What if we don’t act now?

"The first thing to note is that ‘what if?’ history is part of a more general trend, one which takes issue with linear narrative and sees life as a multiform flow. The ‘hard’ sciences seem to be haunted by the randomness of life and possible alternative versions of reality: as Stephen Jay Gould put it, ‘wind back the film of life and play it again. The history of evolution will be totally different.’ This perception of our reality as only one of the possible outcomes of an ‘open’ situation, the notion that other possible outcomes continue to haunt our ‘true’ reality, conferring on it an extreme fragility and contingency..."