Global climate change is coming and we're all going to die.
It may be a little melodramatic. It may be the latest conspiracy to control the consumeristic tendencies of the world, conceived of by a well-intentioned activist scientific community. Conspiracy theories aside, whether or not our species lives to inherit the Earth for another couple of generations doesn't mean that life is gone. It just means that we are. Life on this planet is an incredibly robust thing that doesn't particularly care about you or the things you buy, your family or where you'd like to go on your next vacation, or even what kind of car you drive.
And why should we try to change our ways? Why should we reform, short of our own selfish needs for survival? It was global climate change in the first place that brought about circumstances for our species' rise to our current position in the world today. We're not even the dominant species on the planet, bugs and bacteria not only outnumber us by billions, they have also colonized areas of our planet we have yet to even see. Other species on this planet outnumber us by so much that we do not even know how many other species there are. We know how much an electron weighs, a small subatomic particle that is difficult even to conceptualize much less see. But even the greatest minds of our species have no concept, not even to the nearest order of magnitude of how many living organisms we share this ball in space with. Estimates of the number of insects species alone range from 30 million to 200 million. A small difference in interpretation, really. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-10/ff_barcode?currentPage=1
The majority of our actions separate us from the planet. How many times a day do you think about the fact that the world is round not flat? How about that the Earth is but one rock orbitting this wussy star that we have developed to be perfect at living with and not the other way around, with the universe revolving around you? Maybe it’s egocentric of me but even as a student of biology (the self-proclaimed ‘study of life’) I know I don’t think about those things very often.
Our talents as storytellers have completely outstripped our capacity for survival, deceiving each other to believe that ‘I will just die! without this consumerist product!’ while we let our decision makers get away with denying water (a substance, mind you, that makes up 60% of who and what we are) as a basic human right. We actively engage in forcing groups of other human beings right here in the United States of America to "sell" their water, compete in the world economic house of cards that's really just a game of pass the debt. And when the music stops? Wall Street gets bailed out and the rest of the world is told to pinch pennies.
Imagine for just a second a world based on collectivity. I’m not talking about communism or socialism, although some will view it as such. I’m talking about a world based on the principles of commonality and the dogma of pragmatism. The internet has already done so much to create this sense of a shared reality: the ultimate marketplace of ideas. A place where we are all creators and contributors to the collective consciousness and do not have to simply accept what we’re told by the people with more money (read: access) than we have. Imagine a world where we were all contributors to accepted scientific knowledge. It has pretty much already happened with the media.
I didn't mean for this to be a muckraker post, nor commentary on capitolism and consumer culture although the appearance of both seems indicative of their pervasive quality on our culture, enough at least to make them pertinent to this discussion. If you've read this far then I hope you would agree that we have a responsibility, at the very least to ourselves and our own self-interest for survival, to try to do something about the state of the world today. We have enjoyed a relatively comfortable existence on this planet thus far; an unusual bout of warm weather and uncharacteristically regular seasonal changes for a few thousand years. It is precisely because we are able to conceive of something called responsibility (the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something) that we must act. Species of all types, shapes and sizes must appeal to this necessity. Sentience, as we define it, is not a requirement to these tasks but a tool that we have developed and honed in order to make us the highly adaptable monkeys we are today.
The root of the word 'apocalypse' comes to us from Old English, via Old French and ecclesiastical Latin from Greek 'apokalupsis' from 'apokaluptein' which is defined as 'to uncover' 'reveal' which makes sense if you think about its context in the biblical book of Revelation. The new religion of science is right: we are on the brink of apocalypse, and it is my hope that we are able to collect knowledge around us, learn from our own mistakes and implement proven solutions without constraint to what is comfortable and familiar. Comfortable and familiar have served us well in the past, propagating our kind to what we have today, language, art, music, space travel, technology, but let's not slip backward when we have come this far. Our large brain size allows us to be the most malleable and adaptable species on the planet. Unlike many other species, we do not need to wait generations for change to figure itself out genetically, and let evolution take care of the losers. Instead, we have the unique ability to choose our own direction and adjust to surrounding conditions.
We are the first sentient species on this planet that we know of. May we prove worthy enough to be the stewards of many more to come.
