Human Purpose ?!?!!?

PROBLEM STATEMENT

I have some bad news for you.

Planet Earth is middle aged, born 5 billion years ago it will die in a black hole in about 5 billion years time. Long before that all life on Earth will end.

This may seem bleak but it's true. But if you won't be around to experience it, does it matter to you?

In a much tighter timeframe, homo sapiens has been around for 300,000 years, there weren't that many of us when Rome was in its pomp, maybe a few hundred million, but since about 1600 AD the population has exploded to 8 billion. So we have experienced about 600 years of unprecedented human population growth (600 years is 0.000012% of the life of Earth, a blink of the eye), and the planet might just about support 11 billion people if its resources were reasonably fairly distributed.

In the Anthropocene Era, in which we presently exist, human life faces 3 significant issues.

1- ?Sustainability?(we are using up resources faster than we should)

2- Technology?(human intelligence is being overtaken by machine intelligence)

3- Social Justice (fairness and equity is largely absent)

To sustain human life on earth we need it to endure as long a reasonably possible.?Its a matter of time to extend the quality of life for this and future generations before the inevitable end of this rock into a black hole.

In our present time, Technology is likely to upend work as we have known it over the last 100 years.

Amidst all this, the increasing gap between the growing number of people in poverty and those with riches is unsustainable in terms of maintaining law and order. Mass migration will not be controllable and disorder is inevitable.

These 3 things are interrelated issues currently being discussed at global and national levels but with solutions always deployed locally. Yet the locals don't have a voice, imagine the consequences of a global referendum !!

For the first time in human history the solutions to the problems our species faces needs consensus at a global level, agreement at national levels and implementation at local levels, yet he chances of 195 countries agreeing on anything is about zero. In context more than 8 billion people will be impacted by this lack of agreement, and amongst them are your children and grandchildren.

If you won't be around to experience it, does it matter to you?

COP-out

In terms of sustainability it now appears that our elected leaders have chosen mitigation and adaptation as the twin paths to reduce suffering due to climate change. But there isn't agreement on the scale and urgency of the problem as demonstrated by the difference between the financial ask and the financial grant from COP 29's hastily agreed Hail Mary 'deal'.

The 'deal' looks as though the Global North and Global South are each looking at the same problem from different ends of a telescope. Consequently the poorest parts of the worlds population will suffer most in the near term, with some countries disappearing completely (Tuvalu may be the first nation in the world to have citizens with no land mass but they won't be the last).

Mass migration from coastal cities is now inevitable as there simply isn't enough money, understanding of the climate threats or political motivation to prevent it (4 year political terms trying to solve a 500 year or more problem makes no sense). The implications of mass migration will be akin to those of a world war with every countries citizens seeking political asylum from the others.

In the Global North, technology will rapidly replace labor causing economic migration for work, or lack of it. Even now we are seeing the impact of the first generation of AI impacting white collar jobs that have driven western GDP over the last 50 years, and consequently creating the unsustainable consumer economy that current generations have come to accept as normality. This economic migration trend will accelerate according to Moore's Law.

Some people think that work will be replaced by a universal minimum wage (the incoming DOGE Tsar is one such predictor of that) but will technology remain in the hands of Global North or will China dominate an AI and Quantum Computer disrupted world ? I know where my bet would be placed.

A universal minimum wage also requires non-human GDP to be generated broadly proportional to how it is created today or else how do you pay for it ??That is not likely to be true as education levels in the economic giants has been falling for decades.

But AI cannot replace natural resources which cannot be recreated, and the present situation in which poorer nations, with rich natural resources, paying higher interest for loans than the nations that provide them is economically, socially and politically unsustainable. The present situation is a pyramid scheme .

The consequences of injustice historically ultimately resulted in social unrest and colonization (not always in that order). This time around, in a technologically disrupted world, military power will not be based upon the number of humans in the military and so dominance may be much more difficult to achieve when China and the US experience a technological power shift.

SOLUTIONS

You have to first answer the question, 'if you won't be around to experience it, does it matter to you?'. Of the 8 billion people on Earth 90% are under 65 years of age, they will be around to experience it (I am using the current average life expectancy of 73 years to determine that).

I believe the current 7 billion who will be around to experience these changes (25% are below 15 years of age) would overwhelmingly believe it matters (although in 2014 only 54% of people surveyed thought climate change was a major threat, in 2022 this was 71% and today its 80%).

If we seek to create a sustainable equitable world isn't it vital that technological advances focus exclusively on what this means at a local level ?

Unless we urgently address the consequences of a pre-industrial 2C temperature increase causing the loss of the ice caps, increasingly violent weather events and the consequent food shortages that will drive migration from our most vulnerable population centers, then we will have missed this once in a species opportunity to take control of our future and instead become victims of it.

The 1% might think there is an option live in an actual bubble on Mars but if you won't be around to experience it, does it matter to you?

Will a LI post make any of this happen? No, but conversations begin movements & movements begin change.