Yikes! History is out to get us!
Gooing for Infinity, an anthology of stories by Poul Anderson, includes the story "Epilog," in which, through an accident of Einsteinian physics, Americans from the 1950s or 1960s find themselves flung billions of years into the future, returning to normal space to find Earth populated by the evolutionary products of self-replicating machines rather than any form of organic life. The Earth of that far future is covered in "plant"-life which, like the plants and blue-green algae which have existed on our world since at least as far back as the Neoproterozoic, use energy from the Sun, atmospheric gases, and other resources from their environment to make and store food for themselves -- but those gases would be unbreathable by us or any other type of modern Earthly animal life, the sunlight would include far more energetic and harsher forms of electromagnetic energy than is currently permitted by Earth's atmosphere to reach the ground, and the material of which those "plants" are composed are metal, glass, and naturally-occurring plastics. The "animal" life of that world is likewise formed of metal, glass, and plastic, their brains electronic rather than organic, their food other "animals" or the strange "plants" in their environment rather than the organic life of our time. And rather than human beings like ourselves or even chimps or other technologically gifted creatures of our world, the man-like, technologically sophisticated beings of that world of the far future, like everything else on it descended from simple, self-replicating machines of their remote past, are be made of plastic, metal, and glass; they consume the inorganic "animals" and "plants" taken from their environment; they make replacement parts for their own bodies as easily as they make their tools extremely sophisticated; and they communicate with one another by radio rather than sound waves, enabling them to keep in touch with one another nearly everywhere on their world, experiencing something very like the most intimate telepathy as they do so.
What had happened was that the all-out nuclear war which everyone had feared during the first couple of decades of the Cold War -- because of which a group of Americans had been sent out into space to try to find a habitable world to colonize in case the worst happened and humanity was rendered extinct on Earth by such a war -- did in fact take place, and did in fact destroy all orgsnic life on our world. But self-replicating marine miners, machines designed to extract various minerals from seawater, deposit them at designated collection points on land and, occasionally, to produce more of their own kind from the materials they had collected over the years, then return to the sea to begin the cycle all over again, survived that war. And they began to evolve. Three billion years later, their descendants had diversified into a vast array of new life-forms, inorganic but just as vital and creative as Earth's organic life had been, and just as capable of producing real intelligence at least as great as our own.
At the end of the story, the colonists aboard the spacecraft leave Earth to try to find a haven elsewhere: "It isn't our world any more."
"Epilog" presents an awesome vista of time and life that is both supremely tragic and overwhelmingly triumphant -- we live in a universe so wildly creative, so full of biological and psychospiritual potential that no matter what happens, somehow that potential finds a way to express itself everywhere.
It occurred to me as I woke this morning that we have already seen such a fantastic evolution, right here on Earth as we know it now. Consider:
I was born in 1945. Slightly more than three generations have passed since then, counting 20 years per human generation -- and the changes that have taken place in every aspect of human existence since then have outpaced anything that has occurred in the last two million years of human existence.
During the Ice Age, the changes in human psychology, sociology, culture, technology, and understanding of the universe would have changed so little that it might as well not have occurred at all. Such changes as did occur in the human world then took place at a pace similar to that of the world of the Ice: glacially. The greatest change that had ever occurred in the human way of doing things had already taken place over a million years before that, when humanity tamed fire, some 1.8 million years before our time. Cultural, technological, and other major changes in human life did take place after that, such as the invention of sophisticated new cuisines and clothing, the evolution of artistic creativity, the making of ever-more sophisticated tools and weaponry, and so on. But these breakthroughs took place relatively slowly, with plenty of time for people to improve on them and integrate them into their daily lives.
