Academician Sakharov on the world information system and that leads us to degradation Bashny.Net

Article from the distant 1974, the year written by a physicist for the Saturday Review:
"In the future, perhaps later than 50 years from now, I assume the creation of a global information system (vis), which make it available for everyone in any moment the contents of any book ever and where ever published, the contents of any article, getting any help. Vis shall include individual miniature inquiring receivers-transmitters, control centers that control the flow of information, channels of communication, including thousands of artificial satellites, cable and laser lines.
Even a partial implementation of the vis will have a profound impact on the lives of every person, his leisure, his intellectual and artistic development. Unlike TV, which is the main source of information of many of our contemporaries, vis will provide each maximum freedom in the choice of information and require individual activity". The article "the World in half a century" written by me in the spring of 1974 by order of the American magazine "Saturday review". Temporary line (2024) is conditional – I just gave myself freely to reflect on a desired future, may be actually more distant in time.


I am very pleased with the appearance of my article in the pages of the Soviet press. 22 Oct 1988
Strong and contradictory feelings of everyone who thinks about the future of the world in 50 years – that the future in which to live, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Feel dejected and horror of the tragic tangle of dangers and difficulties immensely complex future humanity, but also hope for the power of the mind and humanity in the hearts of billions of people, which alone can resist the impending chaos. It is also the admiration and lively interest caused by multilateral and unstoppable scientific and technical progress of our time.
What determines the future?
According to nearly universal opinion, among the factors that will shape the world in the coming decades, undeniable and unquestionable are: population growth (to 2024 more than 7 billion people on the planet); the depletion of natural resources – oil, natural soil fertility, clean water, etc.; serious violation of the natural balance and human environment.
These three undeniable factors make a depressing backdrop to any forecasts. But equally undeniable and weighing another factor is technological progress, which has accumulated "a run" for millennia of development of civilization and only now begins to fully reveal its brilliant features.
I am deeply convinced, however, that the enormous material prospects which are in scientific and technical progress, despite their exceptional importance and need not solve all of humanity by themselves. Technological progress will not bring happiness, unless supplemented with an extremely deep changes in the social, moral and cultural life of humanity. The inner spiritual life of people, the inner impulse of activity is difficult to predict, but it depends on in the end and the death and salvation of civilization.
The most important unknown in our forecasts is the possibility of destruction of civilization and of humanity itself in the flame of a large thermonuclear war. As long as there are thermo-nuclear weapons and warring, full of distrust of the state and groups of States, this danger is the cruel reality of the present.
But, having avoided the great war, humanity can still die, and had spent their strength in "small" wars, inter-ethnic and inter-state conflicts, rivalry and lack of coherence in the economic sphere, in the protection of the environment in regulating population growth, from political adventurism. Mankind is threatened by the decline of personal and public morality, which manifests itself already in deep decay in many countries the basic ideals of law and justice, in consumer egotism, the growth in the General criminal trends, which has become an international scourge of nationalist and political terrorism, destructive spread of alcoholism and drug addiction. In different countries the causes of these phenomena is slightly different.
It seems to me that the deepest, the primary cause lies in the inner lack of spirituality in which personal morality and responsibility are displaced and suppressed by the abstract and inhuman in its nature, estranged from the person with the authority (state or class, or party, or the authority of the leader is all nothing more than variants of the same troubles).
In the present state of the world when there is huge and have a tendency to widen the gap in economic development of different countries, when there is a division of the world into opposing groups of States, all the dangers threatening humanity, the enormous degree increase."



source: brainstorm-blog.ru

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