Underpass

I'm currently reading "the Martian chronicles" by ray Bradbury. A great scifi collection of short stories set in a 1940s view of outer space exploration. It's a great book, but very pessimistic about humanity. This morning I arrived at chapter 2006 and earth was seen from mars exploding in an atomic war by a overly optimistic hot dog vendor who had built a stand on what he hoped would become a city filled with earthling pioneers.

Here in the real 2008 we have yet to destroy Los Angeles, London, and all of the Australian continent with accidental atomic bomb detonations, yet we still see this as a bleak time. People are saying that the recent economic crisis is the end of American dominence of the global economy. They may be right and while many will suffer a lowered quality of life here in America, I look around me here in downtown San francisco, at the over passes and the giant glass buildings and I wonder if maybe we haven't been living beyond our means anyway. 

I read that soon humanity's conspimption will outpace the earth's capacity to produce. It's a sad day, but it's a calculation no doubt based on a statistic and as they say there are three kinds of lies; lies, damn lies and statistics. Perhaps we will find ways of squeezing yet more water form this rock, perhaps we'll discover new more efficient methods of production. Maybe the market will take care of us by making the cost of non renewable resources cost prohibitive. Or hell maybe we'll go to mars. 

I want to agree with the pessimists, I want to do what's right for future generations, but I have to trust this herd to stop before it stampedes off a cliff, because we have avoided worse fates. It is afterall 2008.  

Typed with my thumbs

Posted by email from Jesse's posterous