Besides of what you think of our inhumanity to animals
we will not long remain able to feed cows soy beans that took the place, through destruction, of rainforests.
We will not be able to sustain the energy cost to make fertilizer out of fossil fuels and phosphates.
This world, as things stand now, is a deathtrap for most of us.
There are those who would devise a .. ‘solution’
To escape. To use our technology to somehow hibernate or live forever on a spacecraft full of seeds and technology in search of greener pastures , or to launch a fleet of terraforming robots to mars and prepare it for habitation. Some kind of virtual reality trans-human eternal youth sabbatical
Let’s go back to Richard Manning's "Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization" - and see that inequality of wealth was born at the same time as the state and organized religion came into being. With agriculture. Specifically, with the domestication of seed-bearing yearly crops. Cereals. Corn, Rice and Wheat.
The stunted humanoids that follow hunter-gatherers in the fossil record show just what a dumbing-down of our approach to sustenance the fraught step to agriculture had in store for us.
[..I stare into space a long time, contemplating how to explain the scale of our mistake simply.. ]
As I try to distill it down into a syrupy sweet sticky sentence the mind boggles in horror;
All society predicated on agriculture devalues human life, through sheer necessity. Agricultural societies are about having the poor mass huddled in hovels serving to provide the surplus and the luxuries of the elites, those who own the grain silo, those who pay the armies that extort the tax and steal the land from neighboring peoples - or force off the ‘natives’ - the hunter gatherers, protecting the forests and floodplains they depend on from the torch and the spade of the digging man. Our society is one of these.
That at this point, automation of the system and a mass extinction of the poorest two-thirds of humanity can postpone the need to answer this fundamental question by a generation or two. Long enough for the question to lose urgency, for us to remain stuck to our trivialised existences.
It wasn’t yet, when the first time people started mentioning our whole existence was based on a dangerous misconception about the nature of.. well, nature. Us. Life. Energy and the planet.
Did you know,
The population didn’t explode as a result of the surplus offered by agriculture. The population exploded to fulfill the need for cheap labor in order to work the fields that fueled the ever-increasing growth of wealth - and wealth disparity.
Well, if you are reading this, chances are you’re one of those who can still have children who have a chance to grow up enjoying the benefits that led you to being in the position to read this , and me to write it.
Chances are, even if catastrophe strikes and wipes out half the planet, you will be among the ones remaining. Perhaps, among those climbing aboard the arks trying to escape.
Which brings me to the title of this piece.
Those of us leveraging our benefits to escape the great die-off of the planet, dozing off into the lap of hibernatory luxury, with the sampled genomes of all the species and people on earth on board, and a complete record of our cultural heritage as we know it..
We cannot let them go. We cannot let them do it, without cleaning up the mess we’d leave behind.
If we do not learn how to take responsibility for our footprints now, we may never.
We may succeed in colonizing Mars, and leap out to the stars to find a cozy biome,
but we will destroy it. If we were succesful now, in somehow maintaining our bodies indefinitely, travel between the stars, as we populate the glaaxy we will bring our flaw with us. Our inequality. Our wanton destruction. Fueled by the belief in an infinite universe, we could repeat the process indefinitly - turning one lush oasis of life in the vastness of space into a barren graveyard after another.
A plague upon the universe, as we have been upon the earth.
I worry about the universe,
but that’s because I worry about us, here on earth.
And it will be up to us, if to anyone, what humanity's legacy in existance will be.
There's a good chance this won't play out as darkly as I've sketched above. How do I know that?
No hyper-technological holographic projections of aliens have appeared yet to try and exploit what remains of our biosphere to sustain their own dying world.
Chances are we won't manage either.
