Earth

Been reading a new- to me- book, by David Brin: "Earth." It was originally published in 1990, and it is absolutely frightening how much of the future from that year he has gotten right. Global warming. Gas and other resource shortages. Population explosion among humans and the astounding devastation it is causing all around the world, even those places untouched by the escalation of technology. The World Wide Web, and what its proliferation has meant to the "globalization" of our world. Spying by both governmental bodies and individual citizens and the affect that has had on our levels of privacy. The list continues to grow, and I have only read about half the book. It is a big one.
I feel like I am reading a Jules Verne type novel, full of weird insight into our potential future, and frankly,it's scary. If this fellow is right, and growing evidence in the world around me says he just might be, by the time I reach my father's age (he will be 86 this year,) everything I have known since growing up will be changed for good or gone.

It is a fact of being mortal, born to this body and this world, that we will all die, and that everything we have known will pass away. Of the multitudes that have come before my generation, only the smallest handful of things remain. From things we know- the Great Wall, the pyramids of various countries, the dusty and oft times looted towns, villages, and even cities buried by the eons that have passed, we try to piece together some understanding of our very short (on a cosmic scale) human existence. We try to understand when we diverged from animals to being something too many of us think superior. I must agree with one description in the book: man may think of itself as the "brain" of this planet, living entity that it is, but no brain tries to destroy the body it inhabits. At least not if it is sane. Our reckless destruction of the surface of this ancient being will end only in our own demise. We will taint beyond use all those things most needed for us and the species we depend on to continue as we have for only a few tens of thousands of years.

I am personally of a mind that we are the great destroyers, the Kali Ma, of this, the next in a series of great die-outs this planet has gone through over the course of its 4 plus billion year existence. LIFE is actually not what the planet is about, and when it gets out of hand- whether microbe, dinosaur, or human- Gaia chooses to kill off most of it, using life itself as the perpetrator. Thus, we are actually doing precisely what we are created for.

Somehow, that is not a good thought, but it is a sobering one. I just kind of hope I do not have to live til all the crap hits the fan. It is a relatively slow progression now by our standards, taking a few generations, but it could speed up at any moment. I tell you now, it will not be a pleasant thing.
More about the book when I have finished. It haunts me now as it is. I do not think it will go away anytime soon.