Who's drawing the short straw?
I was just checking today's news when I came across this Stephen Hawking's warning.
How many of us are there? Way too many to evacuate all of mankind.
So let us imagine a scenario where mankind actually settles on a different planet:
On a first stage every single person on the planetary base is a highly qualified and highly skilled element. The first settlers are chosen for the job by their value as problem solvers.
After that initial stage an evacuation plan could be conceived… but who would choose who should be saved?
We all live here, we all know the answer. Money and power would speak louder.
Of course money and power would help selecting those who hold money and power.
Those same people are however the ones who are leading this planet to its doom and if there is any justice the ones who least deserve to be saved.
Much as I would love to visit a different planet, much as I wish for mankind to strive… I’m not so sure about this space colonies idea in case we destroy the planet. Somehow I get the feeling that if we screw up the whole planet here we don’t really deserve a second chance.
How many of us are there? Way too many to evacuate all of mankind.
So let us imagine a scenario where mankind actually settles on a different planet:
On a first stage every single person on the planetary base is a highly qualified and highly skilled element. The first settlers are chosen for the job by their value as problem solvers.
After that initial stage an evacuation plan could be conceived… but who would choose who should be saved?
We all live here, we all know the answer. Money and power would speak louder.
Of course money and power would help selecting those who hold money and power.
Those same people are however the ones who are leading this planet to its doom and if there is any justice the ones who least deserve to be saved.
Much as I would love to visit a different planet, much as I wish for mankind to strive… I’m not so sure about this space colonies idea in case we destroy the planet. Somehow I get the feeling that if we screw up the whole planet here we don’t really deserve a second chance.
posted by DCveR at 10:52 AM
11 Comments:
i could not agree with you more. it is our responsability to ensure the maintenance of this planet, if we do not succeed why pursue it further elsewhere? But Hawkins' "prophecy" is realistic at the end of the day. I think most people do not want to accept that reality, but at this rate the human race will be extinct as the dinosaurs are today. We will be subject matter in some biology/geography/physics/paleonthology class in some other galaxy!
If we die we die, tough luck, I am not worried about that. I have no intention of living forever.
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i'd volunteer to stay behind.. how weird would this planet be all empty..
I'd also like to go to another planet, but even Stephen Hawking should realize that fixing the problems with our current planet would be safer, easier, more cost effective and require less technological advancement.
Although, as a sci-fi writer, the colonization of other worlds is a supremely exciting thought, it's probably not the best answer today, or even in 40 years.
I'm staying behind with Ale...
Who wants to be covered in red dust?
I could see a situation where the highly skilled, highly intelligent first settlers,, after a period of time, get the idea they could start a highly skilled, highly educated colony and keep the lessers out,
nyasha: The big issue seems to be that nowadays extinction is no longer something in the remote future, it now seems something possible in a few generations time.
ale & cream: Maybe those of us staying behind would end up doing less damage to the planet and avoid extinction in the end.
chill daddy: Colonization of different planets would be great, if it happened without the stress of an evacuation.
phoenix: That at least would be fair compared with saving the powerful regardless og their skills.
In the end it all comes out to something evil though: comparing the values of different human lives.
It all sums out to playing god, in a sense.
nyasha: I agree.
A ain't one of the money-and-power kind. A ain't a scientist nor someone of the real problem-solver kind (in a context of the post of course). In other words - I barely have a possibility to change my future in a global context. So? I think I would rather like to keep my mind clean of such kind of problems just to live happy. All this problem-of-the-year-2012 is making me nuts also. No thank you, let some freaks commit suicide because of some prophecy or whatever. I ain't the one.
Child Daddy - I'm with you!
I agree that we need to be better at solving our own planet's ailments. Living here in the US, I see so much more waste than I did at home and it was pretty bad there.
Until very recently I have not been able to recycle anything but plastic bags, because the place where I lived had no facilities and there are no public facilities that I could find (although I did eventually find some at the dog park).
A good example happened on a recent trip to an open air concert venue that we have here. One of our party, and I didn't notice this until after it had happened, disposed of an entire roll of paper kitchen towel in the trash, just because she presumably could not be bothered to carry it home.
This mentality is all to common globally, but particularly here in the US.
I just wrote about EM Forster's The Machine Stops. I thought a lot about it when my computer was down...I think you might like that story by Forster.
shyha: Most of our world leaders seem to think of themselves as the most important cogs in the global machine, but in the end it takes all cogs for the machine to work.
gordy: I guess that to some extent all of us could waste less. It seems that the more "civilized" and "modern" a country gets the less we value things.
GG: Thanks, tips on good stuff to read are always welcome!
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