A future of cars and guns and wars, isn't a future at all. Its a continuation of the unpleasant present. It is the box of the familiar, that the charm of speculative fiction was, for me at least, was a chance to see beyond. Swords and horses or flint knives and bear skins, are a retro alternative, and alternative only marginally. They too have become stale and stiltified. Brass gears and polished wood are fine, but cities and combusion are no escape from the suicidal unpleasant. Any one thing can become a rut too. Nature will soon leave us no choice then to venture beyond familiar ways. Anything less, and it will be forced to start over without us, and from somewhere earlier then the beginning of our species. However famous our ability to adopt, continuing to increase our numbers at the expense of diversity, has not proven a successful adoptation. If evolution had fallowed a different path, as it will if forced to backtrack and start over, this makes furry and alien indistinguishable, save for conceptual speculation as to place of occurance. There has been a lot of moving in the wrong direction deliberately. It has even seemed to me, the more we knew what the wrong diriction was, the more adimantly, like an infant testing his limits, a factor which claims as its excuse, a wish to keep the good stuff, has moved. If logic is too much fantasy for us to choose to apply, nature will apply it without us. This has been going on now, too long to hide or deny. It was spoken of before it bacame obvious. It was mentioned that when it became obvioius it might already be 'too late'. Some say now it is too late while others continue to deny. I am neither so pessimist, to take as given all is doom, nor so optimist, to believe there will not be pain and loss, that wiser choices, only a few decades ago, with technology alternatives already available then, could so easily have avoided. The unpleasant present is doomed. But thinking and creative life to witness and continue to evolve beyond in what replaces it, is not. Obvious mistakes are not that hard to delineate. A time when they will have become mysteries of some future past is not beyond imagining. A future which suspends my disbelief, has no choice but to leave them behind, however doing so can be convincingly imagined. A future which fails to do so, is a pandering to familiar contemporary fantasies. So i'm sorry, but cars and guns and cities and wars and even horses and swords, are just not going to cut it. There's still room for gods or a god, but not for pretending to know their shape or their will. Even more there is room for the spirits of other life. Other life that will be the only life if we continue to think we can exist as the only life ourselves.
I'd love to be able to post that the future will be bright and shiny. Our belief shapes a good bit of our reality... so.. I'd love to be able to say that I believe in the future where humanity evolves and we stop killing one another and stop destroying the planet like it was some rent house that we planned to desert come payday. But.. we humans are spoiled.. particularly in Western cultures. We want everything fast and easy. We sit quietly while corporations rape the world.. buy poiticians.. send the poor's children off to die for cheap oil. In addition... we're breeding ourselves extinct. Nobody ever wants to talk about this. That whole 'go forth and multiply' is one admonition that humans actually followed. I think we could probably let that go now.. ya know? Mother Nature used to kill off about a fourth of the population every 100 years or so. Some plague or flu would thin us out. We're a pesky virus now and we don't die off as easily as we did in the past. As of July this year, we were 7.3 billion. How many more can the planet support unless we change our ways? Ain't this some happy holiday chat!
its what all of us together make it. by default consensus if not by chosen. the fate of humanity is not a comet, a war, e.t. or some god floating down out of the clouds, but the accumulated environmental result, of centuries of resource mismanagement. it seems unlikely to me in the extreme, that ecopocalypse could still be avoided entirely. there are things we can and should be doing to ensure the survival of as much as we can, and some are even being done. bright and shiny isn't required. but a very good 'morning after' is very possible. and while ecopocalypse itself might be distopian, thought i don't think people will have the energy for it to be very much so, there is nothing distopian about a very green and furry morning after.
Taking notice of/caring about how other people (and other creatures ) will experience the future is optional. It will suck for some and it will be great for others. How the majority of the people will experience the future does not have to be how you experience the future. But if you for instance can not have a happy future without tigers, polar bears, elephants, orang utangs etc etc. living in the wild than yes: we should take notice and care about the general outlook of the future.
