I.
JRR Tolkien, the creator of the hobbits, elves and orcs, coined the term "eucatastrophe" in an essay on the essence of fairy tales. The crooked word consists of the Greek prefix Eu, for "good," and just catastrophe, which marks the utterly unpleasant point at which things suddenly go downhill. Tolkien combined the two to have one word for the dramatic turn for the better that often occurs in fairy tales. One only needs to think of the redeeming moment when the prince and Cinderella finally find each other after many trials and tribulations, and the lost shoe, "too small even for a doll," ultimately sits on the only right foot. This is a disaster: When tears of emotion flow, because after a lot of suffering and pain everything will still be fine.
Tolkien, a devout Catholic, derived his observation from the world of the Bible. The Gospels are particularly artistic and moving in their dealings with the wonderful, they are "mythical" in their own perfect way. Because of all the sudden turns for the better, he writes, they related the greatest of all, the eucatastrophe of mankind par excellence: the birth of Jesus Christ, brought into the world by God in order to save it, and to redeem people from evil.
The child who will save the world - that is the stuff of which the silent, holy night is made. In our culture it has been the starting point of the great festivals and annual rituals for many centuries, so powerful that the whole calendar is divided into one before and one after Christ. The origins may be forgotten or even despised by many contemporaries today, but the story of the child with whom hope comes into the world has become so firmly intertwined with everyday life over time that it doesn't matter whether you are believe in it or not: it is just there. And that's why, even in the 21st century, a tiny glimmer of starlight falls over Bethlehem from afar on every child born in the once so pious Occident.
That sounds like a Christmas sermon, and yet it's true.
Children are hope, they are the future, nothing in that has changed in two millennia.
No birth announcement sent out today begins with the words: "... we regret having to announce the birth of our child", of course not: The announcements are rather bursting with confidence and vital energy, because every newborn fulfills the human longing for new beginnings , Departure means possibility, chance, future.
II.
A child born in our part of the world on Christmas 2021 has a lot of future ahead of him, 80, 90, 100 years old. If life expectancy continues to rise, and if nothing bad comes up, then those born today can still experience a decade or two even from the 22nd century. Most of them will in any case still celebrate Christmas 2100 with some probability and will therefore know by how many degrees the earth will really have warmed up by then, that alone is a fascinating idea.
A lot, but by no means everything, will have been dependent on the number of degrees for the almost 80-year-old life of the child born today. Because it will also have answers to other anxious questions, no less serious, that its parents and grandparents asked themselves at Christmas 2021: How long will the corona pandemic keep us in its clutches? Will more epidemics follow? Is the war returning to Europe? Will there be Trumpist revolutions? Are dancing robots taking power? Are hackers ruining the world? Are the democracies ready for the future? Will migration en masse, fleeing extreme weather and swelling oceans whirl up today's fabric of states?
Fortunately, in addition to the dark, there are also the bright, more comforting prospects. Technological and medical breakthroughs are in the air. The victory over cancer, malaria and many other diseases thanks to genetic engineering and computer-aided diagnosis is expected in the near future. Generating abundant, clean, safe energy from sustainable sources seems achievable. Artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, quantum computers, metaverse are the colorful catchphrases for possible leaps forward, for a new, capitalized industrial revolution, with which a rich, attractive, healthy, sustainable, good life is to emerge.
In the political arena there is an indestructible hope that, despite everything, humankind can continue to civilize itself collectively, and that hunger, wars and hardship can be contained.
The amazingly stable framework of the United Nations, the whole network of international institutions and growing non-governmental organizations, the European Union, which is only underestimated in Europe itself, all of them are setting the course and working to stop the unconscious consumption and destruction of the earth.
That an idea of happiness prevails that goes beyond material wanting to have and digital being liked.
It is not a matter of fact whether it will go down or up, whether it will get worse or better.
It never is.
It would be important to be aware of this openness.
And endure.
III.
The child born today, like all children before him, will become acquainted with an indissoluble contradiction in life: the future will always be "a fog of the uncertain and the unknowable," as Hannah Arendt once wrote, unpredictable in small and large, and yet man remains compelled to constantly prepare for it.
This is a strong paradox: we constantly have to make provisions for a time about which little or nothing is known, not even whether we ourselves are part of it at all. We get bread for dinner in the ultimately precarious certainty that nothing will go wrong on the way. We buy supplies for a week, we plan a vacation in six months, we conclude contracts for 10 years, take out loans for 20 years, put money aside for a pension in 30 years. We build houses that are supposed to outlast us, we father children in the hope that they will outlive us for decades. Anyone who behaves like this, as a human being, has to behave like this is condemned to pragmatic confidence.
