not here for a long time, here for a good time.

Last night I came out to my boyfriend about how I see the future. Not our future, mind. Our future is bright. What it was that came out finally was my fully formulated hypothesis of the future of the human race. I call it a coming out because I wasn't really able to articulate it (in a very inarticulate way) until last night over dinner. Heavy? No, not actually. As you read this, you might think of it as defeatist but really I think of it as pragmatism.

I went on to a site recently called deathclock.com after I read about it in the London Times and it was there that I found out (um... sure) that I will live until 2066 (of course, this figure changes every time you reload it, even if you don't change the stats) and that was a laugh. But it got me thinking about a conversation I had with my sometimes co-director friend Tom during which he told me he'd love to live for several hundred years. And I thought, "several hundred years? I haven't got the energy for that!"

So that was the point at which I realised I am glad my life is finite. I'm glad I won't live to see another turn of the century. I'm glad I don't have to carry on in this body for eons. I wouldn't make a good rock. I haven't got the patience. In all, I might not be too fussed with death itself, actually the thought of actually dying makes me nervous, but I am glad that I will be shuffling off this mortal coil and making my exit in less than 100 years.

And then 100 years is a very short time. And when you apply that length of time to the scale of Earth's life cycle, it's absolutely nothing. We are like the bacteria we see living and dying in seconds in petrie dishes. We are a flash of brilliance. And we are brilliant, of that I am certain. Never before has the Earth seen such clever beings (that we know of). And the Earth has been through a lot.

For instance, if we need more power we build a dam and the building of the dam changes our environment, drowns habitats and makes a few species go extinct. But we have more power. When our technology supersedes our infrastructure, we shape and change the land to accommodate us. We make nano circuitry. We dominate the sliding scale of industriousness. Never, ever, in human history have we been told "no". Not on a global scale. And here we stand on the verge of an awakening, realising that the global environment is changing on us, whether we had anything to do with it or not, and we're beginning to worry. We've taken it on ourselves to tackle the problem in the same way that we tackle all problems: with industry and combat.

We must combat global warming. We must punish. We must try harder. And we should, by all means. I want to and I try. And still I truly think we're powerless to stop it happening. The climate will become inhospitable to most of us, because it has done so in the far forgotten past again and again, and our success as a human race as we know it will have to change to survive. And we are so brilliant at what we do I think we've lost sight of the fact that we are flesh and that we can't fix everything, and we are only bit players in a greater cosmic dance. We have made an entire business empire out of defeating nature and we've been pedalling it to ourselves for so long we now believe our own rhetoric. We live longer than nature alone would otherwise allow us. People that wouldn't be having babies without intervention are having them, often by the litter. All the diseases natural selection sends our way to cull the over-burgeoning population are over time defeated by our science, and because of that, more powerful diseases and bugs are created and we defeat them too. Men fly to the moon powered by what I can only describe as sheer will. And we are approaching the changing environment with the attitude that we apply to everything, that we have the power to stop it happening, and I don't believe we do.

The Earth has been here before. Other sentient beings have been wiped out time and time again. So we're only part of that cycle. And if we wish to survive (if there's a fighting chance) we have to change our attitude about our status on this planet. And we need to have a sit-down and rethink our ideas about success. There is such a false economy around success as a race, wrapped up in money and power, and really it's all for nothing in the long run. No amount of money or perceived national power will persuade the global environment to spare our houses on the seafront, our offshore oil rigs, our blingy cars, our international interests. The Bush Administration should not be funding people to move back into devastated areas around the Gulf of Mexico to build homes and start businesses. They should be staying the hell out of there. This push by the masses to grab a slice of waterfront property should be high on the agenda of things rethink. This idea that we'll simply move on to another planet and colonise the moon is folly. We don't have long enough to do it.

I feel deeply happy to have seen the human race at this advanced stage, when we've got it all. What a remarkable thing to witness and be a part of. And I don't want to be around for our decline because I'm tantamount to a sentimental old git. I once thought the future held a beautiful world, full of amazing biotechnology, clean energy and global administration. I thought there would be space exploration and terraforming. I thought that our ability to imagine would make anything possible, and would make the world a stable place. But my belief in that diminishes as I watch history repeat itself again and again and our imagination fails us. I once thought we would be annihilated by nuclear war. It was a threat we could track and had the power to change. But the changing of our atmosphere is more than we can cope with.

I am glad I won't be here in 100 year's time. I don't imagine the world will be a very happy place by then. And it's not because I think everything that could be imagined or invented has already been invented, hardly.... I just think our time as the king of the mountain is fast running out.