Large-scale thinking
Jul. 15th, 2007 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
openspace4life" 'Your dream is a good one,' said Ender. 'It's the dream of every living creature. The desire that is the very root of life itself: To grow until all the space you can see is part of you, under your control. It's the desire for greatness. There are two ways, though, to fulfill it. One way is to kill anything that is not yourself, to swallow it up or destroy it, until nothing is left to oppose you. But that way is evil. . . .'
" 'I see,' [the alien] said. 'The tribe is whatever we believe it is. . . . We [and other tribes] become one tribe because we say we're one tribe. . . .'
"Ender marveled at his mind, this small [alien]. How few humans were able to grasp this idea, or let it extend beyond the narrow confines of their tribe, their family, their nation. . . .
" 'You humans grow by making us part of you . . . Then we are one tribe, and our greatness is your greatness, and yours is ours.' "
- Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
". . . and sometimes in the afternoons, first listening to a proposal to genetically engineer kelp to produce bulbs filled with ready-to-burn carbohydrates, then talking for an hour with the UNEP officer in town to plan a tidal energy capture system . . . and then speeking to people in an engineering consortium of government/university/industry groups about cheap efficient photovoltaics, he would come out of it . . . dizzy at the touch of the technological sublime, feeling that a good array of plans existed already--that if they could enact this array, it would go a long way toward averting catastrophe. Perhaps they were already in the process of doing so. It was actually hard to tell; so much was happening at any one time that any description of the situation had some truth in it, from 'desperate crisis, extinction event totally ignored' to 'minor problems robustly dealt with.' It was therefore necessary to forge on in ignorance of the whole situation."
- Kim Stanley Robinson, Fifty Degrees Below (which depicts a much more believable version of the Day After Tomorrow abrupt-climate-change scenario)
These quotes show that growing and managing global consciousness is quite a Herculean task if we want to do it right. Humanity is so big that just comprehending what it means to be "all one tribe" takes a lot of effort, almost a shift to an alien mindset. Some science fiction authors use the phrase "growing up as a species" to describe this immensely difficult transition. But now, with catastrophic climate change looming mere decades in the future, as well as potentially massive risks to civilization due to habitat destruction, widespread genetic engineering of crops, and many other issues, we have run out of time. We have to grow up now, or face a population crash that will make nuclear terrorism look like a statistic about deaths caused by vending machines.
" 'I see,' [the alien] said. 'The tribe is whatever we believe it is. . . . We [and other tribes] become one tribe because we say we're one tribe. . . .'
"Ender marveled at his mind, this small [alien]. How few humans were able to grasp this idea, or let it extend beyond the narrow confines of their tribe, their family, their nation. . . .
" 'You humans grow by making us part of you . . . Then we are one tribe, and our greatness is your greatness, and yours is ours.' "
- Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
". . . and sometimes in the afternoons, first listening to a proposal to genetically engineer kelp to produce bulbs filled with ready-to-burn carbohydrates, then talking for an hour with the UNEP officer in town to plan a tidal energy capture system . . . and then speeking to people in an engineering consortium of government/university/industry groups about cheap efficient photovoltaics, he would come out of it . . . dizzy at the touch of the technological sublime, feeling that a good array of plans existed already--that if they could enact this array, it would go a long way toward averting catastrophe. Perhaps they were already in the process of doing so. It was actually hard to tell; so much was happening at any one time that any description of the situation had some truth in it, from 'desperate crisis, extinction event totally ignored' to 'minor problems robustly dealt with.' It was therefore necessary to forge on in ignorance of the whole situation."
- Kim Stanley Robinson, Fifty Degrees Below (which depicts a much more believable version of the Day After Tomorrow abrupt-climate-change scenario)
These quotes show that growing and managing global consciousness is quite a Herculean task if we want to do it right. Humanity is so big that just comprehending what it means to be "all one tribe" takes a lot of effort, almost a shift to an alien mindset. Some science fiction authors use the phrase "growing up as a species" to describe this immensely difficult transition. But now, with catastrophic climate change looming mere decades in the future, as well as potentially massive risks to civilization due to habitat destruction, widespread genetic engineering of crops, and many other issues, we have run out of time. We have to grow up now, or face a population crash that will make nuclear terrorism look like a statistic about deaths caused by vending machines.
