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

Is it undeniable that the world is changing?

Is the Earth, whether you believe it to be six thousand or six billion years old, changing?

Of course, we only have our own statistics to refer to when it comes to our analysis of the evidently changing world.

Can we believe what we are told by the group of people who, not too long ago in history, told us that the world was irrefutably flat and that the sun rotated around the Earth?

How do we know, except that it all fits in with some mathematical theory that somebody worked out, that the current view of the world and its place in the universe is correct?

Perhaps the world really is only six thousand years old? Perhaps the dinosaur bones really are just a perplexing puzzle deliberately buried by a mischievous deity to occupy our tiny brains, a kind of elaborate gigantic brain training project?

We tend to put all the analysis of our scientific and anthropological beginnings into the hands of others.

This is ironic because one of the characteristics of all men and women is to be inquisitive and yet we have evolved into an ant colony-like state where the many allow the few to tell us what to think and what to believe while the rest of us simply beaver away, earn (and spend) our money and simply exist.

In a strange sort of parody of the plot of the movie, The Matrix, many of us have become so bored of this non-existence life that we turn to the internet for cyber-connectivity.

Here there are whole virtual worlds to enjoy. Chatting, sharing pictures, videos and even posting commentaries of our boring lives in tiny messages.

Some Internet “worlds” emulate real life but are populated by bizarre and extraordinary versions of people.

Some people become so involved in these virtual worlds that they begin to waste away. A fact that was predicted in the 1980s British sit-com series, Red Dwarf, in which a virtual computer game, “Better Than Life”, required users to plug in their brains making it virtually impossible to escape unless you realised that it wasn’t reality.

What is so wrong with the real world that so many of us feel the need to escape from it? Is this a new phenomenon?

Escapism isn’t new; we may have become better at presenting all the fantasy but we’ve simply gone from sitting by camp fires and listening to story tellers, through books, movies and computer games and on to the Internet.

Unless we do something, the next step will be needles in the eyes and electrodes in the brain.

Our ability to use our mind to escape into imaginary worlds sets us apart from other animals. But, of course, we only have the words of others who tell us that this is true.

The popular opinion of those followers of Darwinism would have us believe that we have changed or evolved over the last forty thousand years.

Creationists tell us that we, the world and everything in it were created six thousand years ago in just six days and that we are exactly the same now as we were then.

Probably neither of these is correct as they are both theories that have been put together by men and women and what can they possibly know about anything?

We haven’t even been introduced.

The fundamental question is; who cares?

Why is it so important to know where we came from? The simple answer is that it isn’t important to know. We’d just like to. But why?

We have been conditioned to look back. But we should be looking forward.
If you look at all the stories about people throughout history, the stories that are supposed to be true accounts of actual events, the one thing that seems abundantly clear is that people have not changed one bit since “records began”.

And if we haven’t changed since records began then you can be pretty sure that we didn’t change much before those records began.

But, what has changed is our ability to change things. We’ve learnt to be very good at that.

During the hundred years or so between now and the latter part of the nineteenth century men and women have created the internal combustion engine, wired and wireless telephonic communication, computers and the Internet.

They have discovered the internal workings of, and managed to split, an atom. They have managed to work out the structure of life itself and discovered the genes that make all living things the way they are.
Before that, people had done some pretty fantastic stuff with fire, wheels, guns, steam engines, clocks and a whole host of other clever mechanical things.

Not to mention all the advances that people have made in medical science.

In short, men and women have been applying their minds to bigger and better things over the last forty thousand years since (allegedly) Homo sapiens first learnt to walk erect.

They have managed to change the way we live and the environments we live in. They have made our lives more sedentary, if we want them to be, with gadgets and gizmos aplenty.

But have we changed?

No.

Should we change?

In the words of the Churchill Insurance dog; oh, yes!

The last question here, which is annoyingly rhetorical, is; can we change?

Essentially we have all been lazy. The world of technology has overwhelmed us. The Internet and other communications devices give us the perfect excuse not to bother interacting with anyone. We can buy anything on-line and have it delivered. Soon robots will be able to drive delivery vans and be programmed to open garage doors.

If we don’t interact we don’t mix, if we don’t mix we don’t diversify and if we don’t diversify we will never change.

The historical evidence, if you believe it, may be against us, that’s why you should never look back, enjoy everything you read in books but never believe a word of it.

Let’s all get off our arses (donkeys, mules, asses however you wish to spell it) and do something.

Let’s interact.

Let’s revolt. Let’s tell the media where to go. Let’s buck the trend.

Let’s ruin the statistics.

Let’s change!