Just finished Brief Answers. Lucy’s tribute to her father brought a tear. I admire Hawking’s ability to clarify.  No one has better clarified Space/Time.  I understand the concept clearly at last.  I don’t quite get his explanation of time travel though, probably because the idea has no appeal to me.  Indeed, I don’t want to accept the inevitability of Hawking’s grim thinking about our future.    

I find myself beginning to rebel and reject the ever increasing power of digital technology, or the idea Earth’s temperature could someday mimic Venus'.  I think some of those postulates serve to alienate people ever more from our place here on Earth as children of the soil. I need to believe that if it is too late to stop the warming of the planet, we will find ways to adapt as we always have. We are of the planet like bees and trees. We are not just passengers on our way to another planet warmed by another star.  

So, Useful as they are, I’m not one who believes STEM programs in the schools are the answer to the grim future predicted by some for the planet and for AI.  From my perspective, the domination of the purely rational, technical mind-set goes too far. I can see a time when reaction could set in and be better balanced by the artist/humanist perspective, but I also see few signs of same.  Engineers and Techies are trained how to make and run ever more complex tools and things; they’re not trained to know the best ways for humanity and Earth to use what they make.    

Humanity has never rejected the onward march of creating more useful tools from stone axes to nuclear ones, but we are still adolescents when it comes to the best uses of same. Hawking uses the word “stupidity.” But I like to hope that we adolescents could be on the edge of developing an unprecedented maturity, but to do that we’ll have to find out how to continue living fully as Earth’s children rather than escaping.  I don’t want to escape. I’d rather go out in the rain.  The living critters of Earth and the processes of Earth are too much with me and part of me.  We also must make learning to think a school priority.  People don’t even realize thinking is a skill to learn.

Of course, I can imagine a time when our tools take over all our chores and allow us once again to find ourselves as Earth’s children and relish our place, our connection to nature and the planet. That would take an emotional maturity we now lack.  I like to imagine a time when we can live with wild nature as our ancestors did millennia ago. And keep my car.  

Marty and I were once driving on CA Route 1 in northern California.  ’Twas a two lane road in a small town when traffic stopped in both directions to allow a herd of elk to cross the road.  The animals took their time, grazed on neighbors’ lawns, disdained the automobiles.  Drivers waited patiently until the herd crossed. Some got out of their cars; it didn't matter. It was a long, beautiful, engaging moment when we were close, almost intimate with wildlife. I’ll never forget it. Now, I hope for a time when a family of wolves will stop traffic on a rural road in the foothills of South Carolina and the people will allow them peaceful passage.  

So, I have to reject the pessimism I felt while reading Hawking’s vision of a tech dominated future. That pessimism got intolerable at one point. I stopped and toyed with the idea that my grandsons’ generation across the planet ought abstain from breeding. Then I realized how alienated I’d become to even give one moment to such a terrible idea.
2018-11-14