Chapter - 1 : In the rear-view mirror.
Ours is a resource intensive industry, one that seeks to take from the earth, often irreversibly, the integral parts of the nurturing construct that make this planet habitable. Be it purposing or re-purposing of natural resource in their most binary, virgin states, or the creation of ingenious hybrids that form the bedrock of cities and the unsustainable monstrosities we fondly call buildings, our approach has always been selfishly linear - an anthropocentric discourse throughout history that has reduced other stakeholders in the process of living on mother earth to mere taxonomies and whims of our own devise.
Everything about how we live, from what we wear to how we work, fundamentals of trade and commerce, to belief systems that shape the dynamics between communities, necessitate geographical borders and cause wars, have their roots in our myopic perception, use and abuse of resources and the elements. Man's most ominous construct yet - religion, stemmed from a collective consciousness of fear that attributed, in the style of true anthropocentric whim, identity to the elements - creating the omnipotent entity that is an angry God. Ancient religions like Paganism and many polytheistic religions that divide billions today, from their infancy and early iterations, ascribed liability for most natural phenomena to the whims of a deity figure(s) - Gods of seas, Gods of the wind, Gods of fire and so on.
While serving to birth moralistic code, even if perpetuated by graybeards and Godmen of often dubious credential, they perhaps introduced and unquestionably refined over centuries, concepts of hierarchy, blind worship, ownership, inheritance, nepotism, divide and xenophobia into our collective cognitive construct. These qualities, coupled with miraculous intellectual strides that give us science and medicine, bring us to the brink of an epoch where we as a race are at our most potent, but the very mother earth that nurtured and indulged our fancies and fantasies, is in the throes of an apocalyptic peril. We don't stop here. Instead, given we are perfecting interstellar travel, we dream now of colonising Mars, and inevitably in the future, proxy Marses.
However, is history the ideal blueprint for planning the beta-futures we envision? Will we abide by the same linear, myopic and anthropocentric value-verse when we plan for inter-galactic communities? Can we continue to posit ourselves as the protagonist of every story we write as a race? Let us take a step back to appreciate the enormity of the task at hand. We venture to a planet devoid of the resource matrix that we had at our disposal here, devoid of wind and rain, of the same elemental attributes that lead us to shape religion on earth, a hostile landscape where our very existence as a race will be parasitic and foreign. We will have no option but to start anew, in a way we have failed to through millennia of warnings we chose to ignore on earth - tectonic shifts, ice ages, disease, famine and the inevitability that will be nature's holocaust.
