[Archduke Tips]

I submit this article to the boards to seek feedback and constructive criticism on my idea of the intelligent society and its benefits and pitfalls as well as on my proposed solutions.

I believe that what we are currently are living in can be referred to as the intelligent society. Recently, I spent some time thinking about what I value most and what society values. My reason for thinking about this was because I was attempting to determine what my end goals are and what society is trying to achieve.

As for myself, I believe in God. I think that I am an intelligent person, but at the same time I feel like I am ignorant. I can base so much of what happens in the world in science and mathematics. I can also model systems that represent just about any force of nature or man-made. However, I still can not answer two questions that I believe truly show my ignorance,
1.) Why did God create the universe?
2.) How did God create the universe?

Maybe one day Philosophy will answer the first question and Science will answer the second, but as it stands I can not find a satisfactory answer to either.

Now as society is concerned, what we stress above all things is intelligence. The key to this intelligence is the idea of education. However, I don't think education is making us smarter so much as it is pulling us further from the truth.

The end goal of all of this intelligence is to create the perfect world, which I will refer to as Eden. We are trying to create the perfect medicines to keep people alive and healthy for long periods of time, we try to create the perfect source of power that can sustain the machines that make our lives easier, and we try to make the perfect machines to run all of the tedious and undesirable aspects of our lives.

These things all can be done, and I believe that Eden can be created. However, I do not believe that mankind is fit to live in Eden at this time. Maybe through our intelligence we can reach harmony with the Earth, but the hearts of man are hardened and will not live in harmony with eachother. In a perfect place, man will still destroy eachother.

The problem is not greed, lust, laziness, or anything like that because all of those things can be overcome. The problem will come from an overcrowding effect. In a situation with only small tribes of people living on Earth it would seem like the resources were never-ending. In the modern world, we are reaching a point where we must face the fact that our resources are limited and must be divided over all humans. Eventually we will reach the point where each new human is a burden on all humans. I think this will result in the downfall of the intelligent society and the resurgence of the primitive society. Without any building blocks what is the point of having the knowledge to build? Ultimately, people will not be able to survive on their fair share and they will have to take from others who are not willing to give.

To sum everything up, I believe the benefits of intelligent society are few and only consider immediate effects. Obviously, it would be wonderful to live in Eden. We could reach the point where everyone lives long and enjoyable lives.

At the same time this is the pitfall of the intelligent society. We can not keep reproducing the way we do and living long lives without causing overcrowding which would lead to society's downfall.

Our intelligence essentially created this problem. It is through our intelligence that we have created the conditions so that we can live long and have high survival rates. However, we have always considered long life and high survival rates to be a good thing, and so have never considered the ill effects that they can create.

I have considered several solutions to this problem:
1.) Expand into outer space and take a rapid expansionist policy so that we can claim all the resources we need to keep growing.
2.) Create two types of people, those who can breed and those who can't. Both types would still be able to have sex, but essentially only certain people would be able to create babies.
3.) Attempt to create a more feasible birth/death ratio to prevent us from hitting the population plateau.
4.) Divine intervention

These methods all have their problems. Space expansion is currently not feasible on the scale we would need, creating breeders and non-breeders has many ethical hurdles to cross, and balancing the birth/death ratio is a barbaric idea which would take away much of the progress we have made. Divine intervention is always a possibility, but it is not within mankind's control.

Ultimately, I think we need to move from the intelligent society to something else. Why chain ourselves to this notion of Eden which will create our downfall through overcrowding? We don't need to be intelligent to enjoy our lives. We don't need to be educated. We have destroyed our predators and become the top species on Earth. We already have a wonderful world to live in. It is because we continue to try to "improve" it that we are using up all of our resources. It is hard to let go though. I feel like we are in a wagon driven by a stubborn horse that will soon run us off a cliff.