The World Right Now

We don't have to look very far to see what's going on. But from a distance, things look very serene, with blue oceans and green lands. An observer from this distance might not suspect anything much was happening at all. That this planet has all the properties necessary to support life would be a no-brainer, but what's happening beneath the atmosphere would be a complete mystery.

We have TVs to look at and papers to read, all full of the genocide, infanticide, suicide and pesticide seething in the layer we occupy for ourselves. Down here, at grass roots level, it all looks pretty sick. Blood pours out of open wounds on some creature somewhere every moment of every day, most of it shed for money. We've reached a point now where we're all beginning to feel the guilt. 

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To distract ourselves from what is going on, we're busily stuffing ourselves with delicious food and great entertainment, watching people in important places doing things which affect our global existence. Scientists are labouring over hot hadron colliders while in boardrooms there's the plotting of the next profitable assault. We know they're out there. We don't know what they're going to do, but in the meantime we believe we can do nothing about it and go on eating our fish and chips.

It pays to look quantum. That's where we are. On the cosmic scale, we're small fry, and the Universe can't be said to care one way or another what happens here. If Fermi's Paradox is shown to favour the likelihood that civilisations simply reach a point of inevitable self-destruction, we are simply failing to recognise the possibility that we could buck the trend. The longer we fail to learn from the sums of possible histories, the closer we come to the event horizon. From there all that's left to be met with is our own singularity. 

One wonders if we have to answer to it.

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