magicmom wrote:Sadly I have to agree with you. As big a fan of Star Trek that I may be. I think the human race is bound for extinction and will never reach the final frontier.
I hope I'm wrong, but don't really think so.
"We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair...death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universes will all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind and empty of thought, feeling, life..."
— Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass aka Northern Lights)
"'And we'll do it,' she said.
She turned away. Behind them lay pain and death and fear; ahead of them lay doubt, and danger, and fathomless mysteries. But they weren't alone.
So Lyra and her dæmon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky."
You know, a friend of my father's survived Teretsin and Auschwitz. The Nazis sent him there as a 10 year old boy. He is the only member of his family, of Czech Jews, to survive. He has 6 grandchildren, now. I am always struck by the optimism and humour with which he greets every day in life-- for him, having survived that, each day that God grants him on this Earth is a gift.
We may be doomed, but we have to argue, and fight, and strive, not to be doomed. As Churchill said 'we all have to do our bit'.
The darkest shadow that ever came over civilization was the rise of Naziism in the 1930s, and what it did to the world in the 1940s.
If our grandparents had given up then, it would have been over-- the 1000 year night would have consumed the western world. Read Philip K Dick's 'Man in a High Castle' for a looksee of a world under Nazi rule (or Len Deighton's SS GB for the British version of that).
And then there was the constant threat of nuclear war. The world lurched to the edge of nuclear catastrophe at least twice: in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and again in the autumn of 1983. In each case, it was headed off by the good sense of a few men who avoided responding to apparent provocation. In that latter case, a Russian colonel named Petrov was in the control room when his computers signalled an American attack, which the Kremlin was expecting. He refused to believe the evidence in front of him, and informed his superiors that there was simply a technical problem with the radars (which there was). That colonel did his duty and saved the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
But our grandparents, and our parents, did not give up neither in the face of Hitler nor in the face of nuclear holocaust. They did what they needed to do, both as individuals, but also in terms of their choices of political leaders and their acceptance of difficult measures (yes including sacrifices and precautionary measures) to make a better world for us.
They did their duty to future generations.
We too will have to make sacrifices, to do our duty for future generations.