Yes, there are great challenges to humanity and humanity
can't seem to come to grips with reality. They live like
there is no tomorrow, a self fulfilling prophesy.
Some day the petroleum will run out. When it does, how will people
get to work? How will they stay warm in winter? How will the
crops be tended ? How will products be made ? No answer ?
As long as there's a buck to be made, big business will run
the earth dry of petroleum, and any other resource and blame
the government and the people.
Who really owns the petroleum under the earth ? Who really owns
the air we breath ? Who really owns the sunshine, and the oceans?
Business as the new colonialists, staking claims to these resources
as some sort of 'manifest destiny', and humanity are their victims.
Humanity are the true natives of this planet.
100 years in the future are bleak. What of 1,000 years, 10,000 years?
Humanity will choke itself or poison itself. The rich and powerful
cling to their ephemeral fotunes. In 100 years they'll be dead, so they
really don't care. But history will note it.
One answer is to get dead serious on space exploration. Humanity is a
pyramid scheme. Settling on Mars, with some terraforming. Mining Jupiter
for hydrogen for fuel might tide over humanity for another 100,000 years.
Hopefully some warp drive or worm hole technology will open up the rest
of the galaxy. If not, better start breeding lots of horses, millions of
horses to replace the cars. Better design a stasis economy that can
maintain a reasonable standard of living without constantly having to grow.
Better bring population under control so there isn't mass starvations,
plagues and wars.
With the 'free market' economy there is all this talk about 'personal
responsibility'. Freedom to make money. Being a good man of business.
But like Jacob Marley's admonition to Scrooge, 'Humanity is our business !'
People complain about the price of energy. As if the government should do
something. Then I retort, yeah, let's nationalize the petroleum industry!
They remark, you mean let the government run it? If not them, who?
Same goes for medical care and it's runaway costs in america. It follows
that if medical care is business driven, you will have healthy business,
medical business. So lassez faire, let the energy and health industries
ransack the economy. Make everyone work for minimum wage while business
goes tax free. And then the government wonders why they can't make ends
meet.
Some think that government controlled health care is a bad thing.
They think the government is corrupt and/or incompetent. Well who's
to say? Maybe the health care is corrupt. Maybe the insurance industry
is corrupt. Maybe business is corrupt. What worked once and is no longer
working is a pretty good sign that the vampire of corruption is sucking
the economic life blood out of Humanity. Will health care reform itself
and bring lower prices and better health? No way ! It's time to smash
that model and start over.
The basic premise of humanity is incentive. Humans are silly creatures.
They are not born with instincts of species preservation. Humans are
very self destructive by nature and need incentives and motivations to
do the right thing. The question is who or what should provide these
survival incentives and motivations on a scale needed to preserve humanity
over the long run? If humanity cannot come to grips with it's true nature
it is doomed. In 1,000,000 years, when the dominant species is something
else entirely, all our politics, science, economics, culture and issues
will be as irrelevant as what was important to dinosaurs who came before us.
But we sure enjoy consuming their long decayed biomass as petroleum today.
Regards,
Chris Tenaglia
tenagliac@yahoo.com
P.S. Here is a VLOG I did for something called the DAVOS conference.
Yes, I am boring but thanks to the internet and people's access to it
questions can be raised and pondered. Hopefully mankind will start to
get it.