There are only two hopes for humanity: Either we find another planet to colonize after we’ve destroyed this one, or perhaps your technology might be able to allow us to transform ourselves, or other aspects of the planet, so that we can continue to live here. Venter’s team, currently exploring Earth’s oceans in search of species whose genes may help us eventually “write software for life,” is one excellent reason for all of us to be optimistic. So is the internet — our evolutionary, revolutionary planetary brain — which ironically could encode humanity with the necessary human empathy it needs to survive.
In compelling if chilled fashion, Surviving Progress examines what it will take to achieve that, as the global population sprints past 7 billion and Earth’s systemic resource wars proliferate. Standing in the way are “progress traps” in technology, economics, consumption and the environment.
Drawing a connection over many millennia between our hirsute, spear-wielding ancestors wiping out yummy mastodons and our modern, rapacious appetite for finite natural resources, "Surviving Progress" says the relentless exploiter in us is bred in the bone.
Filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, building out from grim themes in Ronald Wright's book "A Short History of Progress," cover an enormous amount of ground in this globe-trotting production, including the impact of overpopulation, synthetic biology (creating new life-forms), overconsumption, predatory banking, environmental devastation and the seemingly unstoppable 200-year-old Industrial Revolution that is ratcheting up in developing countries.
