Here is a link to a musical background to this essay: Once There Were Green Fields, by Betty Stahl.
Time lapse video technology is so old that its special effects seem like child’s play in this current day of unlimited imaginative potential. Whatever one can possibly imagine can be effortlessly represented in a visual presentation that will soon be including total immersion into tactile, olfactory, and gustatory senses in addition to the usual audio and video. The latest toys are just the beginning. And today’s news seems to be that quite a bit more (that no one has yet thought of at all) can also be manifested onto one plane or another of reality, through the happy agency of Artificial Intelligence. But I’m not going there today.
Today I want to think again about the simple technology of the speeding up of time, as in telescoped articulations of blooming flowers that allow us to watch the lifespan of a plant passing by in a few moments. What if we could see the events happening on Planet Earth in the same way? What if we could program a sequence to display the history of any place on earth over any time span? Suppose we could choose any spot, perhaps the whole planet, centered on the largest old world land mass. This would leave out the entirety of North and South America, but, alternatively, we could show the other half of the globe, perhaps zeroed in on the United States. Or we could choose any other region, large or small. Then we choose a time frame and a speed, and we can sit back and watch the Earth unfold from, say, 1650 until the present time.
We could even continue the presentation beyond the Present Moment, by an application of AI, which would simply be a continuation of current trends modified by the most prescient AI engine. Run the program through the end of the century, say 2100, and we would see a very surprising show. We could set the timing feature to cover that ground in about 20 minutes, or, if we are from New York City, we could allow just four minutes for the entire presentation, but we would have to look sharply, or we might miss something. [ . . . and, for those of you who are surprised, drive safe.]
This would be a pretty sobering show. Our world is falling apart on every level at an accelerating rate (climate change, war, ocean necrosis, pandemics, economic sharpening, consciousness plunging from open, tolerant, and progressive to extremely narrow right-wing conservative all over the world, etc.). I want to set up just such a show as I have been describing on my proposed GaiaAura website, where every region is colored according to the prevailing level of consciousness, using the Colors of the Aura. This show would be so dramatic that it might finally nudge people off the couch, and get them to take action.
Take Action. Now we come to today’s message ~ we can’t just sit back and watch it fall, as falling it certainly is. Not only are all signs running Code Red, but the speed with which they are spinning out of control is accelerating on every parameter, in the classic pattern of an explosion. We can’t just “let George do it” anymore (not that we ever could, but now it really matters). This is a question of the survival of the human race, and possibly all life on earth, or most of it, anyway. It is madness just to continue business as usual, and somehow hope for some other outcome. We need a world-wide organization to address the issue now and come up with a plan.
We not only need technological plans to regenerate the earth ~ there are a great many excellent ideas out there, and most of those ideas should work just fine. Everyone has a plan, and all we have to do is pick a few and follow them (e.g., plant trees). But the real problems we face, and what we really need right now, are social, political, and economic solutions that can break up the bottleneck (read: the strangulating grip of the Robber Barons) and lay out a plan by which we can implement the necessary changes before the irretrievable collapse of our biosphere. I don’t need to mention again my own plans for making over the planet ~ there may be lots of other perfectly good solutions. We just need to get the ball rolling with some international participation for the promotion of urgent and radical change.
It amounts to Social, Economic, and Political Revolution world-wide ~ that’s what I’m talking about. The scale of the Revolution must match the scale of the Problem, and it has to be Planet-wide in scope. And, as technology (and planetary collapse) are accelerating at an exponential rate, we need to match the speed of that collapse with the urgent speed of bringing forward the Revolution. The participation of young people is especially and urgently needed, as they represent the future of the earth and of the human race.
