Let us light a candle while we walk, lest we fear what lies ahead

Innovation of new forms of society and technology. It is the key to our progress. It has allowed us to evolve from naked hunter-gatherers to the dominant species on this planet. This process is slow, normally taking hundreds or even thousands of years. But occasionally evolution leaps forward. **

Many people look to the future with fear. We see this fear throughout the web. Right-wing sites describe the imminent end of America: overrun by foreigners, victim of cultural and financial collapse. Left-wing sites describe “die-off” scenarios due to Peak Oil, climate change, and ecological collapse – as the American dream dies from takeover by theocrats and fascists.

Most of this is nonsense, but not the prospect of massive changes in our world. But need we fear the future?

The past should give us confidence when we look ahead. Consider Dodge City in 1877. Bat Masterson is sheriff, maintaining some semblance of law in the Wild West. Life in Dodge is materially only slightly better from that in an English village of a century before. But social and technological evolution has accelerated to a dizzying pace, and Bat cannot imagine what lies ahead.

1. The Transcontinental Railroad unites America, beginning the end of the regional identities that until now divide us (It was completed in 1869, three years after the first transatlantic telegraph line).
2. The theory of evolution remains controversial, seventeen years after the famous debate between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley (“Is it on your grandfather’s or your grandmother’s side that you claim descent from a monkey, Mr. Huxley?”).
3. Medicine and public health remain primitive. A bedside manner and diagnostic skill are doctors most reliable tools. In three years Pasteur will discover the first artificially generated vaccine (for chicken cholera).
4. Next year Paul Haenlein will fly the first aircraft powered by an internal combustion engine.
5. In two years (1879) Karl Benz will patent the first practical automobile engine, Edison will design the first practical electric light, and David Edward Hughes sent a wireless signal several hundred meters across London.
6. Geo-politically stability results from a multipolar system in which Empires play the largest role, and most of the world consists of western colonies. We are two-thirds through the Long Peace between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI.
7. The deterministic certainties of Newton still rule in science. Great discoveries in thermodynamics and electromagnetism gave confidence that more discoveries lie ahead.

Bat died in 1921 as a sportswriter for the New York’s Morning Telegraph, in a world drastically changed from the into which he was born. Three more decades of rapid change followed. By 1951 the world assumed the shape we see today, and the evolution of culture, science, and geopolitics slowed.

1. The medical industry looked much as it does today. Doctors can both prevent and treat most illnesses, but viral and degenerative diseases remain beyond its reach.
2. The great Empires were gone, replaced by the US as global hegemon. The technology and art of conventional war began to stagnate. Mao had brought the theory and practice of 4GW to maturity; after this no foreign occupier could defeat a strongly-based local insurgency (except in a support role to the local government).
3. The technology of the average home would be unimaginable to Bat Masterson’s mother; our values and language would seem alien to her.
4. Rockets, nukes, computers, cellular telephones, semiconductor devices had all been invented.

During the following three decades computers became faster and smaller, women gained more rights, and the west’s colonies were freed. Big changes, but slow evolution compared to that of 1870-1950. Now a new cycle begins.

“For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.”
— Treebeard, speaking in Tolkien’s Return of the King

What will happen during the next three-score years, by 2068?

1. Peak oil will have come and gone. We will have adapted to a post-oil world (one way or another).
2. The age wave will have past. The developed world will have seen the elderly become its largest age group, placing severe stress on their economies. Many nations’ retirement systems will have gone bust under the load of so many needing pensions and medical care. Eventually the “geezer boom” will pass (many living to 100+), then the global age distribution will stabilize.    Update:  collapse of a nation’s retirement system does not mean collapse of the government, let alone the State.  Also, many nations have prepared for the age wave better than the US (e.g., UK, Chile).  {Hat tip on this to Chet Richards.}
3. The resolution of the demographic bust will lie in the future, but the the result will be visible. Societies with fertility rates still below replacement will face extinction, unless they have learned to culturally assimilate large numbers of immigrants. By 2068 that option may have passed, as most of today’s third-world nations will have passed through years of high population growth into the low-fertility rates of developed societies.
4. Technology will have solved our problems of resource scarcity and pollution. Unless it has not, in which case we will have a very dirty, unpleasant world. I suspect that the children of 2068 will find the concept of pollution difficult to understand. Late 21st century industry will use clean catalytic chemistry (as does our body), and their advanced power systems will make any material resources plentiful.

Conclusions

The world of 2068 might seem as strange to us as the world of 1950 would be to someone living in 1890 We can only guess what it might look like. But the general pattern of the modern age might remain the same, one of progress and overcoming challenges.

We look back at the fears of Bat Masterson’s time with amusement. Cities so large that the daily production of horse manure renders them unlivable. The lights go out when the last whale is killed for its oil. Unlimited warfare, as giant war machines — including airships and submarines — ravage the Earth.

I believe that in 2060 our descendants will similarly laugh at our nightmares, while they look to the future with fear about challenges we cannot imagine.

Humanity was born naked and ignorant, bereft of either armor or weapons, on Africa’s Serengeti Plains. We have survived droughts and floods, an ice age and a supervolcano — steadily leaning and developing our powers. We have always walked into an unknown future, but our past should give us the confidence to do so with caution but not fear.

** This opening quote slightly changes Professor Xavier’s words from the title sequence of the movie X-Men. He is speaking of genetic evolution.

Afterword

If you are new to this site, please glance at the archives below.  You may find answers to your questions in these.

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To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar.  Of esp relevance to this topic:

• about America – how can we reform it?
• some Good News about America!

Posts on the FM site with good news about America:

1. Good news: The Singularity is coming (again)  (8 December 2007) — History tends to look better over longer time horizons. For example, consider one bit of good news: the Singularity is coming.
2. Some good news (one of the more important posts on this blog)  (21 December 2007) –  I do not believe we need fear the future, despite the tough times coming soon.  This remains a great nation, not because of our past but because of us and our polity.  We differ from almost every other nation.  The difference consists of our commitment to our political order, of which our Constitution is the foundation.  In this we are like Athens more than our neighbors …
3. A crisis at the beginning of the American experiment  (27 December 2008) — Looking at the problems looming before us, it is easy to forget those of equal or greater danger that we have surmounted in the past.
4. An important thing to remember as we start a New Year  (29 December 2007) — As we start a New Year I find it useful to review my core beliefs. It is easy to lose sight of those amidst the clatter of daily events. Here is my list…
5. Is America’s decline inevitable? No.  (21 January 2008) – Why be an American if one has no faith in the American people?  How can you believe in democracy without that faith?
6. A happy ending to the current economic recession  (12 February 2008) — Sometimes we can see medium-term outcomes with greater clarity than short-term events or long-term trends.  In January 1942 none could forecast the events of the next 44 months, but it did not take an expert to see that the US would defeat Japan.  So it is with the current economic down cycle in America.
7. Fears of flying into the future  (25 February 2008) — Reasons we need not fear the future.
8. Experts, with wrinkled brows, warn about the future  (2 May 2008) — Experts often see the future with alarm, seeing the dangers but not benefits. That gets attention, from both the media and an increasingly fearful public. Both sides feed this process. It need not be so, as most trends contain the seeds of good and bad futures. This post considers two examples.
9. Good news about the 21st century, a counterbalance to the doomsters  (9 May 2008)

“America’s Greatest Weapon”  (25 May 2008)