clv101 wrote:
My point is that the world, and especially the next few decades is highly uncertain. In my opinion, anyone who says anything about the future with the kind of certainty UndercoverElephant does is likely to be wrong - like almost everyone else who's made predictions about the future.
That's simply not true. People were predicting war in Europe for decades before 1914, and similarly many people felt war was inevitable once Hitler came to power.
If you have a good knowledge of facts, a feel for the unfolding of events, and perhaps above all an understanding of
the limitations of human nature based on observation and knowledge of history, you can make pretty reasonable
general predictions about the future.
There will be no great pulling-together of humanity to face this crisis. Quite the opposite. This is a situation that has played out many times in history, and the fact is that when there aren't enough lifeboats, "You first" is not the prevailing ethos.
UE's predictions aren't even all that specific. Your attitude seems to be, "Never mind the evidence, let's take solace in what we don't know." If something good is waiting in the wings that we don't know about, it would have to be HUGE to counteract the negative effects of what we do know about. And if it's that huge, you'd have expected it to have made its existence known by now.
Some film character once said: "The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."
Actually, there is a body of scientific evidence that suggests this is not the case: that we are all careering towards an inevitable future and that what seems like free will to us is just the future pulling our strings...
"We're just waiting, looking skyward as the days go down / Someone promised there'd be answers if we stayed around."
