Our future
Humanity’s future to be precise
Waddling through the swamps and marshes of Medium posts, I suddenly struck something. I feared the worse. An all-listi-gator. Taking a deep breath, I plunged into the shallow waters and found this pearl. I am glad I found this.
I remember reading Elon Musk’s tweet when SpaceX launched the used rocket. I felt thrilled and knew that this meant the dawn of a new era. Of course I didn’t entertain a notion of why we shouldn’t go. But this post has stimulated me to think that way, even if it is for a thought experiment.
It is true that we have utterly devastated this planet. Ripped it off its resources. Stripped it off its beauty. In fact I was thinking today of how Earth would look in a hundred years. For some reason my mind came up with the picture of Tatooine.

But here’s the problem. Tatooine appears to be mildly populated with vast open lands. That wont be the case with a cataclysmic Earth. There’d be hordes of people. If you ask me, the root cause of all problems and the causal effect of the consequences such as industrialisation and deforestation is overpopulation.
No matter what, we cannot control our urge to reproduce. There. I’ve said it.
But then again. God created the universe to explore. Not for it to remain a shrouded mystery. Does that give us the authority to maraud to any planet then? Pretty much if we have the resources to make it till there. What about our innate tendency to destroy everything and anything we touch? Err…fork that?
It is a sort of overarching paradoxical loop of debate. Perhaps we need to find an intermediary way. I was thinking of something along the lines of sending fleets of controlled human populations for colonisation. Like sending ten thousand divergent people to Mars. Some to Moon. Some to other planet. Most importantly keeping the population in check on those planets. And on Mother Earth.
In his book, The World Without Us, Alan Weisman talks about how nature will take over human creations and the whole world if we were to suddenly vanish. Imagine if hundred thousands of people left earth. They’d desert so many cities, allowing nature to reclaim what is rightfully its own. This will rejuvenate Earth and maybe give it a second life. Its an idea worth considering anyway.
Yes there is the possibility of rogues travelling from one planet to another without permission leading to uncharted populations but this very problem and its solution is presented by Philip K Dick in his novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? The solution is simple. Kill them
(The rogues are Android in the novel. Don’t worry. *Awkward laugh*)
