Is our destiny to become gods or dodos?

The people at the time of Elizabethan England knew from their history that trial-and-error will build a better windmill. And yet, in the sixteenth century, everything needed to build an electric power station was there in front of them. Nothing needed to build that source of energy comes from outer space or the spirit world. But the electric power station at the time was unimaginable.

The world of 2012 is a very different world, not so much due to five more centuries of applying the method of trail-and-error, but mainly due to a very few individuals scattered throughout those centuries daring to imagine the unimaginable. One such person was Max Plank who, in 1900, concluded that radiant energy did not flow continuously as it 'so obviously did' from the sun, but flowed in tiny packets. Now due to his totally counter-intuitive idea, we have a lifestyle that is becoming increasingly dependent on transistors. Trial-and-error works as well as it ever did, but technological revolutions arise from entirety novel perspectives in pure science.

However, there is more to be seen behind the curtain that Plank pulled back. There is much, much more! His idea has enabled more clever people to discover that our minds can influence subatomic particles as if they and we are part of the same thought. Our minds and matter as one! Consciousness as the ground state of the universe!

Is that unimaginable - or is it only as unimaginable today as the transistor was in the year 1900?

I like to mentally trip back to the life of our First Peoples as depicted in the excellent SBS feature of 2006: Ten Canoes. They become my reference point in my attempts to understand what modern life is about.

The thinking of the Aboriginal of old was linear in its purest form. What did not fit the model standardised by group-think to fit all individuals in the group, was automatically dismissed. Hence, his lifestyle barely changed from one millennia to the next. His every forward move was based entirely on what had happened in the past.

Linear thinking is no problem when circumstances are unchanging. Circumstances in an Aborigine's life were very unchanging - except when there was the drought so prolonged that it dried out the land. That event may only have occurred once every ten or so generations, but when it did his numbers fell to near-extinction. It was then that he paid the price for his linear thinking.

In today's complex and world-wide interconnection of human activity, there is a wider variety of processes which could go badly for us than that which threatened the Aborigine. And yet we are still blighted by linearly thinking management. This thinking continues to set us up for disaster.

Whatever unexpected survival-threatening crisis lies ahead of us today, our culture as it is currently structured will be as incapable of dealing with it as was the culture of those who, as they sat on the rocks around what is now Sydney Harbour, watched the arrival of 11 strange-looking floating objects.

Consider the nature of time:

The Aborigine had no concept of time as we have. He thought in terms of periods between events. A period either felt long or felt short - or somewhere in between. The colonists who arrived here did not think like that because over the previous few centuries, the clock had restructured the European brain. It is the regular and incessant ticking of the clock which creates the delusion that time flows regardless of anything else happening - no matter where in the universe one may be standing.

It was a fortuitous delusion because it enabled him to manage his life with precision. The modern world would not be here without the clock.But absolute time is a delusion - it is simply a model of reality that so far has worked for Westerners as they struggled to not only survive, but to improve their level of comfort and safety.

In 1905 Albert Einstein looked at the hunter-gatherer concept - and then his imagination took him one step further. He viewed the period between two events as 'stuff' and wondered if it could be stretched. He concluded that it could be stretched - but if time stretched, then empty space (which he defined as the distance between two localities) had to shrink. Empty was also 'stuff'. Because his unimaginable idea was the truth, we now have (for better or worse) the reality of nuclear power stations and nuclear weapons.

But the vision of Einstein did not stop there, and in 1915 the maths which redefined gravity and put satellites into exact orbits also revealed the existence of the block universe. This is the concept that every event that has ever happened and every event that ever will happen, are here with us right now.

How receptive is your mind to the unimaginable? Is what is unimaginable not worth thinking about - even if our scientist-philosophers tell us that that is the direction we appear destined to be heading?

If Isaac Newton was to rise from the dead he would be stunned at the technology that surrounded him. He would be immensely pleased that the scientific method that he passionately believed in had proven itself in such a spectacular way. But if he hung around for a few days he would conclude that the age of enlightenment had been hijacked by one of the most powerful of human emotions - the desire to possess material objects or the minds of others.

He would notice that universities were no longer focused on producing classical scholars and natural philosophers who were gentle with the earth and the biosphere - but mostly financiers, traders and builders who misused scientific revelation to exploit and damage the earth and the biosphere. He would be astonished at the immense complexity of the economy. He would be dismayed to realise that it was increasingly owing its survival to the consumption of energy and material far in excess of what humans needed for their survival.

We have two competing perspectives leading to two different outcomes. Which will win out in the end? - the lateral thinking of pure science which courageously goes where lesser men dare not go, or the linear thinking of those who control the world's resources and who are driven by greed or fear?

Is our destiny to become gods, or are we to follow the path of the dodo? Even if we do discover all that there is to know, will we be able to rejoice in that achievement for the rest of time - or will all be lost in the destruction of the biosphere from which we evolved?