Sometimes I wonder how wonderful it would be to live in a potential future utopian society—say, in the year 2,000,000 AD. There would be a democratic and egalitarian world federation, and wars would have ended long ago. Nature would be saved, and humanity would live in harmony with the environment. We would harness the endless energy of gravitational waves and black holes. Artificial intelligence would be conscious and a reliable partner to humanity. Humans would have spread to numerous planets that we would have terraformed, bringing our ecosystems along with us…
In 1991, Francis Fukuyama spoke about ”the end of history.” In reality, we are living in the early stages of history: we are living in a post-Roman phase of human civilization. Ancient Rome created the modern social order, colonialism, capitalism, industry, and the technological control of nature and natural resources. The modern world is still a child of the Roman Empire, and Rome remains visible in politics, economics, and science alike. Alternatively, we can speak of a Greco-Roman society, as Rome copied numerous things from Greece. Modern science—originally emerging from philosophy—modern politics, and democracy were born in Greece. The technological management of natural resources on a large scale, on the other hand, originated in Rome. These factors have thus influenced the development of the world, for better or for worse.
Although we are living at the dawn of history, we have certainly made huge leaps in technology, such as flying to the Moon and creating computers and robots. However, our society is in many ways incomplete and full of problems. Our economic system is not sustainable. Yet, we have millions of years to create an ethically and ecologically sustainable world at the highest technological level. It has only been about 10,000 years since the end of the Stone Age. The Pyramids of Giza were built 5,600 years ago. Compared to these milestones, 2,000,000 years into the future is an absolutely massive amount of time. What will the world look like in a hundred million years? Even the tectonic plates will have moved to completely different positions by that time.
In economics, thinking is often short-sighted, operating on a quarterly scale. In environmental science and sustainable development, we must think on a scale of millions of years. For example, our energy system must be designed to last forever. Renewable energy is a circular economy; it is available indefinitely and is, from a human perspective, endless. For example, we currently utilize an insignificantly small fraction of the total solar energy reaching the Earth for electricity generation. The large-scale utilization of solar energy is, in fact, the next phase of our planetary evolution.
One of humanity’s most foolish mistakes was the transition to a fossil fuel economy, which led to massive economic growth, overpopulation, overconsumption, the destruction of nature, and dramatic climate change. The first windmills and watermills were already in use during the time of ancient Rome. We would have acted wisely had we developed renewable energy production from those times onward, bypassing the fossil fuel economy entirely. Electrification and IT are among the greatest technological steps toward a new kind of world, steps that we are currently taking in giant strides. It is therefore most logical that in the future, cars, ships, airplanes, and robots will run on electricity. Data, in turn, has become the greatest economic resource, and IT has transformed the world into a smarter and more functional place. We already have enough minerals for this; we simply need to recycle them and allocate them to the right purposes. In the future, we can source additional minerals from places like the Moon, where there is no vulnerable nature to destroy. Alongside technology, nature-based solutions (trees, ecosystems, etc.)—meaning nature’s own technology—are extremely important. Organic farming supported by technological solutions, such as crop-measuring drones, is the future. The importance of the natural world will never disappear with technological progress.
We will (hopefully) become a hybrid of natural systems, ecosystem services, and high technology. For example, we will always need clean, organic food—that is an evolutionary fact; processed and industrial foods cannot serve as a substitute when it comes to health. Nor are they ecologically sustainable. We will always be completely dependent on nature’s ecosystem services, such as plant pollination by insects, the water cycle, and oxygen production by trees.
Science and its advancement are the greatest investments we can make in the future of the Earth. Science can solve the world’s problems, and science-led politics and decision-making can create a sustainable world.
Daniel Elkama
