Choices, Our Only Way To Survive.

 
It is a time of choices. Animals don't make choices. Humans must.

One thing I've learned is that when I think I'm at the end of this, I'm really not... but maybe this time.

What is "this"? "This" is a project to lay out how humans can survive and develop long term by finding a new ay to live after we have left the hunter-gatherer, tribal way of life we left behind when we created the farms and cities of civilization. This project has taken many thousands of hours, thousands of pages written and thousands of hours of discussion to develop. Thousands of problems as well as possible strategies and solutions have been considered. At this point, what I see as most important to survival are a few choices we have to make, mostly choices that animals would never have to make or be able to. Then again, not to decide is to decide. Nature decides for animals.

The first choice is whether to survive at all. Many decide not to, by one way or another. Some exist, some allow their death, some work for their death. They generally do not leave any mark in history or for that matter, anything behind to show they existed.

The second choice is whether to have a family. That implies that you commit to raising them so that they in turn learn what they need to raise a family.

The third choice is what basic strategy you will focus on for survival. Humans mostly only have two strategies to use: competition and cooperation. Competition is the most common strategy that nature offers us. It is characterized as "red of tooth and claw". The second strategy that nature offers us is cooperation. It is less common and tends to show up in animals that need to work together to survive. The history, nature and consequences of both of these are expanded further on. One consequence though that should be mentioned here is that if humans predominantly use a strategy of competition, we will be unlikely to be able to exist as more than animals subject to nature and we will not be able to achieve the aspirations of humanity through the ages.