I don’t know who created this diagram but I’d like to tip my hat to them.
It accurately explains how I’ve been feeling lately.
I’ve been trying to write but have experienced severe writers block.
On the plus side I’ve been making progress cleaning out the house, so there’s that.
It seems lately that every time I turn around there is some fresh stupid hell created by humanity because collectively humans are bored.
I find that I’m looking forward to some extinction level event, for a change of pace.
I strongly suspect this sort of boredom happens all over the universe in every sentient species. It’s probably why we’ve not detected conclusive signs of other life.
I’m betting that all species get to a certain technological level, things get too easy, they get bored and start making shit up to terrorize each other. It’s not out of cruelty, it’s so they feel something, anything…
Species probably need a hit of adrenalin that they get from pursuing or being pursued in a forest. They need to have real danger, real life & death consequences, and real mysteries to confront.
Had we made it into space, we might have had a decent substitute. Death being less than an inch away in the cold vacuum of space, may have provided the stimulation to drive our creativity and invention forward. We all know we’re not going to make it into space in any realistic way.
The 1960s & 1970s was our window.
We had loads of men who were tough enough, for whom hardship and discomfort wasn’t a big deal. We had role models and heroes that every child wanted to emulate. Big men, doing big things, not for clicks, but because they believed in the potential and dreams of humanity.
The window has closed.
All we have left is a long descent into barbarism. The herd will be thinned out due to disease, war, and stupidity. The surviving humans will forget, except in legends about all we accomplished. Maybe we’ll have another ice age and the glaciers will scour most of our cities and infrastructure from the land.
15 – 20 thousand years later when odd looking bits & pieces of our civilization and technology pop up they’ll be completely unknown and unremembered. So… those future humans will think of us as Ancient Aliens.
That’s more than we’ll deserve. The reality will be that we were a bunch of morons who contemplated our navels too much, demanded to be accepted while not accepting others with differing opinions, who lost the ability to think our way out of a wet paper bag, then turned our maintenance over to artificial intelligence, while eating bon bons on our overstuffed couches, waiting for our rudimentary service droid to come rub our feet or give us an orgasm that we were too lazy to work toward ourselves.
When the end came, most of us will have denied the obvious truth, instead of getting our fat asses off the couch and actually doing something useful.
This line of thinking has made me wonder how many times before this kind of thing has happened on this planet. Likewise, I wonder if it’s actually commonplace throughout the universe, and a function of technology.
I’ve thought that perhaps there’s a very narrow window where a civilization reaches apogee. The only way a civilization survives is if they reach a point in technology & science that they realize their planet is about to undergo some cataclysmic change and this knowledge galvanizes the sentient species to focus on creating a solution to the problem.
If they fail, then they fall back into the muck, after some period of time they rise again with half remembered legends spurring them forward again.
To be clear I’m not even thinking about “Climate Change” as our moronic people think about it.
I’m talking a meteor impact like the one that may have snuffed the dinosaurs.
Consider this, the meteor needn’t actually hit Earth. Suppose something big came in at a fraction of the speed of light and hit the dark side of the moon? Say it splits the moon into pieces. Those pieces needn’t rain down on Earth. Just them spreading around in the moon’s orbit dissipating the gravitational effect on our tides and weather would be disastrous. There’s impressive climate change!
Or let’s say it was a large enough object that it changed the mass or orbit of the moon? What then? Destructive tides becoming the norm. Earthquakes and volcanoes restructuring continents over a thousand years instead of millions of years. Imagine that. What about the moon ending up in a decaying orbit?
Now imagine that scientists figure out the impact will happen in 300 years. Do people keep squabbling, or do they turn all their abilities, resources, and effort toward preparing and saving themselves? Ideally, if a civilization was at the right point in it’s development they’d figure out how to advance their technology to save their species.
The way we are today, we’d argue about what color the paint on a starship should be before we built the starship. We’d be arguing if there would be an appropriate amount of transgender representation on board the ark ship, completely ignoring that puberty blockers 10 years before rendered those folks incapable of reproducing.
Douglas Adams might have been more right than he ever imagined in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We might really be the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.
Thinking along these lines is why I think we’ve missed the window.
We’re so caught up in irrational trivial matters that we’d squabble for 300 years and be squabbling / assigning blame right up to the impact.
Looking at our colleges today, it’s painfully obvious our youth don’t compare to the builders, dreamers, creators, and makers of just 40 years ago.
I suppose that’s why I’m not writing as much. It’s too easy to think, “People might be able to read the words that I write, but they’re not going to understand the meaning.”
Thinking like that makes walking the dog, & tossing stuff out of my life, far more productive activities. I need to get small, agile and light.
Then I’ll be ready for what comes next.