I am becoming disillusioned with TedTalks. I’ve seen quite a few that were inspiring, even maybe life changing a bit, but lately they just aren’t doing it for me. Take this one for example. It’s interesting enough, and you could see it being an episode on Discovery Channel or something, but it didn’t really say much except golly, gee, we are just finding more and more bones. That’s not what bothered me, though.
This is How the World Ends…
In talking about how brief the reign of mankind has been on Earth so far, how miniscule our tenure seems when marked against the overall existence of the planet, in that toilet paper analogy (which was not bad, actually), she said that the time of man was likely to be limited, finite, and we are doomed to be a line in the geological strata, to be observed by future scientists from some reptilian race, who will look at the rocks of Earth 1,000,000 years from now and say, ah, there were the dinosaurs and there were the humans. Good for us they’re both gone now.
I think she’s being pessimistic. Sure, the ecological crisis is upon us, but humanity will survive global warming. It’s going to be a huge mess, it’s a huge mess already, but ways to adapt will be found and some will even find ways to take advantage of the changes. Who knows what lies under Greenland’s ice, and the Arctic Sea will become navigable.
Of course, there are a million other ecological disasters waiting for us in this extremely fragile ecosystem – the death of the honeybees, the extinction of other animals at key points of the food chain, a super epidemic, something in the water, a nuclear war, and that’s mostly man-made stuff, it doesn’t take into account asteroid strikes, sun flares, or invasion by hostile extraterrestrials.
I don’t think we should refer to ourselves as finite, though. There’s a bit too much of self-fulfilling prophecy about it. I prefer to think of mankind as a species which will live forever and spread throughout the galaxy, even though we might morph into some weird sort of man-machine thing along the way.
If we cannot avoid extinction, then what was the intelligence for?
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