In the 2001 movie “Space Odyssey” humanity evolves by interacting with mysterious, black monoliths.
Global Warming, the destruction of the environment, the mass extinction of the living beings we share our planet with, have pushed Earth at breaking point.
This is the moment to take drastic measures to protect ourselves and the environment, but will we be able to do so?
The causes for most of the problems we face today and we will face in the future are capitalism and consumerism. Our constant need to consume in order to support our economy , an economy which grows as we consume and needs us to consume to support it,is a vicious cycle that is at the expense of the environment. Unless we change the way we live entirely the consequences will be disastrous: millions of people will be condemned to poverty, famine will be commonplace, as will migration as a result of property destruction due to extreme weather . There is already a new term for it: climatic apartheid. In 2018, in the California wildfires celebrities and tycoons paid private fire-fighters to save their properties, while common people watched helplessly, unable to save theirs. This is just a case in point of what the world will be like in the future, a world where only those who have money will survive while the others are doomed.
The corona virus pandemic is just another indication of what is to come, and this is just the beginning . As long as man continues to invade and make use of unspoilt land and uses intensive farming methods for food production, the future pandemics will arise more often.
We need firm decisions and the fate of humanity has fallen into the hands of leaders such as the previous US president Donald Trump, who outright refused to accept climate change’s existence, brazilian president Zaif Bolsonaro, who allows the continuation of the destruction of large regions of the Amazon rainforest and other leaders who just don’t take action with the sole purpose of growing the economy.
At these dire times of ours, the decisions we take will decide not just our future, but the future of all living beings on Earth. We don’t have much time left and its is a question whether we will make it or not.
In the movie, our planet is visited by a mysterious black monolith that finds a tribe of primitive homosapiens that, with its help, evolve. If drastic measures aren’t taken until the next time the monolith revisits us, then it won’t find a successful humanity travelling from star to star, but rather a ruined, empty world, stripped of all life forms.
Should we fail, the only thing left in this empty world will be humanity’s bad imitation of monoliths, monoliths that symbolize the emptiness of this world, as well as humanity’s failure.
