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Stephen Hawking posed this question "How can the human race survive the next 100 years?" on Yahoo Answers.
Some of the people who replied are idiots:
" Unity Through LOVE. ;-)
It's UNITY baby, we'll all FALL if we are not United, and to be united, truly united, means we will find love for one another. Thus provide mutual aid to one another, and be in solidarity with our environment creating BALANCE.
The Human spirit will overcome ;-) It's within us dude we're fighters and survivors. Yeah!"
Jackass.
So. How would you answer Stephen Hawking's question?
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posted
The question raises more questions than answers really, but it's a rather good conversation starter and this thread should have no trouble surviving the next hundred years.
I doubt the human race will have much trouble surviving for another hundred years, or thousands more years for that matter, but it's surely going to have to scale itself down a bit and the order of society is bound to go completely tits up at some stage. But that's happened a few times in the past - great empires disappearing and all that. Our descendants will read about the British Empire, the USSR and American world dominance in the same way as we read about the Egyptians or the Romans or the Aztecs.
It doesn't really matter to individuals though because most change is gradual, give or take the odd bloody revolution. I doubt many of us miss the old British Empire, even though it still existed, at least partially, until only a few years ago. So things like cars and television and supermarkets could fade away over time and we wouldn't really notice, any more than we notice that you can't smoke in cinemas and on aeroplanes any more.
Life will just change, slowly evolving. People will voluntarily have less children, or voluntarily die younger, for practical reasons of survival, but that won't be an instant tsunami of death, it will just happen over time.
I'm not worried. In fact, I really wish I could be around to see a scaled down and fresher human race, but if we all stayed around then it wouldn't be scaled down so I'll have to stick with imagining it and going camping in the countryside from time to time to get the general feel of what it might be like.
Do scientists really expect there to be some gigantic conflagration in 2072 or something? What does Hawking know that we don't? Not much I reckon.
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posted
It certainly is an interesting question, but the concept of global war is not something we should be too worried about - whilst in these modern times there are elements of international society who are hell-bent on destroying their enemy, these people are in a minority (and that twat Bush has only a couple more years left - I know he is a fuckup of preposterous proportions, but even he can fuck it up that much in 24 months surely?).
As for the environmental issues, whilst not enough is being done about these things, there are elements of society with a conscience for change, and these masses are growing daily, and in due time I think will apply more pressure.
The key factor in all of this I think is education - 100 years ago in the western world basic education was not available to all, nowadays the amount of people not completing a decent education in a lot of parts around the world is minimal, and many compassionate individuals and bodies are doing all they can to support through financial and actual aid to countries which are not - sadly not enough is being done, but it is getting better slowly. Mediums like television and activist individuals highlighting the plights of the poorer nations are igniting compassion with individuals which is leading to donations being sent to assist these poorest of people, but rather than give aid, they are educating and supplying the tools for these people to become self-sufficient.
My only concerns are with the way the world is becoming more corporately controlled, and the effect this is having on individuality - I wrote a daft idea last saturday about where TMO would be in 20 years time after amalgamation of corporate bodies reduced choice to virtually none, and the bigger these giants of industry get, swallowing up their competition as they go may endanger some of the human spirit of entrepeneurial drive and enthusiasm for building businesses. The thing is that's not such a ridiculous idea when you see daily mergers from these giants (Air France and KLM for example of recent times) which instead of generating jobs has quite the negative effect.
However, in saying that the human willingness of inquisitiveness, added with the better availability of information through the internet and better education oppurtunities mean that we are advancing faster and faster all the time, but the onus does seem to be on improvement of life as opposed to extermination of it, as like circa 50 years ago.
As humans, we do tend to learn by our mistakes, and I'm hoping that the atrocities we have committed in our past can be used to only improve life. Yep I'm fairly optimistic about where we are going, I just hope that I'm not proven wrong.
posted
Not sure if I should post such long posts. They get a real drag to read. I ask forgiveness before I start.
I am much more pessimistic than others it seems. I believe the human race will survive but I have a very dystopian view of how and what it will become. Also, a hundred years is not really that long so it is hard to believe that much will have changed that much. Like dang65 I think societies will go tits up, but not that it will leave the human race fresher and unlike Waynster, I don’t see people acting better.
The human race is in chaos. We have out of control human breeding in countries where contraceptives are not available, yet a phenomenal rate of child death; meanwhile the ‘civilised’ countries with access to birth control are worried about decreasing numbers as the pollutants we create with our technology affect our fertility. We have modern medicine with its back again the wall, struggling to control potential pandemics and fearing the rise of genuine pandemics that can’t be controlled whilst millions die in poorer countries from treatable and preventable diseases. We have ‘emergent nations’ run by dictators who are quite happy to let off atomic bombs, whilst almost incidentally to the rest of the world and its own leaders its own people starve, unchecked by intervention from the Western World. This poses a serious threat that parts of the world could well end up being tainted with the ultimate pollutant; radiation, and made useless to future generations, never mind the continuing threat of other pollutants on our planet. We have civil war and terrorism taken out of individual nations and played out on a world-wide scale, and there is a deep distrust of authority and our own leaders but an almost epic disinterest in Western voters en masse; a lazy refusal to believe they can do anything about it. This is combined with the inability, thanks to terrorism and repressive or corrupt regimes in less fortunate countries, of the general population there to change anything their leaders do to them.
