I've become kind of accustomed to seeing some powerful examples of idiocy in the world; after all, I live under a metropolitan authority in the UK, I have an internet connection with a communications company, and I've been a student within the last 20 years and have accordingly taken out a loan. But I do believe I've now seen it all. Apparently, some people have become confused about which pulp SF author founded the rather silly religion, and have started taking Robert Heinlein entirely too seriously - most particularly, his oft-repeated quote:
The meek can have the earth. The rest of us are going to the stars.
This CiF post by G P Wayne shows up the problem deliciously, most notably the comments left by one TimesRunningOut:
Don't worry mate. While you silly leftists sit in the mud complaining about there only being "one world" the grown ups will be heading for the stars and beyond.
Um, yes. I'm sure (and with good reason, apparently) that Mr Out would be the first in the queue to hurl abuse at anyone who expressed a view that action on climate change was unnecessary because God would personally intervene to end the world before it became uninhabitable for His chosen Aryans... yet isn't this view equally silly here? Apparently it doesn't matter what kind of a mess humans make of the earth, because the truly worthy people will demonstrate how worthy they are, by... er, strip-mining every last drop from it, then running away from the mess they've created and going to do the same to someone else's planet. (Yes, fine examples of the best of humanity there. Right up there with bankers, MPs and tabloid journalists.)
The funny thing is that people still quote Heinlein, 30 years after Douglas Adams (another SF author of some little note, though obviously not one that those who take Heinlein seriously are likely to have run into at all) disposed of the proposition once and for all, in his usual inimitable style. The idea is a nonsense. The best of us will, of course, stay to clean up the mess, and be eternally thankful that those of the species who simply wasted everyone's time and left trails of destruction and misery in their wake were as keen to leave as everyone else was to see the back of them... and since as a species, we've evolved the mobile, we can do so without an uneasy sense of foreboding too. :)
And yet - I fear that Mr Out isn't entirely wrong. Authoritarianism is never the answer - or rather, if it is, then the question is wrong. And the reason is really rather simple. Humans suck - really, powerfully, grotesquely suck - at designing things. Only the very simplest of our structures actually survive, and then only for brief timespans (unless they get buried under lava because we didn't think that mountain over there was even a volcano, let alone active - and I don't think that really counts as an example of long-term planning). We can do bridges, because generally riverbanks don't move; anything more complicated - or significantly, more changeable - than this is pretty much design-proof. And not just because we're all a bit simple, either. There's a preponderance of evidence to suggest that a design made in advance is hopelessly inefficient compared with any mechanism that can adapt itself during its operational life - that far and away the best schemes for dealing with any dynamic situation are themselves dynamic. Demand-paging in computers is a pretty good illustration of this, but a much better one is natural selection. You have two very simple ideas; you have a non-zero probability of mutation during the reproductive phase, and you have a changing environment in which only negative mutations are swiftly disposed of; from that - from two simple ideas - you get the impossibly complicated taxonomy of species we see around us today. Sure, it took a while, it was hopelessly inefficient, and lots of stuff died - but there is no design process that could have got us here, period. Too many variables; far too many interactions to plan.
So evolution is really the only hope of producing sustainable complex systems - and the whole point of evolution is that there is no overarching authority keeping the individual entities safe from each other; such safety strategies as arise do so naturally, organically, and locally, in response to the pressures of a particular situation. (This, incidentally, is perhaps the side that the social Darwinists overlooked. The whole "nature red in tooth and claw" thing is a canard, which ignores many mutually beneficial, even altruistic, arrangements in nature. But those arrangements come about as a response to events, rather than being imposed from the top down for the good of everyone, and are stronger and more sustainable as a result.) That pretty much wraps it up for authoritarianism...
...but since the alternative is persuading everyone on the planet to simultaneously voluntarily stop overconsuming and living as though the world is their own personal plaything, we might as well resign ourselves to the fact that the changes which are coming are going to decimate the human population of the planet - possibly to the point at which it can no longer be sustained. That, having solved the constant evolutionary pressure of local overpopulation by evolving intelligence, first, and then agriculture and trade, we are faced with the consequences of global overpopulation - defined, in its simplest terms, as one species using more resources to merely live than can be sustained. And there ain't no out for that - whatever the Heinlein-esque wishful thinkers want us to believe.
The four horsemen - what were their names again? War, Pestilence, Famine and Death? Didn't Death always look a little incongruous, given that the natural consequence of being alive is dying, and that the other three tend to give rise to plenty of death on their own? I wonder whether Death was never intended to signify the death of individual humans, but the wholesale death of the ecosystem in which they live - the sudden truncation of the ability of the planet to sustain human life... and whether this, ultimately, is what we're facing. Because if it is, there's nothing we can do about it. We're screwed - not by our moral turpitude as individuals, nor even by our inability to properly chart our destiny as a species, but simply by those same Darwinian inevitabilities that every product of evolution must inevitably encounter - the environment will not sustain unlimited numbers of one species indefinitely; somehow, a way will arise to cap those numbers.
At the risk of anthropomorphising a natural process with no guiding intelligence behind it whatsoever: Gaia has decided we're due a cull, and she's busy preparing one. The most we can hope for is that she doesn't overdo it and wipe us out completely. That is the lesson of climate change.
And the lesson of "the meek shall inherit the earth"? Simply this. The humans who survive all of this will be those who can already scratch out a living within the limitations imposed by environment and situation; those who are not wholly reliant upon the power to change their environment to suit them, but whose response to a challenging environment is to use their intelligence to change their own techniques. Those humans, in short, who never forget that they are mere animals - who never confuse themselves with gods - who have not forgotten humility. Chances are that if you can read this, you probably won't be among them.