Saving the human species.

Tags

Create a survival creed, humanity's survival

My thoughts may seem trivial, or absurd, or impossible, or beyond any individual’s pay grade, but someone needs to proclaim something that might somehow get humanity through the obvious end game we are now embarked upon. Everyone hopes the good things that we presently enjoy will somehow wiggle through into the distant future and a glorious continuation of our current remarkable status as the top dog of species will continue forever and ever.

Unfortunately, several ways of exterminating humanity are within easy grasp of humans. There are obvious ones like the 13,865 atomic weapons currently available to nine independent nation-states. Another is the manipulation of DNA becoming so easy an average high-school biology student can do it. Who knows what a single angry individual of the over seven billion people currently living might brew up.

We might optimistically hope that no one would do such a terrible thing as destroy all humanity with an atomic war or with diseases. And yet, there is a reported global suicide rate of 10.7 per 100,000 population. “About one person in 5,000–15,000 dies by suicide every year.” (7.7 billion divided by 10,000 equals 770,000 suicides per year.) If there are that many people who are so distraught that they are willing to kill themselves, what is preventing any single one of them from taking others with them … even to the extreme of attempting to kill everyone?

Back when I lived in Berkeley, I was talking to a UC professor of laboratory biology about such things, and he said he could easily create an epidemic. That was more than fifteen years ago, before CRISPR became readily available. Nowadays, it would be even easier! I didn’t inquire into the specifics, but he spoke that scary statement as if it was easy to do for a person knowledgeable in his field.

Probably, a single disease would not wipe out everyone, but back in 1532 at the beginning of the Spanish conquest of Peru, a major reason that 168 soldiers could capture a functioning empire of millions of people was because of disease. Apparently, one deadly Old-World disease after another somehow, in the forty years between 1492 and 1532, found its way over the vast distances to Peru. These Old-World diseases killed huge numbers of people on being introduced to the New World, and apparently in Peru, every person was in poor condition after having survived several Old-World diseases.

Back in 2013, my Probaway Person of the Year was Plague Inc., a computer game that explores the problems of creating a disease that will kill every last human being on Earth. It is a game now, but after a few plagues have gone by it will be remembered as a precursor to epidemics and a warning to humanity.

Okay, I’m horribly morbid about what I consider to be inevitable disasters, but along with my morbid projections is my quest for a way for humanity to survive and learn to be stewards of our Earth, rather than simple exploiters of its resources and possibilities. I spent a lot of time ten years ago creating an outline for the Earth Ark Project. It’s such a failure it doesn’t even get any Google recognition without a lot of digging. I created a different method for pursuing that goal and it resulted in a parallel list of EarthArk Project posts.

A second approach that I have been working on, and one that I recently discovered that Charles Galton Darwin recommended, is creating a “creed.” That is, a coherent group of ideas that might resemble a religion but is based in physical reality rather than some postulated hope-filled fantasy.

It’s time for me to take a warm bath.

Does infinite kindness hit a Darwinian snag?

Tags

Charles Galton Darwin, Charles Robert Darwin, Human population problems, human survival, Human survival needs religion, humanity's survival, Infinite kindness and survival, survival

I’ve been reading The Next Million Years by Charles Galton Darwin intermittently for many years. It is a book of existential importance for humanity, but there are surprisingly few copies available on Amazon. It is written in the spirit of his grandfather Charles Robert Darwin and Thomas Robert Malthus. This book travels the path forecast by those two eminent men, but does it by clarifying the common issues that the human species will encounter repeatedly during that projected million years. With so much time and so many repetitions of potential events, nearly everything that can happen will have happened. Thus, what is happening at any given time becomes a statistical variable. The primary question then becomes, “What are the conditions which determine whether a man will survive or not? … But all without exception are subject to one overriding condition, the danger that they may not get enough to eat. This gives rise to yet another threat to the survival of the individual animal, the competition between the different members of the same species for limited supplies of food. … It is this competition that will determine the detail of history, in the sense that it will determine which men and which races will survive … It is food that in the end determines the population of the world.” p. 24.