As for information freedom, we have the lucky happenstance of the free web under threat from corporate interests; why even google are imposing voluntary censorship now for economic reasons. We also have a combined world media that is, incidentally I should say, as I don’t believe in any actual conspiracy, increasingly influencing what people know about the world, and thus how people see their society and hence make their choices on personal, social and political levels. To me this means those choices are under threat of manipulation because any media can be consciously controlled, and may well be some time in the future. I don’t think any one body will take the media over, but I do believe whoever owns large chunks of it will exercise conscious control over it; it is a trend that we see now, and that control will work to their personal advantage and gain, of course, not mankind’s. In the future the control these owners exert could well become more sophisticated.
In spite of the growth of corporate power, which I think will continue, in just a hundred years I don’t see any Big Brother control on a global scale. I believe the chaos will continue and whole sections of the race will continue to struggle and suffer whilst smaller sections survive in their enclaves of wealth. I believe some of these enclaves will collapse as the wealth shifts as current resources are depleted and other commodities and resources become the wealth generators. I don’t know enough about the way world economics work specifically to say exactly what will collapse and what it will be replaced with, but it seems a cycle that has affect humankind since the species first began, writ ever and ever larger on the pages of humankind’s history.
I don’t think humankind has had time enough to learn from and adapt its behaviour from the sort of mistakes we have been making since civilisation started developing; to me we are still repeating most of them, with variations. That seems the pattern of evolution with the time scale for real changes that alter deep rooted behaviours a great deal longer than a hundred years, or indeed, the past few thousands. Behaviour has not altered as such, but what has is that what once happened to individual societies to cause their collapse is now happening on an increasingly global level. I believe that trend will continue.
I therefore believe that in a hundred years time the planet will still be viable, though changed by climatic and human effects, so the human race will still be here; but there will be no feel good factor for the whole race; it’ll be like today; a life of suffering and deprivation for some and relative comfort for others; a mix of war, greed and rebellion with, alas, smaller pockets of generosity and people willing to struggle to improve the world than we have even today. All played out on a planet with great pockets of it even more inhospitable than they are now.
[ 09.07.2006, 06:11: Message edited by: sam ]
-------------------- A day without laughter is a day wasted. In memory of Alastair Posts: 1936
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I really enjoyed it too. I cringed occasionally but that is to be expected as I am not the target audience, I guess. I won't be sorry to see the last of her over-wide mouth for a while as I was getting hung up on watching her guppy features contorting and forgot to notice the plot at times, but I feel sad now she's actually left.
Its time he treated the tardis less like a machine. Too right.
-------------------- A day without laughter is a day wasted. In memory of Alastair Posts: 1936
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quote:Originally posted by Darryn.R: As it goes though, top episode and nice to see Billie a little less heavy on the eye makeup.
She sobbed it all off. I was surprised by how little cringing I did at that, Billie being sad has the power to make me feel sad as well it seems.
Daleks were pretty fun in that one, were they always that good? I missed a lot of this series, it's all recorded and waiting to be watched.
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Flying darleks were rather amusing and sort out that old business of how they got up the stairs in past reincarnations. I was impressed and shocked at the crying cyberman because it broke character in the same way as the touchy-feely last darlek episode did with the darleks. But perhaps that was allowed because she was a cybergirlie.
I can't believe I am having this conversation. Let's get back to discussing the fate of humankind. Oh! We have been. LOL
-------------------- A day without laughter is a day wasted. In memory of Alastair Posts: 1936
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quote:Originally posted by sam: Flying darleks were rather amusing and sort out that old business of how they got up the stairs in past reincarnations.
My kids have got a DVD of a mid-80s, Sylvester McCoy-era Daleks story in which the Daleks levitate to go up stairs.
I guess no one actually watched Dr Who at that time though.
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What got me though is at the end when the rift is opened and everything with 'void stuff' is sucked into the rift and sent to into hell not one single Cybermenz made it into the CGI scene and there were supposed to be 5 million of them on the earth.
Not one, and we've (because Femke is Queen Geek when it comes to Dr. Who and peanut headed, fish lipped, chicken legged, and freckle faced Ten) seen it three times now so I've had plenty of chance to check.
That's pretty poor on the part f the BBC, I bet they use some techno babble wank to get out of it too when it becomes a bone of contention.
Not sure about Catherine Tate in the Christmas episode though, it's all been a bit too light hearted this season, and Tennant, despite being a good actor per say brings no gravitas to the role of the Doctor, and a little too much brevity for my personal tastes.
It’s about time we had another Empty Child, kids need to be scared not made to laugh at gay Daleks having the biggest handbag bitchfest with gay Cybermenz.
That said, the "Don't tell him Pike" Dalek/Cybermenz moment was textbook.
-------------------- my own brother a god dam shit sucking vampire!!! you wait till mum finds out buddy!
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I wish Tennant's Doctor would stop fucking patronising the human race too.
"Oh, yes! You humans are so great, I love you all."
Yes, alright mate. No need to gush on about it every ten minutes. Most humans are complete tossers anyway, as it happens. Or does Timelord science magically filter them out from your consciousness?
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H1ppychick
We all prisoners, chickee-baby. We all locked in.
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la la la la, I can't hear you...
I'm really beginning to wish I'd had that Doctor Who catch-up that I promised myself... I think I have eight unwatched episodes stored on the old Sky + now. Everyone at work persists in talking about it too, I keep on having to find errands to run.
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