Note: This was written September 12, 2022 at 11:33 PM
I really think is gonna be so much better in the future. I believe we will be fucking amazing, and if people learned today what we had done 1000 years from now, the entire world would weep in joy. This has always been a belief of mine, even in the worst times in my life. Many have mocked me for this. Like Doestoyevsky's "Idiot", I'm seen as the irrational optimist, naive to the cruel reality of the future, childish in my predispositions.
So allow me to explain.
Concretely, let's call the future "five generations" or about 150 years. Why do I think the world will be better in 150 years? Well, for one, throughout history subsequent generations have ALWAYS tended to improve. Not just humans. Micro-organisms. Cells. Fungi. Plants. Animals. And Humans. All have evolved, improved, and become more fit over time. The saga of human history displays this concept perfectly. You have apes, throwing rocks and sticks, aggressively tribal and unable to communicate, now transmitting highly complex information, instantly across vast distances of 10,000s of miles. 200 years ago you needed a physical horse and many months to transmit a note from one country to another. Today, a 5 year old can do so instantly, without moving, to millions of others across the world.
We are getting better.
And not only that, we are getting faster at getting better.
"Humans deserve to suffer for the things we've done to the planet."
This is a claim a friend told me this recently. I was taken aback enough to spend time thinking about it. Is this statement true? The evidence includes climate change, war, nuclear bombs, environmental destruction, and the factory farming of animals. The claim is that non-human life-forms are equivalent in value to humans.
From that view, factory farming is indistinguishable from a socially normalized holocaust, only worse: you are eating the victims.
Born of deep empathy and irrationalism, this belief is understandable, and false, because nature, in the form of biology, selected for exactly this. Genes to
My counter was that nature programmed humans to do the things we've done to the planet. Nature, in the form of biology, selected for humans to evolve intelligently, become aware, and exploit our resources for growth. This is nature's games, not ours. Why did nature do that?