Asimov’s Foundation
How will we look as a species one thousand years from now ?
If you go by the last one thousand years of human history, we can easily say that a large number of people have seen better life, due to science and its child technology. Due to Governments that are more democratic than before. Due to the ability to connect across the world and synthesize thoughts on various things as if it is one single human brain spanning across earth. But to find where we will be in the next thousand years is a hard problem.
If it is just a linear and optimistic extrapolation from here, it is easy to say that we may have Robots and AI freeing humans from mundane jobs and our children will be engaged in pursuits that we would have only occasionally tasted like wallowing through creative forms of arts and science with no worry of competition as everyone gets a basic income and above that they are free to do what they want.
As a concrete example, will the current state of madness gripping students getting filtered by competitive exams go away if the basic needs are taken care? It appears like it will. Why would I bang my head on obscure stuff if my next meal or a decent living is assured to me ?
It sounds Utopian, but it appears to me as to what is stopping us now from our Governments giving us a basic income which is good enough to take care of us ? In pockets it is done now for the sick, poor and old. But what about having such a thing for all people ? Of course it comes to the point that Goods still have to be produced and that means some of us have to toil for the food to come to the table.
This is because we triggered the economy with a Government paper called currency which requires some work to be done to exchange hands. And this was invented to realize an infinite amount of desires like going on a holiday or having someone chauffeur you to the airport or getting your food delivered at your home and so on.
But in the process, the humans got stuck in their own mess. Though this is the best mess we could have been in when compared to unstable Governments, Kingdoms and Dictators constantly taking you out of your home to fight a battle you had no clue of. Humans came to this point of some form of Democratic Governments, Some sort of political stability, less wars, but to sustain this, they need to constantly work to feed each other. Once in a while you can go on a holiday.
But this is not a perfect solution that can hold up by itself. It requires constant vigil. It requires corruption to be within a threshold. It requires to keep capitalistic tendencies from usurping everything and make all of us as characters in a single person’s dream. It requires careful balancing of voices, of narratives to ensure one voice or one narrative does not hijack and drown others. It requires people to be aware of what they have got, where they have reached in the human history to ensure it becomes better for future generations to live here.
What are the odds that we will lose all what we gained and go back to a hunter gatherer or kingdoms? What are the odds that we lose all our science and technological progress thus far and you do not find a single person who remembers anything and everything and have to begin from scratch ?
What happens if a massive asteroid strike us or an alien attack happens or evil AI takes over or Nuclear wars or or a deadly Virus or Climate change makes this planet unlivable? These seem like improbable as I write this from the comfort of a home and all the good people around sustaining a democracy. But if you are able to see through a thousand years you will find that there is no linearity about the way we will evolve. The odds of humans losing what they gained is neither zero, nor one, but a number certainly in between.
This is what I get when I am half way through reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series. Because science fiction is the opposite of history, it is a wild painting of the future, but with some sort of extrapolation of the past. Asimov does this painting over thousand years of a human species spread across the galaxy like a trained psycho historian who by the way is a central character of the story. And you find that human race wherever they are, whether they are confined to this tiny planet or spread across the Milky way in the future, they never change. All the issues we face today remains, albeit on a galactic scale. The issue of mad kings and dictators, greedy traders, fanaticism and barbarism, wars on one side and the constant strive for a world order, peace and prosperity, freedom and democracy, with science and technology as tools in the hands of both these camps.
It reminded me of a short story I wrote several years ago on similar lines.
