h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I apologise for sticking my nose into another of your forums but you seem to express so well thoughts similar to those which I too have pondered over.

Firstly 'Raftworld', an excellent analogy, appears to be a fore-runner to 'Superrationality'. It all comes back to:

"How do we change the way we think and act?"

The problems seem so enormous and insurmountable when considered, that doing something about them becomes so daunting that the tendency is to do nothing.
Personally, I think there has to be some cataclysmic, earth shattering event such as a flood (Noah may be needed sooner than we think!) or asteroid (The last one didn't help the dinosaurs), that is so worldwide and awful that those that survive will only then be attuned to dealing with this problem. Mankind, I fear, has always been an inveterate user and abuser, living for the now rather than the ‘morrow.

There are so many variables in this equation as it exists now, that for Mankind as a whole to focus on 'saving itself' is a total non-starter. The 'Have Nots’ want what the ‘Haves’ have and the ‘Haves’ don’t want to lose it and want more. We have a long history of using, abusing and exhausting resources whether animal, vegetable or mineral and I don't see it stopping. Until there's a sort of global altruism for the species I see the outcome for Mankind as very pessimistic although this shouldn't stop us looking for a solution. Global communication is a start and that's happening gradually.

These problems are ones that we can consider from the comfort of our economy, relatively safe environment and Western ideals but if you are somebody who lives in the Third World there's a very different agenda , it’s about survival of the individual in hostile (in all senses) environment!


Perhaps we are not destined to survive but more socially integrated and orientated species will. Bees, ants or termites for example?

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It's taken me a little while to reply. I've been trying to reassess how I feel because Raftworld was originally written some 12 years ago. I've realised that the words I used then are still appropriate. I don't think I can really add anything because nothing has changed.

Across the entire population of the industrialized world one can detect an addiction to boredom, a kind of spiritually devouring world-weariness, a mindless acquiescence to the status quo. We are too exhausted working for our own personal dreams of security and success to be able to share in any collective dream - to share in the kind of greater dream, the global dream, that would allow us to envision a sustainable presence upon our planet, that would allow humanity to become integrated as a people, living with wisdom and dignity upon the Earth. Sadly, as we are, without such a dream, humanity is atomized as a collection of competing individuals within competing societies, cravenly content to let the Earth drift inexorably toward decay.

This dreamlessness has much to do with our lack of a common symbol to express our common spirituality. Through our social structures, we have virtually nullified the authentic religious dimension to life. Our scientific self-definition contains no recognition of the reality of the religious spirit that potentially inspires us all. In the short-term, a discerning Green consumerism will certainly help by placing pressure on industry, and a Greener system of economics will certainly help by taxing polluters into reform and encouraging conservation, but, ultimately, this kind of skin-deep Greening of our awareness is not going to be enough. The realization of authentic progress will require a soul-deep Greening of our perception. We are going to have to be Green to our spiritual core. Human survival is dependent upon the Earth being adopted as the common symbol of our spirituality - the sacral centre of a new kind of religion. A new kind of mythology. A whole new way of seeing and thinking and living.

To have no dream is to have no vision. And to have no vision is to have no future.

A fatalist view.

It may seem that we control our future but surely Chaos theory would disagree? We certainly don't help the near future, I'm thinking 'near' in terms of tens of thousands of earth years, by our selfish actions, abuses of our abilities and intelligence. But this is a 'centralist' view where man is seen as the centre of everything. Cosmically we are nearly nothing and our worries about survival are inconsequential and only arise from animal instinct. Many thousands, maybe millions of species, have become or are becoming extinct for a variety of different reasons. This may be a fact of existence: things wax and wane but eventually everything ceases, it's just a question of time. The human equation is nonlinear which seems to be forgotten because we perceive ourselves as MOTU (Masters Of The Universe!) and in control rather than pawns within it. Our actions are limited, local and miniscule in a relative sense. Change, which has been mentioned before, is something we as humans find difficult to come to terms with yet is the very heart of our understanding of ourselves and the universe. For 'Change' read 'Time' for one can't exist without the other and we hardly seem to recognise that it is part and parcel of everything we are. Predicting the future seems so important to us, yet living with the change that naturally occurs is uncomfortable because the status quo doesn't!

If the earths population instinctively believed in reincarnation as human beings, then we as a species may start to consider more carefully how we live on this planet. The long term view is ignored because of the perception of our short term lives. I agree that a new global belief (religion?) has a part to play in determining a longer survival of our species but in the time scale of the cosmos we are as important or unimportant as the beat of a butterfly's wing.
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I've been here before. I think I should be able to respond to the fatalist view with a clear and concise argument, but it's not so easy. It's very much more subtle. I shall be back ...