But what's coming? What's next What life is ahead of a child born today? What can be said about tomorrow? On this impossible topic, theses, found objects and thoughts are gathered here, impossible as a topic because conventional methods cannot research what is to come. There are no specialists who could be consulted, no science who could investigate tomorrow, no witnesses of the time to come. There is only one certainty that the great futurologist and fantasist Stanislaw Lém expressed so calmly: "It is impossible to forego forecasts, but the forecasts are characterized by great uncertainty."
There is data, on the demographic development of societies, for example, that describes what is to come very precisely, but only as long as nothing comes up. These prospects are well known. The child born today, especially in Germany, is growing up in an aging, shrinking society. In the year 2060, when today's child already has 39 candles on the cake, 30 percent of Germans will be older than 67 - and only 16 percent younger than 20 if the birth rate continues to be low, life expectancy continues to rise and the number of immigrants continues to be insufficient . What does such a society look like? How does she feel Which topics are important to you? Which parties, if there are still some in today's form, does she vote for?
In the years to come, the child born today will grow up with parents who no longer believe that their life will be better off than themselves. In any case, today's parents answer one of the most important questions for a long time, important as a guideline for politics, important than Drivers of entire societies, with no: "Will my child be better off one day than I am today?" No, say three quarters of Germans. It's a dark, scandalous welcome to the new baby.
Is the aging society already speaking here?
Does the mood in a country already express itself here, inhabited by saturated citizens who lack the imagination for a more beautiful, fulfilling life?
Do these parents and grandparents live in an end-of-story world?
Do you really believe that the Flood will come after you?
And what actually mean "doing well" and "doing better" in our latitudes, which are among the richest on the planet?
Does that really still mean "having a lot" and "having more"?
IV.
Today, no conversation about the future can ignore the topics of climate and consumption. The sociologist Harald Welzer, who is involved in the FUTURZWEI project, explains very well why this is so in his book "Obituary for myself". In the 20th century alone, Welzer writes at one point, the economy grew fourteen times, energy consumption increased sixteen times and production increased forty times. “More energy was consumed in just a hundred years than in the entire 200,000 years of human history before that. And ten times as much as in the 1000 years before the 20th century. "
Measured against this madness of modern consumption and wasting, “going well” can no longer be seriously considered. And certainly not of “going better” if that meant increasing the monstrous “metabolism” of the global economy even further. The problem is: the current and still prevailing logic presupposes exactly that. Apparently, word has still not got around to everyone that the whole wild dance of overproduction is possibly stuck in what Welzer calls a »finiteness crisis«, which one can no longer escape even in the fastest Tesla. Higher, faster, further, growth in the previous sense, remains the key concept in the old hocus-pocus of the dominant economic doctrines, whose simple-minded but unfortunately predominant image of man urgently needs correction.
A statement is as uncomfortable as it is true: If the findings of climate and climate impact research are correct, which there is no reasonable doubt about, then "the system question" arises again. It belonged to the folklore of the Cold War of the 20th century, when socialists and Eurocommunists in the comfortable freedom of the West pondered whistle-smoking whether Karl Marx was not right and capitalism wrong.
Since the turn of the millennium, it has been re-created by new social movements on associated world social forums, which denounced the global inequality of the distribution of income and wealth. It seeped quite a way into the mainstream when the 2008-09 financial crisis went up trillions in smoke everywhere and "occult" became the rallying cry of young people around the world a few years later. And now it arises again, the system question, in an ecological and consumer-critical variant, mostly without Marx, but with Greta. Is capitalism at an end? Does he have to go?
If a conversation is really to begin about this, the question would have to leave the circle of activists, and it would help to rephrase the question in such a way that social majorities also feel addressed by it. Then capitalism would first have to be properly thanked for all the prosperity, the educational opportunities, the social peace, the good life that it made possible in large parts of the world in the first place.
There is no need to settle accounts with the market economy, but rather the insight that a process of grief work has to begin that first of all recognizes that it was also great with the fast cars and the great trips, the new furniture and the chic clothes that were flown in Pineapple and all that great electronics. Only then will it be possible to talk without moral flatulence about the fact that the price for this beautiful life in an increasingly voracious market economy has become unacceptably high, and that all of the associated everyday life has long been absurd.
