I think life is indifferent to life. It just happens and it ends as easily as it begins. Humanity is the act of trying to make life more precious. Humans to survive and live longer. Many try to improve the world because they're sure they'll have to be in that world in the future or certain their offspring will have to live in it. Humans use speech and art and massive public works as a way of making their works live beyond today and keep their memory alive in the future.
I listen to current debates about Pro-Life and Pro-Choice. We live in divisive times where people firmly place themselves in one column or the other and refuse to see things any other way than the way they already see and believe in the world. But sometimes ideas are short sighted and don't take into account the broad arc of history. People have tunnel vision or limited vision. Like the person that walks along staring at their shoes and the ground a short distance in front of them.
Imagine how a parent from 1865 would feel about our current debate about abortion. World population was about 1.2 billion, compared to about 7.0 billion today. There are 5.8 times more people in the world. U.S. population has increased 11 time in that period from about 30 million to 330 million today. Back then 40% of people died before they reached the age of 5. Now only 1% of the population dies before age 5. A 1865 parent with 2 or 3 children probably lost 1 or 2 already. Almost all parents experienced the loss of a child. I often wonder if most people were sad all the time, or if they simply learned how to accept death.
Those 1865 people also just survived a war where 2% of the population was killed. Almost everyone knew someone that fought and died in the war just past. Everyone knew many young men that served. Many people today don't know anyone in the armed forces and of those that do, few know someone who died or was injured.
Some of these facts lead you to believe that we hold life more precious today. We spent a lot of time figuring out how to better our odds of living by developing clean water, better food, and better health care. Few people go hungry today, disease is much more rare, and we expect to live much longer. So, if preserving life is important, we did a pretty good job of it. You could argue that we hold life more precious nowadays because we do a much better job of it. But you could also argue the opposite. Perhaps people appreciated life more in the past because it was so easy to lose and harder to hold onto. A great deal of effort went into staying alive. Growing food, finding shelter, staying healthy, these were much more difficult to do and people spent a great deal more time trying to do them.
For an outside observer, someone looking at humanity's place in history, what would they make of us? While we continuously are correcting our course and trying to solve the problems we create, we do create a lot of problems. There are too many of us. We are reaching the point where the planet shows some signs of struggling to feed us all. We are impacting the environment and driving many species into extinction. We are covering the surface of the planet and leave few places wild and untouched. Some describe humanity as a virus or cancer on the earth, and sometimes we exhibit similar properties.
One thing I believe is certain is that we'll suffer some setbacks, some pretty severe setbacks, if we don't start cleaning up our act and don't figure a way to relieve our population pressure. If we don't do it ourselves, I believe the planet will inevitably do it for us. Disease, war, natural catastrophes, or decline and loss of vitality could easily start to take over and create a downward spiral.
The cure is not simple. It's a combination of many things. Limit population through a combination of having less children and colonizing space so that the excess population will have somewhere to go. Continually carving up the same amount of land among a rapidly increasing number of people means people will have less space. Given the way human beliefs and inclinations are, we most likely will push into the wild places and take them over. More species of plants and animals will be pushed out to make way for us. We need less people per square mile, not more. This will make life more precious because it will be less common. Beyond simply limiting our numbers, we have to figure out a way to eat without stripping the earth, and how to power our lives without polluting the atmosphere or stripping our resources bare. We need to find meaningful things for people to do with their time.
Unfortunately, putting people on the path to a stable future seems beyond us. Politicians who have the greatest chance to make policies to change the course of our future are mostly concerned with short term gains for themselves. Big businesses with the best means to impact the future are typically interested more at enriching themselves without regard to the future of the planet or the rest of the members of society. Individuals are mostly interested in pursuing the things that make them happy today without much thought of the future.
This is not universally true. There are visionaries and leaders with a clear view of the future. But there are not enough of them and they are not making enough of the important decisions. The best we can hope is that enough visionary leaders with a clear view of the future will be in the world to tilt it in the right direction.
