Have you seen the movie, Idiocracy? It takes your logic to its inevitable end. A perfectly average guy from the present day is put into cryogenic suspension in an experiment and wakes up 500 years in the future as the smartest man alive. It's hilarious.
Yeah, I thought it was one of the better movies of recent years. You probably also liked "Wall-E" for the same reason. Every dark prediction goes down easier with a dose of humor.
On a more serious note, in my darker moments I do sometimes fear that our present lifestyle may one day be looked upon as a golden age as mankind sinks into tyranny and and barbarism having squandered our natural resources without managing to get off this rock.
During any Paradigm Shift, people feel that way. The Industrial Revolution was the catalyst for an enormous wave of pessimism, while it blithely went ahead freeing 96% of the population from "careers" in food production and distribution, at the same time providing them with at least small amounts of leisure time, discretionary income, the ability to travel outside their own community, and of course printed information to balance what they were told by their kings and priests.
Imagine the feelings that the Agricultural Revolution must have stirred. You mean we're now going to spend most of our time in one place, tied down by crops, herds, houses, furniture, pottery, tools, knicknacks, musical instruments and other possessions? No more adventure in our lives? Mark my words, this new "food surplus" phenomenon is going to make our kids fat and lazy, and with several clans living together in a village we're going to have non-stop warfare.
The Electronics Revolution (or "Information Age" as it's more usually called but it started with the telegraph, and television was as reviled by the curmudgeons in my youth as the internet is today) is spawning the same wave of end-of-the-world rhetoric.
Tyranny is hardly new, and instant communication is a tremendous brake on it: look at what's going on in China at this very moment in reaction to the government's attempt to keep their first Nobelist in prison.
And neither is the squandering of natural resources. Medieval Europe polluted itself into literal squalor, and until the discovery of coffee people drank beer and wine to quench their thirsts. It's no wonder their economy was failing, they were all plastered! The Maya deforested themselves into oblivion and the Aztecs turned their breadbasket into the Sonora Desert. The true reason that the United States so quickly became the world's leading economy has nothing to do with the alleged moral superiority of the Founding Fathers. It was built on land that had never supported a civilization, so it was rich in water, game, topsoil, minerals and forests,
and due to the limitations of the transportation technology of the era its population density was very low.
Desertification goes all the way back to the Mesopotamians.
Using technology that is available today, we can build giant solar collectors in high orbit and beam the energy to earth safely in microwaves. That will provide more energy than even we can use, no matter how unwisely we reproduce... and BTW the second derivative of population went negative about twenty years ago and the total number of human beings will start to decrease by the end of this century. Energy collection is arguably the biggest factor in the destruction of our environment, and moving it out into space will generate an Environmental Revolution.
We just have a few tiny problems to solve, like getting all the big countries to cooperate on a project that will take several generations to complete before it starts to pay off.
Are we humans not now driving our own evolution?
We have transcended that by creating civilization. Civilization is a superorganism and we are its cells. We die as individuals but the organism lives on. It's surprisingly resilient, having withstood several serious threats to its survival.
Civilization continues to evolve. It's now in its sixth Paradigm Shift. (Scholars don't agree on a model but mine is Agriculture-Cities-Bronze-Iron-Industry-Electronics, each one fundamentally changing who we are and the way we live.) This evolution is accelerating: each shift happens sooner and completes faster than the last one.
So evolution is in fine shape, thank you. You missed it because it has nothing to do with our minds and bodies, it's all in this colossally wonderful artifact that's all around us: civilization.
