The thousand-year plan or time to act for the long-term survival of humanity

"As long as human lives on Earth, the human essence will survive."

When I wrote down the sentence at the beginning of this post in my notebook today, I shuddered with catharsis. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandias is part of the Hungarian literary curriculum and of contemporary pop culture because it captures the perceived timelessness of human greatness (vanity). Our illusion of grandeur has long since been shattered, replaced by the intoxication of consumption, that the whole world is for sale and the big gorging never ends. I instructed the latest technological "saviour", an enhanced chatbot, to slightly rewrite the classic poem for me, putting the consumer in the place of the king.

"In a realm not far from here I found
A poster sprawling—huge, profound:
Two vast and trunkless legs of jeans
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the ground,
Half sunk, a shattered smartphone gleams
Whose screen, and plastic case, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its maker well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that swiped them, and the heart that bled.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Consumer, shopper of shops:
Look on my Deals, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."


The first report of the Club of Rome was published in 1972 and the first oil crisis occurred in 1973. But humanity has done nothing of substance to choose a different path. 
It's an important question of whether we choose to literally eat up the future of humanity based on our short-term vision, or whether we put on the brakes, start to dismantle our industrial systems and move to a much more modest standard of living. We've thrown half a century out the window while doubling our population, consuming most of our raw materials, saturating habitats with rubbish and exposing wildlife and ourselves to incredible chemical stresses. I can't imagine the damage that microplastics will cause to living organisms. In our virtually mindless consumer fever, we have made ourselves sick and exposed future generations to serious risks. When I read ancient Greek philosophers, I am always amazed at how intelligent people were thousands of years ago, and how the ideas of the ancients are so fresh and understandable in the present. (It is very instructive to study the social structure of ancient Greek city-states. It is a good question to ask what the ideal of the citizen has become by the 21st century. Is the consumer really a free and respected member of society? What state are our societies in anyway? Is any bond at all possible between man and man in a country of hundreds of millions of people, or is it only the hope of profit that restrains them and prevents mass uprisings? Where is the depth of thought behind our actions? We are more like animals, content to satisfy our needs and chase after pleasures (drogs, shopping, travel, sexual adventures, porn, online raving, obsessions.)
Of course, as an ordinary person, I have no right to interfere in other people's lives, I just use my common sense to assess the situation and detail the problems. I am raising a point of view that I don't see much evidence of in the world, that it is time to make the long-term survival of humanity a goal. There is no doubt that eight billion people is a number of individuals that could be affected by any cataclysm, there are bound to be a few million survivors, so the survival of the species is ultimately assured. It's just that the problems that have been swept aside will eventually overtake us and we will start to die out in the millions. I don't know how to convey the horror of our mass extinction. It will be something only on a much larger scale with our higher population numbers than the plague epidemic. Go study history, well if you can learn from it. No, we are not protected by our technology. We are living beings, and we have taken a severe toll on the living world. We have seriously compromised the very survival of the human essence. And why? For false and ephemeral nonsense. 
I hope that my thoughts will resonate with some and that there will be those who aim to preserve the human essence, so that thousands and thousands of years later there will still be those who will wonder at the varied lives of our ancestors.