Morphy wrote on Apr 20^th, 2014 at 8:05pm:


Ok, fair enough.  Apologies if my question seemed confrontational, that was not my intention.  I was just interested in hearing more about your opinion on the future.

Having lived through a half century, I am resisting (mostly successfully, I believe) becoming an "old fart" ... you know the ol' "get off my lawn", "things were better in the old days", "when I was a kid we carved our own bicycles from trees we cut down with stone axes" ... that sort of thing. 

Because it's largely out of my individual control, I've chosen to be optimistic about the future.  One chooses to be optimistic, pessimistic, or indecisive.  However, I do often wonder how much farther we will, or can, go when even the "poor folks" have air conditioning, cable TV, and cell phones (I'm speaking of the USA), and developing countries are running as fast as they can to "catch up".

Routine geologic events ... now those are things that we have no defense for.  There have been plenty in the not so distant past that would change our current world and culture in a matter of minutes to hours.

Thanks for your reply, Morphy.  Interesting topic.

I agree with the optimism statement. We choose who we are. We choose whether a situation is a curse or a blessing, negative or positive because it's impossible to see the absolute end result of something.

A huge collapse in America would be bad by many people's standards. Certainly there would be an unimaginable amount of lives lost, through famine if nothing else. Yet I don't feel pessimistic about something like that.

When I was young I started having dreams about future events. Both in my own life and in a more general way, world events. Without going into detail, I would say the chances of something massive happening in the world during my natural life span is 100% likely in my mind at this point. Although I've never seen anything specifically about the economy or the petrodollar, many of the things I've seen can't occur without it leaving a massive "reboot of the system", to carry on the computer analogy. So the economy collapsing is a safe bet as well.

Anyways, the only reason I bring up the above is because it's taught me not to look at seemingly catastrophic events as necessarily a doom and gloom scenario.