3.2.5. Evolution in the short-run (less than a hundred thousand years)

Well, here things get very difficult to predict since it is a very short period and individual decisions will have a stronger weight. Will man destroy a large part of the world in some gigantic nuclear war, and, if this happens, what kind of society will follow (assuming that some of us or even the planet will survive)? Which mistakes will we avoid to repeat after almost destroying the world? How much of the culture would survive? Or perhaps there will be no global war, and instead we will discover extra-solar civilizations, and even start communicating with them. Knowing that we are not alone in this vast universe would probably give us a great stimulus to improve our spatial skills of observation, communication and travel. Our human world might unite in the quest for space. But this is also very unpredictable. To understand how immensely unpredictable future events in the short-run will be we should examine some of the possibilities.

One of the possibilities is that our current 21st century will be the most developed we will know in this period (that is, at least until the 1021st century). This is not incredibly unlikely if a global war is able to destroy every single human being on this planet (through biological weapons for instance). In this case returning to our current state of technological development could take millions of years (depending on the other species of animal affected). Even if man was not completely extinct by some doomsday device, the time required for our kind of technology to return would be highly dependent on the resources that would survive. If books and libraries were not destroyed it would be relatively simple to reconstruct our current civilization (with its electrical grid, computers and so on). But imagine that almost all humans would be destroyed, that our mental abilities would be disrupted by radiation and disease, after some generations, even language might be lost. In such a case it might take many thousands of years until we had gained again the ability to read or write.

The current conflict with medieval-minded cultures signals what might become a source of global disaster. For instance the fact that most Islamic nations - which have an ideology that considers westerns as "infidels" (outcasts of God) that have have a bad influence on Muslim youths - have large quantities of money and corrupted puppet governments controlled by western societies (seem Chomsky), helps to create a tension that might end up in terrorist acts of nation wide proportions. The decay of the ancient Soviet Union, with widespread corruption and economical degradation, leads to the very possibility of extremist groups buying nuclear weapons that could be easily transported as cargo to any city in the world and detonated there. Such an event would have unpredictable consequences. Would the affected country blame only the terrorist group and its supporting nation, or also the nation that sold the weapon? Would this make sense if it was the action of a group of individuals of the former USSR, or Pakistan? In any case it wouldn't be easy to find an adequate reply, perhaps many people would cry for the same kind of (nuclear) response. Would violence end there? Or would other weapons be deployed, like biological weapons, or even with more nuclear bombs? It is also unclear how the technology that is used to make nuclear and biological weapons can be made secret for more than a few decades. Can we reasonable expect that in two or three hundred years only a few countries will have the technology to produce nuclear weapons. It surely seems that we cannot make such an assumption. In only a few decades Pakistan, India, South Africa and even the economically striving North Korea achieved sufficient nuclear know-how to build atomic weapons. It has only been seventy years or so since the first bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What will happen in the next hundred years? It is silly to think we can simply control the technology. The strategy endorsed by Bush's Administration (released in September 20, 2002, as the National Security Strategy for the USA) advocates the military development of the US in such a way that "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." This strategy shows the level of decay of present US politics and its naïve view of the world. Such naiveté is a sure invitation to disaster. As more military technology is spread throughout the world, the temptation to simply exterminate all the foes to "free and open societies" may grow. The outcome of such a conceivable attempt is by no means clear, but it certainly includes a retaliatory action that might send us all into a new dark age.

The main difficulty in predicting what will happen in the next couple of decades stem from the fact that we have an enormous amount of new technology and science at our disposal. Yet, the marvelous brains behind these achievements are struck out from positions of power. Governments are constituted by people who belong and are well positioned in political parties. But political parties are mostly made-up of socially ambitious people, that want fame and to be at the center of everything, and to have power. The kind of people that are attracted to political parties is either fanatical (they think that everyone else is wrong and that "they" have the key to save the world) and/or lusting for fame, power or money. These are the people that you definitely not want to take control of the public finance, military and so on. But unfortunately they are the only group from which the electable are chosen. The really preoccupied, intelligent and fair among us will very rarely go to political parties, and, if they go, they will rapidly get out when they see the abundant lies and demagogy through which political parties gain their votes. So, although we have evolved in science and technology, we have at best stagnated in the quality of the political profession. These crazy people holding our destinies have the power to send us to stupid wars even when the large majority of people is against such thing (like Tony Blair did), they consort with the rich and powerful and grant them their wishes, even if they are absurd (like continuing to expand the military power in the US and under-investing in new power-energies in order to maintain oil company's profits) .When our power grows and our ability to decide how to use it stays the same, it seems inevitable that the only way to learn how to handle such additional power is to use it badly. Only then, suffering the bad consequences, we will learn how to use it.