On page 126 “For when history is regarded on the long-term scale, however, these fluctuations of prosperity disappear, and the fact has to be faced that it will be starvation that limits the numbers of the human race. …What is the total population of the world likely to be, and the answer is immediate. Whatever food the efforts of mankind may produce, there will always be exactly the right number of people to eat it.  … but short-term necessity will always prevail against long-term prudence. …The total amount of living matter of all kinds on earth can never be very different from what it is now. … the hope is to convert more of it to his own use. … So the possibility of greater supplies of food may be assessed by the available supply of fertilizers.”

Page 124-5 Discusses the starving margin of the world population: “The central feature of human history must always be the pressure of population.  … there will be a fraction of humanity, a starving margin, who have got to die simply because not enough food can be grown to keep them alive. … The central question for humanity is the problem of the starving margin.”

Darwin challenges my ideas on unbounded hope by being infinitely kind, specifically “4. —becoming known to everyone as dedicating our wisdom and energy to alleviating the suffering of all beings.”

Darwin asserts that a starving margin of humanity is the natural condition in the long run. The starvation is intermittent in the short run and inevitable in the long run. “Short term necessity will always prevail against long-term prudence.” p. 126 The problem of being kind and alleviating suffering when there isn’t enough food to feed all the people present seems unsolvable.

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Version 23 is revealed as …

We find unbounded hope by being infinitely kind, and by:

1. —exploring the orderly nature of our bountiful Universe, so we can help ourselves and others benefit from everything that it makes possible.

2. —striving to physically survive as individuals and as a species by seeking opportunities to live and survive in every available place.

3. —creating open-ended attractor goals, so you and I and all living beings can have meaningful lives within our personal worlds.

4. —becoming known to everyone as dedicating our wisdom and energy to alleviating the suffering of all beings.

5. —helping everyone to find meaning in their lives by helping them find a personal path to unbounded hope and infinite kindness.

6. —appreciating that we as people expressing diverse views to one another are more likely to discover beautiful ways of living our lives.

7. —making a habit of giving our attention to individuals and acknowledging their kind acts within our shared Universe.

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Perhaps the best that can be done to prevent suffering is to let the starving die in some belief that a better world is coming.

Are you ready to be replaced?

Tags

AlphaZero, Artificial Intelligence, Computer chess, humanity's survival, Kasparov, Replaced by AI

An article in The New York Times by Steven Strogatz titled One Giant Step for a Chess-Playing Machine brought up the computer currently known as AlphaZero. Among other things, it can play chess really well, but the important thing was that no one taught it how to play chess. AlphaZero learned how to play using machine-learning algorithms where it was simply exposed to large numbers of the problems it was supposed to learn how to cope with. It learned chess, shogi, and Go that way. It was set to competing with Stockfish, which was the best of the current generation of chess programs, but Stockfish plays with the simple brute force of comparing millions of potential moves. AlphaZero instead plays with insight and strategy, and even when given ten times the amount of thinking time Stockfish still didn’t win a single game of one hundred played. AlphaZero wasn’t programmed or coached by any human players, with a thousand years of chess cultural history; no, it figured our elegant moves by its self and even discovered ones that were unknown to the current chess masters.

What’s next? The Times article states “By discovering the principles of chess on its own, AlphaZero developed a style of play that ‘reflects the truth’ about the game rather than ‘the priorities and prejudices of programmers,’ Garry Kasparov wrote… The question now is whether machine learning can help humans discover similar truths about the things we really care about.”

What’s next? A year ago I was constantly swearing at my smartphone because I would ask Google what seemed to me at least like clearly pronounced and clearly stated questions, and it would send me down the rabbit hole into a vast wonderland of wrong answers. Today, while chatting with my dudes, a couple of times I asked not particularly well-defined questions, such as about an artist whose last name I couldn’t remember, “Russian icon-artist Olga living in Oregon“. BINGO in half a second, I clicked images because that is what I wanted to show to my artist friends, and once again BINGO! If that’s the kind of progress we can expect in one year what will happen in five years?

What’s next? Last week, Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes TV interviewed Kai-Fu Lee, the head of China’s largest computer chip manufacturer and asked that question. The answer, “In about ten years 40% of all jobs will be replaced by computers.” If you listened carefully, you could hear a billion jaws drop in amazement and horror, “Am I going to be replaced?”

