Cities Of The Future

Let me preface this by stating a fact - Climate Change is REAL.

Now that we've established this fact, we have to come to terms with what happens to our cities and population centers in the near future.

Our species has a fatal flaw in its design; an inability to think beyond the immediate reality. We plan our lives, our finances, our weddings and dinners but we are not equipped to plan 20 or 30 years in our future. An individual unable to plan their lives is still not a big failure, but as a species we have failed our basic instinct of survival. Evolution brought us to the top of our planet and now we're actively killing our future. We believed our governments would be able to think long term, but we simply did not equip them with the tools or systems needed to do this.

A majority of our population simply strives to survive and we've designed our society for this. Basic needs are missing in favor of control and power that a few wield. Our politics are based on competitions and are very short term; 4 or 5 years is not enough for the people in power to decide long term policy. Half their terms are spent preparing for the next election which they want to win. The other shoe of this argument is that we inherently do not trust people and have designed political systems with checks and balances to keep the worst people from doing the worst things with their power.

All this leads us back to a systemic failure across the world to get the right information about climate change. We've known about it for decades and yet, even today, people refuse to believe in climate change. Why? Sure, we're not a long-lived species so we don't have the perspective of a long period of time passing. But we have science which tell us of our planet's history and its possible future; but most choose to not believe it. As if science was a school of thought, instead of the rules of the universe.

There are many reasons for denial, like fear and ignorance, or the outcome being too grim to be accepted as our fate. We tend to defend our beliefs even in the face of evidence proving the contrary. We make it personal. "Could I have been wrong all this time? Fuck no." It's easy for me to say this, but I blame our evolution and the society it led us to.

I often wonder what it would be like to alter things in the past; a few historic events here or there and see how the flow of time changes. An excellent two-part episode from Star Trek: Voyager called "Year of Hell" comes to mind. An advanced species uses technology to make alterations to past events in the hope of restoring their now deceased empire. With every change, they project outcomes and then make the change to see how allegiances shift, wars happen and entire species get wiped out.

This is what we need. We need to see the outcomes of our actions before we make mistakes that cannot be fixed. What would be the outcome of early humanity not discovering agriculture? What if the first trade involving currency never happened? What if we discovered solar energy before coal and oil? Would we be massively different as a species or just simply turn back to our destructive ways in time?

Currently, our future is grim. The boomers won't live long enough to see it, the millennials might but the generations that come after will live through the decisions of the past, unable to fix them. We live in large cities by the coast which threatens to swallow our cities. All estimated temperature increases are being revised every year as we break records in increasing hot weather and shortening cold seasons. Several studies point to most of our agricultural societies losing all arable land in the very near future. Our glaciers are melting, ocean currents are changing and severe weather events keep getting worse.

We build technologies to work around this; electric cars, hydrogen cars, carbon capture and a whole other things with the hope that maybe something will work. We pat ourselves on the back as we drive an electric car which does not directly run on fossil fuels but is built with a staggering amount of destructive mining and energy generation. We hope that one day human ingenuity will win over the destruction we've caused, so we can keep doing it.

Recently, a famous CEO of a famous company said that it was time to remove all the barriers around AI power consumption as it is our only saving grace in the future. When I first read that, I was astounded. Something that already consumes large amounts of our power should be given free reign to do more damage? But then, over the next few days, I realized the pragmatism in it. We're doomed if we do, doomed if we don't. Might as well do and hope for the best. This is where we are. Throwing all our eggs in the proverbial future hand basket and hope that one of them hatches something that saves us.

We are the most intelligent species on the planet after all. In a few decades, we will have wiped out most other species that exist as we continue to expand, extract and exterminate. You may call me cynical and yes, I am a cynic. I've lived through a time when we accepted science and then suddenly as a pandemic was upon us, we participated in theatrics instead of taking vaccines and listening to doctors. Accepting science as a gold standard for our survival is a relic of the past. We like being pandered to and choose leaders for their personality and religious beliefs instead of their governing capability. To say we deserve this is unfair.

But, nature and science don't care about fairness. I hope the lesson it teaches us is something we are capable of learning.