Predicting the future - Reply hazy, try again

Okay here it comes …the big countdown to the latest doomsday prediction

12-21-12

Are you scared?  Nope, me neither. I’m not worried that the world will end suddenly just because we have reached a magic number on our calendar. As one of my friends (laughingly) pointed out, I’ve lived through 5-5-55, 6-6-66, 7-7-77, 8-8-88, 9-9-99, 10-10-10, 11-11-11 and now 12-12-12!  

I remember the Y2K panic. That didn’t happen, did it? Besides, I was taught that God put me on Earth to accomplish a certain number of things, and right now, I’m so far behind that I know I will never die!

What causes great civilizations to collapse is over-expansion and the exhaustion of natural resources. The Mayans did both.  If they could not foresee their own end, then I’m not putting much stock in their forecast for the rest of us. The future is what we make it.

Mystery of Easter Island 

Mankind has messed up a lot of things, but I believe we still have time to correct our mistakes. We’ve cut down rainforests, blown up mountain tops, killed whales, fouled our drinking water, waged war with each other…

yet even in big polluted cities, birds are still building nests on tall buildings, grass is still growing in sidewalk cracks and when people put a flowerpot out on their windowsill - butterflies still come by.  Nature will survive us if we give it the smallest chance.

Rewilding

Consider this poem by Sara Teasdale:

There Will Come Soft Rains     

There will come  soft rains and the smell of the ground,

And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,

And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree

If Mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

It’s a wonderful world.

We exist because our ancestors had the power to adapt successfully to changes in the environment.

This ability to modify ourselves is written in our genes.  

We Are Hardwired For Adaptation

You don’t have to be a scientist to understand this.  Just look at your family tree. (Sorry, you can’t escape your biology.) Who you are is due to the decisions your ancestors made in choosing mates.  If you think they’ve reached perfection in you, I suppose you could store some of that DNA so that you could be cloned in the future. (In the deep South we already do this – it’s called “cousins”.)

Albert Einstein said, "I never think of the future, it comes soon enough."  And he was right. It has come sooner than I ever thought it would. Because time DOES fly.

When I was a child watching cartoons on Saturday while drinking Tang ...

"The drink chosen for the Gemini Astronauts!"

...I thought by the year 2000 I’d be riding into work on a flying car like “The Jetsons”, 

living in a very different city,

 and looking something like this

Oh, wait isn’t Katie Perry doing that one now? 

Okay, maybe it’s better for everyone in my age group and size that this clothing trend didn’t happen.  Scary! 

Who really started this doomsday myth?  According to news reports, Guatemala’s Mayan people have accused their government of perpetuating the myth that their calendar foresees the imminent end of the world to promote tourism for monetary gain. Imagine! As if anyone would do that, right?

In reality, the world’s end is linked to our sun – which was formed about 5 billion years ago and still has about 3-1/2 billion years left before the gas fueling it is depleted.  When that time approaches, the sun will become a “red giant” expanding more than 250 times its present diameter.  The planets closest to the sun (including the Earth) will be burned up! But, hey – we’ve got a looong time to figure out the solution.

We could just set up a human colony on another planet, you say? Yeah, but it would have to be located in a galaxy other than this one, because our sun’s next phase would be as a “white dwarf”  - which would make our whole solar system uninhabitable.

We may have an environmental sword pointed at us, but the future does not have to be a plank that we walk blindfolded. There are always choices.  We just have to remember that the pirates are not our friends.

It may be the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine.

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." -- William Shakespeare, from Macbeth