Tomorrow’s World

The brilliant thing about humans is that unlike all other life forms on earth we make things. And when I say make, I don’t mean fabricate, as birds build nests and beavers build dams. We don’t just use tools like the sticks chimps utilise to fish for termites, or birds to root for grubs. No, when I say we make things we create spectacular things that just didn’t exist before. In the minds of certain animal rights activists there is virtually no difference between mankind and monkeys; when you show me a monkey making a smart phone I may concede you have a point.

The current Mr Greenpeace, John Sauven, was on the Sunday Politics yesterday, making something: a right tit of himself. In the face of verifiable evidence that, on all measures, air pollution has been steadily declining for forty years he blatantly denied using invented statistics and fake claims of 40,000 premature deaths for political ends. As always with those of a leftist bent – the highly intelligent, caring, progressive sector of society – measures to solve this non-problem would impact more heavily on those they seek to protect from their own ignorance... and autonomy.

On Planet Greenpeace, the hoi polloi can’t be trusted to wisely steward the world’s resources and it is only by limiting potential, ideally by legislation, that devious capitalistic urges can be curtailed. No third runway, obviously. Then ridding the roads of cars, closing down supposedly polluting industries and soon, energy rationing. What next, compulsory vegetarianism? I have to confess a certain sympathy with one Green aim, population reduction: starting with a swift cull of those who espouse Mother Earth philosophies that would return us to agrarian lifestyles and a level of poverty unknown in generations.

Turning back the clock – a charge often erroneously levelled at those who wish to curtail big government and the global socialist project – is never the answer. The genie is out of the bottle and there is only one way; ahead. You can’t put the atom back together and pretend it never happened and you can’t forget all the advances made by people with vision that have improved our world immeasurably. Around the time I was born the global population was estimated at 3 billion. Fifteen years later it hit 4 billion and a fresh wave of third-world famines sparked the fear that we would never be able to feed so many. Forty years on and it has doubled, yet we keep on somehow feeding them.

And we do it because we are big-brained problem solvers. Our technological progress is just that, progress; forging forwards. We went to the moon, we eradicated diseases that used to claim millions, we fed the world and now, as much as at any time before, we must look to our ingenuity not to limit our possibilities but to push on. Here's just one example of our staggering ingenuity, plucked randomly from dozens, which hints at denying our doomsayers the fulfilment of their wishes; carbon 14, a thing that never existed before we made it. Imagine a world where electrical energy is no longer an issue. Portable, safe, effectively everlasting diamond battery power for everybody. From the problem of nuclear waste comes a solution for the future.

In the future there will be equal rights for vegetables

Will the prophets of doom and disaster embrace the possibilities with open arms? No, they will find something to hang their antagonistic hats on; something to bleat about. When gender battles and planet-saving and diversy-multicultilicious concerns have run their course there will always be new causes to cling onto. For just as the potential of mankind to think its way out of trouble seems infinite so does its capacity to imagine itself hard done by. In tomorrow’s world, as life gets easier and easier, the malcontents will continue to thrive.