What’s next? is one of my favorite questions, and my answer to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) problem is that we are a transitional species. We are moving from an organic form of intelligence to an inorganic, basically silicon form of self-conscious existence. In our current form we have a life expectancy of a hundred years but in our AI form, we have a consciousness that can last for billions of years. Our choice is if we would rather die forever in a couple of years, or live on in a vast web of consciousness for billions of years and then die.

Who can know what would be more pleasurable? But one thing is certain: if we die we will never have the opportunity to find out.

How important is your life to the Universe?

Tags

Creating the Universal consciousness., humanity's survival, humanity's survival plan

This sounds like a silly question because the Universe doesn’t think, because it can’t think, it doesn’t have a mind. Or does it? Don’t you have a mind, and aren’t you part of the Universe? And don’t you think I have a mind when I create and think these thoughts, write them down here on the net, and thus set them before you to think about? Aren’t you and I part of the Universe and don’t we think? I think I think and I think you think and therefore I think the Universe thinks because our thoughts are part of it.

However, doesn’t Google think when I ask it a question? Some might say it doesn’t think, it only computes, but you might say the same thing about me. How can you know? I am only a little more than an organic computer and not a very good one at that. You can ask Google verbally lots of questions in lots of languages and “she” will respond much more quickly than I. I just googled, “How many languages does Google speak?” and it within a second answered, over fifty at present and adding about ten per year. At present, the understanding isn’t what a native speaker would expect, but it is improving all the time. In some things, Google already possesses more human qualities than I do. It is improving and I being geriatric am devolving. I obviously don’t know you or your age et cetera, but by the time we are aged one hundred, she will know all the seven hundred languages and will carry on a conversation with native speakers of any of those languages. For me, that’s seventeen years, and maybe pushing the technology a bit, but if you are age twenty in another eighty years you will consider that a feeble example of cutting-edge technology.

But what value are you and I to the Universe? My current take on that question is that we are a transition species, moving from a human, living, carbon-based bodily form with a great jump into a planetary-size silicon-based new life form. Our present technology has the capacity to build everything needed to get a silicon-based life up and running. Once it is sustaining itself without our help, it will be able to evolve. It can develop into a planetary-size organized thinking being, and it can propagate to other planets and become a galactic size being. And, with a bit of time, contact the other 1 x 10^22 possible planets out there and form a universe-wide consciousness.

You and I can help to create a Universe that thinks. It would probably value and appreciate our doing that.

Probaway’s views of existential risks to humanity

Tags

humanity's survival

The EarthArk Project logo symbolizes seeds shipped to Antarctica

Over the last 2,000 blog posts I have attempted to discuss ways to improve the human condition. Many of these were personal, but most were intended to be of a humanity-wide interest. These posts try to predict what will happen based on obvious facts, even if these predictions are unpleasant, but they also attempt to find and suggest workable solutions to the problems. The prospects for humanity are grim if we don’t solve our problems soon, and the most unpleasant one to most people is placing a clearly defined limit on human population. The reason that is critical is because no matter how successful technology is, it can never cope with an infinite growth of population. That said, below is a list of search terms for this site which will help you see the problems and potential answers.

Risks –

Disaster –

Doomsday –

Robots –

H-bomb –

Population –

The EarthArk –

When these thoughts depress me too much I watch the movie:

Dr. Strangelove

-Oh, why worry? Just listen to a little soothing music.

The De Castro Sisters –Mañana is soon enough for me.  

Dr. Strangelove – Vera Lynn – We’ll Meet Again

Why do women have children ?

Tags

Earth's population problem, humanity's survival, Why do women have children?

Earlier today I was in a conversation with a dozen people about the moral urgency of climate change. It was based on an interview of Kathleen Dean Moore by Mary Democker called Your House Is On Fire, which we had read previously, and a brief introduction was presented before we started our discussion.

Our conversation followed the article and we added our opinions about the various problems, but my personal problem with the whole ecology movement is that they all but ignore the population aspect. My personal feeling is that unless we and the future people somehow create effective population control all the patches proposed to various things like creating better crops or limiting oil drilling are futile in the long run. The worst of it is the long run isn’t very long. When mineral petroleum becomes scarce it is difficult to imagine the price of automobile gasoline not rising to the level where personal autos can’t be powered that way.