During the Neolithic era, which began around 9,000 years ago, when the Ice began to melt and the first human settlements outside caves were made, change became more rapid, but not much so. Relatively large-scale agriculture was invented, then improved upon; the first villages and towns came into existence; irrigation systems for routing water from its sources to where it was needed for agriculture, manufacturing, and personal use were worked out and created; the making of pottery from clay became a widespread new industry; and the forging of metal for the making of tools and weapons began. These magnificent inventions made radical changes in the lives of humans, but again, those changes took place over enough time that it wasn't that hard for people to adjust to them. And, as had been the case during the Ice Age, there was little or no disconnect between generations as a result of those changes. Life for children went on pretty much as it had for their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. The wisdom of the elders really was wisdom, relevant to everyday experience as well as useful, even life-saving, during times of sudden upheaval, and members of the generations that had gone before were respected, even revered, by their descendants as life-givers and sources of the knowledge that people needed for their very survival, not only as individuals, but as communities and peoples.
And so it went through the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, all the way to the time just prior to the inception of the Industrial Age, which began with the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century. While some truly revolutionary discoveries and inventions had taken place during that time -- e.g., the astronomical discoveries of Nicolaus Copernicus, whose heliocentric astronomy ultimately entirely displaced the geocentric astronomy of earlier times; the discovery of Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings by Galileo Galilei -- their impact on the common man was negligible. Once they occurred, they took many years, even generations to permeate the culture in which they took place. The wars of Genghis Khan and other conquerors had far more impact on most people than such scientific discoveries and philosophical revolutions ever did -- and in fact it was due to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century that the stirrup, a revolutionary invention in its own right, first came into the hands of Europeans, Middle Eastern peoples, and the Chinese, something that improved horseback transportation immensely. Prior to that time, non-Mongols invented and used the stirrup, if at all, only locally and on a very limited basis. Even the Romans, that singularly practical and inventive people, hadn't invented it. It was left to the magnificent Khan and his people to introduce it to the general Eurasian land-mass. Though those invasions came at tremendous cost and numerous horrors, they also produced the system of protected post-roads that allowed caravans to travel between Europe and the China Sea without fear that they would be waylaid by highwaymen and brigands -- something that opened up trade between vastly separated regions and allowed the mixing of ideas, technologies, and philosophies between very different cultures, and because of which modern Western peoples reached the Moon for the first time in 1969 rather than in 2969, and have been able to put universal desktop computers on the desks of even very poor people for the first time in the 1980s rather than in the 2980s. Those wars did revolutionize the world -- but even then, the lives of ordinary people went on pretty much as they had before, and there was still little or no disconnect between generations in the same communities and nations. The world went on pretty much as it had, at least for Europe and Asia, even as new lands were discovered by Columbus, Magellan, and other explorers, and colonized by wave after wave of Spanish, French, Dutch, and English colonists.
Then came the Industrial Revolution. And now there were serious disconnects between generations. Children whose ancestors had been farmers since time out of mind were suddenly put to work in factories and sweat-shops, doing work that was mind-numbingly repetitive, completely disconnected from the life on the land their parents and grandparents had known, sometimes not seeing the Sun or experiencing the weather for days at a time as they toiled over looms, put together piecework, inspected work to find anything that was damaged or badly made, or cleaned up factory floors and other areas of the buildings in which they labored. And in 1845, right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, the deadly Irish potato famine depopulated Ireland, sending survivors to America to escape the pestilence that had murdered so many of their countrymen. Other waves of immigrants to America were to follow, as well, as men, women, and children fled the harsh conditions of life in their native lands, hoping to find better opportunities in a land whose streets, they had been assured by common gossip, were paved with gold. That those streets weren't in fact paved with gold -- that many or most of them weren't even paved -- and that, it turned out, they had to pave them -- didn't keep them from trying their luck in America. In spite of everything, it really was better in America than in the old country, at least on average; there was opportunity there aplenty, if not in the overcrowded, corrupt, and filthy cities of America's East Coast, then in lands out west, especially along America's fabled West Coast, with its gentler weather and kinder seasons, vast, fertile soils, enormous rivers, and exotic peoples, the Indians.
And as Genghis Khan and his people proved, where you have lots of people from all different backgrounds coming together in job lots, able to compare notes with one another and try out new things, you will have endless new inventions, fabulous discoveries, and everything that goes with them. The biggest and most important of which, of course, is Change.
