This is my first GD thread, though I’ve hung out for a while watching the debates, musings, and opinions of veterans here.
This thread was partially inspired by the ongoing peak oil thread in part from the questions about the future of humanity that brings up and also because the blog linked to in that OP had a few posts talking about how humans need to spread out into space. It is pretty safe to say that in 100-300 years, the methods we use to consume energy will be very different than today with little to no coal and oil. And I would think it’s equally safe to predict large societal differences based both on the difference in energy extraction and any new technologies developed. In fact, I would say the only sure thing we can say about the future is that it will be different from today due to the constraints we will have to face and humans’ past track record.
So the question I want to pose for discussion is whether you think anytime in the future humanity will be content to settle into a form of society that remains static for the long term (i.e., multiple millennia, or indefinitely, barring external catastrophic influences). I am defining static here as no non-trivial change in governmental or economic form or policy, no net population change, and no technological advances. I would be ok with allowing things like new forms of art and entertainment or work in fields like pure mathematics where no one was interested in using their results to change society. The followup question is then if you think such a society could come about, what stage of development do you see humans at? Could we have it just on Earth at similar level of today’s technology running solely on renewable resources? Could we do it with even more energy consumption or would we have to slide back a century or two to make it permanently sustainable? Or will we be satisfied only when there are a galaxy of suns under our control?
My own thoughts are that (at least some) humans have an innate tendency to be bored/dissatisfied with the status quo, no matter how good it already is. Plus there’s always the sheer curiosity that would lead us to go forth into the universe as far as possible (which may not actually be that far). These forces drive technological development, which drives societal progress and change. And when you couple it with the fact that as a species we are currently incapable of planning for more than, say, a hundred years into the future, we will probably always run into long-term consequences in areas like resource allocation, climate change, etc…
I don’t know if humans overall definitely have an innate tendency to be bored with the status quo. At various times, some societies have been relatively stagnant for periods of hundreds or thousands of years. Ask a person from the Middle Ages how they see things being a hundred years in their future, and most likely they would think it would be very similar to their present.
Things changed with the Industrial Revolution. I think more people expect “progress” now. New inventions, more energy, higher standards of living, etc… are now expectations. People would be disappointed if their lives aren’t “better” than their parents, and expect the same for future generations. Will people continue to have this attitude in the future? I have no idea.
I think most people would be satisfied with a static society, but a few - the inventors, the rebels, the visionaries - will *never *be. The only way to achieve such a society would be to brutally suppress these individuals.
I think many humans would be quite satisfied with a static society; probably the majority if it was pleasant enough for them. The great majority of human societies have been largely static, after all. I doubt that humanity, full stop ever would be short of genetic engineering/mind control though; some people want novelty, to change things, or just to seize power for themselves. Someone is always going to be dissatisfied with the present arrangement.
I honestly think people would always want to get to a ‘better place’. If only for the reason that people often measure their own succes in comparison with others; people want to feel they are doing better than others. I think I even saw some research (sorry. no cite) that indicated that employee’s contentment with their salery depends more on what other coleagues make than on the actual salery. In short, I somewhat believe what agent Smith said in The Matrix, about the first crops failing beacause the people wouldn’t accept an utopian reality.
Really? I’ll venture that aside from isolated tribes, the only society that remained static from antiquity to near the present day was that of Australia. Possibly New Zealand too. Every other continent has seen civilisations rise and fall. Even in the middle ages, advances were being made in architecture and gunpowder. And astronomy. And …
People do like order, but that’s not the same as being static.
Although the stone age wasn’t really about a culture deciding that they were happy with the status quo, it was more a period of extremely slow development as (probably) mankind didn’t have the culture or language required for retention and advancement of ideas.
With discussions of this type it’s often phrased as though life right now is A-OK but some people insist on building faster cars and more luxurious homes.
But you could equally frame it as how can anyone be happy with this current phase in our development when there remain so many incurable diseases, for instance?
Of course some will respond to this by saying that the human population is already too large (it’s a stock answer to any attempt to improve our lot in life). But in the context of this debate, what would we be saying? That millions should suffer to preserve the status quo, and we should all be happy about it?
I just read the following quote from another forum:
The history of the Universe has been summed up thusly: "Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people.’’
– John P. Wiley Jr., quoting Edward R. Harrison (a cosmologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst) Smithsonian Magazine, December, 1995.
So… hydrogen atoms were not satisfied with status quo. In that vein, maybe we (along with embedded computers) will evolve (unwittingly) into some type of super-organism that has a new goal-seeking mechanism we can’t comprehend today.
Humanity could well be satisfied with a static society; indeed medieval China practically set that up as a cultural goal. Of course in the short run you have any number of dynastic/ feudal upheavals as individuals or families rise and fall on the Wheel of Fortune, but pre-industrial societies advanced only very slowly over the course of centuries.
Now if you ask will society enter a static mode in the next few centuries, I would have to doubt it because there are still developing technologies with the potential to revolutionize how things are done. I think we may be nearing the limits of what can be done with “clanking” technology, macro-scale engineering, but there are things like biotech or universal fabricators that could significantly change how things are done.
That theme runs through a lot of SF, mostly dystopian.
Allowances must be made for the psychological tendency of the kind of people likely to write such fiction to see themselves as visionaries, etc. And clearly somebody is suppressing them, or why is it so hard to get published, or, once published, to break out of the genre-ghetto?!
This is more or less what I’m talking about. Even if most people are content to keep the same life more or less for generations, it doesn’t mean the society won’t change. Even setting aside the group who does want change, you still have to deal with external disturbances from nature that get increasingly bothersome in the very long term. So I would suggest that there has been no truly static society in human history. If a real one were to come about in the future, it would probably have to be designed and planned for well in advance.
I really like that quote as it really gets across the point that the universe is still undergoing transients (has anyone guessed I am studying controls?) from the big-bang. So in the REALLY long term it’s almost certainly impossible to have an unchanging society. I would pay good money for a chance to go five thousand years into the future to see what the world is like, be it hybrid human-computer superorganism, galactic empire, or a world of 500 million living a futuristic peasant life.
Also, looking back at the OP, I realized there were at least two different questions I was asking. There was the one about the human tendency to change which everyone has been addressing and then the one about energy consumption and what level we could use on an indefinitely sustainable time scale. I know right now the renewable resources are far more than our current usage, but how much farther can we can develop before we have to expand out to other sources of energy (e.g., spaceborn solar collectors)? For example, if the entire planet reaches a first-world level of quality of life, could the amount of energy use be taken solely from renewables?
the brutal suppression part is a good idea. So-called “visionary” opponents of the sustainable geocentric model of the universe who keep on pushing these nonsensical, ignorant claims of the Earth rotating around the Sun ought to be burnt at the stake. Or at least be made publicly renounce their heretical views.
Well, one problem there is that once a ruling dynasty establishes peace and stasis, the peace-and-stasis often leads to a population explosion, which produces new social stresses, for which the state might not be prepared and which it might not even be capable of comprehending. Sometimes it leads to dynastic revolution, sometimes to the kind of total systemic collapse (whatever it was) that destroyed the civilization of the Maya. Above an Old Stone Age level of productive technology, a static society is really very hard to maintain. The Maya couldn’t do it with New Stone Age technology.
