What’s Next?

The reign of Trumpian terror is shortly to be behind us.

We still face a pandemic, an economic crisis and all sorts of other inter-related challenges. In that sense, just surviving might be all we can handle.

BUT, there also may be an opportunity, if we can seize it, to use this moment to foresee the future course of human evolution, over which we have no control but which we will have to adapt to.

We all, sort of, know that our most ancient ancestors crawled out the sea and learned to breathe. They could NOT have been thinking about a future because they did not even know what that was.

Evolution is NOT PLANNED; It just happens!!

Our most recent 100 years illuminates that reality.

–The industrial revolution started before the end of the 19th Century and lasted beyond WWII, ushering in an era of incredible global prosperity. It took people a long time to see it and call it an industrial revolution/evolution.

–The great struggles of the 20^th Century centered on securing freedom around the globe. The two violent world wars left much of the globe ostensibly “free,” but at an incredible cost. Very few people at the time grasped that war was perversely the route to freedom.

–Then the information revolution launched a massive, digital world where none had existed before, and is busily rewriting the rules of the globe. Social media gave us Trump as well as WIFI and email.

So, where/what might the next century have in store for us? As important, where should we want it to take us?

–Perhaps we are on the cusp of reaching out to another world.

–Climate change will either change/kill us or we will have to adapt, perhaps by going elsewhere?

There is no denying that the stars beckon with all their mysteries, but that is surely much later.

–Our problem of overpopulation is only getting worse. We are reaching a point of maximum human density. That raises terrifying questions about how to “cull the herd” to ensure our survival.

–The racial, religious and ethnic conflicts that have caused so much suffering recently show that our sense of the human “family” is failing us. The tribalism that separates has grown more with time.  

–We are an infinitesimal manifestation of evolutionary potential in the grand scheme of the Universe.

–If our future lies in the stars, we will have to learn to think of all Earthlings as family, lest our divisions leave us unprepared to deal with foreign (alien) worlds that might greet us as we have greeted, say, immigrants.

–Or, maybe we are reaching a point where the oceans will swallow us again, forcing us all to adapt back to life under water? At times that appeals!

There are little signs, here and there, that suggest all the above, but where/what remains a mystery.

Prior to Trump and Covid, and all the other disruptive things during that period, some systemic changes in our lives began to appear:

–people everywhere began to pick sides – red or blue.

–general distrust of governments everywhere rose dramatically.

–the historic sense of an optimistic future diminished.

Then the wickedness of Covid, coupled with the economic consequences of the inevitable loss of jobs etc., speeded up most changes in a post-Covid world without supplying any ideas about what next.

The next world is likely to presage a new stage in the general evolution of human progress.

That will include a global mad scramble for work/jobs; also there will be a similar scramble for access to medical developments for future pandemics.

Both those factors will give people with more education great advantages over those with less. So far that has supported our evolution to a world of increased digitization.

The world that is beginning to arrive is the world beyond earth.

That next stage of evolution will exert great pressures on reducing the number of people on earth. Fewer and fewer people will be needed – to make things, to move things, to do everything.

That is the intuited base of the fears of the undereducated. They already see it and feel it coming, which is why those people saw Trump as their savior. From their perspective, those are fairly reasonable thoughts, which is why we all have been so confused.

Humans’ adaption to the next stage of evolution will be a shrinking number of super educated people.

Get ready as soon as you can to lay a foundation for your grand- and great-grandchildren.