Cities Of The Future

Let me preface this by stating a fact: Climate Change is REAL.

Now that we've established this, we have to come to terms with what happens to our cities and population centers in the near future.

Our Fatal Flaw

Our species has a fatal flaw in its design—an inability to think beyond immediate reality. We plan our lives, our finances, our weddings and dinners, but we're not equipped to plan 20 or 30 years into the future. An individual unable to plan their life is not a big failure, but as a species, we have failed our basic instinct of survival. Evolution brought us to the top of our planet, and now we're actively killing our future. We believed our governments would be able to think long-term, but we simply didn't equip them with the tools or systems needed to do this.

A majority of our population strives just to survive, and we've designed our society for this. Basic needs go unmet in favor of control and power wielded by a few. Our politics are based on competition and are extremely short-term—4 or 5 years isn't enough for people in power to decide long-term policy. Half their terms are spent preparing for the next election they want to win. The flip side is that we inherently don't trust people and have designed political systems with checks and balances to keep the worst people from doing the worst things with their power.

All this leads us back to systemic failure across the world to act on climate change information. We've known about it for decades, and yet even today, people refuse to believe in it. Why? Sure, we're not a long-lived species, so we don't have the perspective of long periods of time passing. But we have science, which tells us our planet's history and its possible future—yet most choose not to believe it. As if science were a school of thought instead of the rules of the universe.

Denial and Disbelief

There are many reasons for denial: fear, ignorance, or the outcome being too grim to accept as our fate. We tend to defend our beliefs even in the face of contradictory evidence. We make it personal. "Could I have been wrong all this time? Fuck no." It's easy for me to say this, but I blame our evolution and the society it led us to.

I often wonder what it would be like to alter things in the past—a few historic events here or there—and see how the flow of time changes. An excellent two-part Star Trek: Voyager episode called "Year of Hell" comes to mind. An advanced species uses technology to alter past events hoping to restore their now-deceased empire. With every change, they project outcomes, then make the change to see how allegiances shift, wars happen, and entire species get wiped out.

This is what we need. We need to see the outcomes of our actions before we make mistakes that can't be fixed. What would be the outcome if early humanity hadn't discovered agriculture? What if the first trade involving currency never happened? What if we'd discovered solar energy before coal and oil? Would we be massively different as a species, or would we simply turn back to our destructive ways in time?

Our Grim Future

Currently, our future is grim. The boomers won't live long enough to see it. The millennials might, but the generations that come after will live through the decisions of the past, unable to fix them. We live in large cities by the coast that threaten to swallow us. All estimated temperature increases are being revised every year as we break records in increasingly hot weather and shortening cold seasons. Several studies point to most of our agricultural societies losing all arable land in the very near future. Our glaciers are melting, ocean currents are changing, and severe weather events keep getting worse.

We build technologies to work around this: electric cars, hydrogen cars, carbon capture, and a whole host of other things, hoping maybe something will work. We pat ourselves on the back as we drive electric cars that don't directly run on fossil fuels but are built with a staggering amount of destructive mining and energy generation. We hope that one day human ingenuity will win over the destruction we've caused so we can keep doing it.

Recently, a famous CEO of a famous company said it was time to remove all barriers around AI power consumption because it's our only saving grace in the future. When I first read that, I was astounded. Something that already consumes large amounts of power should be given free rein to do more damage? But then, over the next few days, I realized the pragmatism in it. We're doomed if we do, doomed if we don't. Might as well do it and hope for the best.

This is where we are: throwing all our eggs in the proverbial future hand basket and hoping one of them hatches something that saves us.

The Lesson We Won't Learn

We are the most intelligent species on the planet, after all. In a few decades, we will have wiped out most other species that exist as we continue to expand, extract, and exterminate. You may call me cynical, and yes, I am a cynic. I've lived through a time when we accepted science, and then suddenly, as a pandemic was upon us, we participated in theatrics instead of taking vaccines and listening to doctors. Accepting science as the gold standard for our survival is a relic of the past. We like being pandered to and choose leaders for their personality and religious beliefs instead of their governing capability.

To say we deserve this is unfair.

But nature and science don't care about fairness. I hope the lesson it teaches us is something we're capable of learning.