The reknowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking posted a question to the world recently on the Yahoo Answers website (http://answers.yahoo.com) asking how we might accomplish survival for the human race for another 100 years (an overly modest period of time, don't you think?).

Anyway, I found that attempting an answer was very thought provoking... which was probably the effect he intended. Anyway, what I posted in answer to the question is republished here:


If we define the "human race" as all of the people currently alive, or as future generations with DNA identical to our own) then our demise within the next hundred  years is so certain that it makes the question pretty pointless.

If, on the other hand, we loosen up and define the human race as a continually evolving species capable of producing ensuing generations (which will likely be just a teensy bit different than preceding generations,) then our chances improve dramatically.

The problem is that along with our remarkable intelligence and fantastic dexterity there is some additional baggage which apparently had high survival value in the bad old days, but doesn't seem to be serving us so well in the present day.

Paramount among these is our insatiable acquisitiveness, greed and duplicity. That these universal human characteristics got us to where we are now, is no guarantee whatsoever that such 'hard wired' survival strategies will get us to where we must be in order to survive that next few hundreds or thousands of years.

Whether we succeed or not is of no consequence to the natural world.

The natural world is as utterly uncaring as a rock. It presents no abstract tests of worthiness to survive. Survival is either achieved or it is not.

The ideas of worth and caring are abstract intellectual inventions of our (and probably some other) species as sometimes useful strategies in the compulsory quest to keep on keeping on. In other words, in our super-brainy species compassion and society (along with deception, aggression and greed) got us to the top of the heap, domination-wise, but they might not keep us there.

They might just as well be our undoing.

In the biological 'musical chairs' game these traits still enable us to muscle or trick our way onto a seat every time the music pauses, and a few thousand other species fail to make the cut and go extinct. The looming doom, of course, is that at some point there will not be enough surviving species to sustain the minimum prerequisites of interdependent life.

At that point, the child’s game of musical chairs becomes the child’s game of ring-around-the-rosey, wherein we all fall down and become ashes.

We will have "won" ourselves into extinction, the ultimate "lose" in evolutionary terms.

For it to turn out any other way would involve deliberately and more or less voluntarily losing certain resource competitions which we would otherwise easily "win" if not restrained in some manner. The natural world shall provide highly effective (albeit heartlessly brutal) restraints. Welcome to the jungle.

It's a tough one. We are biologically 'hard wired' to win survival contests, and to go on winning no matter how much we have already acquired.

For example, notwithstanding their enormous charitable contributions recently, can you even imagine Bill, Melinda or Warren voluntarily becoming poor, lowering the consumption level of their lifestyles or renouncing the values and behaviors they exercised in acquiring their fabulous wealth in the first place?

Right.

It would seem to me, therefore, that to impose or implement some sort of new idea or social reform that would assure us another hundred years (or so) the idea or reform would require a nearly universal compliance to certain new rules of behaviour quite contradictory to our past and present biologically and culturally ingrained habits.

There is as much chance of that as there is for the Republican Party advocating gay marriage, immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and a ban of SUV's from all Federal Highways.

More likely is the natural world simply doing what it does, and that means that the herd shall be thinned.

Our best chances for the herd not winding up thinned out of existence lie in the fact that 6 and half billion people represent a truly incredible amount of cultural and biological diversity.

For example, I personally knew a 72 year old man who in addition to being cheerful and kind could jog 15 miles a day, on a diet of fish, meat and animal fat, in temperatures hovering around 30 F degrees below zero. In his culture wealth was measured by number of friends, not number of dollars.

My father told me of Australian aboriginals who, during WW II, could enter or leave at will a carefully guarded air force base at night, in the middle of an apparently uninhabitable dessert, and be undiscoverably gone during the daytime. That they would risk being shot without challenge by trigger happy sentries just to say hello or have a look at the place, is proof of a culture with values quite different from ours.

So, is there some "How" that we can realistically implement which would better assure our species surviving the approaching involuntary downsizing?

Yes.

Ban further civilized encroachments into the usually inhospitable places where primitive humans still reside, and allow the reoccupation by genetically indiginous homo sapiens of such places where they once resided, and then use our high technology and rigid legal, financial and military institutions to protect them there.

Academia would have a good old time (and make lots of money) setting it up and studying the results. There might be some accidental compensation in the knowledge thus gained, but the real value would be in the fact that increased cultural and genetic diversity is some insurance against extinction of the species.