SALİM KADIBEŞEGİL

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We are at the beginning of a new millennium. We are witnessing the building of a new world in human history. Where are we heading? What kind of a life is waiting for us and for our kids?

I guess we are stuck in the reality of “Star Trek” movies produced in 1970s, which took the relationship between space, time and humans out of sci-fi movies and novels and made us perceive them as real life. Driverless vehicles are on the road. It is almost certain that there will be life in Mars. There is lots of Mars-based activity even in estate agencies!

We may get a rough idea about the kind of life we live if we have a look at the titles of the blog Dunya Halleri (The Ways of the World) written by Serdar Kuzuoglu, the beacon of the digital world. Here are some examples from the posts published in the last few weeks:

• Curricula to be uploaded on mobiles in Brazil.
• Employees of Epicenter, an innovation centre in Sweden, are using microchip implants to make their lives easier and to save themselves the trouble of carrying company swipe cards.
• Scientists found a way to convert spinach leaves into beating human heart tissue. This solution can be used to cure damaged organs.
• Amazon starts using its own monetary system.
• Domino’s to use robots to deliver pizza in Germany.
• DoNotPay, the world’s first bot lawyer that helps people overturn parking tickets, is to help refugees on Facebook.
• 50000 seeds added to the Global Seed Vault.
• SpaceX to send two tourists into space.
• Youtube users watch 1 billion hours of videos every day.
• According to Wikileaks, CIA collects data by breaking into the operating systems of smart devices or infecting these devices with malware.
• Japan legally recognises Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies based on a bill changing the banking law.

We live in a period when we don’t even need to go to work to earn money. We are the first generation of parents to learn from their kids in the world of internet kids. It’s been a long time since geographical borders lost their meaning even if they formally exist! “World citizenship” is no more a theoretical concept. It is a department / lecture in universities.

As millennia, which can be considered quite short for human history, are passing, we can tell where the scenario that we call life is heading by looking at the past few millennia. For instance, Anatolia has played a leading part in human development for almost ten thousand years. As the nine-thousand-year mystery of Gobeklitepe is gradually being solved, we see that the essence of the culture in Gobeklitepe was not very different from today’s culture. In fact, if we went on a journey from Gobeklitepe to Palo Alto and if that journey took nine thousand years, we could see some basic cultural characteristics whose essence would probably be familiar all around us.

Palo Alto is a little town in California, in the USA, the capital of technological innovation and development in the world. However, it hosts a great number of companies in the high tech industry. The driving force behind it is undoubtedly its location right beside Stanford University and its qualified teaching infrastructure.

There wasn’t a Stanford University right beside Gobeklitepe. However, the 7-m tall standing stones, which gave information about the transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary societies that foreshadowed the agricultural revolution, may have functioned as a university.  The drawings on these stones are considered as a reflection of the relationship between humans and life in the form of “information“. Even if the devices for humans to hold on to life change in the information-science-universe triangle, humans’ cultural conservatism penetrates into these devices.

Many things may have changed since the agricultural revolution, but the discussion about how the concepts of

• good and bad
• right and wrong
• beautiful and ugly, which are the common ground of life and the basic question of humankind, are received in different societies has never changed during the journey from Gobeklitepe to Palo Alto.

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Humans have destroyed nature, bribed others, taken part in corruption and misled the justice system for nine thousand years although they describe all these behaviours as “bad, wrong and ugly“. Moreover, they have been excellent at showing bad as “good”, wrong as “right” and ugly as “beautiful”.

Scientists say that the sustainability of life is at a “critical threshold” at the beginning of the new millennium. This data is not only seen in sci-fi novels or movies anymore. It is right in front of us as the plain truth with all its ruthlessness.

Capitalism, the latest “invention” of humans, is in the throes of death, because it placed money before our moral and cultural “right” as a “value”. We bred mindlessly, consumed, destroyed and became impoverished when we thought we would become rich (whatever that meant). Then, we found ourselves waiting in front of a wall. We didn’t even know how high it was.

A quote from the article, “We are gradually destroying the World”, published on Kuzuoglu’s blog on 24^th Feb 2017 might help us elaborate our point:

According to the research conducted by the University of Leeds, 10% of all plant and animal species will be extinct by 2050. Rhinos, elephants and almost all the big predators will become extinct. Deforestation, infrastructure projects, overfishing, commercial agriculture and widespread use of fossil fuel are among the other negative influences of today’s lifestyle. All these factors increase the speed of extinction a thousandfold. It is thought that commercial fishing may end by 2050 due to overfishing in the world.

Justin Farrell, a sociologist from Yale, says that corporate companies spend their wealth to raise suspicion about climate change. It is stated that the economic system focused on constant growth will end up in no way other than consuming all the sources in the world.

Damaging the environment is not the only problem. Population growth is one of the major factors in our present situation.  It is stated that there will be a huge population explosion in the cities, and that it will cause overpopulation and faster spread of contagious diseases. Cleaning can become a serious problem since we do not have the adequate infrastructure.

Moreover, sea levels are rising 25% more rapidly than expected. When it is considered that most of the world population live by the sea or by the river, this situation becomes more dangerous. By 2050, it might become normal to see floods every day. Drought might become a serious problem in some areas where people meet their need for water with melting snow.

Today, 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water. It is expected that this figure will increase by 2050. According to MIT, the number of people living in the areas with lack of water will increase to 9.7 billion.  We will not be able to grow agricultural produce due to lack of water.

We should change our lifestyles seriously.  It is important to reduce meat consumption and food waste in general. Everyone should recycle their waste by avoiding overconsumption.

Clean energy sources should be used more and fossil fuel should not be used anymore. We have to take serious precautions to protect the world or it will come as no surprise when we lose our planet.

The journey from Gobeklitepe to Palo Alto was not originally designed to “destroy the world”. The main matter was humans’ experience with holding on to life against nature. The need for “covering-clothing oneself”, which begun with a fig leave, made it possible to see that fig leave labelled Armani, LV, Prada or D&G nine thousand years later. A piece of leather made of the skin of a wild animal and put on feet is now called shoes. However, nobody in Gobeklitepe estimated that 8000 litres of water would be used to produce a pair of women’s shoes! Prisons were built to restrict freedom of offenders in the past. However, nobody predicted that humans could willingly live deprived of their freedom in the prisons called cities and surrounded by skyscrapers.

2016 was the 800^th year of Magna Carta, which brought a governance system called democracy where the main rules of common life was no more controlled by a king but by the people. It was discussed whether democracy was actually a beneficial system for humans at the meeting entitled “Why Democracy?” organised in the UK Parliament because of Magna Carta’s anniversary. Humans have never had “a moment of peace” because of democracy that correspond to pure and naive ideals.  Some people have used democracy as a means to their private benefits, and “goals” have never been realised throughout history. Since these goals were not realised, humans have become impoverished and ended up with outcomes that threatened life in the planet.

The journey from Gobeklitepe to Palo Alto is still continuing. A new world is being built in the new millennium. We don’t really know what kind of a life is waiting for humans during the building of this new world. There is only one truth that we know: Humans have never won against nature. They have ended up in Gobeklitepe whenever they thought they won!