The principle of hope and humanity's propensity for creativity and ability to collaborate will save it from catastrophe as the future of our planet seems increasing precarious, the author of a new book on the future says.
Historian and Professor Emeritus at Macquarie University, David Christian, who co-founded the Big History Project with Bill Gates tells Nine to Noon organisations like the United Nations are signs of the global collaboration needed to avoid impending doom.
Future Stories, A User's Guide to the Future draws on science, history and philosophy to imagine what the world will look like in the next 100 years and consider solutions to the biggest challenges we face.
Photo: supplied/Phil Fisk
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Christian focuses on the many possible futures ahead of us, drawing on science, history and philosophy.
He says our anxious efforts to determine the course of history is part of the human condition, but also all living organisms take it into consideration to survive.
“We're telling ourselves future stories all the time. And there's a very good reason for it, we'll spend the rest of our lives in the future. So of course, the future really matters,” he says.
“Thinking about the future and planning for the future is something that’s almost a defining feature of living organisms. All living organisms, including the simplest bacteria, have to think about the future. And they also have to be pretty good about placing bets on the future, because that's the only reason they survive. I mean, if you make choices about the future, just randomly, you're not going to survive.”
Simple organisms like E coli create the best conditions to survive without having brains and these do so via biochemical compositions.
“Well, I've got a whole chapter on E ecoli,” he says.
“There are very elaborate and very beautiful mechanisms built into the simplest organisms that help them really do three things. These are the three things we all do when we're planning for the future. First, you have an idea of the futures you want the futures you would prefer, and for all living organisms, those are the futures that help them flourish and survive and reproduce.
“And then secondly, they have ways of detecting what is going on in their environment. So, detecting trends in their environments and knowing what's happening in your environment allows you to make a guess about what's going to happen in the near future.
“If you identify trends, so you see food ahead of you, for example, then you think it's a good idea to head forward. And then the third thing you do is you act and all organisms have mechanisms to do this. In bacteria the goals are built into the DNA of every organism. The DNA consists of like a sort of code for building proteins, but the purposes of the organism are built into the DNA, because that code allows them to build just the proteins that they will need to have a good chance of surviving in their environment.
“Then all organisms have ways of detecting what's going on... and give them some idea of what's going on outside - how hot it is, how cold it is, then they figure out what's the best thing to do. Signals are conveyed inside the molecule inside the bacteria by proteins changing shape. There's complicated signaling systems and then eventually it acts, it decides to do something. It's very beautiful, and very complex, very sophisticated sort of computing mechanism, even inside an organism as simple as E Coli."
The process is similar for plants, determining when to flower or drop its leaves. For humans there are trillions of cells co-ordinating to determine the most likely future and how to prepare for it, he says.
“For large organisms, the challenge of thinking about the future is to get trillions of cells to collaborate together on the future of a large organism of which they're all one part,” Christian says.
This a powerful metaphor for where humans are at present history, so interconnected around the globe that every individual is beginning to realise that their fate depends on the fate of humanity as a whole, he adds.
“So for me, it's a fascinating question, Can humans learn to collaborate as effectively as all the cells inside your body collaborate, to preserve the larger mechanism?”
With the conflict in Ukraine and threat of nuclear war, climate change, and pandemics, people are anxious about the future. There is cause for pessimism, but also signs of optimism with global collaboration, he says.
The United Nations, a body designed to look after the collective interests of nations and people, is a mechanism for expressing the needs and interests of a multi-polar world and could act in the those interests.
“That is something new in human history, that organisation many people are cynical about, but it has managed to send a detachment of people into the nuclear site at Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, and it's managed to persuade both warring sides to allow it to go in.
“Now, that sort of collaboration on the Sustainable Development Goals, is also staggering. Every member of the United Nations, I believe, has signed off on a very detailed program for a good future.
"So, there are all sorts of signs of increasing global collaboration that makes me optimistic that the conflicts will not ruin the human future. But of course, we can never be completely confident, because we do have weapons, for example, that could destroy much of the biosphere in just a few days."
Christian says humans are unique in planetary history in that we share information and collective have more information about past trends and can therefore consciously plan for the future and dominate change across the planet.
We’ve done so to our detriment however, with dystopian futures on the horizon, namely due to climate change. But Christian remains hopeful of human ingenuity and a capacity to adapt, collaborate and change.
“If we let ourselves fall into too much pessimism about the future, it'll demotivate us and it'll really stop us doing the hard work, of finding out how to avoid a catastrophic future and how to build a good future,” he says.
“That is, if we human, we humans who have this sort of fantastic gift for technological and scientific creativity, but it’s a yin and yang thing. We can create staggeringly powerful weapons. But we also can create new technologies for getting energy for in sustainable ways. And hopefully, we can develop new political technologies that allow us to manage manage Planet Earth in a sustainable way in the future.”
He believes if humanity get past the next 100 years, that era will be critical, with a period of stasis, where many processes slow down a bit as we start taking planetary limits more seriously.
Bu that period of stability may only last a few centuries due to a “staggering human propensity for creativity”.
“That means we will keep spinning new technologies, even in a period where we may sort of slow down economic growth,” he says. “That means in a few centuries, I think we'll almost certainly be migrating to other planets. And that's why terraforming will become fundamental to survival on other realms.”