In his book Last and First Men, published in 1930, Olaf Stapledon wrote a two-billion-year history of the human race. In his tale we grow wings and take to the sky and move from Earth to the outer reaches of our solar system-though we do not leave it. Stapledon was a philosopher trained, like Richard Dawkins, at Balliol College in Oxford, though he later went west to the University of Liverpool to lecture. His narrative is not enlivened by winsome or wicked characters or personal vignettes, but proceeds, almost like a formal history, to leap through the centuries and millennia. He was boldly optimistic that we have many millions of years ahead of us, even though we have managed only about 120,000 so far as modern humans and barely ten thousand years of civilisation.
My concern is for the next TWENTY years.
So, will we make it? I am afraid I can’t answer that.
It’s up to you.
The Hunches of Nostradamus
2008 Three American teens develop prehensile ears for mobile phone use.
2009 Shias and Sunnis in Iraq agree to put twenty children out in public each night to be shot by the other side-to save time.
2010 George W. Bush voted worst American President in history. Hides in a Texan retreat with remaining loyal buddies. Both of them.
2011 Climate change projections worse than expected. Nay-sayers claim they knew it was bad but didn’t want to frighten people.
2012 Evacuation of coastal zones rehearsed in Europe and Pacific.
2013 Robert Mugabe dies. International rejoicing.
2014 Only 127 great apes left in wild.
2015 Weather oscillates in extremes of hot, cold, drought, rain, terrifying winds. Storm surges wipe out several coastal communities on three continents.
2016 Earth summit. No agreement. Leaders wear peculiar costumes, enjoy banquet.
2017 Animals revolt, take over planet.
2018 Turmoil.
2019 United Nations emergency meeting.
2020…
Postscript
A few years ago, I wrote a short book entitled Our Final Century. I guessed that, taking all risks into account, there was only a 50 per cent chance that civilization would get through to 2100 without a disastrous setback. This seemed to me a far from cheerful conclusion. However, I was surprised by the way my colleagues reacted to the book: many thought a catastrophe was even more likely than I did, and regarded me as an optimist.
I stand by this optimism.
– Lord (Martin) Rees, President of the Royal Society of London,
Master of Trinity College, Cambridge
Further reading
Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Harmony Books, 1979.
Appleyard, Bryan, Understanding the Present: Science and the soul of modern man, Picador, London 1992.
Barlow, Tom, Australian Miracle: An innovative nation revisited, Picador, Sydney 2006.
Bloom, Barry, ‘Public health in transition’, Scientific American, September, 2205.
Bodanis, David, The Electric Universe, Little, Brown, London 2005.
Clarke, John, Working with Monsters: How to protect yourself from the workplace psychopath,
Random House, Sydney 2005.
Cooper, Cary, interview with Dr Norman Swan, ‘Job satisfaction and health’, ‘The Health Report’, ABC Radio National, 22 May 2006 ‹abc.net.au/rn/healthreport›.
Davies, Paul, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the universe just right for life? Allen Lane, London 2006.
Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion, Bantam Press, London 2006.
– -, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1976.
Dunbar, Robin, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, Faber & Faber, London 1996.
Eagleton, Terry, ‘Lunging, flailing, mispunching’, London Review of Books, ‹http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html›.
Ehrlich, Paul, The Population Bomb, Ballantine Books, New York 1968.
Frayn, Michael, The Human Touch, Faber & Faber, London 2006.
Gould, Stephen Jay, Rocks of Ages: Science and religion in the fullness of life, Ballantine Books, New York 1999.
Graebsch, Ahnut, and Schiermeier, Quirin, ‘Anti-evolutionists raise their profile in Europe ’, Nature, vol. 444, 23 November 2006, pp. 406-7.
Greenfield, Susan, Tomorrow’s People: How 21st century technology is changing the way we think and feel, Allen Lane, London 2003.
Haskell, Yasmin, ‘Ockham’s Razor’, 21 October 2006 ‹abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor›.
Huebner, Jonathan, ‘A possible declining trend for worldwide innovation’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, October 2005, vol. 72, pp. 980-6.
Hughes, Ted, quoted in Phillips, Adam, The Beast in the Nursery, Faber & Faber, London 1998.
Kahn, Herman, Thinking About the Unthinkable, Avon Books, New York 1962.
– -, The Next 200 Years, Sphere, London 1978.
Lernley, Brad, ‘Waste into oil’, Cosmos, issue 9, June/July 2006.
Lovins, Amory B., ‘More profit with less carbon’, Scientific American, vol. 293, no. Ill, pp. 74-82
(29 August 2005), ‹www.sciam.com/media/pdf/Lovinsforweb.pdf›.
Hawken, Paul, Lovins, Amory B. and Lovins, L. Hunter, Natural Capitalism, Little, Brown, New
York 1999.
Maddox, Brenda, Beyond Babel , Andre Deutsch, London 1972.
Meadows, Donella H., Meadows, Dennis L., Randers, Jorgen and Behrens III, William W, The Limits to Growth: A report for the Club of Rome ’s project on the predicament of mankind, Signet, New York 1972.
Needham, Kirsty, A Season in Red: My great leap forward into the new China , Allen & Unwin, Sydney 2006.
Newman, Peter and Kenworthy, Jeffrey, Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming automobile dependence, Island Press, Washington DC 1999.
Norris, Pippa and Inglehart, Ronald, Sacred and Secular: Religion and politics worldwide, Cambridge University Press 2004.
Paul, Gregory S., ‘Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in the prosperous democracies’, Journal of Religion and Society, vol. 7, 2005.
Rees, Martin, Our Final Century: Will the human race survive the twenty-first century? William Heinemann, London 2003.
Rose, Steven, The Conscious Brain, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1973.
– -, The 21st Century Brain: Explaining, mending and manipulating the mind, Jonathan Cape, London 2005.
Roychowdhury, Anunüta and Sharma, Anju, Slow Murder: The deadly story of vehicular pollution in India, Center for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi 1996.
Seddon, George, The Old Country: A sense of place, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne 2005.
Stapledon, Olaf, Last and First Men: A story of the near and far future, Methuen, London 1930.