I think that's projecting a bit too far. We really are just a blip to the earth. Whatever we do, good, bad or indifferent, in a few tens of millions of years, the last ten thousand years and the next ten thousand years will be a few inches of coal. That's earth time.
We are pushing the limits of our particular envelope, because we are linear, goal oriented organisms in a cyclical, reciprocal, feedback generated reality. Our actions are generating reactions and it's developing into a seriously negative feedback loop.
How do you go about peeling away thousands of years of myth, culture and belief that it is about some end game, pot of gold at the end of the narrative arc?
As these mobile organisms, necessitating a sequential process of perception, narrowed to points of focus and accumulated in a narrative based culture, we think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future, but the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Yet even our most advanced theories try to explain it as a dimension. Similar to how we once tried to model the sky around our geocentric point of view.
Plants don't do time, so much as they do thermodynamics. Time, temperature, pressure, color, sound are all effects. Frequencies and amplitudes.
Time is frequency, history is amplitudes.
We like to think there is some divine entity overseeing all this, but a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the myriad details of which we are aware.
Conflating the ideal, which is aspirational, with the absolute, which is elemental, tends to create the assumption that our ideals, beliefs and aspirations are somehow universal, rather than unique expressions of circumstance. So there can be no 'live and let live,' as the Other becomes a sin against one's own True God.
Our economic theories are especially useless. Markets need money to circulate, while people see it as the signal to extract and store, requiring ever more to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted. As money functions as a contract, with the asset backed by a debt, storing it requires generating debt. So this religion of money is an economy of debt. The capital markets couldn't function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus capital. The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.
The endless wars are just one way to make it go away, so more can be borrowed.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is an atomized culture that is more easily manipulated by institutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system. Networks, organic, social, cultural, matter as much as the nodes inhabiting them.
Now the future we have been borrowing against has arrived.
