Jumping Off This Rock

One of the main factors which should scream out loud that our society is currently incapable of acheiving anything TRULY productive, is our failure to advance in any meaningful sense, to the problem of where our descendants are going to live.

Now partly, I think we are being slightly alarmist.
The world can easily feed itself today many times over- Africa produces four times as much food as it needs, it just doesn't get distributed properly, whilst us Europeans burn most of what we produce, even when we pay our farmers NOT to grow food.

The fact remains, there's good land sitting idle even in the UK, one of the most heavily populated countries on earth.
This is NOT an overcrowded planet yet, by any stretch of the argument.

If we managed our planet better- in the way I have described- I feel pretty sure we could feed 100 Billion of us and still have plenty of space. And the average global population density STILL wouldn't be as high as it is in the UK today.

It's about the technology and managing the infrastructure efficiently.

The environment is a worry. But only if we don't take control of our atmosphere. In a hundred years or so, I see no reason we why won't be able to install low flying devices that extract the Carbon back out of the CO2, simply leaving Oxygen.
And we'll need this sort of technology anyway.
Technology to create and regulate artificial Eco-systems.

Because, if we really want a bright future, part of it has to be about making great leaps forward.
Just as the navigators of the sixteenth century sailed the oceans and made the world one, one day we must expand the space we occupy.

The problem of population cannot just be solved with birth control. Birth control is inherently negative, in a sense.
It's great for freeing sex from unwanted pregnancy.
But as a deliberate strategy to limit human population, it is a mixed blessing.

Our current society doesn't feel it has the resources to waste on taking this seriously.
Instead, it feels that energy is better spent developing computer games- reality simulations- because we can't be bothered with the real thing.
Real risks, real dangers, real steps forward.

Because let's face it, the day the first settlers- as opposed to astronauts- land on Mars, it will be one of the greatest triumphs of our existence.



We worry about energy. Sitting out there beyond the asteroid belt are four gas giants many times the size of earth, which can power human needs for millennia.

The Solar System is our oyster- it is there for the taking, we pretty much have the knowledge and the resources NOW, to jump off this rock and expand the domain of Man to the Kuiper belt.

And one day- maybe further still.

It is not vanity, to want as much for Man as we can sieze. That is what life is all about. Loving Man, is about wanting Man to acheive his dreams.

This is one of the things that gets me annoyed, that makes me despise our society so much, when I realise what we COULD be doing, and I look at what we are doing.

Because any healthy species, any species with any drive about it, believes in a future where its population growth is permanently exponential and regards that as a positive, not a negative.

Only a species that has lost its sense of purpose wants to limit its numbers.
Because the more of us there are, the more intelligence we have, the more strength we have, the more creativity we have.

And of course, the more Love we have.

To me, this is what proves the system is failing. It is incapable of siezing opportunity for Man, and doing something useful with it.



Because I WANT my descendants to live in towering cities of glass, concrete and steel, piercing the very sky, cities where million, if not billions, live together, work together, play together and make love together.

And I really don't think the daily game of shift the assets around is a constructive way of getting there.