The Future Can Be Great If We Live

There are all kinds of scientific advances that we are on the verge of. If we get all of them we can feed everyone good food without wrecking the Earth and have as much power as we all need and get it without harm to us or our environment. 

The tricky part of getting all of that good stuff is whether we will kill ourselves off before they arrive.

Right now most people are spending our natural resources as if there is no tomorrow. That, of course, can mean there will literally be no tomorrow for the human race. This doesn't mean that we will literally die tomorrow or even next year. We may even get a decade or so before things get really bad.

That delay in consequences for what we are doing now may be our undoing. People are not generally thinking very far ahead. Most grocery stores only keep about three days of food on hand. Other kinds of stores may plan a little farther ahead, but a year ahead is long-term planning.

The worst problem with this short-term thinking is that we are doing damage that is about to reach a tipping point where it can't be fixed and the end after that, will be certain.

It is easy to think about what we want right now. It is harder to think about what we will have to have for tomorrow, next week, month, year, or a decade from now.

We need to think fast. We don't have much time to learn to do that. The sands in our hourglass are running out and most of us aren't even paying attention. Not paying attention can mean paying with your life later.

Now is our chance to reduce our carbon footprints to save our Earth and ourselves. We are starting to see how many lives climate change can take, and this is only the warm-up for it.