Life in the Rear-view Mirror

Where Are We Headed?

This chapter begins the last part of the book, where I look ahead rather than behind.

It should be clear by now that, as voyagers on Spaceship Earth, we face significant problems. We have a contaminated biosphere that's getting worse daily because the earth is indeed a giant spaceship, and whatever pollution we produce stays with us. It can't escape! The more natural resources we consume, the more toxic substances we emit, and the more we do that, the greater the hazard and risk to human health, not to mention that of other species. Of course, the process is being accelerated by three factors: an ever-growing population, an ever-growing per capita consumption, and the lack of political will to bring them under control.

What does the future hold for our spaceship? Nobody knows the answer, but we can examine some possibilities. If nothing else, we may be wiser for it.

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Predicting the future is like predicting the weather. It's not easy making short-term forecasts, and impossible to make long-term ones. To talk about the future, I need to first remind myself that I have seen changes in my lifetime, which I could never have imagined as a child living in southern Italy, or even as an adolescent living in Toronto. That's to say that a young person growing up today will also see incredible changes in his or her lifetime.

I have been privileged to live during an exciting and truly remarkable period, when even the impossible was made possible. Sending a man in space seemed unthinkable at the time, and very few believed that it was true. Many thought that it was communist propaganda, but soon after, we had people walking on the moon! Now we have people living in space for months and years at a time.

In 1967, few could believe the news that a South African doctor by the name of Christiaan Barnard had performed the first human heart transplant operation. Organ transplants and joint transplants are now routine medical procedures everywhere in the world. Of course, we've had many other medical advances, such as: nuclear medicine, laser surgery, computerized Tomography (CT) scans, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to name a few.

In 1973, the Concorde, the only commercial supersonic airplane that ever flew, made its first non-stop transatlantic flight from Washington to Paris, in only three and a half hours, less time than it took to go from Washington to Los Angeles by subsonic planes.

About ten years ago, I had my first video conference with friends in Italy using Skype, an experience that was previously available only to the super rich, but not even imaginable when my father passed away in 1985. The Internet was one of the most egalitarian developments of the century. It connected people of all walks of life around the globe, and made information available to the masses as never before.

Change is the only constant the world has ever known. It's my deepest desire that future changes, whatever they may be, will be in harmony with nature. It's my hope that progress of the human species will be measured on how well we treat each other; that quality of life will be measured not by the rate of consumption (per capita GDP), as we do now, but by the rate of deconsumption (per capita GDP reduction) because uncontaminated air, water, and food are essential to life. It's also my hope that we will consume less, not only for our benefit, but also for those who come after us. It will mean foregoing things of marginal utility: some short-term pain for long-term gain.

I am sure that the next fifty years will also be filled with exciting new developments. That's the beauty of capitalism. It feeds the creative genius of people of all classes, to make the impossible happen. However, capitalism needs to be regulated because not everything it creates is necessarily good for us. It's a system that feeds on growth, which in turn feeds over-consumption and waste.