Today’s Sunday Times Magazine has a great article about the uncertain future facing the world. In the article, Brian Appleyard argues that due to the decline in innovation over the last couple of decades we are at risk of stalling human progress. The last 200 years have seen the greatest inventions and innovations, with the greatest frequency, that man has ever made – the most prolific year being 1873. But as we live longer, eat better and live better lives than ever before we have become too reliant on unsustainable resources, and principally oil.
Appleyard’s argument that we create fewer great inventions now than in previous decades is clearly subjective and ignores great innovations such as the Internet, the means to organise it (Google), and mobile phones and it’s our failure to replace the internal combustion engine for a more eco friendly version and move away from our reliance on oil that could be the undoing of the human race.
Most tools, foods and consumer goods use oil in one way or another. But this previously cheap commodity is rapidly running out to the extent that some predictions see only another 10 years before oil actually starts to run out.
Appleyard puts two and two together – the lack of oil and the lack of innovation – to see an apocalyptic end to the world as a we know it.
"The evidence is mounting that our two sunny centuries of growth and wealth may end in a new Dark Age in which ignorance will replace knowledge, war will replace peace, sickness will replace health and famine will replace obesity. You don’t think so? It’s always happened in the past. What makes us so different? Nothing, I’m afraid."
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