How absurd, the sociologist Ortwin Renn gave an example of this in an interview with the authors of the bestseller »Germany 2050 ″. Renn says that on average every person in the world buys one item of clothing a week. “As a result, more than 5.8 million tons of textiles end up in the garbage every year in Europe, in the USA it is 14 million tons. In Germany, more than 9,000 items of clothing are 'disposed of' every five minutes, and half of all T-shirts are thrown away after less than 37 days. "
You don't really have to know much more to be able to say that the god of consumption, as we have now worshiped him for a good half a century, is dead.
That in this late phase of the total throwaway society there is a process of self-destruction that nobody wants, nobody can accept anymore.
That it is irresponsible to the child who will be born today to continue like this.
V.
But what next? The answer does not have to be given by the individual, it is not first a question of buying fewer T-shirts or only those made from organic cotton. The answer is not to even manufacture the vast majority of T-shirts in the first place, not because it is banned by evil governments, but because the states and responsible organizations cleverly draw the political-fiscal-economic framework for industry and world trade in such a way that For example, growing cotton for textile junk is no longer worthwhile, any more than manufacturing T-shirts that end up in the trash after 37 days. And the fashionable, cultural, socio-psychological, i.e. immaterial needs that were satisfied with T-shirt consumption in the old world will be dealt with in the future, more on that later, in the virtual space of the metaverse.
Here lies the new system question that directly affects the future of the child who is born today: An ecologically driven perestroika of capitalism is needed, a realignment of the market economy away from the destructive towards the non-consuming, the preserving. What applies to T-shirts must apply to cement, to mining, to steel production, to agriculture, to the flow of traffic. Of course, it would also need shrinkage. Pause. Waiver. New priorities.
The good news is: the renovation has started. What the European Union alone has achieved in legislative and reform terms in this direction in recent years is - if you look at it from a distance - of global importance and historical significance far into the future. The initiatives of the industry, the new priorities of the financial sector, the whole green wave that runs through our current economy are more than just a fashion. A break is in progress, fragmented, difficult to read, but it is taking place.
The bad news is: Around the globe, majorities in society, especially in rich countries, do not want their way of life to be questioned any further. The actual greenwashing these days often does not take place in corporate headquarters, but in wealthy private households in Munich, Milan and Manchester, where the buying frenzy does not let up as long as the harmlessness of one's own life is certified with eco-labels.
And in order not to scare off this clientele and not to bother society, which is tired of democracy, to spare the commuters and not to hurt the diesel drivers, many governments play softball, as it is called in America.
They no longer trust each other, or they no longer trust themselves to govern on the basis of clear knowledge and plausible prognoses.
You are elected, but then apologize for having the power to legislate, draw lines, set points.
Politics today, not only in this country, that applies to many countries in Europe, shy away from taking on responsibility.
They all talk a lot about it, the Chancellors and Prime Ministers, but often they only proclaim goals and when they are missed they set new goals.
But goals, says Harald Welzer, are not actions.
VI.
Germany has just completed another major, recurring exercise in forecasting and futurology. The three party negotiators have met extensively behind closed doors to assess the near and distant future and to prepare the country and its society for them. This is called coalition negotiations, takes place every four years, and this time, as you know, the traffic light came out.
Politics is an overwhelmingly complex business when it comes to the future. Anyone who procures weapons for the Bundeswehr, plans routes for the railways, keeps the pension system solvent for future generations and also has to watch Russian troop movements at the same time, really does not have it easy. And every decision includes the uncertainty as to whether the underlying assumptions and scenarios may be upside down tomorrow.
What to do when the wall falls What if the planes crash into the World Trade Center on September 11th, if the banking system shakes in 2008? What if the pandemic rolls across the country in ever new waves? The "black swans" of contemporary history are deeply engraved in the fever curves of the stock exchanges, unheard-of events on which the course of the world is set anew. The child born today will not be spared from them.
But even without the big noise, everything is in constant motion, even if contemporaries are not even aware of it. Huge megatrends roll through time like »slow avalanches«, labeled with names that have long since meant everything and therefore often no longer mean too much: globalization, digitization, individualization, urbanization, they are somehow there, somehow effective, but also somehow very cloudy.
