Life in the E‐Sphere

摘要

"There is only one evil, ignorance and only one good, knowledge" – Socrates The so-called Third Millennium (at least as reckoned in the Western chronology) will be a time of enormous challenge and change. Simply put, how well we meet these challenges will decide how long the species Homo sapiens might survive. These potential challenges to survival today seem almost endless and suggest to some that even a thousand more years may be difficult for our species to sustain, much less an eon – another billion years. The problems for humans to overcome range widely. They span a spectrum of environmental issues that start with global warming, carbon dioxide and methane buildup and include the darkening albedo of the polar ice caps. They also include global pollution, desertification, loss of the rain forests and arable land, and the depletion of petrochemical energy sources. Since September 11, 2001, we all now know that we must also cope with techno-terrorism and man-made destruction on a planetary scale. Thus the problems to cope with are more than environmental or natural in cause. We must find out if we will ultimately be able to achieve a steady-state global population and sustain it economically and socially as well as strive to attain universal access to global education and health care. The 21st century certainly will be a time in which we must address such human-bred dangers as techno-terrorism, nuclear proliferation, abuses that stem from bio-engineering and cloning, and much more. At the same time we could also unlock wonderful medical breakthroughs from the fruits of stem cell research. We also seem to have an endless array of new biological and computer viruses (now numbered at 5000 and growing rapidly) attacking the health of our global society. Ironically we have made little substantial progress in overcoming known dangers even as new technologically generated challenges are emerging at an exponentially increasing pace. It seems, therefore, that the next century and most certainly the next millennium hold the key to whether humanity can survive as a species. To do this we will have to shift from a maximized economic growth mentality to a maximized human development and survival mentality. This means developing more wisdom rather than blindly developing more information or more technology or more material wealth. Goal number one must be to sustain a livable biosphere. This is not something we can do quickly. The objective must be to improve the environment at least gradually over the few centuries – a task easier said than done. If our global population hits 12 billion within the next century the challenge will become ever so much larger. Consider this: So far we have lived at best some small fraction of the time that the giant dinosaurs survived. To date humanity has been around, at most, about 5 million years, which is much, much less than the nearly 200 million years that represented the Golden Age of the Dinosaurs when they were the masters of the world. They reigned supreme until a huge meteorite that struck earth during the Jurassic Age apparently wiped them out – a fact that should put our current environmental dilemmas in clear perspective. As Sir Arthur Clarke once said: "The dinosaurs failed to survive due to the lack of a space program." To pursue a space program is not the lesson to be learned from Sir Arthur's observation, although this is certainly a good idea, but rather that we need to plan ahead. It is possible that we may fail to survive because we developed high technology but failed to derive from it systems that are designed to grow our species rather than simply to expand economic production. The 21st century may thus spell "Do or die" for humanity. Here are some of the issues to consider with regard to our aspirations not only to survive another millennium but also to thrive and continue to evolve for another billion years. The rate of technological change is not so much accelerating but in a state