Our crisis is a Birth

chicken out of egg

Our crisis is a Birth

"Our", of course, refers to the human species; the species that is yet to become fully human.

"Birth" is a hazardous event. Things can go wrong during the birth process, or problems can arise during gestation which endanger the chances that the newborn will survive for long.

Our fate, as a very new and innovative species, hangs in the balance. We can hope that there are no evolutionary defects endangering our survival after the impending birth event.

The analogy soon breaks down but it suggests that one of the big differences between the "birth of our new species and a natural birth is that we have some say that may determine which way the balance goes.

Christianity believes in being "born again" in the spirit.
Evolution implies new species arising in the future.
Biology investigates eggs becoming chickens by breaking out of the egg shell.
Physicists study phase changes into radically new states of being, like water changing into steam or ice.

Why not realise that humanity is a metamorphic species facing the next level of evolutionary complexity?

The metamorphosis need not be dramatic or spectacular. Just get society to free the spirit of the human individual from the daily grind and worry of making ends meet.

The progress, during the last century, of "the industrial arts" (phrase coined by Thorstein Veblen) ensures the creation of surplus wealth that is not the direct result of private human effort and industry.

Socialising this unearned wealth into a subsistence income for every woman, man, and child alive at any one time, will release the evolutionary potential locked up in the genes of every human being.

Yes, it's Utopia or Oblivion.

The outline of a thesis explores in more detail this connection between a most general and a most specific level of human reality.

Or go back to the trees

This site contains ideas relating to first things (principles), in the sense of Stephen R Covey's book First Things First. But it is not about business (unless that business is about Life, The Universe..., Everything)

This draft effort seeks to convey the importance of the evolutionary time scale of the Universe and of life on Earth. It also recalls a kind of collective memory that needs to be part of modern cultural awareness. This "memory" is the big difference between "modernity" an all other cultures that went before the historical discoveries of the last two hundred years about the universe, the story of earth and life that, in next to no time, colonised it .

It is important to view the current predicament of humankind in this context.

Evolutionary ages:

Universe, 15 billon;
Earth, 5 billion;
Life on Earth, 3.5 billion;
true Humans, 0.001 billion (1 million)

Since the Sun is likely to remain life supporting for the next 5 billion years*,
What can humans be?

Humanity is in an exam situation. As most leaders, politicians, and well-heard opinion formers do not know this, evolution's assessment is likely to be... FAILS.

But even then, optimism remains a rational attitude. Evolution will be set back by a mere few million years. There will be plenty of time to bring out a more viable edition of a thinking, self-aware species. Indeed, how many million years are in five billion?

*Scientific estimates vary regarding this piece of cosmology from the cautious (three billion years, to the above optimistic deadline).

The damage humans can do to the planet also varies. According to the book A Walk Through Time, causing large scale species extinction is the most lasting damage. It takes about 25 million years for evolution to fully replenish biodiversity ("much of it with new creatures").

The worst case scenario is, then, that the Sun will destroy its nearby planetary children, and life on earth, 3 billion years in the future; new species with power to destroy what evolution creates cause evolutionary reversals, lasting 25 million years, on 120 occasions.

What are the chances of such a pessimistic evolutionary outcome? Surely, it must be very nearly zero.

These highly speculative claims are full of issues needing to be expanded on and challenged. Visit the conscious evolution forum to discuss them.

Now is the time to choose to progress from knowledge to wisdom

Graphics by courtesy of Julius Reznicsek(C)

E-mail janos
Find this page at http://baseportal.com/baseportal/goodworld/main

Deep optimism refers to an attitude that recognises a danger and the possibility of the worst outcome,
but is still animated by faith and hope in some unimagined resolution of even the direst of situations.

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