Alanw wrote:
My reference to Avatar was facetious; although, not that far fetched when considering how fast man is using up earth's resources. Once we get close to depleting a majority of our resources, man' s struggle with other men will only become more severe IMHO. I would like to think that man's time on earth will be long lasting and that we could evolve into one peace loving society, but with todays technology and weaponry and viewing the history of mankind, things will have to change drastically.
On the other hand, today's and tomorrow's technology may make it possible to easily feed and house the world's population without depleting our resources. I didn't want to be viewed as being too pessimistic.
I think that part of being satisfied with existence is in understanding its boundaries.
Take a single human life, for example. Putting aside speculation surrounding what may or may not happen following biological death, we know that a single human lifetime has some upward boundary that is based on the genetic programming that is built into the body. This life expectancy can probably be tweaked to get people to 110-120 years, but it's very unlikely to be tweaked to get people to 500-600 years. In other words, there is probably a 100 year or so boundary around a human life in this dimension, and that boundary is part of what gives life urgency and meaning. If I had several centuries to do what I wanted to do in life, I can't imagine how lazy I would become as suddenly almost nothing would have much urgency.
I think that there is a similar dynamic with respect to species. Species have a certain life expectancy based upon a complex cluster of factors, including place in the food chain, climate conditions, availability of critical natural resources (food, air and water especially), and disease. Sooner or later these factors conspire to wipe out 99% of all species. The 1% that survive for very long periods such as sharks, ants and jellyfish are essentially just lucky (though being well-matched to your ecosystem and resilient in responding to changing conditions are important factors). So this logic would suggest that homo sapiens may have a life expectancy as a species just like 99% of the other species that have ever lived. I see nothing about homo sapiens that would suggest to me that the same rule don't apply to us as apply to other species. It's true that we are VERY intelligent compared to most other life forms, but we also have a much greater tendency to kill each other (often on a large scale) than most other species, and I think that these two factors may ultimately cancel one another out.
We will, of course, do eveything in our power to prevent our own extinction, but our ability to take meaningful anti-extinction mitigation steps may be limited by individual self-interest conflcting with group interests, inter-group rivalries trumping overall species survival concerns and a basically short time horizon in our ability to make rational decisions (i.e., natural selection would not have any way of identifying members of our species who could make effective 100+ year plans because the planner would always be dead before the benefits of the superior insights about the future could be confirmed).
One of the challenges our species is faced with is we are increasingly able to create problems that span longer than a single human lifetime, but we have a reasoning faculty that basically only works over time periods of one human lifetime or less. Thus, the problems that take more than 100 years to unfold and/or would take over 100 years to solve simply don't register on most people's radars. I think that this blind spot in our ability to make effective long-term plans could ultimately present a very serious threat to our survival.
There is something in us that makes us want to think of all things human as eternal and everlasting. We like to think that we as individuals are immortal, we like to think that our species will live forever, and we like to think that our current institutions will exist into perpetuity. These ideas comfort us and give wholeness to our lives and there is nothing wrong with that. On another mental frequency, though, there is the idea that maybe all of that is wrong, and we are, both as a species and as individuals, transitory phenomena. We are a blip in a multi-billion year story of the universe doing its thing. We are like a single grain of sand on an enormous beach. On a timeline of the universe, we may be a tiny mark on the scale from our earliest stirring of consciousness to the last breath of the last future human. The problem with the message on this mental frequency is that people don't like the way it makes them feel; it bothers them; it makes them feel insignificant. I would suggest, though, that knowledge of the transitory nature of something, even if it is you and your species, doesn't have to be a source of bad feelings. It can just as easily be a cause for urgency and a desire to do things right the first time.
Wouldn't it be funny if there were many races of aliens who lived on a different time scale than us (perhaps these creatures live to be 10,000 years old), and they visited the earth on a very "regular" basis every 100,000 years. In the earth's 4.5 billion year history these aliens would have visited the earth thousands of times, just checking things out to see what was happening here. The last time they stopped by it might have been 50,000 years ago, when there wasn't much intelligent life to observe (though they might have inadvertently left behind some stone cutting tools). When they return 50,000 years or so from now, they may find little more than they found last time they stopped by. To these creatures, there may only be a vague sense that we ever even existed. As they look through the records of our world they may find it amusing when they read about our current EPA planning a one million year storage plan for nuclear waste. Upon seeing these plans, one alien may look at the other and say "Well, it looks like that didn't turn out quite the way they planned" as they both let out an alien snicker.
But I think I understand what you're saying, essentially we need to accept our current plight on the Earth and make the best of it, without getting our heads all mixed up in extreme and costly fantasies.