Surviving the white water ahead

Life on earth is rapidly approaching a transition point of very rapid change, where either we will survive the "white water" run, or we will capsize and pretty well lose the planet.

(The photo is of our neighbor in space, the Andromeda galaxy.)

I won't list all the downside scenarios, but there are many. The academic volumes Lethal Arrogance by Llody Dumans and Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow are compendia of just some of the things that could go wrong.

Worse, those authors argue that, in fact, unless we can somehow manage to contain ourselves, we will basically force one of those disasters to occur.

The reason is that every time we solve one safety problem, instead of stopping there we escalate the problem. So, having solved the problem of building 1 story buildings, we moved on to 2 story. Having solved 100 stories we move on towards 200 stories. The same is true for buildings, for automobile speed, for aircraft size, etc. We, as a civilization, can't ever leave well enough alone, and have to take something that works and press it until it breaks again.

The problem, eloquently described by Perrow, is that the costs of these inevitable outcomes or "normal accidents" continues to rise. When Oog's hut fell down, only Oog and his family were at risk. When the World Trade Center fell, tens of thousands were at risk. When Chernobyl failed, tens of thousands were killed. God knows what is going on underground in some secret laboratory that's next on the list of things to run amok.

We passed the point, as a planet, where the majority of problems were due to the elements, and have moved into a realm where the problems we are creating for ourselves and each other are as large or larger than the biblical disasters. And, if anything, we respond to this situation by accelerating our research into new things to do to each other.

So, the point is, we all have a mutual interest in solving the problem of how to survive the next, say, 20 years without killing ourselves off as a species. If that problem isn't solved, the rest of the arguments about who is right and who is wrong about some particular belief or theory becomes irrelevant. The question of which nation, corporation, or political party "controls" what area of the mideast or what oil fields or what agricultural land or what water supply becomes irrelevant. No amount of wealth of any king or sheik will matter.

So, how do we pause our argument long enough to jointly solve this mutual problem? Can we take some sort of time-out and pause to discuss survival of the human race?

The reality taught us by "systems thinking" and observation is that we are at a point where it is not "them" that is creating this hazard to us all, it is the "battle with them" that is doing it, and if we could all agree to a temporary cease-fire, we could check that out.

That is the problem that religion, science, and anyone else with working brain cells should be working on. Can't we forget who is "right" for long enough to figure out how to reduce the hazard that our battle over who is "right" is producing?