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Consider for a moment, the Wright Brothers and the first self powered airplane (or aeroplance for you forn'ers). Up until then, a self-powered plane had never flown. Four thousand years of history said it couldn't be done..
But then it flew.
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Why consider this, you ask? Well, we are in kind of a Wright Brothers moment in history. And the questions is, can we make it fly. If you look at current growth rates, be it population, technological, output, corruption, global warming, carbon monoxide, etc... they are growing exponentially. That is, like this...
That rate is almost impossible to sustain in all things. There are two reasonable outcomes. In the first, growth levels out at a reasonable level like this.
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| Exponential growth levels out at a sustainable level. |
For an example, think of the warfare technology. From forty thousand of years ago, it was spears and arrows. Seven thousand years ago, the bronze age gives us daggers and swords. Five hundred years ago it was longbows. Four hundred years ago, muskets were invented. It was only 1836 that a revolver, an easily reload gun is made. less than 30years after that the first machine guns. In the next 50 years the land mine, airplane bombing and sophisticated rockets. And by 1945 the atom bomb. But the, through luck of smarts, we then topped arms technology growth. We hit the sustaining line (we could have just as easily blown each other up and hit the lines below, that we didn't).
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The other outcome is a crash. Something like that happens when the demands grow to unsustainable limits and then crashes. It is something like this.
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An example of this is Cod (fish) caught off Canada. Cod fishing was rich and boundless - it seemed. Until it collapsed. Turns out, it was possible to capture too many cod, and not leaving breeding pairs. It didn't have to be that way. Canada could have limited the catch to a sustainable amount. But technology improved (nets, dragging, etc) to the point where this improvements wiped out the cod.
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And so we are back to the Wright Brothers moment. Technology, human population, corruption of the United State's governmental system, carbon monoxide and global warming... they are all in exponential growth. Is it possible to drive it to a sustainable level? If we can't, then each of these can be self-correcting via a crash. In fact, that is what much of "young people fiction" and current film expects. The Hunger Games, Divergent, Elysium, World War Z - all of these assume a crash in society driven by something.
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However all of these issues can also be driven to a sustainable level. We might settle in on a planet where weather is more extreme than we want, but livable none the less. There may be more people than we expected, but we can still feed them all. We could finally have enough computing power when we all get implants. Another Teddy Roosevelt Republican could be elected to stop the power of corporations and greed.
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It is more than possible (but less than probably) that we can maintain a sustaining level on these problems - particularly if we can spread out the answers. After all, when I was little, it was assumed that a nuclear war was inevitable, and then that didn't happen.
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So, will the plane fly this time?
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