Politicians like to use them because they can be used to hide helplessness and to demonstrate determination. How often have Germans been promised nationwide, first-class digitization in the past few years and decades? And how often has globalization been used to divert attention from government errors and failures? It can no longer be counted.
And it doesn't stop. The new Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz also presented his first government declaration shortly before Christmas as a potpourri of old hits. "The 20s lying ahead of us will be years of change, renewal, reconstruction," said Scholz. "In the 21st century we don't need less progress, but more progress!" Or: "The prosperity of our country depends on our ability to build the infrastructures for the climate-neutral age."
Scholz has essentially promised the child who will be born today that everything will be fine and that everything that Angela Merkel has left behind in 16 years will now be tackled. Digitization, robotics, future technology, glass fibers, chip production, all of these now want to be "strengthened" and "expanded". Immediately the »departure towards a climate-neutral and digitized society« is coming, and in the next four years Germany will be structurally made »fit« »for the world of the 21st century«. One would really like to believe that, but the time has come for politics to deliver.
Everything is still just a vision: When today's baby is nine years old, in 2030, the coal phase-out will come, "ideally," Scholz said. Then "80 percent of our electricity needs" come from renewable energy, and 15 million electric cars are driving around. We will see. On its 24th birthday, in 2045, Germany will be climate neutral. Scholz said so. This means that in 24 years the whole country will no longer contribute anything to global warming through harmful emissions. Let's hope the best.
But, to be completely honest, the strongest passages in the new Chancellor's speech were those in which he made no promises but only made a few clear statements.
That Germany is and wants to remain a cosmopolitan, tolerant country, an immigration society that wants to promote the right and good in world politics within the European network.
That the country won't let a couple of extremist anti-vaccination campaigns control it.
Scholz failed, and it will take revenge, to seriously prepare the Germans for the future.
He failed to make it clear to everyone that they will soon no longer be able to produce 10 tonnes of CO₂ per person per year, but only two.
And what that means for everyday life, namely that it gets damn tight, damn hard.
As long as this is not stated, "more progress" will not be dared in this country.
VII.
In Germany people like to use terms such as »Industry 4.0« and the like to make things important, but what is actually missing is the simplest basic digital education, innovative openness - and also simply: curiosity and sportsmanship. The priority of digitization in this country was always just assertion, empty shell, Sunday speech. In many places the state still sits behind piles of paper and Leitz files in Wilhelmine buildings and manages the world by fax. Instead of looking for opportunities, objections are found, instead of tackling the new, the old lies in the way. In the new Bundestag there are 735 MPs, eleven entrepreneurs and three entrepreneurs, that says something. Civil servants and lawyers are represented in hundreds.
Their future expertise often does not go far beyond what trend researchers and women's magazines sell as the world of tomorrow. The “city of the future”, for example, regularly looks like a mix of today's Shanghai and Fritz Lang's Metropolis from 1927, just somehow brighter, more glassy, greener. Air taxis are an integral part of this imagined future, autonomous cars of course, supermarkets without cash registers, trains on stilts, people with nanomaterial coated laundry on their bodies that will never get dirty again.
Whoever enters the interior of the imaginary apartments makes acquaintance with old friends, the intelligent lamps and smart radiators, with vacuum, cooking and cleaning robots, who wish you a good day. The windows generate energy from sunlight, every step is used by springy floors to generate electricity, and thanks to the Google Brain Team, the home entertainment machine park will soon know which film, which music, which wall color and spatial fragrance would be pleasant at the moment.
There aren't any children, maybe one, but there are artificial cats and e-butlers in any shape, Mandalorian or Minnie Mouse, who serve Gomasio-spiced insect sticks. The refrigerator, which should not be missing in any of these visions, orders fresh milk when needed, which is delivered by drone within minutes, but today only the semi-fat, because the networked body scales want it to be compared with the data from the resident's tracker.
This is roughly how trend researchers imagine it. Anyone who still knows the Feuerstein family feels reminded of them, except that the useful primordial animals of the old cartoon series in the futuristic magazine and agency stories of our day have been replaced by somehow cool gadgets. And it always gets particularly funny when today's influencers and other self-proclaimed experts on the future try to assess upcoming social and societal changes.
Then even German authors regularly fall into English, as if the future could no longer be talked about in German. In their visions, »dual career couples« stumble through »co-working spaces« and constantly update their »skills«. Nobody actually goes to work anymore because the “factory live glare” in the “home office” makes so good sense for everyone. And if a joint »Deep Dive« is necessary, where the feel would not be bad, interaction and creative input, you send your hologram. This is what it says in current books and articles.
