Tuesday, November 30, 2021

As Threats Mutate

 As I try on a daily basis to wrap my mind around the challenges facing us if we are to better humanity’s chances for survival, much of it boils down to technology — both biotech and cyber tech.

By some measures, we have advanced further and faster in the past half-century in these realms than all of the millennia preceding, so much so that we may also have outpaced our intellectual ability to keep up with those changes.

But we know our brains are capable of much more than we demand of them, so the problem now boils down to focusing on which concrete steps can we take at present to harness technology to solve the problem of our impending extinction as a species.

There *must* be a solution to climate change, for example, as our brains tell us in our most optimistic moments — we just have to imagine that solution and implement it. Then again, the global nature of a problem like planetary climate change makes it seem impossible to grasp in a form that yields those solutions — other than escape.

And escape, of course, is precisely what the billionaire-financed space travel and ideas of colonizing other planets are predicated on — escape for the few, the rich, the selfish — forget about the great unwashed masses left behind to deal with the mess which the few, the rich, and the selfish have so prodigiously profited from.

In this context, the battles over science vs. fantasy and truth vs. fiction come down in our brains to synthesizing the opposites. Thus science fiction predicts and (at least in Hollywood) solves many of our greatest problems, just as literary non-fiction solves many of the issues facing a conscientious writer trying to communicate essential truths in this most ambiguous of eras.

Ambiguity — or what might better be termed the state of not knowing — is a very difficult state to maintain as we struggle with these challenges. Yet that is where we find ourselves.

A litmus test in the age of not knowing is where do you come down — with pessimism or optimism. Our brains allow either option; only one, however, may lead us to solutions. And that is the hard one to sustain.

***
TUESDAY’S HEADLINES:

No comments: