Question: what are your thoughts on the future do you think that we will keep on developing new technology? or do you think we have to stop somewhere? I Think that we will have to stop we cant keep thinking ahead . but what is your view?

Nathan Langford answered on 28 Jun 2012:

Hi jordanikin,

Wow! What an amazing question. This is certainly one that all scientists and people in society should be thinking about. I’ll give you my first thoughts now, but I may have to come back and add more later.

I don’t think we will ever reach a point where we will stop thinking about new technology or new ways of doing things. Humans (or at least some of them), like their ape ancestors, are strongly curiosity driven creatures. We will always want to think about new ideas and it is natural that these will most commonly relate to what we do every day.

However, and I think there is a really, really big *but* here. I do strongly believe that we will have to start thinking very carefully about which new technology we choose to take forwards. At the moment, our society has developed into a pattern where we are making “progress” for the sake of progress – or at the very least for the sake of profit. We continually strive to use bigger, better and more sophisticated “things” just because they are available – not because we necessarily actually need them, or even because our lives will be fundamentally better off once they’re here. Every new idea seems to get marketed and developed. Companies need to make profits from what they do, so they either need to identify a market for their products, or *create* a market for them if it doesn’t already exist.

There is a saying that “necessity is the mother of invention”, which means that when you really need something, you’ll come up with a way to do it. But we live in a very materialistic society, where lots of people are trying to make things and then spend lots of time trying to convince us (as consumers) that we desperately need them. Just think of how many people write random little apps for the iPhone and put them up on the appstore, hoping that they can convince someone that they need it! So more and more, we all come across situations where we (or others) buy things we “didn’t even know we needed” until we saw them. Apple products are a good example of this. Now, I love my iPhone, but apple makes a conscious marketing strategy to identify (or maybe create?) our needs before we know what they are. Steve Jobs very famously said, “most of the time people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” “Customers didn’t ask for the iphone, but today millions of people can’t live without it.”

Okay, I’m getting pretty philosophical here now, so what’s my point? And how does it relate to your question? Well, we live in a very interconnected world. Once upon a time, when people needed to do something, they worked out a way to do it and maybe that required building something to do it – and most of the time, that would be the end of it. Maybe they made one for their brother too. Now, however, everyone has access to tools for selling and marketing their products internationally through a few clicks in their web browsers. So, if someone has an idea for doing something, and maybe even builds something along the way (an app, for example), doesn’t it just make sense to try and sell that idea or product to everyone else too? There are probably plenty of other people trying to solve the same problem and why waste all that effort you put in doing it yourself? So like the internet, or in fact perhaps driven by the internet, new technology and products seem to be exploding almost exponentially. Now, it sounds like that might be something that can’t keep on going, but the problem is, all these ideas are being had by different people, who probably think “well, I don’t know about everyone else’s ideas, but I want my one to succeed, because it’s going to benefit me.”

But how does this end up? The problem is that we are driving this technology explosion by consuming the resources of our own planet. Now, we know there is a finite amount of natural resources available on Earth, in terms of space, food, energy, water, etc. So how do you reconcile these finite resources with our ever-expanding desire for new technology?

Maybe the point is that pretty soon we have to return to the idea of being a self-sufficient society. We need to be able to create enough food for us all to eat, without destroying rainforests or coral reefs to do so, and not just for the short term, but indefinitely, so we also can’t go around hunting animals and fish to extinction, or destroying the habitats they live in, so they can’t survive.

We need space to live. In fact, as an Australian living in Europe, we need a certain amount of space to subsist (to eke out an existence), but as humans, we need much more space to be able to live a fulfilling life and be happy. The problem is we also need space to create the food we eat and space to play in. We even need space just to go and explore and stand somewhere where you can’t see 5000 other people running past manically doing their own thing. What happens when our population keeps expanding and expanding? Do we build houses over every single square metre of land? Or do we start living in small concrete boxes just to fit everyone in?

We need to create enough energy in clean, renewable ways to drive all the technology that we love and don’t want to live without. We can’t just keep using up fossil fuels, most fundamentally for the obvious reason that *they’re going to run out* and then we won’t have any left. I wonder if anyone has asked what will happen to the Earth’s ecosystem if all the fossil fuels are used up? But it’s much more urgent than that, because using these fossil fuels is not clean – long before they run out, we are going to reach the point where we will have inflicted irrevocable, irreversible damage on our own planet – the place that feeds us and gives us somewhere to live – damage that will materially worsen our own life experience as a species. In fact, the scary thing is – *we are already at that point now*!! Have you ever seen the Great Barrier Reef? Would you like to? Your children and your grandchildren might not get to! Does that make any sense at all?

Have you ever heard people make the argument that “we just can’t fix the climate change problem yet – it just isn’t economically viable…” In my opinion, this argument is completely ridiculous, even from an economic standpoint. We can’t afford *not* to fix the climate change problem – otherwise we won’t have a climate to fix. What’s the point in having a working economy now, if we have a damaged world and a damaged society in 50 years time?

So we need to start making choices about what we develop and what new technology we need or want. We need to choose technologies that bring us closer to the point where we have a self-sufficient society and avoid those that take us racing in the other direction. We all need to think about these choices. And we all need to understand these choices. And we all have these choices to be making every single day. As children, you need to start thinking about these things too… it’s your future!