Alas, fundamentally, life remained "business as usual"; in poetic terms: love and war; frankly and precisely: making babies and killing each other. Just the balance between these favorite activities shifted. Although the exterminations have been nothing to sneeze at (and wasted a lot of precious oil), they were vastly exceeded by the procreative bedlam, resulting in a population explosion unseen in the history of the planet. Of course, it has shrunk the naturally short duration of the oil period further, so that other energy sources could barely be developed.
Mankind did discover atomic fission, and an observer from another planet would assume that power plants exploiting this process are being built expeditiously all over the Earth. This may be true in China, but not in America and Europe although their inhabitants discovered all of the advanced science and invented the resulting technologies. They also became accustomed to a particularly high energy use, which should spur them on fervently. The conundrum, which the alien observer may not readily comprehend, has a twofold root: (a) the degree of mental enlightenment of all Earth people is characterized by a Gaussian distribution with the masses in the center still pretty much in the carnivore animal stage (as we have seen in regard to "love and war"); (b) yet these countries elect their governments by popular vote - i.e. one vote per person. As a consequence, the limited mental horizon of the majority of the populace, their superstitions and fears and their often illogical way of thinking is manifested and actually concentrated in their government leaders. |
Our alien observer would find it hilarious that these Western people are afraid that a few thousand might die in an accident of a nuclear power plant yet do give a second thought neither to the tens of thousands dieing each year in automobile accidents nor to the catastrophe certain to come upon us when the oil runs out. They always cite the explosion of the Tschernobyl reactor in the Ukraine yet forget that it was caused, in a typical Soviet fashion, by an inept management overseeing poorly trained operators of a faultily designed facility that should serve as nothing else but a school example of how not to run an atomic power plant. They also bring up the incident at the Three Mile Island station in Pennsylvania yet overlook the little fact that there all safety measures functioned and the count of casualties was exactly zero.
A hundred years ago the millions of people still got by eating the food raised naturally on the farms surrounding them and delivered by railway and horse cart; heating their tightly clustered homes with a little coal or wood and lighting their short evenings dimly by gas made from coal; walking to their schools and work places; weaving their clothes from wool and cotton; crossing the oceans by wind and coal; and generally working hard ten hours a day on six days a week.
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