Thus spake Douglas Roberts circa 02/14/2010 02:19 PM: > So here's mine: we'll either evolve a set of ethics and a level of > intelligence, and a maturity to finally do the right thing with a > certain degree of consistency, or we won't. I'm not holding my breath > though; I would't take even money on us getting there. I do wish there > were some way that we could check back in a few tens of millions of > years so see which way it went, though.
Intelligence is a red herring. Intelligence isn't driving the process. In fact, I posit that intelligence is an illusion, as is wisdom and even knowledge. What's real, however, is the _population_ and its density. As the earth grows more densely populated with humans, various infrastructure will collapse and be rebuilt. If the "peak carrying capacity" believers are right, then there might be a catastrophic collapse that will take down most of the ecosystem with it. But I tend to think that the death of the ecosystem will be graceful, lasting as long as the Sun stays benign and we're lucky enough to avoid large cosmic interactions. The two ways we can get to the kind of maturity that will solve these problems are: 1) develop social methods that foster living in very close and increasingly closer quarters and/or 2) stop having so many damned babies. http://gpso.wordpress.com/ -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