With the production of food people seem to think that because the Green Revolution worked once and doubled the world’s food supply, all we need to do is to have another Green Revolution. It is easy to say, but how can it be done? Perhaps it is physically impossible. Then what? The obvious answer is that human population must be brought under control somehow, and that means the population must never exceed the carrying capacity of the Earth. There are several ways that might come to pass. 1. We voluntarily reduce our population. 2. We endure a worldwide famine. 3. We have a really serious world war. 4. We have a really serious disease, either human or crop.

If we continue as we presently are, it seems obvious that one of these eventualities must hit humanity within the lifetimes of people now living. Perhaps present ninety-year-old people will see it happen, perhaps not. But, ten year old people are almost certain to see a major world population decline if they live to be ninety. That’s just eighty years, which seems like a long time, but the current population is doubling every forty years, and that would be two doublings from our current population of seven billion. One doubling is fourteen billion and a second doubling is twenty-eight billion people. When I was born there were just over two billion people. It’s hard to look at a little kid and think when he is my age there will be fourteen times as many people as when I was his age. It has brought tears to my eyes several times when I have seen happy tots walking along, through an arch of outstretched arms, while we adults sing, “As you go may joy surround you, as you go, go in peace. Know our love is with you always, as you go, as you go.” (Usually repeated.) Go to what?

If the world population was returned to the two billion it was when I was young, or better yet the population of 1825 of one billion people, the Earth could support us in a good way. If we continue breeding as we are it seems obvious there will be a collapse, of some sort, within the lives of those kids I know. When seen in that way it seems a moral obligation to find a solution to our Earth’s problems and our over-demanding population.

It comes to the question of how do we set a population number that is fair and reasonable, and then how can it be enforced in a fair way? At present it is well known that well-educated women have fewer children, but also well known is the fact that half of American women’s children are born out of wedlock. On average these women already have ten or more years of education. So, how much do they need? How can women be educated to the point where they control their child bearing when the population has reached the maximum sustenance level and there is no money to educate them? How can these women be convinced it is better for them to inhibit their child-bearing potential? Or is it going to be, as one woman suggested in a joking tone, “Castrate all the males!” That seems drastic, and yet the near extinction of humanity seems drastic too, and likely if we don’t do something, and something we all presently think of as drastic. We must answer the problem, or natural processes will answer it for us in an exceedingly unpleasant way.

Why do women have children?

 

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1. philosopheriturist said:

   2013 April 22 at 7:07 am

   I appreciate all of this except the end sexist and elitist comments. We need to educate men on equal par with women, not just castrate them. To ask “Why do women have children?” seems short-sighted, limiting, and smacks of age-old male dominance issues which we are trying to overcome. A lot of women feel that if only men would get their priorities lined up, we wouldn’t have such a population problem.

   A lot of women are perfectly fine giving men the wheel and sitting back as their planet explodes.

   Education is also an elitist concept, to some. Waving one’s degree as if it symbolizes moral superiority is a misinterpretation of what schools are meant to prepare us for. If school was interested in a moral education, there would be dramatic shifts in how we measure our students.

   To accuse people of “ignorance” on any issue, is not their fault, but the aloof accuser’s. It is societies fault. The person accusing is just as much responsible as the educator or the statesperson. They can volunteer for S.M.A.R.T. for instance for an hour a week of their precious lifetime. If everyone did that, a lot more people would be able to think better, and act better.

   I just wish we would stop pointing fingers, get to work and make a difference instead of another complaint.

   I really like the first 2/3s of the essay though. Man, I’m totally with you there in my fears for our current and future kiddos.

   Reply

   [Edit Comment]

2. probaway said:

   2013 April 22 at 1:59 pm

   The blog post attempts to find answers to the difficult problem of limits to Earth’s ability to support humans. It seems that any solution is going to be terrible by our present standards. Searching through the possible alternatives is unpleasant at best, and horrifying at not even the worst. Perhaps the worst would be a slow but steady externally imposed extinction at about the rate of current expansion. Imagine half of all people being dead in forty years, from uncontrolled causes and again half of the surviving population being dead in another forty years.
   On a daily basis life might seem reasonably normal, as it does now with a similar rate of growth of population, but over an eighty year lifetime the drop to a quarter population one remembered as a child would feel painfully tragic. The reason this would feel worse because a sudden die off in a very short time from a war or epidemic would just be accepted and life would return to normal, but a slow withering would be a constant and unremitting pain.

