The Futurist Case For Peace

Where Worlds Collide

I didn’t always write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

To be quite honest for most of my life I spent my time trying to find ways to distract myself from the reality of a conflict that not only traumatised a majority of Palestinians, but also left many people who I knew personally in a state of trauma.

When I was a child I imagined that the conflict would be solved by the adults around me. Certainly, that was the aura of the time, when Barak met Arafat and Clinton in the White House. It seemed that like with Northern Ireland, a resolution to the conflict was only months or years away, and then things might be more normal.

One of the happiest days of my life was the day of the Good Friday Agreement. Remember that Britain itself has not always been a peaceful place. Britain in the 1990s certainly had its share of terrorism, such as the 1996 Docklands bombing. The Good Friday Agreement seemed to bring an end to that awful terror.

In the halcyon days of the 1990s it was easier to believe in Martin Luther King Jr.’s pronouncement that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. And the best form of justice in my eyes is no more conflict and violence. The most just thing in the world is life, and the ability to live a free and normal life. Everybody should be able to enjoy this. It should be a basic human right. And the bedrock of this is dispute resolution, and conflict resolution.

But, of course, I became an adult and there was no resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That was a blot on my consciousness. But I am just one person, and not the Palestinian government, nor the Israeli government. I am not any kind of political leader. So I buried myself in video games, puzzles, science fiction, guitar, economics, coding. I played in bands. I got married. I found things to occupy myself with.

Human beings are resourceful animals, but the truth of our predicament is rather precarious. We only have one planet, and we are deeply divided. The weapons of yesterday like nukes and biological and chemical weapons are bad enough, but the weapons of tomorrow—including robots, nanoscale weapons, and artificial intelligence—may be even more dangerous.

There may come a time in the future where destructive people who believe that destruction is justice have the capacity to end life on Earth in a single attack, or the deployment of a weapon. Indeed, we could simply do this accidentally.

That’s one reason of many why I prize and value conflict resolution and reconciliation. We are simply too vulnerable to put ourselves in a situation where we risk imposing a mass extinction event onto our entire species.

The risks of extinction are mitigated but not entirely resolved when humans occupy 2 or 3 planets, and some additional space stations. They will be further mitigated when humans occupy multiple solar systems, and multiple arms of the galaxy, and multiple other galaxies, and so forth. Each step we take towards a new frontier not only serves as a guarantor against self-inflicted extinction, but also serves to harden our species through the trials and errors of the frontier. The strength of America as a country today is related to the trials and errors of frontier life. The same will be true when humans set foot on Mars, and Ganymede, and Europa.

Establishing peaceful relations—even if we don’t have to agree about everything—between the tribes of our species can smooth this process, and eliminate some of the risks. Frankly, there are far too many exogenous threats to humanity for us to be worrying about fighting among our tribes. Climate or atmospheric catastrophes, solar flares, gamma ray bursts, pandemic illnesses, authoritarian governments oppressing their own citizens, and the aforementioned risks of artificial intelligence gone awry are all horrifying enough without us hating one another. Not to mention what could happen if we ever ran into intelligent alien life.

The only comfort here is that the conflicts and grudges we are fighting over are centuries or millennia old. The dangers of the new world, a world transformed by digital, electronic, and chemical technology are far greater than these old grudges that come from a world of swords, bows, and axes.

We will figure out sooner or later that we are stronger together, and we have more in common with each other, and that imposing suffering on one another serves no real purpose. If there is any reason why the moral arc of the universe (or at least the human part of the universe) tends toward justice, it comes down to the human tendency to be able to empathise with one another, and see that actually a lot of the time our interests as human beings are aligned. While there may be bad ideologies, and bad leaders, and bad movements, our common humanity is a shared thread—thin, fragile, and shining —that we can carry with us across the stars