Author Kim Stanley Robinson
Science Fiction Author Kim Stanley Robinson (Mars Trilogy) has an article in the current Scientific American issue devoted to “the future.” After discussing the various strategies that forecasters use to construct visions of the worlds ahead, he ventures his own prediction.
“The inequality of our economic system, the destruction of our biosphere’s ability to support us, the possibility of sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history being caused by us — all this will be well known to everyone alive. The necessity to change our technological and social systems to avoid catastrophe and create a just and sustainable world for all will be evident. And because necessity is the mother of invention, we will invent. The crux of the change will be in the laws we agree to live by, including the laws that define our economic system. Capitalism as we practice it now is the Chelyabinsk-65 plutonium plant of contemporary technologies: dirty, brutal, destructive, stupid. It isn’t capable of solving the problems we’re faced with and is indeed the name of the problem itself. So we will modify capitalism, law by law, until it is changed into a sustainable system.”
(Emphasis mine.) Robinson sees also the alternative, namely that
“we will screw up, fight one another, cause a mass extinction event, go nearly extinct ourselves and emerge blinking out of holes in the ground decades later, post-traumatic and brain-damaged as a civilization.”
But he think’s it’s more likely
“that our intelligence and desire to do good for our children will see us through to the invention of a civilization in a stable relationship to the biosphere. After which I predict things will get even more interesting.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.