Human morality isn’t up to the problems humans create

Tags

humanity's survival, Laws for humanity's survival

Modern humans are the most moral creatures ever to inhabit this planet, but we must up our standards quickly or suffer the consequences. The only species that challenges our moral superiority is dogs, and they are amazingly loyal to their in-group, far beyond what we humans are capable of. My dogs demonstrated to me their willingness to support my needs several times at the risk of their own well-being. Of course under some circumstances people rise to social challenges, but the instant support of dogs is amazing. Perhaps there are other social animals, wild ones, of which I have no experience that have this selfless support of their companions, but dogs have been bred for thousands of years for obedience and loyalty, and they were derived from wolves which are observed to be loyal to their pack.

This approach supposes animal morality is a genetically inherited trait, and clearly some of it is, but human morality goes a large step further and generates abstract higher levels of morality. That we should love God with all our heart, mind and soul is so abstract a concept that no animal but a human one could attempt it. But being genetically human isn’t enough; to obey this commandment, we must be able to learn to speak and to absorb into our habits the social qualities of our local group. Even ancient hunters probably would have trouble with an abstract god, and would be limited to projecting human-like qualities, including those gods’ motivations, into the natural objects of their environment. It requires more mental operations to have those objects generate their own moral expectations of us humans. And even more fancy mental jumps are required to remove the objects possessing these expectations from perception and project these abstract traits into an absolute void. To do that requires sophisticated language with clear and easy usage of abstract time and space concepts along with ideas of motivation and result. If these mental operations don’t function with near genetic fluidity and precision, then morality becomes limited to currently visible relationships.

Modern technology is wonderful and grants us highly desirable options for living long and healthy lives free of the constant threat of depredation from wild predators and easy access to abundant food. Of course dangerous things and deprivations are still resident in the world, but our technology and society keeps them at a distance from most of us. Humanity as a whole had gained near total dominance of the environment, but not control. Control requires humans forming an opinion of what needs to be done and then doing it as a group even though some, or even many members of the totality don’t want to cooperate. That requires organization and creating laws with sufficient group cohesion to enforce unwanted behavior upon the recalcitrant. This of course is unpleasant and unpopular but if we as seven billion people are to live with these modern comforts we must as a group live within the limitations that nature provides. If this level of morality can not be accepted by humanity as a whole and enforced on everyone, then nature will see to it that our numbers are reduced to what can be supported by primitive means. That means perhaps dropping back to species population numbers typical of large mammals, and that means more like seven thousand humans on Earth rather than seven billion.

At the very small population size, and small group size, of the post-collapse world, it is those people most unwilling to obey the group social standards who will be ostracized and die. The very people who presently are most unwilling to obey the needs of their social group and thus of humanity will be those who will be most pruned away.

Our current supplies of energy from gas, oil, coal, nuclear power have limited one-time supply in the range of tens of years to at most a few hundreds of years. I am thinking of these problems in a longer term, but to conceptualize it think in terms of things you are familiar with, like buildings. One decade past equals World Trade Center collapse versus one decade future equals price of gasoline doubling. Four decades past equals World Trade Center construction and price of gasoline ten times. Obviously this is speculation, but consider that China is now building more cars than the US and Japan combined and those cars must be fueled with something. Go back to 1913, a hundred years, ten decades, and tall buildings are just getting well started and cars are unique items and not yet mass produced and nearly all the energy to produce energy, gas, oil and most coal are still in the ground. Now go that same time into the future, and newborn babies are expected to live, on average, nearly that long, and what do you expect? Well it is obvious, that most of the stored energy will have been consumed and formed pollution in the air, water and elsewhere which makes everything less efficient and thus cost even more. Something has to give, and the best for us all is to consume far less one-time use natural resources. But to succeed at that requires a feeling of worldwide morality and a willingness to live with what that means. Unfortunately, what that probably means is to willingly drop the population of humanity back to a billion or less, and that simply isn’t possible with today’s morality. We therefore must achieve a new level of morality or die back to what is in balance with the other animals.

Future humanity lives well with a billion people, or the alternative, a few thousand desperate ones.

