A
phrase that probably everyone has heard (and many have said) is "the good
ol' days". It refers to various points in the past where things appeared
to be simpler, and life easier. This phrase usually accompanies a pessimistic
view of the present and the future: climate change poses a massive risk to
human society, yet few people care about it; the current generation of
Americans is entirely engrossed with technology, and many call us the worst
generation; issues like terrorism or disease are increasing in frequency and
deadliness. However, H.G. Wells' 1895 novel The
Time Machine proves that such a mindset has always been part of human
society.
This
pessimistic outlook is no more present than in the eleventh chapter of Wells'
novel. Having just escaped from the Morlocks, The Time Traveller ventures even
further into the future, where he encounters the ongoing devolution of our
planet: Earth's rotation slows, its oxygen levels deplete, monstrous crabs
dominate the land, and at the very end, only a strange black creature remains. Throughout
this entire chapter, Wells uses a rich vocabulary to convey an overwhelming
sense of despair in these landscapes: the lines "...the dim outlines of a
desolate beach grew visible," (157), "I cannot convey the sense of
abominable desolation that hung over the world," (160), and the final
sentence, "But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful
twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle," all evoke the
bleak future H.G. Wells sees coming. These scenes, along with those with the
Eloi and Morlocks, serve as a criticism of the Victorian society in which he
lived, using hyperbole to illustrate what would become of the world if the
system were left unchanged.
My
question then is as follows: how do you see our future? Is society, or the
planet as a whole, slowly getting worse? Or is the future brighter and more
optimistic than some believe?
VSauce's What Will We Miss?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uiv6tKtoKg
To answer your question, Boak, I think that there are a few possibilities for the future (by which I mean events that could happen within a few thousand years). The first is a big bottleneck event. This might be due to some rogue bioweapon, new pathogen, mass starvation, EMP bombs, etc. Such an event might set us back by a thousand years or more. But we'd recover in the end, and we might even redevelop technology and move on.
ReplyDeleteThe second is extinction. This isn't out of the question. If one of the bottleneck events listed above were just a little bit worse, then ALL of us could die (or at least enough of us could die so that the birth rate is made lower than the death rate). That would be the end. It's the worst possibility.
If we make it through the next few thousand years, we might develop interstellar travel and colonize the galaxy. At the very least, we would have probably enough technology to prevent a bottleneck or extinction event. If we develop advanced technology, we could escape the end of the solar system and secure our continued existence. This is one of the best possibilities.
In Wells's novel, the time-traveler's observations do not necessarily preclude the last option stated above. It is possible that some humans escaped into space before the end of the world. And indeed, some people have written sequels to the novel that describe such scenarios.
Our modern culture is very young, only a few lifespans long. The internet age is merely a third of a lifespan old. There is nothing in history like the current age, and it is impossible to predict where we're headed.