So 2015 is upon us! I don't know about you, but the years of the new millennium just seem to fly by so quickly. Could it be that as adults, our lives do not vary that much from year to year, compared to the many milestones one crosses from childhood to adolescence and beyond? I was sitting at a cafe in a neighborhood I grew up in, and they were playing pop music from the 1980s. It felt like I was stuck in time or back in the past, looking around at the familiar buildings and layout of the street where I have been hanging out since I was a teenager. It got me thinking of how change in general seems to have slowed down, at least from my perspective. As a kid, the 21st century held great mystique and wonder for me, watching movies like Back to the Future, Total Recall, Terminator and Star Wars. It seemed so far away back then that the possibilities were endless! Flying cars, spaceships, laser ray guns, fully intelligent robots and artificial beings, the list went on. Here we are now, well into the 21st century, and it's as if nothing much has changed, or at least the rate of technological advancement has slowed compared to the 1980s and 90s. What do we have to show for it? The internet, Facebook, twitter, instagram, whatsapp, smartphones? YAWN. It pales in comparison to the very real sense of progress I felt as first CDs, then portable mp3 players replaced walkmans, cell phones rapidly became ubiquitous and outmoded fixed line telephones, answering machines and pagers, the PC and laptop took over from giant room-sized mainframe computers, to name some examples. Where are the advances in new hardware today? The iphone? That's merely an improved cell phone that plays music and video and takes pictures! That's nothing compared to the digital revolution seen in camera technology that put professional grade SLR cameras within reach of many. If we went back even further and compared the progress made during the 1950s and 60s, when jet planes and plastics took over, or the explosion in new forms of transportation and warfare made possible by the industrial revolution of the 19th century, the disparity in revolutionary inventions really becomes apparent. Where are the wonders that would be possible with our knowledge of genetic engineering and ability to map genomes? AIDS and cancer still plague us, while hybrid beasts, super soldiers and clone armies are nowhere to be found.
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| You still haven't arrived, T1000. |
My point in all this rambling, patient reader, is that the rate of technological progress has slowed. This, despite our population skyrocketing past 7 billion souls, making available more combined brainpower collectively than in previous times. This is worrying because the longer we take to make significant breakthroughs the more problems we face from the negative effects of growth. It is like a snowball accumulating in size as it rolls, making the need to find new resources on the one hand and deal with the waste products of our civilization on the other that much more urgent as time passes. What will we invent that will replace our dwindling fossil fuel (albeit largely oil) resources that underpin our ability to sustain the current number of people on Earth? We are truly in a race against time, and it seems to me that the previous 14 years of this century were wasted on waging wars and on financial speculation, while the world continued on its business-as-usual trajectory, consuming ever more non renewable resources and putting ever greater stresses on our one precious planet.
My hope for the new year is that we see some genuine progress toward addressing humanity's predicament, be it more agreement on what to do about climate change, new inventions that could help reduce our ecological footprint, or better yet, change in our behavior to become less consumers of material goods, with more focus on mental and spiritual well-being.
Here's toward a brighter future for us all!
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