as a 17 year old male living today, i can't help but find my outlook on the future to be a little bleak. What with the threat of nuclear war constantly increasing, global warming breathing down our necks, all this 2012 shit (which personally i dont believe but still), and just humans in general being complete assholes to each other, i don't see much to look forward to. Do you guys?
Look forward to the challenge of living thru all this crap. The universe has handed you a test and you can choose to view it as the ever so popular "what is the sound of one hand clapping" sort of question or a more "if A&B are =, and B&C are = then A&C are also =" view of things. But it sounds as if you might be looking to the universe as some sort of replacement to the Nintendo or another Reality TV show, you need to look within first to find what it is in this place which drives you, what your interests are. You can be sitting in a thatched hut in the middle of nowhere and while on one hand "theres nothing to do, nothing exciting", on the other, you could be exploring the area around that "dismal little hut", planting crops, watching the birds, finding out where the source for that creek is. You could be in the city surrounded by crime, pollution and overcrouding, or surrounded with a never ending source of opportunity to learn at libraries, museums etc. Perspective friend, thats where the answer lies. My 2 cents.
As a 17 year old, you missed the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and the Petrov incident in 1983. People back then had much more reason to expect an imminent nuclear holocaust than they do now, but it didn't happen. The threat of nuclear war is not "constantly increasing", it comes and goes.
Cajjohnson: As you can see I have several years on you. I went through "duck and cover " drills in school in case of Atomic attack. Then there was the Cuban Missle Crisis in the early 60's. With people building fallout shellters and buying tonnes of food. That was the begining of the Cold War, then Viet Nam which grabed my ass for 2 years. Then Y2K, now it's peak oil crisis and credit crash. I'll be 60 in another year, I'm looking foward to teach my grandsons to fly fish and spend more time in our garden. If a person looks for the negative, you can find it. The positive is out there too. ...............................Dennis.......
The future is what you make it. Remember when Bill Gates said "Where do you want to go today?" The planning should have occured yesterday. x
yup. i see lots of things to look forward to. right now it looks like people are dead set determined to make it as painful as possible, through ignorance and indifference, to get there, which is really dumb, because we will anyway, even if we have to be dragged screaming backwards into it. =^^= .../\...
indeed. and while the future IS something we're making all the time, i'm looking at what we ARE currently making it, as well as changes that can, and some that almost certain will, occur in our doing so. there WILL be the most great peace and its perminence, sometime withing this milinium. which means not only will wars end but nations and people will stop screwing other nations and people out of means of survival and gratification, and yes, end doing so to their own as well. but i'm not saying this is all going to happen on such and such a marvelous date, or that we're suddenly going to stop giving ourselves a lot of pain on one either, but there WILL come a day, a day probably, when there are a lot fewer of us around to witness it, almost certainly one i won't be alive to see, when noting will be any less sustainable the it has to be, and at the same time less any gratifying for anyone either. and it may come about, as soon as people start realizing they've been conned if they expect to find that gratification by impressing each other. =^^= .../\...
yes, there is disinformation, but there is always a balance. with "evil" comes "good" peak oil spawns tax redistribution and renewable energy an expensive and ineffective war makes people realize there are better things to spend money on - like education, which will virtually destroy poverty we are in a new age - an age where we are depending less on ourselves and more on eachother. give us some time to work it out. yes, we as individuals only get 100 years of experience, but "time" is infinite, and things will change. just realize that people hundreds and thousand and millions of years ago humans were discussing the same concepts...
Okay, so how will formal education for the whole world end poverty? How can you institute a formal education system for the whole planet, never mind a single country, unless you have a privileged minority, and a poor minority for them to profit from? Who will draw up a curriculum that's relevant with respect to all cultures on the planet? I understand where your coming from, but it shows a lack of understanding of the social relationships that create poverty. Education is important, but we need a new understanding of what education is; It must me relevant to time and place, it must evolve from the ground up. It cannot Be dictated by a central authority. Poverty, after all is a product of privilege.