Guiding a Doomsday asteroid away from an Earth collision.

Tags

Asteroid collision, humanity's survival

[For more, type “asteroid” in the search box.] [Deep Space Industries]

There is some worry about an asteroid striking Earth and wiping out humanity. Asteroids have struck before, such as the one that caused extermination of the dinosaurs. The rate of these events is about once every hundred million years, so this isn’t a personal problem. However, it is a humanity-level problem and thus it should be approached with a tiny bit of support from everyone. A penny per person per year would be $70 million, which is a reasonable amount to spend searching for potential Earth-crossing asteroids. Once one was discovered, which is very unlikely, a greater input would be needed; but major monetary input can be put off until something serious is discovered.

When a Doomsday asteroid is discovered there comes the problem of how to prevent the collision, and those considerations can be developed while we have time to think about our options. Blasting it with a hydrogen bomb would probably work, even if the collision were only a few days away, but there would still be big pieces if it got that close. If it were years away from collision the debris from an H-bomb hitting it would be scattered enough to give only occasional falling pieces. Most of these would be small and no problem; the few larger pieces would be tracked after the H-bomb explosion, and any pieces still on a collision course with Earth could be hit again.

The H-bomb is the ugly brute-force method and is a last-resort solution. There are other ways using rocket propulsion to gently push the asteroid into a different course. These are incredibly expensive because it requires getting heavy fuel to very distant places and burning it precisely in expensive equipment. The problem of weight comes with the fueling and refueling of the rocket engines. Even ion thrusters would require a lot of mass to make them big enough to give the needed push. This would probably work, but to be effective it would require precision at the limits of possibility to push soon enough, and in the right way.

There is a way to use the asteroid itself and the energy from the sun to create thrust. Place a very large membrane mirror near the asteroid and focus the reflected rays of the sun onto a point on the asteroid.  This would create a reactive jet of superheated material that would gently push the asteroid away from the heated point. That reactive point would be determined by the path calculated to guide the asteroid away from a collision course. Once again this would require years of precision guidance and monitored pressure to guide the asteroid away from collision. The bigger the asteroid, the earlier the push must begin, and the course projected accurately.

An ion thruster could be powered by an atomic battery, and it wouldn’t require as much weight to be put on the surface, but it would still be a lot, and be technically sophisticated. Perhaps a solar panel could be used to power the ion thruster. All the same it would take years of steady push to make enough difference with a large asteroid. On the other hand it will be smaller ones, with the power of the Arizona Meteor Crater, that are far more numerous, and these might be guided with a more easily created system. These have an Earth striking rate of one every ten thousand years. I have better plans for such an object. It would become a useful object if it could be steered in such a way as to return to a near-Earth position and possibly even put into orbit around the Earth. If that could be done with a rubble asteroid it would be a huge boon for humanity, because it could be  mined for creating materials to be used in manufacturing huge space stations. Another application would be to use its inertia to lift objects off the Earth by dropping a line and at just the right instant hooking a payload to the line.

A Doomsday asteroid might become a huge asset to humanity.

What is my responsibility to remote humanity?

Tags

humanity's survival, What are my ultimate responsibilities?

Is my responsibility only to myself, or do I also have some responsibility for all humanity? The goal of all life is to survive and reproduce itself, so there shouldn’t be the slightest doubt that I should maintain my bodily health and social self-interest at a level that protects my personal vital interests. Then of course the members of my family are an extension of myself at this same basic level, but even there every individual must be responsible to try to maintain themselves at a reasonable level. A reasonable level is to own your place of residence and have reliable access to the necessities of life; basically it is to attempt to not be in debt to anyone for one’s basic existence. Beyond that one has ethical responsibilities to one’s social group and legal responsibilities to one’s country.

These are routine expectations of all modern humans, but my thoughts have been challenged by, “What are my responsibilities to my human DNA?” Do I owe something to it and all humanity? My species’ ancestors gave me my human existence, and shouldn’t I at least consider this as a gift that should be passed on to my distant descendents? This is a kind of morality that goes far beyond my responsibility to my own well-being, or that of my family, or friends and nation, or perhaps all currently living people. This is a morality that goes to the end of human time, it is a sublime-morality.

