(The epilogue to the book by Peter Jakubowski "Our illusory physics", from 2014; the original book for viewing online.)
Let us briefly reflect on our hopes and fears for the near future.
A hundred years ago, there were about one billion people in the world. Now we are more than seven billion. If we are to believe most media reports, our future looks bleak and desperate. There is a big problem with the style in which we live today. Some say that we are "borrowing" the planet from our grandchildren if we keep this style. Native Americans once described our global situation very aptly: "Only when the last tree is cut down and the last river poisoned will they understand that they cannot eat money".
In this context, there are many unanswered questions. What are our tasks and obligations towards future generations, what do we owe them, what do we owe the future? The first, perhaps still naïve answer is that we all have the responsibility to be a good "teacher" for the next generations. We need to teach them the right core values. But how do we know that what we do now will have a positive impact on the future?
I think we need to trust Nature again and use the same new paradigm that, as we have shown in this book, describes our past and our present situation on Earth much better than any other view has done so far. First of all, we can consider a kind of super-humanity as the next step in our biological and social evolution, which will allow us to use our "super-brain" quanta to solve our future global problems.
For example, let's start with the following "definition" of a superhumanity (quoted from the book by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, "What is life?", University of California Press, 1995, p. 235). "Superhumanity is neither a simple collection of humans nor something other than aggregated humans and their devices. Plumbing, tunnels, water pipes, electric wires, vents, gas, air-conditioning ducts, elevator shafts, telephone wires, fiber-optic cables, and other links enclose humans in a rapidly growing net. The way superhumanity behaves is in part the result of uncountable and unaccountable economic decisions made by people - singly and in groups - within the context of an increasingly planetary capitalism. 'The problem with money,' says a character in a recent film, 'is that it makes us do things we don't want to do'. Whether or not superhumanity's tendencies are conscious beyond us, individual humans should not be surprised if the aggregate of planetary humanity shows unexpected, emergent, seemingly purposeful behaviours. If brainless bacteria merged into fused protists, which cloned and changed themselves over evolutionary time into civilisation, what spectacle will emerge from human beings in global aggregation? To deny the existence of superhumanity by insisting it is merely the sum of human actions is like claiming that a person is merely the sum of the microbes and cells that constitute the body."
Next, however, we must realise that according to our new paradigm, such a super-humanity must also be understood as a quantised entity. And this is where we touch the really serious problem of our way of life today. What is a quantum of super-humanity? What is a quantum of human life at all? The answer seems simple: it is a family, a union of father, mother and at least two children who live healthy and long enough to give birth and a good education to the next generation, and the next, and so on, who are able to make good choices for their own lives and futures. If we do not manage to return to the old routine of such a "family quantum of life" (but without the mistakes of the past, such as "despotic" or, on the other hand, "far too kind" parents), we can forget all further attempts to create a healthy and prosperous foundation for the life of the next generations on our planet.
The first practicable step, I think, might be to count the nations of the present world not by the number of their citizens but by the number of healthy families living in a nation or country. Then we would immediately see, for example, that neither a one-child idea nor a as-many-children-as-possible idea leads us on the right path to the future.
We cannot shift the responsibility for our actions onto Nature, but we can learn from her even more than before, much more.
