DISCOVER OUR NEW WORLD in 1492 …
Saturday, April 24, 2021
Over the next 500 years, natural climate change will happen.
Oceans will rise, weather patterns will change, pandemics will come along, and the world might get overpopulated relative to its ability to feed everyone – so there might be a big die-off event for people and animals.
That’s a short period, so it’s unlikely we’ll have new species evolving, but women will lose their fifth toes from too many centuries of shoes that pinch.
None of us have crystal balls, and as we look back, we know the pace of change is accelerating exponentially. Expecting that a more innovative society will change more wisely and be more nimble about it is theoretically possible – but given disasters of COVID-19, financial crises, sub-prime mortgages, and political volatility in recent years, intelligence is not a cure – it’s just another variable.
Before 2nd and 3rd World countries wore those labels, there was the old world; the 1st World. Then wide-eyed adventurers in ships crossed oceans to verify the earth was round, to see what was over the next horizon beside more water.
A comment struck me on a recent webinar; a speaker who could have easily chosen different terms like post-pandemic, after-Covid or ‘once we are through this mess’ … didn’t – he used the term The New World without skipping a beat.
I wondered what it must have been like for people in 1491 Spain before Columbus made his big find, The New World. Some expected Columbus to sail over the edge of a flat world. Some expected disaster, while others might have predicted he’d never come back. Cynical Spaniards would have expected, sooner or later, their King and Queen would abandon such stupid adventures as plain crazy and withhold funding.
I’m sure there were very few betting on Columbus returning with treasures and laying claim to two continents, neither of which contained China – for he discovered The New World. Looking back, Columbus did well for Spain and the whole world even though he never found the route to China.
My point is not about discovery, adventure, and charting new courses on the high seas. I wonder how ‘The New World’ will look?
Will we, one day, see ourselves having navigated well or taken the best care of citizens. While we feel borderline-euphoric over vaccinations and dreams of herd immunity, those brooks little comfort for 3rd world countries where death tolls are poised to be devastating – India, Brazil, and Bangladesh, to name a few.
Most talking heads, business leaders, politicians and financiers boast of rubber-band-snap back, predicting robust 3rd and 4th quarters this year from pent-up demand spurring consumer spending, strong demand for luxury goods too, booming real estate markets and high demand for cybersecurity software. They will be right about some of it, but not all – they never are.
Let’s go back – imagine it’s 1492 – The New World was just discovered. Columbus went shopping for Asian spices and came back with two new continents – now that’s a big black swan event!
New things. New ideas. New purposes. New opportunities.
How will The New World-2022 be different from that?
Yes, modern and techie – faster, and techie – more sophisticated and wizened by hundreds of years of history since the discovery of The New World and a century of history since the last global pandemic. Many are talking about the roaring ‘20s. I don’t hear that roar.
I expect we’ll talk like a post-carbon, tree-hugging, alternative energy chorus for a while. We’ll pretend carbon is the root of all evil instead of the root of all life – which it is. We’ll pretend that politics and epidemiology can change the world, that better policing will make us safe and non-racist.
We, collectively, hold so many false expectations of new life, new ways, and I roll my eyes believing they aren’t wrong but also won’t be instantly right either.
The longer we are separated from ‘how things used to be,’ the pendulum will swing a few time – just long enough for the anti-vaxxers to come around, just long enough for enough folks to lose their shirts on crypto-currencies, just long enough for evil-doers and evil nations to up their games.
What do we believe The New World will look like, and how will we look?
It might be safe to guess about next year or the year after, but five hundred years from now, how will people look back on us – and will it be as dramatic over that 500 years as the time from 1492 to now?
Short answer: vastly more.
Look at the different starting points in terms of technology, science, general literacy and communication.
My predictions are no so much about the next 24 months – because the timing of things is a factor of too many variables, so I’m thinking of this more in terms of how we’ll view our 2021 from 500 years in the future.
We’ll have found ways to moderate population growth, feed people better using less land and fewer animals – we’ll have pock-marked the planet with mines for rare-earth minerals to make enough lithium and cobalt things to make our implanted devices and software-piloted vehicles/hovercraft/planes will take anywhere we want to go.
We’ll still make things; primarily, our things will be made by machines.
As we know them now, religions will have failed, died, and been resurrected as philosophy. The planet will have one government, one currency, and have harnessed fusion, so then everyone will have constant power 24/7 everywhere with the radiation risk of nuclear. We’ll be exploring space more – possibly interplanetary travel and beyond. We’ll know, understand, better use and better protect our oceans. Maybe we’ll live and work underwater. And I don’t mean Manhattan underwater – which is not to say sea levels won’t rise, but I expect Manhattan to be a futuristic Venice; they’ll build it up higher.
We’ll have implanted devices to monitor health and make brain-internet connections (or to whatever replaces the internet) whereby we’ll have instant access to everything our mind might want from the entire body of accumulated knowledge. Schools will be reinvented to focus more on human social skills and concepts – for all other things we’ll rely on technology. Universities of today will be museums or demolished. Higher education will be a software installation to our brain – point, click, supply credit card number – and presto, bingo, bango, a Ph.D. is implanted. Some coursework will be involved. The brain will be involved, but A.I. will have overtaken human capability. Rather than training better human brains, our robots will be building better A.I. to implant in systems and in people.
They’ll have Mozart, revere Kerouac and Hitchens, Gates and Jobs, but most arts and science icons of our time will have faded from memory, at best, tiny footnotes of ancient history.
We often find great satisfaction in seeing something entirely different from the expected or forecast – we’ll just have shorter wait-times for each next-new-big-thing.
A year ago, the world was ‘sort of’ pro-green, thinking about being more environmentally wise, and the economies of all countries were lumbering along, making small changes that always seemed too hard, too costly, and too slow to implement. Enter COVID-19, alarming and unsettling everyone – and wow, haven’t we made so many unpredicted changes?
Nothing in life is certain except change.
What comes after NOW is entirely unknown.
Every expert is trying to figure that out, and every politician is taking advice from every expert in their orbit – and flip-flops are frequent as new information seems both better and contrary to old data.
We want some settle-down and calming-down time soon. That’s an imaginary concept we might all need from time to time, but life and death go on, calendar dates change every 24 hours.
It is impossible to know with any certainty what life will be like two years from now, alone 500 years from now – but we should also recognize what future historians will write. They will look back at this pandemic in the second decade of the 21st century – and they’ll learn lessons from all the genuinely clever innovations being made now. Whether we’ll learn from all the dumb moves is questionable. We are making history – we are living proof of history, and we get to embrace The New World …
Welcome to The New World.
We are all, just like Columbus, in search of something.
500 years from now, what will historians claim was a turning point – that thing discovered by me, or by you, in 2021?
Someone will hit the right balance of ‘change/moonshot’ to alter this world – it might be one of us. What Jobs did, what Mozart did, and what Einstein did – no different than Edison or Galileo – hard work, big brains, and effort. Somebody in a kitchen, on a beach, or in a lab is working on something right now that will change the world and be important still in 500 years.
And yes, ladies, I’m right about that fifth-toe.
Enjoy your shoes while you can.
p.s. – in tribute to Columbus I’ve limited the above column to 1,492 words. I could ramble on and on but that seemed an apropos place to stop.