They hardly ever see people living in Braunschweig or Bruchsal in the future and taking the bus to work and going to the bakery and doing sports.
The imaginary futurologists are only marginally interested in the fact that children have to go to school and that old people should somehow live well.
They cannot even imagine that completely different, much more tangible questions will arise in the “city of the future”, for example how to better use empty space and close building gaps.
Or how you use less and less concrete when pouring foundations thanks to new 3D printing techniques, how you save wood when shuttering, or how you trick the existing building law so that cities can finally be built more densely and use less space the quiet, invisible topics of the future.
And this is where Germany fails, regularly, in the small print.
Only on the urgent need for reform in building law, which in its current form prevents the city of the future, there are resolutions and declarations, years of discussion processes, flaming appeals from well-known architects and powerful planning officers.
But it is happening, although there are so many legally trained experts in the Bundestag: nothing.
So the city of the future, which is worth living in, beautiful and functional, remains a German plan.
A political goal.
Goodbye to you.
VIII.
The child born today will have to grow up without Thomas Gottschalk and will no longer understand why TV ratings exploded again shortly before Christmas 2021 when the 75-year-old showmaster with the colorful suits made his comeback as "Wetten, dass ... "Moderator celebrated. Today's children will no longer spend large parts of their later life in front of screens, but in the metaverse, where the boundaries of the world as we knew it are being exploded. Everything speaks for this at the moment, even if we Germans take the train As usual, you will first miss it, then be mocked, only to belatedly mock it at the end.
The point is that Mark Zuckerberg's new baby "Merkverse", the metaverse, is not a crazy idea of over-the-top Silicon Valley developers, but rather the solution to many problems of our time, and one way or another: the next big thing. The child will, perhaps as early as the late thirties of the century, be able to move through an already amazingly real parallel world, which he or she enters with the help of virtual reality glasses or masks or fantastically advanced contact lenses, who knows. Why will it do that? Because that's where the music plays, life, the 21st century. And almost everything else.
Why is? Anyone who has not seen Steven Spielberg's film "Ready Player One" should catch up on it, because it is, so to speak, the wild science fiction draft for the developments that are currently being brought into non-fictional reality. It should now be possible to create "walk-in" digital spaces, "immersive" worlds in which there is more than just playing. In the future, people will meet there, work, shop, study, learn, train, make music, interact. AR and VR, »augmented« and »virtual reality« are supposed to make this possible, this has been dreamed of for decades, but now computing power and transmission speeds are within reach that make one believe that it will be implemented.
With »Second Life«, an early attempt to lure people into an art world, that will in principle have a lot to do, but nothing more to do with execution and quality.
It is now really about opening up a new, deceptively realistic continent.
And the pioneers anchored off its coast, one foot on the beach of the New World.
They move unimaginable amounts of data that have to be processed at unimaginable transfer rates.
In order to create convincing, interactive 3-D worlds that don't just look like a nice attempt at first glance, the computer, network and component industry has to practically reinvent itself again.
If you miss this development because you need a few years to calmly plug your dead spots with newspaper, you will be left behind.
Again: what is it about? Raja Koduri, a leading developer of the Intel group, who has just announced that it will develop graphics processors for the Metaverse, speaks of a "photo-realistic" virtual world in an interview with the Internet platform Quartz. It still takes enormous technological leaps to make it possible. The Intel manager estimates that the computing power of today's computer chips must be a thousand times greater than it is today in order to be able to create really perfect, stable 3-D worlds. To do this, the entire infrastructure of the Internet, including the hardware behind it, has to change, says Koduri. "We are already working in the background on the streets and highways because we assume that this new civilization will emerge."
A new civilization, a digital twin of the existing world, the Germans, as always at the beginning of great developments, think that this has nothing to do with their future. But the metaverse will be a driver for innovation that will turn entire industries upside down and create new ones that need research, better machines, new products, new trade ideas, new media, new forms of payment and manners. From today's perspective, everything that is invented and developed along the way, and what is then done with it, is still completely unimaginable.
But at some point, maybe 2050, the metaverse will be a kind of completion of the web. After the web1: websites and email, the web2: social networks, the web3: decentralization through blockchain, it could become the fourth and then most highly developed level. In the case of its convincing realization, it will mark the end of the boundary between analog and digital, a new space that will fit into previous life like a magical room in which everything imaginable and unimaginable is haunted: supermarket, sports arena, gym, concert hall, classroom , Cockpit, church, doctor's office, factory, operating room, games in the midst of dinosaurs, sperm whales, icebergs.
