Traveling in Time

Most dire warnings of impending doom, as well as most rosy scenarios of flying cars, suffer from extrapolating the past into the future. Which would be fine, if the future ever held up its end of the bargain and cooperated. Image the questions a traveler from, say, 1750 would want to know: “Wow, with that many people, how do you find enough forest for firewood?” (A real and pressing question at some points in France and England.) “If only 3% of your population is agricultural, do most people starve? Have you evolved to a species that doesn’t need to eat as much?” “If everyone lives in the city, doesn’t the pestilence wipe it out from time to time? Are there rivers of manure in the streets?” “If the economies are counted in the trillions of dollars, wherever did you find all of that gold?”

The point is that maybe we’re not asking the right questions. History tells us that self-immolation and self-restriction of the status quo rarely shows the path forward. (Think Spain in the Sixteenth Century.) Usually framing the question as “what can we do to get what we want with fewer or better inputs?” more often does the trick. Wood is replaced by coal which is replaced by oil which is replaced by gas which is replaced by . . . . my money’s on electricity. (I wonder if I should make that literal . . . . ) That’s not to say that rudderless ideas of “something will fix the problem,” are necessarily the way to go, just that the solution will come out of inputs and outputs, not fetishising bad outcomes.

As an example: Rather than asking “how do we get rid of sprawl?” one could ask, “what, exactly, would allow people to live they way they would enjoy the most?” and go from there.