Alan Alda was interviewed by Denton on Elders recently, and one of the things he reminded me of was that Humans are a baby species, we’ve been around 10,000 years and compared to most other species who’ve been around millions of years we really are a speck in time.

When we talk about the future of the Human Race we get all defeatist and think about nuclear wars and climate change and so on. Admittedly Nuclear war would pretty well fuck us, the few people that would survive wouldn’t have many resources to rebuild, the Earth would be contaminated… it’d be a lot worse than Noah’s floods.

But climate change… well you know ‘The end of life as we know it’ …yes. But that’s not saying much. ‘Life as we know it’ has supermarkets, cars, economics and a whole bunch of other things probably not vital to the survival of the species. Enough people could survive with enough resources that humans would bounce back. We’ve survived Ice Ages before, it wiped out the majority of the worlds humanish population, but humans are resourceful and can survive such disaster. Clothing, fire, scaring the crap out of bears and stealing their caves.

Not to survive intact, not to bring our cars and credit cards with us, probably not to get to colonise Mars any time soon… I think we’re a long way off those kinds of sci-fi dreams. Realistically we probably need to learn to survive as a species before we ascend as beings…

Think about it though… Humans, resourceful Humans… where will they be a thousand years from now, a hundred thousand years from now, a million years from now?