With which the world began to change with a vengeance. Faster and faster the changes came, along with new wars and new social, political, technological, and cultural realities that evolved from those wars. By World War 2, massive changes had taken place in the world, so massive that serious disconnects had begun to afflict the relationships between generations. It showed most quickly and least importantly, of course, in the slang: the "lousy" and "swell" thrown around by teenagers and college-age children in the 1920s and 1930s made their parents and grandparents recoil. During the 1920s, women's hemlines rocketed from the ankle to the knee, the pocket-flask, filled with potent bootlegged whiskey or moonshine, became a commonplace at college events as well as at functions attended by adults, and young adults began to experiment with free love -- sex without consequences and single-parent families. Silent pictures, then the talkies, together with the jalopy, began to revolutionize life as nothing ever had before -- and the disconnect among generations widened exponentially as a result.
-- Which was as a candle to a hydrogen bomb compared to what came about as a result of World War 2 and its aftermath.
The Bomb. The Atomic Age. The Cold War. The Space Age. Apollo and the lunar landings. The exploration of Mars. The Hubble Space Telescope and its descendants.
The work of Alan Turing and his colleagues. ENIAC. Machine language and asssembly language and COBOL and FORTRAN and their evermore advanced cousins. Unix and Linux, MacIntosh computers and IBM clones, Windows operating systems: the computer revolution. The Internet. The World Wide Web. The Information Age and all it has brought.
Faster and faster the changes have come. Changes in slang are, as always, the least of it -- but whereas older generations only had to deal with colloquial changes, the current generations are becoming used to obscenities and profanities that would have left previous generations fainting on the floor as commonplaces.
But far more serious changes have been taking place in those 66 years since I was born, as well: pollution of the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, streams, soils, and everything else in our lives has begun to make radical changes in the chemical makeup of our environment. From conception on, we are exposed to weird chemicals and strange radiation whose like was never known on Earth before the 20th century. Radioactive fallout, produced in quantity during the era of atmospheric testing of nuclear devices (1945-1965), can still be found worldwide. With frightening regularity, testing of our waterways turns up larger and larger traces of modern pharmaceutical products -- products that may go some way to explain the growing incidence of such developmental dysfunctions as autism, ADHD and OCD, mental retardation, certain deadly conditions that can only occur as a result of mutations of germ-plasm that take place before conception, intersex conditions in a host of creatures, not just humans, even such conditions as narcissistic personality disorder and psychopathy, not to mention such potentially lethal diseases as cancer and leukemia. The junk-food dietary regimens that constitute most of the stuff eaten by Westerners have led to epidemics of obesity and diabetes -- and the drastic population shift in the West from farms to urban and suburban environments, with radically reduced amounts of the sort of exercise that people undergo on farms due to what has to be done to make those farms viable economic entities, certainly hasn't helped any. The very ecological dynamics and chemistry of our world's biosphere are changing so rapidly that it's a wonder that any of us can survive them at all, let alone produce viable children who will in turn produce viable, fertile children of their own -- and it's possible that one of these days, human survival and the continuance of our species may become extremely problematic, thanks to those rapid ongoing changes in the biosphere, all the short- and long-term results of human activities.
It gets worse. Whereas before 1945 almost all children were outdoors much of the time, playing or working, casually observing the sky at all hours and in all seasons, today more and more children spend most of their lives in malls, never seeing the sky, never leaving the mall to go outside and look at it. Whereas family pets before 1945 were mostly dogs and cats, today more and more of them are hamsters, guinea pigs, and other small deer. Whereas the favorite games of children were once softball and kickball played in the nearest vacant lot, which often was a part of nearby woods and thus exposure to wildlands, or pick-up-sticks and jacks, played on any available wooden or concrete surface (which sometimes proved to be an exposure to expletives uttered by exasperated adults who had to maneuver around those children in order to get from point A to point B), and graffiti were almost solely the provenance of small boys armed with chock and a growing interest in the opposite sex and a route to the nearest bridge abutment or across-the-tracks, tumbledown structures, today they are electronic games such as Grand Theft Auto, or, increasingly, hacking and trolling on the Internet, and the graffiti -- well, the less said about them, the better.
