Are we headed for a Wall-E style BuyNLarge controlled world?

originally posted by: FauxMulder
a reply to: intrptr

Well, Stephen Hawking says we have 1000 years to escape earth. Hopefully we will spread out into the galaxy.

Is his estimate based on exhaustion of resources or time required to develop the technology? One supersedes the other.

a reply to: intrptr

I dont know i think he is saying we will destroy ourselves within the next 1000 years.

Prof Hawking’s predictions for humanity have been bleak in recent months. In January, he cautioned developments in science and technology are producing “new ways things can go wrong”. He also estimated self-sustaining human colonies on Mars would not be constructed for another 100 years, meaning the human race must be “very careful” in the time before then.

a reply to: FauxMulder

Oh, he thinks we'll 'be alright' if things go according to the plan. The Science plan.

We're choking on the effluent runoff of our 'Scientific-ness'. More to the point of Wall-E. In the film, I think that we leave the planet by 2015.

Other toxic waste films stretch it further, . A thousand years a long time to wait, given the current trend of endless war, debt and disease.

originally posted by: FauxMulder
a reply to: Aliensun

One bad aspect is that because the Government and these large corporations are in control, through laws & regulations they make it so they are the only ones that can handle the supply. Their competition is effectively neutered or kept small in a local market only. It usually a revolving door between banks / corporations & Governments.

The cincher is that the revolving door is always going to be there for the elites to come and go as in the EU.

As the mom&pop businesses have disappeared across the US, so it will be across the world. The bottom line sought is more efficiency in government and the utilization of resources across the entire spectrum of human existence. What will suffer is individual freedoms across that entire spectrum also. What is scary is that these desired changes are very much along the line of the old communist doctrines except with some division between control and supply. Let the success or failure of the EU be your guide but remember, it is a system that still must work within traditional systems. It the whole world shifted toward a command/supply structure, the success rate would be vastly improved and probably swifter than imagined.