THE FUTURE: THREE VIEWS.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish,” says Proverbs 29: 18. What then does the future hold? Is there still vision? That’s what I’ll try to investigate.
Even though I will mainly quote secular sources, I still believe that this citation from the Old Testament also holds true for these authors. We all, believing Christians or not, act on ‘vision.’ All our hope or despair is based on what we expect to happen: for most of us our opinion is founded on our ingenuity, our technological prowess, our expectation that the past determines our future, while others base it on our ultimate goodness or scientific findings.
I will look at three points of view.
(1) George Friedman, and his book, The Storm before the Calm.
This man is founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, which specializes in geopolitical forecasting, and author of The Next Decade and The Next 100 years. He is perhaps the most ‘qualified’ futurist, based on his expertise and insight.
The title of his book is quite telling: he foresees a stormy decade, after which humanity, chastened by past mistakes, will assert itself and reap the benefit of having learned from its errors.
Of course, he starts with history, the great teacher, and praises America’s past achievements where ‘common sense’ was the guiding light. He identified 80 years geopolitical cycles, starting with its founding in 1776 to the Civil War in 1860, then again from there to World War II in 1940 to the present age, 2020, and now, from there the imminent crisis unfolding. He also recognizes a 50 years economic cycle, which today coincides with the current 80 years one, spelling big trouble ahead for the next decade. So, brace yourself: a dangerous decade ahead.
Curiously Mr. Friedman does not mention Climate Change, or looming inflation, or any possible weather-related event, which makes his long-term forecast rather doubtful. Perhaps the fact that his book is dedicated to his 8 grandchildren, colored his views. If he had taken environmental issues seriously, the title of the book could have been The Storm before the Hurricane.
As an aside: Dr. Steve Keen, a fellow at University College London’s Institute for Strategy and Security, referring to Climate Change, holds a different view. On May 21 he told CNBC that, “Mainstream economists “deliberately and completely” ignored scientific data and instead “made up their own numbers” to suit their market models. Now, a “war-level footing” is required to have any hope of repairing the damage”.
I believe that George Friedman catered to the mainstream professional class, whose livelihood is at stake.
(2) Dr. Malcolm Light, on THE ARCTIC NEWS.
This past week I looked at the website of The Arctic News a couple of times. Here’s what I found. By the way, the Arctic News is the website where some 25 Arctic specialists report their findings, based on their expertise and observations.
On May 18 and 22, Dr. Malcolm Light had the following message:
The greatest threat to humanity on Earth is the escalating Arctic atmospheric methane buildup, caused by the destabilization of subsea methane hydrates. This subsea Arctic methane hydrate destabilization will go out of control in 2024 and lead to a catastrophic heatwave by 2026.
As you know the weather is starting to change rapidly for the worse now and I have been working on Arctic methane induced global warming for about 14 years. There are massive deposits of methane gas trapped in the undersea perma-frosts in Russian waters and on land in Siberia as well and if the global warming boils of just 10% of what is there, there is enough to cause a Permian style extinction event that humanity will not survive.”
Yours sincerely,
Malcolm P.R. Light
Earth Scientist
According to Dr. Light we only have a few years left. No “Storm before the Calm”, as George Friedman asserts. On the contrary, the voices of extinction, including us, humans, are becoming more believable and more pronounced. He, and scores of Arctic observers, including many from Russia, believe ‘the end is near’, as we enter a time of worldwide strife, global heat and unbelievably ferocious weather.
(3) WAR.
In April 1992 I bought a book by Michael Grant, an expert on the Ancient World. In his THE FOUNDERS OF THE WESTERN WORLD, it struck me how history was made by continuous wars, all the time, everywhere. War shaped Greece and Rome. War has shaped our present world, and War will end the world, as it also ended Paradise, when the human world waged war with God and his Creation. Even Heaven saw War between Satan’s adherents and God’s angel army, now extended to our entire planet. Our CLIMATE CHANGE occurrence is nothing else but the culmination of humanity’s war against God and his creation: now in its final stage: the war to end all wars.
The book “WAR”.
It so happened that this past weekend my youngest son gave me a book, written by Margaret MacMillan, with the simple title “WAR”. Its subtitle is “How Conflict shaped us”.
Dr. MacMillan, a famous Canadian, professor of history both at Oxford and Toronto, wrote quite an entertaining book about a subject we all are daily engaged in: WAR. Judging from history, war is as human as breathing.
She ends this book with a warning. Her last words are, “With new and terrifying weapons, the growing importance of artificial intelligence, automatic killing machines and cyber war, we face the prospect of the end of humanity itself. It is not the time to avert our eyes from something we may find abhorrent. We must, more than ever, think about war.”
Where there is no hope, there is no future. Where there is no faith: there is no future. “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” says Proverbs 29: 18.
What then does the future hold? Is there still hope, or faith, or vision?
As often, I end with the Scriptures. Revelation 20 tells us about war. Verse 7 – 10, “Satan will go out and deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth to gather them for battle. (That’s us, fooled by our ‘carbon craze). In number they are like the sand on the seashore. (All 8 billion of us). They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God’s people, the city he loves. But the fire came down from heaven and devoured them all.”
That fire is, as I read this passage, is triggered by the global heat that will release the Methane deposits in the Siberian and Canadian Arctic, so abundant that only 1 (ONE) percent is sufficient to ignite the entire globe.
When that will happen only God knows. That it will happen soon, is now beyond dispute. Remember Jesus’ words: The End will come totally unannounced, without warning, like ‘a thief in the night”, (Matthew 24: 44).
Fortunately, “The veil that hides the face of the future is woven by the hand of Mercy”.