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Does scientific progress threaten humanity?

“The future is bright, it’s wonderful.” Love him, strive for him,

Transfer from it to the present everything that can only be transferred. “

N. G. Chernyshevsky

What will the world be like after us?

Louis XIV said: “After us – at least the deluge.” But somehow I do not want to live in a world that will disappear “after us,” and there is no need to build houses and write poetry, and there is no one to think about tomorrow. But we think – everything, from great thinkers to ordinary workers: “What will the world be like after us?”

Surprisingly, the inhabitants of the richest country in the world are full of pessimism, and this manifests itself literally in everything. We watch a movie: on a wild Earth, they fight for fuel, then for something else, fierce gangs of human-like scoundrels, long ago and firmly forgotten what kind of humanity is. On incredible spaceships from space, aliens

arrive to capture the Earth, turning its inhabitants into slaves or corpses. Reasonable machines raise rebellion against their creators, and terminators move terminators to kill. Smoke, roar, death, banditry… The green grass and forests are something of a fairy tale, the planet has long and forever turned into a smelly dump, and in the poisoned waters of the seas and rivers deadly mutants have long and forever superseded all life. The achievements of the technique of cinema make it all so believable that one does not want to live, but pulls to shoot the inventors and crazy professors, letting their monsters on us. Stop progress!!!

There is a remedy – and it has been tested many times by mankind. You just have to destroy books, burn them, force people – even if under pain of death – to sell books to new firefighters, those who do not extinguish but fire the fire. 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature of the ignition of the paper. Instead of books – a TV screen full-length, instead of a miracle of a happily found word – unintelligible standard dialogues:

-I love you.

–

I love you too! Are you okay?

– I am fine. Are you okay?

– I am fine.

You can insert your own cues: the content is so pointless that, whatever you say, it will come down. People are unaccustomed to reading and thinking, they will be told on television, who is talent, who is a star, are they happy… It is not known why books and reading are forbidden in the world of Bradbury, but most likely for two reasons: the philistine is frightened by the “overhead costs” of technical civilization, and the “elite” used this fear to forever remove from the life of society the very possibility of competitors, put on ordinary people “muzzled thoughts.” Someone and somewhere continues to invent and discover, but invented a cybernetic killer, running on the trail of a man who dared to love the book. And now, at the fires in the night, people who voluntarily denied themselves and their lives sit to save the Book. Man is the Bible. The man is Hamlet.

People who learned the book by heart and carry it to an unknown future, when humanity will again need a book.

What will the world be like after us?

In my opinion, Bradbury, like his heroes, is also frightened by our technical civilization: it is too expensive for the Earth and humanity itself to achieve it. And it’s too disgusting to use any discoveries. So what do we do? How to leave the world after yourself?

It seems to me, it’s not a matter of technique, not of discoveries, but of a person’s morality. Human curiosity, spiritual striving makes a man invent a plane, and the chimpanzee sitting in us loads his wings with bombs. To facilitate the work of a miner, dynamite is created, and fierce instincts stuff explosives with shells. There is no point in stopping technical progress, there is no point in prohibiting books – this will only give the animal an animal’s will. And then, perhaps, the dark horrors of modern anti-utopia will come true. But most likely, there will be nothing at all: we will destroy our world.

I do not know how to make every Homo Sapiens think about the future of the planet and realize that it does not depend on what kind of new machine a person comes up with, but on how and what he will apply it. How much the person will be reasonable. It seems to me that Sergius of Radonezh has abandoned his passion for consumption more than a man of the future than our “new Russian”, who in fact at the end of the 20th century lives by what People refused three centuries ago. Scary is not a stick in your hand, but a thought that allows you to drop it on the head of another person or an animal. Killing the instincts of the beast and educating the Man in himself now, we create the future. Does it frighten you? Does it give you hope?

What will the world be like after us?