LatinosUSA

“The idea we don’t articulate is how intimately our lives today are connected to people who haven’t even been born yet.”

“Those things we don’t pay attention to, like plastic pens, cell phones, or computer parts that will become fossilized. In 2020, we surpassed a peak: there are more materials generated by human beings than biomass on the planet.” David Farrier, author of ‘Footprints: In Search of the World We Will Leave Behind“ (La Vanguardia)

Our present lives are linked to the past; we accumulate an ever-increasing amount of virtual memory that grows exponentially. But until now, we were unconcerned, disconnecting our present from the future. We assumed that our ecological footprint wouldn’t alter the space where future generations will live, but for the first time, the future is present in each of our decisions. Saying that soon 70% of the energy produced and consumed in Spain will be green sounds strange, but it’s a decision made by the country’s oil and electricity companies in recent days.

Every footprint we leave, every step we take, is a space on our future agenda. Plastic supermarket bags have become obsolete in recent years, but they’re at the bottom of the oceans waiting, says the AI: “A plastic bottle or a diaper that ends up in the sea can take up to 500 years to decompose. It is estimated that more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic have ended up in the sea.” (1)

These are just some examples of how our present life is connected to the future, says David Farrier: “There are 8 gigatons of plastic, which is equivalent to twice the combined biomass of all animals.”

But I wouldn’t want to dwell solely on the material aspect, or the waste of our daily lives, but rather on the immense lifespan of lines of code. I mentioned yesterday in a conversation that the project to reach the Moon used half a trillion lines of code, and Google’s AI uses six trillion.

«The oceans are warming and becoming acidic, killing all life in them, except for jellyfish. The plastics we fill the oceans with are ideal for them because they need hard surfaces to reproduce.»

The time has come to decide: it’s either the jellyfish or us. Either we save biodiversity, or we will have very little survival.

Every action that governs our present—for example, at my house we make five cups of coffee a day—should be guided by the question: Where do we put this waste?

Every cup of coffee in our house should connect us with those we don’t know and who will come after us.

The future? Or… present

(1) I refer to AI as Google, which responds to, biases, and filters global content through 6 million codes.