Shape of things to come

While humanity may catch a break from its worst enemies, population growth ensures new challenges will be created.

The world around us is changing beyond recognition. Technology is revolutionising everything. From medicine to travel, the breakneck speed of innovation is taking humanity into a future that was projected only in the works of science fiction. In my childhood, a car phone was a wonder. In my father’s childhood, computers were unheard of. Today when you carry cheap mobile sets with high processing power in your pockets, constantly connected with the world community through the internet, you cannot underplay the giant strides mankind has made in past few decades.

This technological revolution, and much more that is still to come, may have interesting political, demographic and economic ramifications. For instance, when international travel becomes as easy as a bus journey back home, and by any luck as cheap too, how effectively will the nations of the world be able to keep their borders sealed. Internet has already brought the communication boundaries between nations down.

Before 9/11, there was massive speculation about the decline of nation-states. On that day, terrorists gave the states of the world a new lease on life. But more than a decade after the terrible incidents on that fateful day, the old trends are returning. Can we say that the days of boundaries dividing peoples of the world are numbered? Most likely, yes.

On a separate front, mankind is making steady advances in the field of medicine. When Bill Gates decided to take personal interest in philanthropy and announced initiatives to find cures for most deadly diseases, I was ecstatic. I wrote a piece spelling out what it entailed for us all. Granted that the human genome might not be as easy to programme as computer’s binary code, but if treated in the same fashion, geniuses like Mr Gates can help a great deal in finding solutions. It is indeed thanks to geniuses like these that we now have retroviruses meant to undo health issues at a genetic level.

While humanity may catch a break from its worst enemies and challenges, the population growth ensures that new challenges will be created. To begin with, we all are children of anarchy. Survival of the fittest essentially implies that many will perish, if not owing to diseases, then of starvation. The more mouths there are to feed, chances are, many will go hungry. And then there is the issue of heat, waste and space. A growing population means humanity will have dearth of space and climatic conditions will take a nosedive. What can be done to address all these problems?

Feeding the world population may not be too difficult if we can acquire more space. But can we? Right now, there are huge demographic imbalances. Rich countries can afford to keep the population influx at bay for now. But if the pressure increases and borders eventually decline, this might not be as easy as it seems right now. Also, if the earth is put to test in order to raise food productivity, this may result in desiccation and end up compromising productivity everywhere.

Then there is the ever-growing need for more energy. Our overdependence on fossil fuels harms our atmosphere and threatens to suck our planet dry. There are precious few alternatives available and may not be able to keep with the population growth.

A solution readily comes to mind. The colonisation of space. Space is a vast untapped resource. So far, without any proof of sentient life anywhere but on our planet, one wonders why is humanity not taking a keen interest in colonising it? Of course, we need parallel advances in technology to make that possible. From better interplanetary transport vessels to terraforming technology, we will have to invest much more in concepts that still are in the realm of science fiction and that, too, on a war footing. Global catastrophes cannot spot the difference between various nations; why are we hell bent on letting such prejudices come in the way of finding a collective solution then?

Published in The Express Tribune, February 2^nd, 2014.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.