Think about all those utopias that science fiction has sold us since its origins. Those cities where technology reached a zenith we can now only dream of, while civilization prospers as well as it can. As a team led by Spanish theoretical physicist and astrobiologist Celia Blanco, a researcher at the Ramón y Cajal Institute, that future is almost impossible for our society.
Remembering all those dystopias that science fiction has narrated to exhaustion, you might think that this impossibility comes from future global wars, world pandemics or even larger disasters in the form of meteorites from outer space. However, as experts analyze ten plausible scenarios for human civilization, what lies ahead is a much bleaker picture.
We Know How to Survive the Science-Fiction Future
The work published on ArXiv simulates 200 trajectories for each of those ten scenarios over 1,000 years, revealing a devastating reality: only 2 of those 10 endure to the next millennium without collapsing. The rest not only collapse, but they do so on more than one occasion or even recur.
And they do so, unlike what we usually think, due to two elements that are not usually the protagonists of the most widespread apocalypses in science fiction: the rate of resource depletion and the capacity to recover after a collapse. In other words, what determines our fate as a civilization is precisely what we are neglecting most.
If only two out of ten futures survive, the problem isn’t that the stars align in some way, it’s that we are rowing in the opposite direction. The majority of political and economic configurations that we maintain as a civilization are, unsurprisingly, the ones that lead us to that collapse according to Celia Blanco: “The long-term fate of a civilization, apparently, depends less on luck than on design”.
The two only scenarios in which we survive are those of an egalitarian society with a horizontally structured government, and one in which the acceptance of autonomous machines is joined with coexistence with nature and the equal distribution of resources.
The rest, from transhumanism to returning to our origins and becoming one with nature as our ancestors did, end up falling sooner or later. In other words, the only futures we survive require wealth sharing and distributed governance among all. Authoritarianism, by contrast, is the system that collapses first and more often.
Besides urging us to make better decisions as a civilization, the study also suggests that by analyzing the chemical footprints left by those hypothetical futures we can better study other planets to try to discover whether there is or was at some point a civilization that matches those standards. What should worry us most right now, in any case, is what kind of footprint we will leave on our own planet.
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