Thread by @AukeHoekstra

A short story (long thread) about life on this rock called earth and about the choices we face.

Once upon a time, there was a rock.

The rock was very special because billions of years ago, the chemicals on the rock started doing improbable things to form something called life.

After a while plants and animals appeared on the rock and then - only a short while ago really - one animal called a human, started using technology.

First, humans started using tools like hammers and clubs. They learned to make fire so they could get more energy by cooking otherwise inedible animals and plants. Humans started using speech to convey more complex concepts to other humans.

Then they started farming food so they became less dependent on the whims of nature. They started writing so things could be remembered, even when the original human messenger was not there. By now, humans could dominate and enslave all the other species.

Then came the time of machines. First machines replaced human muscles. Using machines, humans could travel at great speeds over land, water and even through the air. Powerful machines started producing all kind of stuff in factories, even other machines.

All this meant the machines needed food, just like muscles. And because there where so many of them and they were so powerful, there where entire areas called countries that needed fifty times more energy to feed machines than to feed humans.

Then the humans found a solution: dead plants and animals buried in the rock long ago that they could dig up and burn as food for the machines. And so it went on and humans multiplied and machines multiplied even more.

Then new machines arrived whose purpose was to aid or replace human brains and to communicate instantly over large distances. These new machines further increased the pace with which humans and machines could make more new machines and more new stuff.

Many humans now lived in large dwellings, specifically made for them, surrounded by machines that made them connected, comfortable and cured them when they got sick. Other machines could transport them all around the rock when they felt like it.

What humans found most important was to have more stuff than other human beings. And so the amount of machines and stuff kept increasing rapidly. Sometimes humans used machines to kill other humans when they though they should have the stuff the other humans had.

Until, one faithful day, humans realised they couldn't do this forever. Soon they would run out of dead animals and plants to burn. Soon they would have dug up so much of the rock and taken away so much from other life on the rock that the whole rock system would collapse.

A period of denial and lamentation started:

Surely the supernatural being they invented as creator of the rock would provide for them!

Maybe it was all a hoax, perpetrated by humans that were too smart and up to no good?

If it where true, it was probably impossible to change anyway, so best to ignore it as long as possible.

And so on.

This period was no fun at all.

Fortunately some humans reacted differently. They thought: if we where smart enough to dig ourselves into this hole, we should be smart enough to dig us out of it. And: if we can create machines to dig us into this hole, we should be able to create machines that dig us out of it.

This reaction intensified when humans constructed machines that could take them away from their rock into space. Looking from space the rock didn't look large and indestructible but small and fragile.

Humans started to think that maybe they should see themselves as the custodians of this rock instead of as its pillagers. (If only so they and their children might enjoy it a while longer.)

Some humans started to work together with smart machines to make simplified models of what happened on the rock. Using such models they could safely plot strategies to dig them out of the hole. Especially young humans where good at playing such games of 'ravage or repair'.

And so it was that humans found out it was possible for future generations of humans to have just as much stuff as they had for a very, very, long time. They didn't have hundreds of prosperous years left but hundreds of millions of years!

What they found was that energy was not at all the problem they thought it was. The star gave them thousands of times the energy they needed and it would shine for hundreds of millions of more years. This energy could easily be converted directly into electricity.

You could also use the air movement on the rock caused by the star. And although this was a lot less energy, it was still easily ten times (maybe even a hundred times) more than they needed.

At first most humans thought burning dead plants and animals meant they had to give up less stuff so they wanted to continue doing that. But it turned out they actually needed to give up less stuff with solar and wind.

Raw stuff was not really the problem either, even though a lot of people liked claiming it was. There was enough raw stuff left to make all the energy producing machines humans needed and also give every human being a copious amount of luxury stuff.

The problem was that they where not behaving themselves as custodians of the rock:

1.
All the burning of dead plants and animals was heating up the rock. So that would have to stop or they would have to create a way to scrub it out of the atmosphere or shade the rock. Stopping was probably easiest and safest.

2.
They would have to stop just willy nilly diggin up stuff and then throwing it away after a few months or years. All this thrown away stuff was bad for life on the rock and they would soon run out of stuff if they continued like this.

So they needed to dig it up a little bit more carefully, they needed to reuse it and they should better cut down on the useless stuff. Which was actually kind of common sense if you stepped back just a little.

3.
They where decimating life on the rock, not only by heating up the rock and polluting it but also by destroying the places where the other plants and animals lived. A lot of humans thought killing of all these other plants and animals would take the shine off their rock a bit.

Other humans realised they had no clue yet how to keep the rock habitable for their children without the other plants and animals also doing their thing.

So basically the plan was:
1.
Stop heating the rock by burning dead plants and animals.
2.
Stop polluting the rock by reusing stuff instead of throwing it away.
3.
Stop taking away the rock from all other plants and animals and give them some space too.

The humans who came up with this plan thought is was pretty obvious now that it was formulated. Many younger people asked: why haven't we started doing it like this a long time ago?

But many, oft older, humans tried to convince the younger people that this was impossible and a bad idea. Most of them simply thought the way they had been doing it all along was fine because they had been doing it all along, thank you very much.

Some of course had other motives. They had acquired a lot of stuff doing it the old way and they where afraid they would lose some of that stuff if things changed.

Also, humans had organised themselves in tribes and had convinced themselves that their tribe was the best and should have more of the rock and its stuff than other tribes. They found it much more important to fight with other tribes than to care for the rock.

And that's where humans are now.

They have the plans, the machines, the energy and the stuff to dig them out their hole.

They just have to convince or push aside the people that don't want to change or might lose some stuff if they do it differently.

And they must be able to look beyond their own tribe.

So now I look at this rock from space and wonder what will happen.

Will humans be able to work together to create hundreds of millions of years of increasing prosperity on this very special rock?

Or will they kill themselves and must evolution start anew?

Only time will tell.