OK, so you know I quibble with Stephen Hawking’s mechanical view of the universe (who is featured in the above video), but I still love Carl Sagan (more prominently featured), and have very fond memories of his old TV program, Cosmos. I’m well aware that I have been a bit of a downer lately, but blogging lets me process what I’m feeling about the world, and hence I’ve been on the downside of the optimism scale of late. Anyhow, to switch gears, this autotune mash-up of Sagan is a wonderfully positive song. It actually makes me feel good about being human living in this universe.
As Carl Sagan says, we are living in the most exciting time to be alive in the history of humanity. To paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, we have at our disposal, right now, the resources to design a future in which 100% of humanity can live like millionaires while sustaining the resources of our planet. Our challenge is to advance our civilization to Type III from it’s current position of about Type .7 (not yet Level I on the Kardashev scale) before our dying Sun envelopes us in about 1/2 billion years.
The prospect of the next singularity in which technology and biology are united (Ray Kurzweil) and the exponential growth of technology, are all steps in the necessary evolution of the next generation of sentient beings (I refer to as Sapiens) beyond humans.
The next step in this evolution is the capacity to design large scale systems. (I talk about some of our baby steps toward systems design at http://andDESIGNmagazine.blogspot.com) In order to do this we need students in schools to learn design thinking (the use of images, objects, spaces, and experiences to solve problems).