The metaverse will be irresistible and successful above all because it answers the question that governments are always shirking about today and that has so far remained open in the discussion about climate protection: what a life worth living should look like, if per capita and year only one or two tons of CO₂ are allowed to occur?
The metaverse can be the answer to that.
It will consume loads of energy itself, but in the long term it could help decisively to end the madness of analog overproduction, because the cravings for must-have bags and disposable T-shirts, for a closet full of sneakers and chic clothes will be there in the future , be satisfied in virtual space.
That can not be?
It has already started.
Wer Kindern und Jugendlichen schon einmal länger beim Fortnite-oder Minecraft-Spielen zugesehen hat, weiß, dass die neue Welt des Metaversums kommt, weil sie sich in den Köpfen junger Menschen heute im Prinzip längst dreht. Im Fortnite-Kosmos etwa kaufen sich die Spieler »Skins« für ihre Avatare, wörtlich: Häute, Kampfanzüge. Es gibt schicke und nicht-so-schicke, begehrte und seltene, es ist ein teurer Spaß, bezahlt mit echtem Taschengeld. Das Faszinierende ist: Die virtuellen Klamotten tragen den Teilnehmern in der Welt des Spiels genau die gleiche Anerkennung ein, die sich im analogen Leben mit echter Kleidung und anderen Statusobjekten verbinden. Analog, digital – Hauptsache cool, als Mensch oder Avatar, echt oder virtuell. Deshalb wird das Metaverse das Schrumpfen erträglicher machen. Es wird große Teile des Lebens in einen Raum verlegen, der an die »Matrix"-Filme erinnert – und natürlich klingt das erschreckend für Menschen, die mit Kaufhof, Tchibo und C&A aufgewachsen sind. Aber die Menschen des 19. Jahrhunderts hatten auch Angst davor, an der schieren Geschwindigkeit der gemütlichen Dampflokomotiven zu ersticken, und sie haben es trotzdem überlebt.
Es ist doch auch eine ziemlich logische Entwicklung, dass sich alles, was wir tun und lassen und haben und benutzen immer weiter entmaterialisiert. Bei Tonträgern etwa haben wir es miterlebt von schweren Schellack- und Vinyl-Schallplatten bis zum Streaming heutiger Tage. Nun können Datenwolken kostbare Kunstwerke werden, auch das setzt doch nur fort, was sich auf Kunst-Biennalen schon lange gezeigt hat, und dass nun auch Gefühle, Werte, Sozialprestige, Trauer und Respekt digitale Formen annehmen können, kann niemanden überraschen. Es ist die Zukunft des Kindes, das heute geboren wird.
Wenn nichts dazwischen kommt.
IX.
Ein Forscherteam der Universität Oxford hat Verfahren entwickelt, um die Wahrscheinlichkeit eines Aussterbens der Menschheit aufgrund von Naturereignissen berechnen zu können. Die Ergebnisse sind einigermaßen beruhigend – aber dann auch wieder nicht. Lässt man die Geschichte des Menschen schon vor 200.000 Jahren beginnen, dann liegt die Wahrscheinlichkeit eines Aussterbens der ganzen Gattung heute bei eins zu 870.000, ist also ziemlich gering. Die Wissenschaftler reden aber leider nur von Meteoriteneinschlägen, Vulkanausbrüchen, Erdbeben, also enger definierten Naturkatastrophen. Der vom Menschen verursachte Klimawandel floss nicht in die Berechnungen ein, die Möglichkeit von Atomkriegen auch nicht. Man ist also eigentlich nur so schlau wie zuvor.
An der Freien Universität Brüssel hat ein Projekt unter Leitung von Wim Thiery ermittelt, dass ein Kind, das heute geboren wird, siebenmal so viele Jahrhundert-Hitzewellen erleben könnte wie ein 1960 geborener Mensch, nämlich um die 30. Das Kind, das heute geboren wird, wird viel mehr mit Waldbränden, Dürren, Flusshochwassern, Missernten zu tun haben als die heute 60-jährigen, das lässt sich aufgrund solider Modelle errechnen.