Of, course, if there really is a global war, scientific and technological development will be delayed for some time (no more than a couple thousands of years if man survives). At the same time, it would be a great opportunity to became more reasonable. After the first world war aristocracy lost a bit of its grasp of society. The second world war helped to bring down the last remains of colonialism (with some exceptions like Vietnam), and to expose the craziness of the "sub-human" concept, be it applied to Jews, black people, gypsies, homosexuals, etc. It also brought home the dangers of excessive eugenics or preoccupation with "purity". In a very important sense, our "open societies" of the present, with their respect for all creeds and ways of life, and organizations like the UN, were the fruits of such wars. We either learn because we reflect on something, or because we see in practice the negative consequences of following a certain path. Wars are many times the result of a lack of reflection that ends up in showing us in practice what we didn't want or were unable to see in theory. So the fact that science and technology may be cut of by wars, this does not necessarily mean that our understanding of the world will globally be reduced. In some cases what we loose in science and technology might be gained by advances in the philosophy that guides our goals and decides what is worthy and allowable.

With or without war technological and scientific advances will continue, it is not a question of if, but just a question of "when", or, if we manage to blow up the planet, of "where" (in which planets). Science is the explanation of an understanding of the world that others may replicate in their minds. Through the help of books, their examples, problems and typical solutions (see the short text by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for a more thorough analysis of ways in which science is transmitted) the student understands how the author understood a certain type of events. Technology is the most tangible result of science, an amplification of the power by putting into practice the hitherto unpredictable consequences of some action (from creating fire to thermonuclear explosions). Technology may be categorized in many types according to the specific ability it provides or expands - for instance according to the ability to:

• • survive and expand our presence (heating, clothes, food production, sanitation, etc)

  • perceive (like telescopes, radars, ultasounds, etc)

  • act (tools, transportation, weapons, medicine, etc)

  • kill (weapons, including nuclear, chemical and biological warfare)

  • cure (medicine in general)

  • understand (symbolic language, books and computers)

  • create beauty (engineering, artistic instruments and techniques, new materials, etc)

  • feel pleasure (drugs, artistic deployment, etc)

  • social control (tv, police and military technology, surveillance equipment, etc).

We could easily find more categories, in any case it seems clear that all almost all categories contribute to the first goal (they help us to survive and to expand, at least indirectly), or fall under three very general abilities: perceive, understand, and act. In the case of beings whose behavior is directed by "instinct", that is, a wisdom etched by millions of years of mutation and selection, the ability to act may be vastly superior to that which each individual understands. We can see this on animals like ants, whales and so on, whose behavior produces the right outcome even if the individual has no way of understanding why. Of course, it clearly happen in man also, although we are less aware of our own limitations (perhaps because they are so obvious we just do not give them importance). For instance a couple is able to give live, however no one understands the human body in its entirety, how it is created from DNA, etc. We don't know how it happens but we know that if we do certain things others will tend to happen in a generally ok manner, and that is enough for practical purposes. However, in many other cases, like building bridges, computers, fluorescent lights, sending a spaceship to the moon, and so on, a very precise understanding of the mechanisms involved is necessary. These are clearly cases where understanding expands the ability to act. So, in the short and long run it is likely that civilizational beings will add to the abilities they inherited from their long primeval history, those that are made possible by the expanding understanding of the world. Since we are in a very primitive phase of that expansion (and in a very early stage - just the first few thousand years of a civilization whose history may surpass billions of years - we are not even close to one per cent through in our potential history as civilizational beings) it is impossible to imagine the future advances of understanding that the eons will bring. The only thing we know for sure is that, whatever it is, it does not fit our incipient intellectual abilities of the present (compared with what will come). A future civilization will look at us as we look onto monkeys and dogs. The gap of understanding between a pet and his human caregiver is so huge that explaining to the pet the simplest things like how long we will be away, or ask "it" where "it" prefers to stay in our absence, is simply impossible. This inability to communicate would, with all likelihood, also happen between us and an advanced civilization (even if it was just a couple of million years ahead of us).

Because an expansion of understanding opens new possibilities of action and perception we cannot really imagine what the future will bring in terms of technological evolution