I’m sure there are folks out there trolling the internet for items about Star Trek. They’re called Trekkies. And the title of this post is a direct quotation from Star Trek - The Motion Picture. So, it’s reasonable to expect that they may find this post and have a look. They will be disappointed. I apologise to them if they feel that I have tricked them into looking at my blog instead of interesting facts about Star Trek. It is not my intention to trick anyone.
This post is about us - the carbon units currently infesting this planet. We’ve been infesting it for quite some time now, and if reports are to be believed we may not be infesting for much longer. Let’s face it: the end of the world is a popular topic in fiction, films and documentaries. Imagining the end of the world or of civilization is a growth industry. Bad news still sells newspapers.
Why should this be so? Sorry it comes with the territory. In historical terms it's pure hubris. Homo sapiens stands head and shoulders above other species as the pinnacle of evolution. And, unless you are a religious person this is simply the result of the march of evolution. But, evolution has no end product. And however much you may wish it wasn't so we are simply the evolutionary result of many chance encounters. We are in the box without knowing so and have no idea how to imagine any other reality outside the box. We are prisoners of this planet and this reality.
We are, if the commentariat is to be believed, at a crossroads on this planet. The resources required to keep our species going forward are either too difficult to maintain or too depleted to enable us to go forward, as we have unerringly done for the last few thousand years. I submit that voluntarily going back to some sort of sustainable pre-industrial utopia is simply not an option.
Now, it may well be that Micawber-like something will just turn up. Possible but increasingly unlikely in my view. Society has become so dependent on technologies that the average Joe doesn't really understand much about how things work. He just doesn't need to.
Think I'm joking? In the dim and distant past I taught science. I loved a lesson where I asked 12 year olds to explain how some mundane and common items in the home actually worked. A light bulb or a telephone or a heating system could they explain, even briefly, how they work? Some of the answers were very entertaining. Mostly they fell back on you just flip the switch. That was the extent of their knowledge and engagement with the modern world. And, it was not necessarily their fault. To the average Joe things just work until they don’t and then you get somebody else to make it work again.
Think we could turn the clock back and become subsistence farmers again? Get real.
We either find some way to share the resources or our stay here may be much shorter than we either think or wish.
Which neatly brings me to my dream, or should I say my nightmare. Essentially we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that though as individuals we are mortal, as a species we are immortal. We go on and on and on for as far as we can imagine. All our hopes and the remorseless march of the selfish gene populate our future.
Out in the cosmos there are problems. Despite efforts lasting a long time in human terms we are still alone and may continue to be on and on and on. There are lots of theories purporting to prove that out there life must be really quite common. Thousands of habitable planets are just waiting for contact. But, there is a chilling alternative. Habitable planets and even life itself may be as grains of sand on every beach on Earth. Intelligent life could even be common, as grains of sand in a wheelbarrow. Time and the sustainability of civilisations could be the controlling feature. Many civilizations may have existed, flourished and died before the capacity we have of detecting them has become available.
Septics will note here that what I’m describing is not new. Ancient Aliens visiting us is not a new idea. What is new is that they may have thought us so primitive as to not be worthy of another visit and before it occurred to them to look us up they themselves fell victim to what I’ve described. Overpopulated, running out of essential resources and unable to sufficiently master the technology necessary to avoid an asteroid taking them out, or some new virulent disease plunging their civilization back into the Dark Ages; they just ran out of time for a return visit. The fourth dimension - time may be the controlling feature here, not some complicated algorithm involving mathematical probabilities. They may have just run out of time as we may before the cosmic forces align at precisely the right moment.
The comfort of religion or philosophy only works if we can be assured that we will be noticed and remembered. Cast ahead to a future where the Earth is just an uninteresting looking rock orbiting a nondescript star and a passing space ship just goes cheerfully on its way not realising that a complex carbon-based civilisation once was here but destroyed the Earth.
We leave no trace. We leave no marker. We are truly alone in the cosmos separated not so much by space as by time. Our immortality is gone in a flicker of space-time.
That, I contend, is a nightmare truly worthy of note.
