Project Foresight

I've always been a huge fan of Carl Sagan -- not so much his old PBS specials, but his written material. The text of Cosmos is so much better than those 1970's vintage episodes. A reader of Sagan and my Monologues might have noticed how my titles reflect his.

He was fond of suggesting that humans, while capable of foresight, are incapable of using it. This concept has only been amplified over the past two decades in American culture:

• Why do you suppose a bank, any bank, would have ever lent a half million dollars to a 46 year old WalMart associate for thirty years?
• Per my last post, why would people cash-out their retirements, not for paying down debt, but purely for short term material goods?
• Why would they have ever used their houses as ATM machines? Did they not expect they would have to pay the original principal back?
• Why do you suppose we are paving over prime farmlands with sprawl? Are we never assuming that any future generation might find local food production essential?
• Why do wealthy pseudo-environmentalists parade around Boulder, Colorado on bikes, wearing yellow and orange geckos on their bicycle jerseys, but don't give a shit if any geckos are still living in the mountain creeks?
• Why is it that we will harvest, legally or otherwise, our green sturgeons until there isn't a single one left on the planet?

With Sagan's legacy I am apt to consider the consequences of my actions 400 years from today -- a seemingly ridiculous length of time, isn't it? Think of the year 2409. If you and our other 307,289,958 Americans can't even look forward a half dozen years, why should I ever bother thinking four centuries ahead?

I wonder, as Sagan did, if we won't have destroyed ourselves well before 2409.