Can Our Species Make the Leap?

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I often think about where we’re going, as a species. Are we actually progressing, or do we make sporadic bouts of progress only to have it beaten back? In this country, there are no doubt examples of progress, gays have the right to marry, weed is legal in some states, etc; But, is this really progress? A lot of people in the ghettos would say no.

After a conversation I had with a customer at work yesterday, I realized a lot of the racial divide, as well as the class divide still exists, and is the primary war these people are fighting every day. I don’t really need to tell you this, I mean, the news is replete with these stories, but I guess my question to you is, “when is enough, enough?”

I take a lot of my cues from science and philosophy, namely the principles of simplicity and deductive reasoning, and I have to use these principles in a world that is becoming nothing but more complex on a relational level, but supposedly more intuitive on a technological level. Scientists, when thinking about the future are mixed in their reactions as to what is going to happen.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI,) the effects of a limited or overwhelming nuclear exchange, the effects of global warming and other environmental effects are things that obviously weigh pretty heavy on the world’s most orderly of minds. As to the question of when our civilization will rise to the level of a Type 1 civilization, responses are also mixed. Physicist Michio Kaku says that humankind will reach Type 1 status in the next 100 to 200 years, barring an extinction event.

But, would this be a good thing for our civilization? Maybe I’m looking at this wrong, and if anyone wants to talk about this, I’d welcome any other viewpoints, but it seems to me that as the days and years tick up on the calendar, the amount of violence we do to one another, and the degree to which our society has elected to just not give a shit rise even more. Instead of being the ennoblers of the earth, we’re destroying it at an accelerated rate.

Instead of holding each other up, we’re destabilizing each other and laughing as the palaces crumble.

I’ve given up on watching the news or even reading any of it on Facebook. This may be silly, but I’ve got enough to depress me in my everyday life without having to import the world’s misery. I do my best every day to bring light into someone’s life, but I do this on a small scale. It’s done with a flower given to an unsuspecting woman who is having a bad day. It’s a hug to someone I work with when he seems on the edge of tears. It’s the collective realization that while Anonymous’ credo of “no one can be as cruel as all of us” may be true, it’s corollary is also true, “no one can be as loving as all of us.”

I can’t look at people suffering in Syria, watch our government turn them away and then bomb that same country in reprisal for gas attacks that could have had no targets, had we let them into our country in the first place. This isn’t a world gone cold, this a world gone mad. This seems to me to be a world on the brink of catastrophic civil collapse, a madman chewing at his own flesh.

I try to remain optimistic, but I can only come to one conclusion; this species is doomed. I wish I could think differently about it, but every single scenario I run in my head has us destroying ourselves, and wishing at the last minute that we hadn’t. The potential of a once-promising species being trampled into nonexistence by its own bearer.

Suppose for a second that the book 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke was even remotely right, and that we are the product of an evolutionary kick in the pants, given by a species that has long since departed this system, what would they think of us right now? Of course, if I could look past the death and mayhem, I could see examples of kindness and oneness with the universe, but it would be a hard shell to peel back. If I were a species looking at our world and all of its petty wars and mindful, deliberate violence, I wouldn’t consider us worth saving or helping.

I suppose one could look at our children and say, “well, hopefully, they’ll break our cycles.” This is not enough. WE must break these cycles. But, we won’t. It is our unwillingness to act that will ultimately spell our destruction.

And the universe will not care in the slightest…
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