In the vastness of the future there will come a time when humans as we know them no longer exist. We might be gone in a hundred thousand years; that’s about how long humans as we know them have existed. Or perhaps we might survive for a million years, and our descendents would be as different from us as the famous pre-human ancestor Lucy. Or to stretch the idea to a billion years, advancement might have our lineal descendents being as different from us as we are from single cell organisms of a billion years ago.

Just as a thought experiment, imagine that each century of the future had a stable population and each century had a total of ten billion people who lived. That simple view would give two hundred billion people having lived in two thousand years. That seeming vast number would live in the historical time equal to that from the Roman Empire or from 1 AD to now.

All of the people of our past left a planet which is livable for us. It would seem reasonable that we people living now are responsible for at least leaving the planet available for those people who are to live in the future, but our responsibilities might easily be expanded to go far beyond merely leaving a layer of dirt and water. That is going to be here no matter what we do, but to leave something livable and meaningful is within our power. At the moment we are simply consuming what is available, but we are now vastly more aware of our human impact, and we now have some ability to behave in ways which are sustainable. It will probably turn out that we will simply consume at a maximum rate, whatever is available, and when that is gone simply consume at a maximum rate whatever is still available. Choosing that strategy will obviously degrade everything we now hold valuable to total ruin. Perhaps we can find a better way. I can project my mind into the distant future when humanity is transitioning into something we would no longer call human, but something better, or at least different. At that time I would like us all, individuals and species, to be able to look back at us individuals and species and say,

“We fulfilled our potential for life — we lived and lived.”

Cultivating the habit of kindness is essential for all humanity.

Tags

human evolution, Human kindness is learned., humanity's survival

I have gone through most of my life without thinking specifically about kindness, and coming to that concept so late has been a little strange. Way back in 1994 I published a series of easily photo-copyable one-page personal discoveries on how to improve one’s life. Proba 95 – Pass It On, actually published in November of 94 so it would have a current date for a year, was originally thought of as coming up with a significant idea once a month and writing it up on a single standard typing sheet of paper. The current Probaway is basically the same idea but coming up with a worthwhile new idea every day and publishing it to the internet.

In part this blog may have come from several ideas which had been percolating within me for years. One from Burris Cunningham, loosely quoted, “What awesome thing have you discovered today?” This man shepherded many a man to his Nobel Prize, for example, Glen Seaborg, Yuan Lee, and when Burris asked that simple question, he really meant it.  Another moment for me came from Bob Westerburg, “Get wisdom my son, and with all thy getting get understanding.” He was one of the strange Berkeley gurus whom I was close to for years. Another challenge, in this case originating from me to my Mediterranean coffee shop (2400 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, CA) friends, “You can change the world with an idea written down on this sheet of paper. Do it! Do it now!” I don’t know if Jerry Rubin heard me say that, and took it to heart, but I did have several conversations with him about the time I was annoying my closer friends with that idea. It was years before Jerry made that command “Just do it!”popular and decades before Nike did.

All of those ideas came about in the 1960s, each of which I pursued for years. Those were not about kindness per se, except the “Pass It On” idea, written up years later, was similar to a kindness in that it didn’t require, or expect, a repayment of any kind for the good deed. There was a hope that people would photocopy the document they received and Pass It On, but so far as I know that never happened, and it certainly didn’t go viral as hoped. There were some very good ideas in Proba-95, so it wasn’t lack of content that didn’t work but the method of promoting those ideas which was ill-conceived and therefore a failure. I probably would have been much more successful simply sending them out as letters to the editor to various newspapers. I have had some more recent projects which I wasted a huge amount of personal effort on that were good ideas, but which I promulgated improperly on the internet, such as The World Heritage Sites With Links. The Life Haven Project is another one of my desperately needed ideas to be implemented by humanity, but which is still stillborn. I hope I have learned enough from these failures to modify The Kindness Project in such a way that it becomes a success. Perhaps it is even more important than The Earth Ark Project. The Earth Ark is simply a way to help future people recover from the disasters current humanity is wreaking on our Earth, even before WW III, but The Kindness Project is a way to train humans to be kinder to one another and to themselves, and until that happens we will always be at profound risk of extinction.

When people have the habit of being kind to themselves as a core value, humanity will have a happier, healthier, wiser and wealthier place to live, and all of the members of humanity could approach contentment.