I think it’s quite strange, and also very sad, that people are putting up with the way we’re turning the planet into a poisoned, dirty old mess, to the point where we’re going to end up with something that’s pretty much hostile to life. Well, human life, at least. Hardly anyone seems to want to do anything about it. Or we want to, but we’re just not actually doing much for some reason. Neither am I, really, which of course makes this speculation hypocritical. We all have an idea of a paradise world, which from one person to the next is likely to have pretty similar features; a clean, peaceful, aesthetically beautiful, lush, oneness with nature with no war or disease or famine. Something like that, you know, all the things that come to mind when you think of heaven or whatever. Is making the real world into the heaven concept do-able? Who knows? As far fetched as it might seem, I don’t think it’s actually and genuinely been tried yet, has it?

It’s quite an alarming but obvious realisation that if things do carry on the way they are, our civilistation, certainly as we know it, simply doesn’t have long left. Whether we poison all the air and water, whether we run out of viable farm land, break the weather, use all the fuel, all of the above, and/or any of the other countless ways we can effortlessly make maintaining our lives utterly fail - it’s definitely coming if we don’t manage to turn things around, it’s hard to say when exactly, but, as we probably all know, lots of data suggests we’re actually right on the brink, so maybe, therefore, our ‘flourishing’ has capped itself off and we’re now seeing the first stages of decline, the only real certainty at this point is that it’s no longer a question of ‘if’.

What it all probably comes down to is the whole natural instinct of competitiveness which inevitably leads to greed and corruption, and those kinds of vile things. Up to now that’s made sense from an evolutionary standpoint, and it certainly works wonders for most of the other creatures we share the world with. But one of the main things that separates humans from them is that we’re the only creatures around at the moment who can step back and think in the abstract, and when we do, we realise that what is bascially selfish survival only works in the short term, over longer periods the merciless consumption of whatever resources we can get our hands on ultimately becomes detrimental to our survival, both as a society and as an individual. In a way it’s a bit of a paradox, that if we simplify and boil the meaning of life down into a means to pass genetic information to the along subsequent generation, then the methods we’re hard-wired into using don’t actually make any sense. Or at least they break down and fail after a certain amount of growth, no different to a culture of bacteria in a petri dish.