(Source: Pinterest)
Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa all start on the same day this year. Ramadan starts a few months later (March 11th, the birthday of my ex-wife). In a diverse city like NYC, many of us greet each other with “Happy holidays!” Following my habits, I will expand these individual wishes to collective wishes for global humanity. The new year is a time of wishes and predictions for our future.
Probably the most famous monologue that many of us carry in our heads starts with “To be or not to be: that is the question.” It’s the opening line of a monologue spoken by Hamlet in act III, scene 1, of William Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy, Hamlet (I was required to memorize the speech in high school in Israel). From my present perspective about the coming new year, a generalization of this line from our personal fates to the fate of humanity seems to be in order. The “not to be” part could properly be translated to life extinction. After all, as far as we know, we are alone in this vast universe. The prognosis for extinction is growing. I will mention two related articles here. One is from over 10 years ago and discusses a report to the Club of Rome:
According to a new peer-reviewed scientific report, industrial civilisation is likely to deplete its low-cost mineral resources within the next century, with debilitating impacts for the global economy and key infrastructures within the coming decade.
The study, the 33rd report to the Club of Rome, is authored by Prof Ugo Bardi of the University of Florence’s Earth Sciences Department, and includes contributions from a wide range of senior scientists across relevant disciplines.
The Club of Rome is a Swiss-based global think tank consisting of current and former heads of state, UN bureaucrats, government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists and business leaders.
Its first report in 1972, The Limits to Growth, was conducted by a scientific team at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), and warned that limited availability of natural resources relative to rising costs would undermine continued economic growth by around the second decade of the 21st century.
The other article, which quotes from Stephen Hawking, gives the planet a few more decades:
NASA has recently raised alarms about the existential threats facing Earth, bringing into focus the predictions made by physicist Stephen Hawking prior to his death in 2018. Though the space agency has not endorsed Hawking’s specific timeline of Earth’s demise, it has echoed concerns about the dangers of global warming, overconsumption of energy, and other threats to humanity’s survival. As the climate crisis worsens, the world is left wondering: how close are we to the catastrophic fate Hawking envisioned?
One of the most famous physicists of our time, Stephen Hawking, became increasingly concerned about the future of humanity in his final years. In the 2018 documentary The Search for a New Earth, Hawking outlined a dire prediction for the year 2600. He warned that unless significant changes were made to how humans live, Earth could turn into “a gigantic ball of fire.” Hawking attributed this disastrous scenario to global warming, climate change, and the greenhouse effect, which he saw as the main drivers behind the planet’s eventual collapse.
Back to Hamlet, these predictions fall under the “not to be” part of his monologue. What falls under the “to be” part is more complicated. My “to be” is a sustainable Garden of Eden before the snake came to poison us. The biblical concept of the Garden of Eden has occupied famed artists, children everywhere, and many people in between. An example is shown at the top of the blog and the Pinterest link underneath has a large collection of other depictions. Aside from Adam and Eve, there are no people and no items that indicate even a trace of civilization. The picture shows plenty of vegetables and a bird. The many other examples in the attached link include all kinds of animals. It is for us to determine what a Garden of Eden would look like with more than 8 billion people—especially with more than half of them living in cities with all of the accessories that human society has constructed.
One thing is for sure: there is no time limit on a collective Garden of Eden, so it must be sustainable. What needs to be done to reach such a goal is complex and I don’t make a claim to even draw a picture of such a world. However, throughout the blog, I have paid special attention to five recent global trends that are younger than me, meaning that they started after WWII. These include climate change, nuclear energy, the fertility crisis, global electrification, and the digitization of humanity (see the August 20, 2024 blog, which includes a table with the most recent values of these trends in the 10 largest countries that count for more than 50% of the global population). I will outline where I want to see these trends in my collective global Garden of Eden. Some of the efforts to get us there will be outlined in the next blog.
- Conservation of energy does not apply – a circular economy is a must!
For obvious reasons that were outlined in previous blogs, successful achievements in the global energy transition to replace fossil fuels will lead us to dependence on sustainable energy that will be fueled directly or indirectly by solar and fusion energy. If fusion energy becomes our main source of energy, we will become a binary star system where the conservation of energy becomes less crucial than it is currently. In that case, our planet’s lifetime will stop being anthropogenic (dependent on us). The remaining internal lifetime of our sun (defined by the availability of hydrogen in its core) is about 5 billion years. The external lifetime (defined by collision with other cosmological objects) will be shorter and more unpredictable.
- Limits to fertility – globally disconnect it from economic considerations
Most of the reasons for global changes in fertility rates are anchored on economics. High fertility is based on the need to support previous generations, high infant mortality, and the unavailability of birth control. Declining fertility below the replacement rate depends largely on solving those issues and having women be equal partners in education, attainment, and work. As far as I know, we haven’t yet found fertility rates that are only based on the wish to have children, independent of economic considerations. The placement of equilibrium fertility, relative to replacement, will determine the future of the population in our ideal world. Growth will need to be replaced as the only criterion for success.
- Global electrification
Without this, global digitization (4) and global energy conversion (1), cannot be achieved.
- Robotics to accommodate labor needs (AI and digitization are part of this)
I have finished reading Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, “Nexus,” a review of which I am posting here. The book is from the perspective of a historian and philosopher on the future of global digitization that leads to AI and quantum computing in everyday life. The perspectives on the same issues of a futurist with great credentials in this area is summarized below:
At the heart of Kurzweil’s vision is the concept of the Singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and catalyze a profound shift in how we live. He predicts that by 2045, we will have reached this milestone, and in the decade leading up to it, transformative technological advances will reshape nearly every aspect of life.
One of the most exciting aspects of this transformation is Kurzweil’s belief in the integration of AI with human biology. He imagines a future where nanotechnology allows for “virtual neural layers” that link our brains directly to the cloud. This, he argues, will vastly expand our cognitive abilities, enabling us to think in ways that today seem unimaginable. “We’ll be able to think in entirely new ways,” he writes, envisioning a time when creativity and innovation flourish at unprecedented rates.
- Elimination of the use of nuclear energy for military applications
This is self-explanatory.
The key to even dreaming about a collective Garden of Eden is to develop a democratic global government with sovereignty on global issues. This should include all the tools that federated nations currently have (courts, police, binding laws, etc..) with restrictions to be applied only to global issues. As it stands, the only institution that currently has some semblance of this role is the UN, which was created at the same time as the other global trends mentioned above. Unlike the other trends, however, it is static in terms of impact and it is not sovereign. More about all of this in future blogs.
