Our unhappy addicted Ego driven condition has become not simply the source of our own unhappiness that was bad enough but now its the source of great discomfort and dislocation for all life and Human Society on the planet.

We are out of control. We are basically severely addicted to things, and can not stop ourselves. And we know, or we should know, that there is not enough petroleum or heavy metals in the planet to give all the thing addicts all the things that we know they must have in order to be happy.

We have spread this intellectual virus from pole to pole, from Turkmenistan Borneo, to the upper Amazon to the Himalayas, what are we going to do about this? Well so far we’ve been treating this like an endless garden party, there’s no serious plan on the table to deal with this at all.

No one of us, I think, can imagine that history could go on for another thousand years. I mean, what would it look like? At the current rate of population growth, spread of epidemic disease, rate of invention, connectivity, depletion of resources, the atmosphere … it is impossible to conceive of another thousand years of Human history. History, then, is ending. History is a kind of gestation process; it’s a kind of metamorphosis; it’s an episode in the life of a species.

If you think of the simple example of metamorphosis – that of caterpillar to butterfly – we all know that there is this intermediate resting stage where the caterpillar is, for all practical purposes, enzymatically dissolved, and then reconstituted as an entirely different kind of organism, with different physical structures, different eyes, different legs, a different way of breathing; with wings, where no wings were before; with a different kind of feeding apparatus – this is what’s happening to us!

History is a process of metamorphosis. It’s a pupation stage. It begins with naked monkeys, and it ends with a Human machine planet-girdling interface capable of releasing the energies that light the stars!

And it lasts about fifteen or twenty thousand years, and during that period the entire process hangs in the balance. It’s a period of high risk. It’s like what a butterfly is doing in a cocoon, or what is happening to a child in the womb: it’s a gestation process, where one form of life is being changed into another.

If we should fumble the ball, if we should actually where our ancestors over thousands of generations did not fail. If we are to fail, the magnitude of the tragedy will be immense.

Because failure is not inevitable, it is not inevitable that we fail … there are ideas, personalities, technologies, available right now which honestly explored and implemented could rescue the Human enterprise from the disgrace that hovers over us. We don’t want this to end in a toxified garbage pit ruled by Nazis … which is, you know, the way we may well be headed.