On The Cusp: The Immediacy of Societal Transformation

We live on the cusp of a situation where, previously, it was impossible for a single human being or a relatively tiny group… to introduce a technology or behavior that radically alters the entire meaning of the history of life on Earth… by radically altering the current and future paths of both the biosphere and human beings. Of course, one might argue, there was never not such a time… at least not after the industrial revolution… it was a matter of scope and rate… to which I will both agree, and assert that the modern degree of compression of scope and rate has gone functionally exponential…

The dark side of this, is that it is presently possible (by which I mean achievable) for a highly motivated individual to collapse the biosphere. To produce an endgame scenario for life on Earth, or, at the very least, to reduce the remaining pool of organisms to the phase where there are no complex organisms anymore.

And some will argue ‘Well the Earth has been through that before,’ and I find this objection puerile, because, while not merely trivial, it rejects active responsibility while at the same time failing to properly address a variety of outcome scenarios by simply presuming that the complex organisms and ecologies will (eventually) recover. There are many situations where this will not occur, and the relationship between the…