The many ponderous pundits, armchair analysts, talking heads and paid-up members of the commentariat who have spent the last few days critiquing the government's latest intergenerational report have completely missed its most important underlying assumption.
An obvious question, which must surely be on the lips of anybody who has been following the news cycle over the last few months, is on what basis do the authors of the report believe the world whose future it purports to chart will be here in 40 years from now?
While the optimism underlying this assumption is refreshing, it lands in the middle of a debate about whether or not artificial intelligence will have wiped out the human race or, Matrix-style, turned all of us into flesh and blood D-cell batteries to meet its exorbitant demands for energy, before the end of the decade.
Just consider some of the doomsday scenarios that have dominated the headlines this month alone.
Wow. Hanrahan had nothing on this mob.
One obvious consolation is that the track records of everybody who has ever shouted that "the end is nigh," with the possible exception of Noah, don't stack up too well. I find great comfort in Niels Bohr's observation that "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."
This latest round of doom and gloom has prompted me, a child of the 1960s, to reflect on the many and varied apocalyptic scenarios that have been conjured up during my 65 years of, as yet, uninterrupted existence.
When I was just two years old, the fear was that the world would end with a bang, not a whimper, in a nuclear holocaust. While I slept in my crib the Cuban Missile Crisis came and went without incident. The backyard fallout centres were either dismantled or recycled as wine cellars.
The year 1962 was also the year marine biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, warning the indiscriminate use of synthetic pesticides - specifically DDT - was poisoning the food chain and pushing the natural world towards systemic collapse. DDT and like compounds were swiftly banned. My gaggle of magpies still trills me awake every morning.
Then came 1968, the late 20th century's "year of revolutions" when anti-war protests, student riots and civil unrest peaked with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. That too also passed.
This was also the year Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, predicting exponential human population growth would rapidly outstrip the Earth's agricultural capacity, leading to mass famines. He warned that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s. While famine still persists in parts of the world today the issue is not food supply. It is the inequitable distribution of an abundance of food that is the problem. Surely we can solve that one.
The 1970s were particularly rich in doomsday scenarios. One scare, that barely rates a mention today, was that after a temporary cooling trend in northern hemisphere temperatures some scientists prematurely concluded the next ice age was imminent.
The energy crises of 1973 and 1979 fueled dire warnings that oil production had peaked and economic and civilisation collapse was inevitable.
Closer to the present day the discovery of the ozone hole, the Y2K bug and the global warming hysteria spawned by Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth cascaded into the heat death of planet Earth. But Mr Gore and his acolytes had over-egged their cake.
If their dire predictions had come to pass in their entirety humanity would have been marinated in its own blood, sweat and tears decades ago; probably at about the same time as the long awaited Mayan Calendar Apocalypse of 2012.
The fallout from COVID-19, easily the closest thing to an apocalyptic event I have experienced in my lifetime, is interesting. With the benefit of hindsight more damage appears to have been caused by a blind faith in technocrats and health czars who had the ear of governments than the virus itself.
Much of the cynicism many of us now have about big government and centralised bureaucracies stems from that period of overreach.
The intergenerational report is right when it assumes humanity, and the world it inhabits, will still be there in 2066. The odds are however that it is wrong about pretty much everything else.
HAVE YOUR SAY: What doomsday scenario scared you most over the years? Do you have faith in humanity's ability to muddle through (as it has done for millennia) or do you fall into the "we're all doomed" camp." Email us: [email protected]
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
- Two separate struggles for his life are ex-police officer Beau Lamarre-Condon's explanation for the alleged shooting deaths of his ex and the man's new partner.
- Residents in communities affected by floods and fires will experience more trauma from repeated natural disasters unless greater action is taken on climate change, the Prime Minister has warned.
- Prince Harry is "completely fine" with an explosive new memoir chronicling the life of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, his uncle Charles Spencer says.
THEY SAID IT: "If all men were just, there would be no need for valor." Agesilaus (as recorded by Plutarch).
YOU SAID IT: We've had a strong response, representing a wide range of views, on Tuesday's article on the frontier wars:
From Faye: "Certainly, our legislation should be amended, and the the frontier wars should be given full recognition at the Australian War Memorial. The same honest history should also be included in all Australian schools. We must acknowledge the disastrous effects of our colonisation upon our first nations peoples."
From Bede in Canberra: "Thanks David - great article. I recommend (historical investigation) book by ANU historian emeritus Professor Tom Griffiths entitled Alice's Dreaming which thoroughly investigates this topic."
"I understand a new War Memorial gallery covering the Australian frontier wars will be opened in 2028 following a review of the Memorial's legislative scope. This is a good thing," writes Tom.
"The myth that regular army forces were not involved in the frontier wars is belied by The Appin Massacre of Aboriginal men, women and children on April 17, 1816, was the result of Macquarie's orders for members of the 46th Regiment to lead punitive expeditions in the Liverpool district, Hawkesbury, Nepean and Grose Valleys. Also, on August 14, 1824, at the time of the Wiradjuri resistance to the depredations of expanding settlement, Governor Brisbane declared martial law over all of the territory west of Mount York," Shirley, Dubbo.
"Recognising the frontier wars in the AWM is one way of beating deniers over the head with the truth. It's the one highly revered institution that can educate all Australians and have the story accepted by most." Keith, Canberra.
On the other hand:
"Various sides of my family settled in Molong, the NSW Southern Highlands and Morpeth. No calls to arms or 'kill the bastards' orders recorded. If your new-found 'truth' and scholarly researches allow, please update me in particular on riverine ops on the Hunter, Morpeth to Newcastle from the 1830s onwards. We have extensive records and not one f'n' mention of a 'war', says Neil.
"I never cease to be amazed by the legend relating to how long Aboriginal people have been in Australia. You state 60,000 years before 1770. Ernie Dingo stated 160 million years on a recent ABC program. This has to be wrong, because it would mean that Aboriginal people were in Australia before Adam and Eve were created," Roger.
"Call it war if you like but the great bulk of engagements were stock loss reprisals by uneducated British urban-dwelling desperados fighting to survive in a harsh and unforgiving alien bushland environment. Not an excuse, just a pragmatic fact. It was rarely government policy to kill the locals." Mick.
David Ellery is a senior ACM writer, filling in for John Hanscombe while he seeks some sunlight outside the burrow.
