The Flip Side Of The Coin

With the death of the old year comes the birth of the new, and it's hard to attend any birth without feeling hope.

We are living in an increasingly peaceful world. It's sometimes hard to appreciate this, what with North Korea and Iran pounding their chests, not to mention a handful of lesser conflicts raging (and conflict can only be called "lesser" until you're in it). But our planet has been getting progressively less bellicose for centuries. As recently as twenty five years ago, it was commonly believed that we would blow ourselves to smithereens, something like this:

All joking aside, the possibility of total nuclear annihilation is only slightly more plausible now than the notion of California breaking off the western coast of the U.S. to go and hang with Hawaii.

So that's a good thing.

Better: the rate of world population increase is steadily dropping. Since the time of Malthus, we have been told that eventually, the spread of humanity would overwhelm the earth. I learned this in high school: it was treated as an established fact, on the order of two plus two. Like much of what I learned in school, this turns out to be wrong...and for reasons that, with a little thought, would have been obvious: increasing prosperity and mechanization obviates the need for surplus labour in the form of children. Increasing freedom for women worldwide--hell, even in Saudi Arabia they're discovering that women can work, and work well, outside the home--eventually means those women won't view themselves as receptacles and baby-incubators. Not to mention: given money, some folks suddenly imagine ways they could spend it on themselves. This is stated merely as an observation; I make no judgment on those who either choose or do not choose to have kids. I only notice that enough people are choosing to limit their families...a Malthusian extinction is highly improbable.

And people are getting wealthier. Particularly the abject poor. There remains a great deal of work to be done, but people in China and India are MUCH better off than they were a generation ago. Africa is sitting on vast reserves of natural resources, including much of the world's coltan, an indispensable component in the manufacture of electronic devices. Right now a guerilla war is being fought over that resource--typical human behaviour--but history has shown people tend to wise up and recognize their own self-interest...eventually. (Funny how so much of the world's wealth is concentrated directly under so many poor people.)

Democracy is spreading. When I was born, according to Freedom House, there were 44 countries classified as "free". Today there are 89. In 2007 I suggested that "tyrannies only succeed so long as they convince people they have no power. The moment people begin to understand they are collectively more powerful than even the worst tyrant, the death of tyranny is a foregone conclusion." That moment is happening for more and more people worldwide.

We are making progress against the scourge of disease that has plagued us since we first came down from the trees. While not the answer to everything, at least not yet, stem cells have shown great promise in a wide array of therapies.

Technology continues to infiltrate every aspect of our lives. Information storage is trivially cheap and getting cheaper: at this rate, we're not far off true lifelogging. Suppose that everything you see and do is captured by video and sent to a secure storage facility, accessible by you at any time and by the authorities in the event you are accused of a crime. (Robert Sawyer imagined this possibility in his excellent Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, which I highly recommend.)

This prospect used to be widely ridiculed. If taken seriously, it was considered with dread. Nobody would consent to record their lives! Who would forfeit their privacy to that extent? That was before YouTube and Facebook and Foursquare conclusively showed that a great many people care very little for privacy, at least as their parents understand the term.

All in all, things look pretty damn good. Give me some breakthroughs in harvesting solar energy by the gigawatt and I'll be a very optimistic man.

Here's hoping for a prosperous 2011 for you, dear reader, and as many others as possible.