Dear Editor,
Fifty plus years ago my fellow students and I used to sit around and prognosticate about the future of mankind and the planet we inhabit. In general, our naivety and idealism caused us to predict that by the 21st century we would not only have learned enough from our pervious mistakes, we would finally find a formula for creating a truly peaceful, utopian world.
And our genius at creating new technologies would help us to solve all the problems that overpopulation, economic disparities, and environmental degradation would precipitate.
Well, here we are several generations later and we continue to maim and kill each other, our industriousness and greed and belief in the efficacy of limitless growth is precipitating a degradation of our ecosystem, the gap between the haves and the have-nots across the globe is increasing instead of diminishing, and we have long past the point where the Earth can effectively sustain a growing population.
We remain prisoners of our ethnocentric prejudices and cultural biases and steadfastly cling to the need to emphasize the differences between ourselves rather than what we share in common. And although it is easy to point-out the myriad of rewards and benefits we reap from our tecnological innovations, it is not as easy to make a supportable case that these and any new technologies that might emerge in the future will be enough to help us finally solve all the environmental, economic, health-care, energy, food, and social problems that are increasingly threatening to overwhelm our capacity to deal with them.
Back then we believed that because of our specie’s intelligence, creativity, and innate capacity for problem-solving we would eventually develop strategies for managing the world’s food and energy resources that would serve to benefit every person in the world, not just the most affluent and powerful, and close the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
We really got that one wrong didn’t we. The wealthy continue to get wealthier and more powerful and the number of poverty-stricken, disenfranchised, displaced, homeless, starving people grows with every passing year.
A lot of our other predictions turned out to be wrong, as well, but we did manage to get a few right.
We predicted that because of population growth our cities would grow vertically and that living spaces would decease in size and availability and eventually cost more than an average person would be able to afford.
We believed that the mutually promotive reciprocity between the building of automobiles and the need to provide roads and services to accommodate them would continue to determine the design of our environments and our life styles. And we predicted that the lowest common denominators in popular culture would eventually dominate mass media.
I guess the game of “futurism” is similar to baseball — bat .300. and you’re a star.
Ray Arnold,
Richmond