Thiery und sein Team sprechen von »intergenerationeller Ungerechtigkeit«, das hieße weniger vornehm ausgedrückt: Die heutigen Großeltern in den reichen Ländern der Nordhalbkugel haben auf Kosten ihrer Enkel die Welt verprasst, unbewusst vielleicht, nicht willentlich, aber im Ergebnis muss man es leider so sagen. Für die Zukunft könnte man daraus den Schluss ziehen, dass sie ihre Kinder und Kindeskinder nun wenigstens nicht mehr belehren über den richtigen Weg, und schon gar nicht den schönen Elan bremsen, mit dem die Jugend versucht, nicht nur an Freitagen, die selbstgefällige Welt der Silver Surfer aufzumischen. Vielleicht beginnt gerade wieder so eine Bob-Dylan-Zeit, »The times they are a-changing«. Und wir müssen alle zugeben, dass die Wasser ringsum steigen, wie es im Lied des Literaturnobelpreisträgers so schön heißt.
Trotzdem ist alles Wissen auch seltsam vorläufig. Ernst-Ulrich von Weizsäcker hat im SPIEGEL-Interview neulich gesagt, dass in den Sechzigerjahren des vergangenen Jahrhunderts, als er Physik studiert habe, noch vor der nächsten Eiszeit gewarnt worden sei. Und in den Ölkrisen der Siebzigerjahre habe man zwar schon von einer Energiewende gesprochen, aber noch geglaubt, dass die Kohle der ideale Ersatz für das Erdöl wäre.
Heute, sagt von Weizsäcker, werde nur noch die Digitalisierung als Fortschritt betrachtet, was ein Irrtum sei. Sie verschärfe sogar die Probleme, meint er, weil sie an vielen Stellen den Energieverbrauch noch weiter in die Höhe treibe. Ein Freund des Metaversums wird aus von Weizsäcker wohl nicht mehr. Aber sein Traum vom effizienteren Umfang mit allen Ressourcen, die Vorstellung, doppelter Wohlstand sei möglich bei halbiertem Naturverbrauch, ist auch geplatzt. Das zugehörige Buch, »Faktor 4« stammt von 1995, und sein Autor selbst sagt: »Diese Art technischer Fortschritt findet kaum statt.«
Das Kind, das heute geboren wird, wird von Kriegen um Wasser hören und von Versuchen, die Sonneneinstrahlung durch riesige Segel im Weltall zu regulieren. Es wird Reportagen darüber sehen, wie Hunderttausende Tonnen CO₂ verflüssigt und in unterseeische Sandsteinschichten gepresst werden. Es wird mit gutem Gewissen Flugzeuge besteigen, die nicht mehr Kerosin, sondern wiederaufbereitetes Salatöl tanken, später Wasserstoff, noch später wird vielleicht gar nicht mehr geflogen, sondern ganz anders und viel schneller gereist, wer weiß. Elektroautos, das ist ein interessanter Gedanke, könnten 2055 wegen ihrer Umweltschädlichkeit wieder verboten werden. Und dann würde ein japanischer Künstler in Dubai einen Turm aus 100.000 Ladesäulen errichten.
Was noch lässt sich denken? Was ist möglich? Plausibel? Wünschenswert?
Das Kind wird in einer Warenwelt aufwachsen, die den Leitlinien des Münchner Designers Stefan Diez folgt, die das zirkuläre, reparierbare, nachhaltige Produkt fordern, das von der Herstellung über die Nutzung bis zur Entsorgung so wenig Energie verbraucht wie möglich. Der globale Trend zur Verstädterung wird sich in Westeuropa Mitte des Jahrtausends überraschend umkehren, kleine und mittelgroße Städte werden profitieren. Große, soziale Bewegungen propagieren ein nachhaltiges, technikfreies Leben auf dem Land, das an die Traditionen der amerikanischen Amish erinnert.
Das Kind wird kein Sparbuch mehr haben und sich eines Tages die Hände gar nicht mehr mit Scheinen und Münzen schmutzig machen, weil auch Deutschland im Jahr 2044 als letzter Staat der Welt das Bargeld abschafft. Das Kind wird keine Kühe mehr auf Weiden sehen, und keine Tiere mehr als Gefährten haben, weil der Mensch, statt die industrielle Fleischproduktion zu verbieten, gleich die ganze 50.000-jährige Kultur der Viehzucht und Haustierhaltung beendet und den Veganismus zur selbstverständlichen Norm gemacht hat. Allergien jeder Art werden zur Volkskrankheit Nummer eins.
