Thursday, November 18, 2010

The Future for Earth

 I was writing the above article that starts with "Innovation" above and started to digress in a slightly different direction and so I decided to start a new article, include where I was before "Innovation: The Next American Economy" and move forward with my ideas and thoughts.

I think the main reason this hasn't happened fully yet is that in the past it has been Nations destroying each other for thousands of years. Whereas now, partly because of the internet and 24 hour a day communications taking place literally worldwide, people all over the world are not as fundamentally different as they were say, during the Great Depression and World War II. One of the reasons for this is 24 hour a day round the world communications and people from literally almost every nation on earth (except maybe for North Korea) visiting every other nation on Earth in ways that would have been unthinkable and unsafe as recently as 75 to 100 years ago. So, no longer are nations like separate planets unreachable by most of humanity.


For example,  almost everyone I know who has the means to do it has already been to China and Europe and Japan. And many even people in their 70s that I have met have literally been to every continent and sometimes almost every nation on earth. This too would have been unthinkable as recently as 75 to 100 years ago by most people on earth.

So, it is almost as if nations have become like cities that people from other cities visit often worldwide. This has changed the world de facto into a one world state, not governmentally, but in the ability of anyone with enough means to go literally almost anywhere by simply picking up a phone or going on the internet, getting a reservation on a plane or boat or train to anywhere on earth in about 1 minutes time.


So, we are now only limited by our resources and our time to go anywhere on earth. So, money and a passport are all one needs now to go anywhere. This has changed everything.


And most changes in the past also had to do more with Wars and reducing populations of enemies than any other single factor. Now, with nuclear weapons this is no longer practical unless we all die at once on earth which ends civilization and all people. So, there has historically been what I would call " A New Twistedness" to civilizations worldwide because of this primary change since World War II.


As a result our new problems have more to do with Overpopulation and Global Climate change and less (almost nothing) to do with mobilizing for war with a neighboring country on Earth like before for thousands of years.


So, everyone is sort of confused by these changes. For example:


Obama on START treaty: 'There is no higher national security 

Republicans want to stop the START treaty before it happens thereby jeapordizing our capacity to verify nuclear Weapons in Russia. This is actually sort of crazy just like most things the world is doing now in all countries. So there is this sort of infinite series of paradoxes on earth now where one often feels like the story of the monk being chased off a cliff by the Tiger.

The Tiger he sees above him on the cliff, he is holding the strawberry plant to keep from falling down the cliff into the jaws of another Tiger below. What does the monk do? The answer is: He eats the strawberry.   In other words if there is no useful answer one lives in the moment as if it were his or her last which it very well might be. And these are the times we now live in worldwide with no really good choices.


But, I would say we are in the midst of a paradigm shift just as big as when nuclear weapons were first invented and used. and even though we haven't recovered completely from the first paradigm shift or even from the collapse of the Iron Curtain it doesn't matter. We All still have to find a way forward or we are all dead. Very Simple.

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