I know how crappy it feels to be fearful of a future that you feel helpless to prevent. Those feelings gnaw at you day in and day out and cast a pall over everything to do and experience. I also know the future comes and the present becomes history with or without our active participation. We can no more stop it than stop an ocean wave from cresting on the shore.

All we can do is make the choices we can make and take the actions we can take so that when that day comes for us to breathe our last breath, we know that we did what we could for what we believed in. It will never feel like it was enough but it is all we can do.

For me, the late 70's were about how we were going to be completely out of oil by now and everything from plastic to driving around would be impossible. That and the levels of pollution were going to make it a requirement that you wear a gas mask outside. The 21st century was going to open up as a toxic wasteland of factories belching out pollution as we huddled to make clothes out of flax and vehicles out of wood. Oh and nearly every creature but people were going to be extinct because the 30 billion people living on the planet will be so starving even the rats aren't safe.

Of course here we are, 50 years later, and none of that has come to pass. But the point I took away wasn't that the people predicting that future were wrong, its that they made their predictions assuming nothing would change.

Some of the changes weren't even on the radar back in the 70's. If you told someone then that your hybrid car would get 50 miles to the gallon, where "good" gas mileage at the time as 12 or 15, they would laugh. Or if you told them that as people's standard of living went up, they stopped having so many children they would ask "What, sex is no fun in the future?" Or it you told them that their television would have 10x the screen size but hang on a wall and use 1/10th the power, they would say "Nah, even on Star Trek the screens are all small."

We don't live in a system on rails. We live in a massively interconnected system. When oil prices go up, we invest in solar, when people die from disease we invest in medicine, when species become threatened we adapt habitats.

Here comes the unpopular opinion, the current future killer is Climate Change. We have documented all the ways in which humans have impacted that climate. We are causing it to change in ways that we cannot predict what the effects of that change will be. But here is the thing, we know from geologic and other records that the climate has changed often on this planet without any help from humans. The system adapts to that change. Some species die, some develop, some change niches. We can guess that this future will be very different from our current circumstance, but more or less different than 1970 to 2020 ? How about 1820 to 2020? Or even 1720 to 2020?

I can promise you that things will happen over the next 50 years that are in none of the climate models. Humans could finally harvest fusion power, volcanism could wipe out half of humanity, ecosystems in formerly frozen lands could re-emerge into the semi-arid rain forests they were long ago.

None of those things will you or I have the ability to make happen or not happen. But it doesn't change the things that matter.

This pandemic will effect this generation. There is a sharp divide today between people who have lost someone they care about and people who haven't. The people who have lost are more motivated to change things than the ones who were not affected, as a result change will happen. Slowly, imperceptibly while it is happening, but looking back from 2030 to 2020 the changes that occurred due to this event will be as clear as the changes that happened because of 9/11 in the US. Some will be superficial, some will be more substantial, but the system will adapt. And for people born into it, it will be the only system they have ever known and so it will be comfortable and normal to them.

I know you're scared, fear is the mechanism we have that spurs us to change our behavior. It can be good for that as a survival reflex, but letting it wear on you over things you personally cannot change is not healthy. Make the choices and do the things you can do, vote for the people who feel you do about what needs to change, volunteer when you can to help programs that work to mitigate harm. Be a good person and be an example to others. It's the best anyone can do.