A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

Loosener and Davies contend persuasively that the ‘clockwork universe' concept helped to shape our materialistic world, formed on the belief that everything proceeds in the cosmos according to fixed laws. The job of science was to establish just what these laws were and to learn how to manipulate them.

Colin Mason states in his new book A short History of the future - surviving The 2030 Spike  that  - This mechanistic view, still very much alive and preoccupied with material productivity, largely disavows creativity and free will, the mysterious, the spiritual - and asks

Has the future a future? 

He goes on to say - Science as a discipline has, of course changed. Einstein provided totally new perceptions of space, time and gravity. Quantum physics implies that the apparently solid does not exist, except as energy. ‘Particles' appear to come into existence out of nothing and as mysteriously disappear again. Chaos theory, contending that systems which normally appear to be ordered can be perturbed by factors impossible to assess, depicts a universe of partly ordered events, partly of unpredictable ones.

A major part of the scientific view is toward the idea that the cosmos is organised on apparently random (dare we say it?) lines which may best be understood intuitively, rather than by reductionism and linear thinking.

As Richard Dawkins points out, the best way to understand how a motor car engine works is to break it down into its component parts and understand them. Whether this ‘reductionist' principle is a tool one can apply to all areas of enquiry is now seriously in question. Many studies have been carried out into  "unconscious thinking" -intuition - leaving little doubt that the brain can sort information and present answers to problems without the owner of that brain being consciously aware of what is going on.

Eighteenth century botanist, Carolus Linear, wrote of ‘a great chain of being, a chiefly ordained and immutable hierarchy of life which among other things, established white Europeans as a superior race, with the right, even the mission, to dominate `inferior' races.

Observing any one of several individual but critical trends suggests that, without rapid and positive action, history may have only a very short way to run.

Whether it is the growth of world population,  of  greenhouse gas concentrations and the accelerating rate of climate change, the running down of oil and natural gas reserves, growing shortages of fresh water for agriculture, industry and domestic use, or the increasing difficulty in controlling epidemic diseases -we are facing a mounting global crisis that will peak in less than a generation, around the year 2030.

Taken together, these trends point to a potentially apocalyptic period, if not for the planet itself then certainly for human Societies and for humankind.

In this compelling book, an update to The 2030 Spike, Colin Mason explains in clear and irrefutable terms what is going on - largely below the surface of our daily or weekly news bulletins.

Being forewarned, we are forearmed, and Colin Mason draws on his own extensive political experience to describe how much we can do as individuals, and above all collectively, not merely to avert crisis but to engineer thoroughgoing change that can usher in genuinely sustainable and valuable alternatives to the way we live now.

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