Call Me A Fool, Will You?

Call Me A Fool, Will You?

­­­­When you want to make a fool of yourself what’s the best time to do it? If you are like me, you would say it’s best to do it on All fools day, when you are expected to act the fool by everyone else. I am therefore going to make an absolute fool of myself by doing something I have wanted to do for a long time- make a prediction of how the world would look like fifty years from now- on April 1^st 2063. This is just a wish list and even I don’t think they are all going t come true but what the heck, no harm done in hoping, is there?

1) World Government.

      Now that we have finally stopped eating each other, well maybe not every one of us, there may still be a few holdouts in Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Australia who still practice cannibalism, but now that the majority of us have lost the taste for human flesh why don’t we all stop killing each other and start living together peacefully? I mean haven’t we had enough chances to destroy our civilization back to the Stone Age with our war mongering between ourselves? Why can’t we forget our differences in race, religion, language, nation and caste and go on to form a single unified world government? One world and one government is the way to go for our species to survive the next few centuries. Such a government can think for the entire world as a unified whole instead of giving into narrow parochial interests and vote pandering. And have no doubts about it- our species has developed to such a point that our future evolution definitely requires a combined planet wide effort if we are achieve what we are capable of doing which leads me to my next point

2) Off -Planet development.

           The biggest challenge facing humanity right now is the discrepancy between our uncontrolled population growth and our limited resources. The only option left to us to deal with it (because history shows that birth control never works) is to go off-planet. Tell me truly, is there anyone on planet earth who doesn’t hate gravity? I mean gravity is all very well to keep us rooted here to the surface, but the required acceleration needed to overcome gravity has bound us with chains to the surface of our mother planet when we should be out there exploring and settling down on other planets galaxy wide. And as for those who nuts who crib that terra-forming is wrong, hello!!! We terra-formed earth for our species to survive, didn’t we? There is no question of ethics involved in making either mars or venus, fit enough for humans to settle in and thrive. Who else is there? Martians? Venusians?

3) Robo-society.

      Which brings me to my next prediction of a highly robotized society. I mean if we are going to indulge in advanced scientific research and off-world colonization, we cannot afford to waste time and more importantly human brains and resources on mundane everyday matters which could be better done by robots. Highly automated droids (hence I love the name of Google’s OS- Android) should be employed in each and every human endeavor which requires mindless thinking and repetition. Do we seriously need humans to do work which robots can faster and more accurately? We need to get over the terminator movie induced – irrational fear of artificial intelligence and embrace robotics wholeheartedly. Only if we have all manual labor performed exclusively by droids will we finally have a chance to use those fine brains of ours for inventing the things we need to develop our species.

Footnote: Now that you have my list, I am sure that you are all making up your own set of predictions or alternatively -laughing your head off at me. Yeah, I get it too. I know how absurd these sound when we know that our species is renowned for its differences and inability to get along with each other. And even education doesn’t seem to make a damn difference to that way of thinking. Proof? Look at the number of caste affiliated facebook pages (tambrahm confessions anyone?). And these are supposed to be the privileged sections of society - people with a good education, access to the internet and an enhanced world view. If even educated people perpetuate the lowest of common denominators, a specific caste identity, how will we convince the rest of the world that genetically we are all of a single species- just human beings- homo sapiens sapiens? Now that’s the reason I call these dreams of mine a fools dream, an educated fools dreams.