http://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes
The “Future” Question: numbers, babies & sustainability
What do you get when you marry a celebrity statistician who describes himself as a very serious possibilist with an entrepreneurial enterprise software developer?
Essentially, we get the belief that at this very moment we as a species are writing the future of humanity. Our choice is twofold: deteriorate our resources to our own demise, or come together in a way not previously possible and focus on a sustainable, balanced world with an equitable human experience for our species.
Sound utopian? Even in very recent history the answer would have been a resounding yes. At this intersection of time, however, it is very seriously possible to make decisions based on educated information distributed through and collaborated on technology, giving us the power to harness our human capacities into the single goal of a sustainable future for all. And for us to survive into the future: it’s all or none.
Hans Rosling is an unconventional Swedish professor with a passion for bringing numbers to life in a manner that not only informs his audience of global health concerns, but excites us in ways that prompt ‘thought’ to ‘action’. He talks about the ‘new world’ and asks us within this context: what about the future? His visual interpretations of animated data into real space are compelling; watching his global stats race across the screen while he rattles off the numbers is like watching marathon race and hoping they all get to the finish line.
For Rosling, to know the future is to review the past, to chart it so that it gives context to where we are now, and to extrapolate that information providing an accurate snapshot of only two scenarios for the future: sustainability or demise.
Justin Rosenstein, the guy who invented the “like” button on facebook, asks the question ‘what if we could take every project and double it’s effectiveness’. He is passionate about building infrastructure that helps everyone at the same time and imagines what it would be like if all of humanity could coordinate its action seamlessly and without effort working towards a single goal.
Both Rosenstein and Rosling are trying to pull us from an individualistic, self-centric mindset into one of collective action towards sustainable resources with focus on different skills and specialties. As their skills are different, so are their expressions and approaches to this idea.
Rosenstein ask us to see ourselves as one big project using technological infrastructure so that we might break through to a sustainable world solving the problem of resources for all, where Rosling shows us where this focus might land. The main thrust of Rosling’s passion can be compressed to one issue: the child mortality rate. That emerging economies will catch up with, or forge ahead towards, wealthier countries still leaves, statistically, roughly 2 billion people living in severe poverty with low child survival rates and this, Rosling illustrates, is important to our collective future.
In fact, Rosling calls child survival ‘the new green’. Child mortality is the only way of getting to a sustainable population for the world. Over several talks Rosling shows that our mindset of developed and developing countries is harming our ability to create an accurate picture of ourselves globally. For example, despite the charge of religion in our modern world it has very little to do with family size and child survival–hence our survival. In fact, 80% of people live in countries with about 2 children per woman across religions. The greatest impact is economy—and not emerging economies, which is the bulk of the worlds economies. We are talking about the very poorest of the poor, the people whose main concern is food and shoes.
According to Rosling, and other educated analysis, the main need is to focus on getting the poorest economies out of deep poverty so families don’t need to have children to work, to increase the age of marriage, and to increase education for women and increase the rate of women in the workplace. Fifty percent of the decrease in child mortality can be attributed to female education. When we get girls in school the effect is seen about 15 years later.
Increased rates of child survival in the poorest economies is a humanitarian issue not only because they are children that are suffering, but for climate change and our own survival collectively.
Statistics show that we have less children per woman when: children survive, many children are not needed for work, women get educated and join the workforce, & family planning becomes accessible. When we collectively plan for the resources needed for the people on our planet, Rosling says that we need to plan for a population of 10 billion, which is where Rosling’s statistics project us being in a best-case scenario of decreased mortality rate for children.
Rosenstein posits that there could be a single human project for global thriving, and Rosling identifies it. Can we create what Rosenstein calls a global species cause? Do we have the will to come together now that we have the tools, skills, and technology to achieve such a goal. Both Rosenstein and Rosling create that sense of urgency for the audience that, yes, at this single moment in history we are writing the future for the whole of the human race.
Children as the new green, a sustainable future for us all, and the very real possibility that we might all not only survive, but thrive: that’s a goal worth working towards. If we don’t, our future resources will not sustain our population. We have the knowledge, we have the technological infrastructure, we have evolved consciously as a species. The question of the future is: do we have the will to reach beyond our own goals and needs to encompass a larger vision that includes us all because it seems that in the new world, it’s all or nothing.
Naturality Design 
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