous or an opposite of love.
But, like I said, don't believe me. Read his words, the ones that managed to make through the distortion of the sect wars in the early church. Everything else about Christianity is just tacked on garbage. Especially anything Paul wrote about sex.(1)
And, yeah, I know it's a bit odd to say 'Don't ever listen to anything anyone says God wants you to do' and then say 'But here, listen to what this guy said God wanted you to do'. That is what you call 'faith'.
And I've got no problem if someone wants to love everyone as themselves for some other reason, or even no reason at all, or want to called God 'Allah' or 'humanity' or 'nature'.
1) Why did I single Paul out? Because he was writing to Romans who would attend church on Sunday and then go to an orgy dedicated to a Roman God on Monday, and people like to translate the word he used that means 'sexual immorality' as 'fornication', which it often is a metaphor for worshipping idols, or even worshipping idols via sex, so a lot of his condemnations seem a lot broader than they actually are. Also, he disliked sex in general and was apparently afraid of women with any power, neither of which have anything to do with anything Jesus said.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
OK, I'll bite.
Atheism is, in my opinion, a higher evolutionary state than theism. If you want to talk about progress, the secular, scientific worldview has brought us all kinds of advancements in virtually every aspect of life. Scientists, not priests, discovered electricity, developed antibiotics, found a way to travel to the moon; the list goes on and on. If you look back at human history, religion has generally been the biggest impediment to scientific progress. Its main use was (and continues to be) as a device allowing a select, manipulative few to gain control over and wealth from the gullible masses. Religion has had a role in almost every war in human history, and there's been a clear trend over the past few centuries: The more secular a country is, the less likely it is to go to war.
It's popular among secularists these days to placate believers by saying that science and religion can coexist, but I don't believe that's true. The progressive believers, those who no longer believe in stoning disobedient children to death, for instance, are deliberately ignoring a portion of what they consider to be the word of God. The extremists, on the other hand, may find themselves at odds with the modern world, but they're the ones who are truly being faithful to their beliefs.
I'd also like to add that the human mind has the capability to convince itself of the veracity of some incredible horseshit--look at Scientology, for instance. Heaven's Gate? Jonestown? These people were all sure they were right about the nature of the universe, just as you appear to be. The only difference between your beliefs and theirs is that yours are more widespread.
Take a step back and look at the modern world objectively. Religion threatens us in a very serious way. Islamic terrorism is a threat now, but it's nothing compared to what it will be when nuclear weapons technology becomes more advanced and widespread. It doesn't help that the world's only remaining superpower is being run by what the Muslims (and some of us) see as a villain straight out of central casting.
Believing in God, in my opinion, is no different than believing in Santa Claus. It may be comforting, but no matter how much you want to believe it, a fat man in red is not going to make presents appear in front of the tree in your living room. The world would be so much better off if people would just see it for what it was.