And then there are the commercial, industrial, financial, and economic changes, overwhelming in their numbers and natures. We've all ended up on the butt ends of them, and nobody but a few rich and powerful sons of bitches at the top are happy about them.
Consider a child born today to perfectly good, decent parents. Within mere days, all their assumptions and expectations about the environment in which that child will grow up will become obsolete, and not in insignificant ways. In so many cases, parents are unable to protect and nurture their children proplerly not through any failings of their own, but rather because our species and thus our world is now, and will be into the indefinite future, changing so rapidly and radically, scientifically, technologically, culturally, microbiologically, and ecologically that they and their children might as well be living on planets in different galaxies from one another. Since 1945, the world has changed more than it ever did between the beginning of the Neolithic era and World War 2. In some ways, particularly chemically and ecologically, those changes are more radical than anything that has taken place since the beginning of the Tertiary.
Poul Anderson's "Epilog" is, of course, science fiction. But it's also an astonishingly prescient vision of events and developments among human beings and their world, not over three billion years from now because of the evolution of human technology in the aftermath of global nuclear war, but just six and half short decades since the end of World War 2 as a result of snowballing technological, social, and cultural evolution of human beings in response to the cumulative events and processes of human history going back to the beginning of human existence.
It isn't pretty. Unfortunately, we're stuck with it. And what that means for the future is anyone's guess. But people should stop blaming themselves as individuals for such things as autism, allergies, the mainstream media, what passes for music these days, the terrible state of proofreading in today's publishing, paranoid school districts whose attorneys insist on shenanigans that ends up getting the sued far more and far worse than they would have been without the lawyers, the idiot Left and the even more idiotic liberals, today's "feminists," Whine Liberation, that idiot brother-in-law who leaves his filthy dirty boot-prints all over your brand-new furniture, and refuses to get a job, and worse and worse and worse (H. P. Lovecraft would have sued for copyright infringement because of some of this sort of horseshit). If blame for such things should fall on anyone or anything, it should be the Industrial Revolution that began in the late 18th century, the Renaissance before that, or even the hookup of East with West that came about as a result of Genghis Khan's safe, secure post-roads. Good luck on suing, though -- I don't think you can find a court anywhere that would accept such a lawsuit.
What had happened was that the all-out nuclear war which everyone had feared during the first couple of decades of the Cold War -- because of which a group of Americans had been sent out into space to try to find a habitable world to colonize in case the worst happened and humanity was rendered extinct on Earth by such a war -- did in fact take place, and did in fact destroy all orgsnic life on our world. But self-replicating marine miners, machines designed to extract various minerals from seawater, deposit them at designated collection points on land and, occasionally, to produce more of their own kind from the materials they had collected over the years, then return to the sea to begin the cycle all over again, survived that war. And they began to evolve. Three billion years later, their descendants had diversified into a vast array of new life-forms, inorganic but just as vital and creative as Earth's organic life had been, and just as capable of producing real intelligence at least as great as our own.
At the end of the story, the colonists aboard the spacecraft leave Earth to try to find a haven elsewhere: "It isn't our world any more."
"Epilog" presents an awesome vista of time and life that is both supremely tragic and overwhelmingly triumphant -- we live in a universe so wildly creative, so full of biological and psychospiritual potential that no matter what happens, somehow that potential finds a way to express itself everywhere.
It occurred to me as I woke this morning that we have already seen such a fantastic evolution, right here on Earth as we know it now. Consider:
I was born in 1945. Slightly more than three generations have passed since then, counting 20 years per human generation -- and the changes that have taken place in every aspect of human existence since then have outpaced anything that has occurred in the last two million years of human existence.
