Armageddon
posted by Jen | 1:44 PM
Yesterday I had an incredibly frustrating and tiring day at work. The worst part about it is that I didn't have a big sim or a meeting where I had to talk to big shots about a contentious topic. I merely did software testing. Poorly. I couldn't seem to do thing right the first time. I recorded data in the wrong time format, took the long way to generated baseline data, etc. I was so tired that I fell asleep on the couch for about 2 hours early in the evening. Then I wasn't tired at bedtime, so today I'm really tired and I have a big meeting and a night sim. And all this, I did to myself.
Becca and Gavin had a big conversation about how best to take the next step of the space program and invigorate the space flight industry at the same time. It got me to thinking about national and global scale problems and how big they really are. You know, the global warming, world peace, starving children in Africa type problems. It always seems to me that we tend to try to treat the symptoms of big problems, but nobody ever talks about solving the root causes of the problems. And who can blame us - they're BIG problems, and that leads to it being really, really tough to solve them. I can't think of solutions. But that got me to wondering if we are ever going to solve anything. I mean, can anybody think of a truly global "oh-my-god-this-is-the-end-of-humanity" type problem that has actually gotten solved? Anyone? It would really do wonders for my outlook if someone can think of something.
Blah, I must be depressed today. Too bad I can't go to my boss's retirement party tonight and have some fun. :P
Becca and Gavin had a big conversation about how best to take the next step of the space program and invigorate the space flight industry at the same time. It got me to thinking about national and global scale problems and how big they really are. You know, the global warming, world peace, starving children in Africa type problems. It always seems to me that we tend to try to treat the symptoms of big problems, but nobody ever talks about solving the root causes of the problems. And who can blame us - they're BIG problems, and that leads to it being really, really tough to solve them. I can't think of solutions. But that got me to wondering if we are ever going to solve anything. I mean, can anybody think of a truly global "oh-my-god-this-is-the-end-of-humanity" type problem that has actually gotten solved? Anyone? It would really do wonders for my outlook if someone can think of something.
Blah, I must be depressed today. Too bad I can't go to my boss's retirement party tonight and have some fun. :P
3 Comments:
Sure I can. Humanity has done some pretty impressive things. Start in prehistory, where we figured out how to be farmers rather than hunter-gatherers, ending sustinence living and staving off the starvation of most of the species. Or, take more recently, the development of penicilin or the eradication of polio, or even just, in general, the germ theory of medicine. Without these things, we're talking about cataclism and mass deaths on an unbelievable level - certainly, a terrible thing for civilization and an extreme threat to humanity.
I'm not saying that humanity hasn't done amazing things. But your examples are both social/scientific advances that improved the quality of human life, not solutions to problems that are threatening the human race. In the case of the development of agriculture, it allowed humanity to put down roots which lead to the development of civilizations. But, there is nothing really wrong with being hunters - as long as that's what you've always known. As for modern medicine, I'm talking more about problems we've created for ourselves than those that are intrinsic to living in a world with biological diversity. (Don't think that Polio didn't occur to me when I was mussing this myself. But it just doesn't strike the same emotional chord for me as the human-made troubles.)
I can think of several advances in the last two hundred years that have saved tens of millions of lives. Most of them are medical, such as vaccines for smallpox, polios, measules, and pertussis.
We've done a decent job of handling problems when the solution deals in a microscale: vaccinate these people, or build a waste management infrastructure for this city. We're still struggling to fully understand the influences of things on a macroscale, such as global warming.
I think we'll be able to do it, though. I wish I could predict when. I think within the next 20 years we'll have developed our understanding of macro processes to confidently adjust them.
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