By InterstellarNerd8760 AKA Weston Rosch
Humanity’s future seems bleak. Political divisions, climate change, artificial intelligence, and the ever-lurking threat of nuclear war makes humankind’s future seem insecure. But, just maybe, if we try hard enough we can mature and become something greater. We have an amazing potential so now we just need to use it.
Over the past 12,000 years humanity has seen exponential growth: we have changed and adapted in extraordinary ways, we are no longer hunter-gatherers, now we’re the most powerful species on our planet and can do wonderful things. Our descendants in the future will be able to experience a wonderful world that countless individuals before them slowly built over time. That is if we don’t murder ourselves in the next hundred or so years.
So, my simple ask for you as you read this article is to think of all the potential humans that have yet to be born and young people like myself that have a life yet to live. One day humanity may become an interstellar civilization and we may make contact with aliens and discover if we are truly alone in this universe. But our wonderful future ahead of us can only be lived if we don’t screw things up today.
Humans have the ability to destroy entire cities and engineer viruses that are almost certainly deadly. But we can also redirect asteroids and are just unlocking gene-editing technology that can possibly cure cancer and other genetic diseases. We just have to believe.
Over the millennia humankind has seen many set-backs like several ice-ages we have lived through, supervolcano eruptions and life-threatening diseases like the Bubonic Plague, AIDS and COVID-19. But we have adapted and made it thus far. So who knows how far we can continue to grow?
Let’s talk about climate change. It’s a broad subject and is hard to sum up in a few sentences so I will try my best. In a nutshell climate change is wildly concerned with CO2 emissions and the warming of the planet (hence why it is commonly called “global warming”). Of course climate change is quite complicated and there are many aspects of it but basically we are killing our planet. Our only planet. And if we don’t act now we have the threat to raise global temperatures by catastrophic proportions and risk the extinction of humanity. You don’t want that do you? So let’s not do that and insure that the billions of people that have yet to live will get a chance to live.
Now we move onto our second and possibly even more dangerous threat: nuclear war. We’ve limited our stockpiles of nuclear warheads quite a lot but there are still approximately 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, a few thousand of which are in the United States and Russia. A nuclear war would be disastrous and has the potential to wipe out humanity for good. If the millions that would die in the first moments of a nuclear exchange aren’t enough we still have to account for the possible nuclear winter that could follow and the millions that may perish. According to ICAN (the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) even a small-scale nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would result in a catastrophic ending: the countries in the immediate area surrounding India and Pakistan would be most hardly hit but radiation, ash and soot may spread over the entire world. A nuclear winter. Something we don’t want.
Artificial intelligence will probably not become a higher power and attempt to enslave humanity but then again who knows. It’s a sensitive topic and has the potential to tip either way. According to the Tech Business News artificial intelligence will probably not take over the world in a political sense but will encroach on our lives and start to control the business world. Take the growing technology of smart homes and autonomous vehicles for example; we don’t even realize it but AI is starting to become an even bigger part of our lives. So let’s make the right decision and make sure AI doesn’t become too powerful.
Biotechnology has an amazing potential, we can do truly amazing things with it but we also can destroy ourselves with it. Soon we will have the ability to control human biology however we see fit. We’ve adapted and edited the genes of plants so we should be able to do it with humans soon. Of course everything comes with consequences. Biotechnology allows us to control the biology of ourselves and organisms we share the world with but it also lets us modify and create deadly diseases. For example scientists in Australia accidentally created a lethal mousepox virus when trying to make lab mice infertile. Overall the concept of biotechnology is promising while also horrifying.
But our future doesn’t have to be grim. In the future we may colonize space and create a steller utopia for ourselves. There will be thousands of billions of people, game developers to make life fun, scientists to discover more about our universe and economists to solve the enigma that is poverty. We can and we will make this future a possibility. So please. Just try to be a good person and think about how your actions will impact the future. Just one misstep could derail and alter the course of history. And think of it this way: everyday we don’t murder ourselves means that we have another day to experience in the future. Thank you for reading.