Envisioning Humanity’s Future: 1 Billion Years Ahead

The universe has been around for 14 billion + years and we have just been waking up as a species for a few hundred or thousand depending on how you look at it. We can only live in our own times but thinking only of our own generation or our children’s generation will not cut it for the human race’s future Think about those born (or whatever) in a thousand years or a million or a billion years, they are our children also.

We have come so far technologically, politically, scientifically and almost any other “ically” you can name in the last 200 years that it is mind boggling. What will we be capable of in a thousand years? In a million or billion years? I can’t imagine but one thing we need to do is give some thought to that kind of longevity for the human race.

Earth is our only home for now and the foreseeable future. The idea that we can trash it and then move to space is ridiculous. Space is less hospitable and always will be. Yes we need to eventually move into space and to other planets in our solar system and eventually out into the galaxy but that requires baby steps and a solid foundation for each next step. For now Earth is our home and we must not only keep it habitable but we must make it thrive from generation to generation.

The assumption that we humans will wipe ourselves out completely is very unlikely. We evolved on this planet over millions of years. Our predecessor species survived catastrophes we can only imagine. We must come at our problems from a place of understanding that we humans will be here in the future.

What we must avoid is impoverishing ourselves to the point where we cannot continue to progress. Fear is our worst enemy. War is an asinine way to solve problems we need more principled and forward thinking leadership. Because of fear we have run from important technologies in the past rather than taming them. We ran away from nuclear power, we are on the verge of running from AI. We must learn to be less craven and more educated as a species.

Our public needs to be better educated and to learn to revere solid principals and to at least be able to recognize deception and use basic logic. We should revere those who move the human race forward but never worship them. I think we are actually kind of good at that. Representative democracy is our best form of government for now, we need to protect it at all costs till we have something better or it evolves into something better.

Finally when we say “save the planet” we are actually saying “save ourselves”. The spinning ball we ride through space will be just fine with or without us but we are the only species that we know of that contemplates the future and appreciates the planet we have and the universe we travel through. That makes us valuable. If a star is born and there is no one there to witness it was it really born?

We must take care of ourselves and all the lovely species we have left and move into the future unafraid with eyes open as they can be. Let’s do our best!