LIVING END?

Authors note: Trill is a fictional female acquaintance who makes it possible to write in a style that is comfortable for me

My Dear Trill,

     I want to thank you for the portrait. It is quite good. I like the way the eyes follow you around the room. How did you achieve that?

     Another of your sweeping questions, and one that is concerning many people these days. “How long can the human race survive? I will try to tell you what I know about the subject, though changes, good and bad, are occurring every day. 
     Yes, it does concern me too, though I won’t be around when events have reached a tipping point - a point of no return. Some say that ir has already occurred, but I’m not sure I agree.

     Diogenes of Sinope was a well known cynic and critic, in constant conflict with the the culture, corruption and confusion of his time, and doubts about the future in the Aegean region of the world, around 400 BC.

     Today there are many such critics and cynics, including self-styled prognostigators, diviners of Revelation and Nostradamus, religious fanatics, producers of The Farmers Almanac, politicians, opportunists and, more credibly, an assortment of scientists who use real data to produce trend analyses and apply other computational techniques to buttress their predictions of where humanity and the biosphere are headed.

    Who to listen to?

     Two prominent British astronomer/physicists, Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees, have recently expressed opinions regarding how and why the human race may disappear in the next one hundred to one thousand years. They cite the rapid advancement of technology as being too much for most humans to cope, with machines taking over more and more of the theorizing and decision making, corporate perfidy, nuclear war, global warming and genetically modified viruses as being new phenomena of our own making, and that reckless mismanagement will ultimately bring about extinction.

      They are on the same page regarding one possibility, as expressed by Martin Rees in a recent interview following a visit to nearby Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California:          “My worst nightmare would be that some crazy guy with an ecology fantasy that humans were a plague would try to use some type of biological technique to kill lots of them, without caring who they were.” Not a far-fetched idea, thinking back to the world-wide influensa pandemic of 1918 that killed, world-wide, from twenty to forty million people. A little mischievous tinkering with the ubiquitous rhino virus, and who knows?

      Both scientists are concerned about the gradual but ever more rapid change to the biosphere, of which there is ample evidence. Deforestation may leave Earth looking like Lebanon, hundreds of years after its cedar forests were timbered to almost the last tree, to build ships - but with much more dire consequences, as forests are needed to absorb carbon dioxide emissions. Neither speaks to the role of positive feedback (when things get worse, they get worser), or what steps must be taken to reverse a trend.

      Stephen Hawkings consistently warns about perilous times ahead and even worse, because pessimisticaly “things could go wrong.” As recently as last year he warned scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) that investigations of the Higgs Boson (the God Particle), could inadvertantly initiate “catastrophic vacuum decay,” creating a quantum bubble that would expand at the speed of light and consume the entire universe. He did not add that an event of this sort could occur at any place in the universe, may have already occurred, and is speeding toward us. The event could reach Earth and the solar system millions or billions of years from now......or tomorrow.

      I take a lighter view of Higgs Boson in my poem “The Hunters” the last two lines of which read: “What a kick for humanity, if it turns out to be the same as love.”

      Both scientists agree that the next hundred years are critical. Hawking believes that the human race will be saved only by moving into space and onto other planets. But billions, most of Earth’s population, would be out of luck.

      Sustainability in space is problematic. Aboard the International Space Station virtually no effort has been expended to solve problems along this line. Instead, there are steady rocket flights of resupply missions, taking food and supplies to the astronauts and returning to Earth laundry and trash.

      Rees, on the other hand, insists that the problems can and must be solved on Earth, arguing that there is no place in space that is as benign as the harshest place on Earth - the Antarctic. 
      So there you have it, Trill. The human race could be saved by a concerted effort by most of its population. But that would divert them from the daily struggle just to exist, or, at the other extreme, from the pleasurable and wasteful life that they are used to.
          Sometimes I get “off the track”, thinking about this.

In a dream world
poets tell it like it is.
Women preserve order
as they do in their own homes. 
Men are stewards of the planet 
and all its living things.
As evening approaches,
their thoughts turn to dancing 
to rhythms
they didn’t know were there. 
War is unthinkable.