Das Kind wird nicht mehr hereinfallen müssen auf Fake News und skandalös gefälschte Filmaufnahmen, weil alle Web-Konzerne dank scharfer Regulierung durch die Staaten für die von ihnen veröffentlichten Inhalte verantwortlich geworden sind und von 2040 an riesigen Redaktionen gleichen, die das Geschnatter der Welt nach freiheitlichen, guten Kriterien redigieren und Hass und Lüge perfekt wegfiltern. Schon ab 2038 gibt es in vielen Ländern der Welt das vom französischen Publizisten und Futurologen Jacques Attali kurz vor seinem Tod konzipierte Schulfach »L’art de s’informer«, »Die Kunst des Sich-Informierens«.
Das Kind wird rund um die Uhr seine Körperdaten tracken, und mit ihnen eine granulare Medizin ermöglichen, die Krankheiten schon im Entstehen verhindert und jede Medikation individuell auf die Bedürfnisse der Patienten einstellen kann. Rückenschmerzen sind von 2045 an Geschichte, dank intelligenter Stützwäsche, die schon von klein auf Fehlhaltungen verhindert.
Das Kind wird vierzig neue Symphonien von Mozart und die Klavierkonzerte 6 bis 10 von Beethoven hören, komponiert von Maschinen, aber immer noch gespielt von Menschen auf alten Instrumenten. Es wird neue Romane von Tolstoi lesen, die wirklich von ihm sein könnten.
Für den 24. November 2050 um 17 Uhr hat sich das Kind mit einer Freundin und zwei Freunden aus Schulzeiten verabredet, um gemeinsam abzuwarten, ob der Publizist George Friedman mit seiner Weissagung von 2009 Recht behält, dass an diesem Tag um diese Uhrzeit der dritte Weltkrieg beginnt mit Raketenangriffen von japanischen Mondbasen auf Amerika. Um 17.30 Uhr, weil nichts passiert ist, öffnet das Kind, das längst erwachsen ist, zur Feier des Tages und des Weltfriedens die Flasche Portwein des Jahrgangs 2000, die ihm seine Eltern hinterlassen haben.
Im Park der vielen Maschinen und Geräte, zerrissen zwischen analoger und virtueller Welt, ständig umgeben von Bildschirmen, künstlicher Intelligenz, biotechnologischen Neuerungen, wird sich das Kind, älter werdend, grundlegende Fragen darüber stellen, »was es bedeutet, ein Mensch zu sein.« Das steht, man stelle sich vor, im CIA-Bericht »Die Welt im Jahr 2035«.
Aber was es bedeutet, ein Mensch zu sein, das ist eine uralte Frage, auf die die CIA keine Antwort finden wird, keine bessere jedenfalls als die Bibel. Hannah Arendt, die Denkerin des 20. Jahrhunderts, eine große Versteherin der Welt, die gewiss kein frömmelnder Mensch war, hat in ihrem Werk »Vita activa oder vom tätigen Leben« so argumentiert. Sie, die vor den Nazis aus Deutschland floh und 1937 von ihnen ausgebürgert wurde, die als Staatenlose herumziehen musste, ehe sie 1951 amerikanische Staatsbürgerin wurde, entwickelte an der Figur des Jesus Christus eine Theorie des Handelns.
Ihre Gedanken dazu in »Vita activa« kreisen darum, dass man kein Gott und auch nicht Gottes Sohn sein muss, um »Wunder« zu vollbringen. Letztlich sei »wunderwirkende Fähigkeit nichts anderes als das Handeln«. Jede Handlung gleiche einem Wunder, weil sie eingreift in den Lauf der Welt »und den Gang menschlicher Dinge immer unterbricht und von dem Verderben rettet«. Und weil handeln nur kann, wer geboren wird, ist das Geborensein, und mit ihm der Neuanfang, das eigentliche Wunder.
So schrieb Hannah Arendt 1958, und beendete das Kapitel ihres Buches so: »Dass man in der Welt Vertrauen haben und dass man für die Welt hoffen darf, ist vielleicht nirgends knapper und schöner ausgedrückt als in den Worten, mit denen die Weihnachtsoratorien ›die frohe Botschaft‹ verkünden: ›Uns ist ein Kind geboren.'«
It brings the assurance that life goes on.
That there is always a future.
Must give hope.
That there is of course the possibility of rescue.