During the Ice Age, the changes in human psychology, sociology, culture, technology, and understanding of the universe would have changed so little that it might as well not have occurred at all. Such changes as did occur in the human world then took place at a pace similar to that of the world of the Ice: glacially. The greatest change that had ever occurred in the human way of doing things had already taken place over a million years before that, when humanity tamed fire, some 1.8 million years before our time. Cultural, technological, and other major changes in human life did take place after that, such as the invention of sophisticated new cuisines and clothing, the evolution of artistic creativity, the making of ever-more sophisticated tools and weaponry, and so on. But these breakthroughs took place relatively slowly, with plenty of time for people to improve on them and integrate them into their daily lives.
During the Neolithic era, which began around 9,000 years ago, when the Ice began to melt and the first human settlements outside caves were made, change became more rapid, but not much so. Relatively large-scale agriculture was invented, then improved upon; the first villages and towns came into existence; irrigation systems for routing water from its sources to where it was needed for agriculture, manufacturing, and personal use were worked out and created; the making of pottery from clay became a widespread new industry; and the forging of metal for the making of tools and weapons began. These magnificent inventions made radical changes in the lives of humans, but again, those changes took place over enough time that it wasn't that hard for people to adjust to them. And, as had been the case during the Ice Age, there was little or no disconnect between generations as a result of those changes. Life for children went on pretty much as it had for their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. The wisdom of the elders really was wisdom, relevant to everyday experience as well as useful, even life-saving, during times of sudden upheaval, and members of the generations that had gone before were respected, even revered, by their descendants as life-givers and sources of the knowledge that people needed for their very survival, not only as individuals, but as communities and peoples.
And so it went through the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, all the way to the time just prior to the inception of the Industrial Age, which began with the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century. While some truly revolutionary discoveries and inventions had taken place during that time -- e.g., the astronomical discoveries of Nicolaus Copernicus, whose heliocentric astronomy ultimately entirely displaced the geocentric astronomy of earlier times; the discovery of Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings by Galileo Galilei -- their impact on the common man was negligible. Once they occurred, they took many years, even generations to permeate the culture in which they took place. The wars of Genghis Khan and other conquerors had far more impact on most people than such scientific discoveries and philosophical revolutions ever did -- and in fact it was due to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century that the stirrup, a revolutionary invention in its own right, first came into the hands of Europeans, Middle Eastern peoples, and the Chinese, something that improved horseback transportation immensely. Prior to that time, non-Mongols invented and used the stirrup, if at all, only locally and on a very limited basis. Even the Romans, that singularly practical and inventive people, hadn't invented it. It was left to the magnificent Khan and his people to introduce it to the general Eurasian land-mass. Though those invasions came at tremendous cost and numerous horrors, they also produced the system of protected post-roads that allowed caravans to travel between Europe and the China Sea without fear that they would be waylaid by highwaymen and brigands -- something that opened up trade between vastly separated regions and allowed the mixing of ideas, technologies, and philosophies between very different cultures, and because of which modern Western peoples reached the Moon for the first time in 1969 rather than in 2969, and have been able to put universal desktop computers on the desks of even very poor people for the first time in the 1980s rather than in the 2980s. Those wars did revolutionize the world -- but even then, the lives of ordinary people went on pretty much as they had before, and there was still little or no disconnect between generations in the same communities and nations. The world went on pretty much as it had, at least for Europe and Asia, even as new lands were discovered by Columbus, Magellan, and other explorers, and colonized by wave after wave of Spanish, French, Dutch, and English colonists.
Then came the Industrial Revolution. And now there were serious disconnects between generations. Children whose ancestors had been farmers since time out of mind were suddenly put to work in factories and sweat-shops, doing work that was mind-numbingly repetitive, completely disconnected from the life on the land their parents and grandparents had known, sometimes not seeing the Sun or experiencing the weather for days at a time as they toiled over looms, put together piecework, inspected work to find anything that was damaged or badly made, or cleaned up factory floors and other areas of the buildings in which they labored. And in 1845, right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, the deadly Irish potato famine depopulated Ireland, sending survivors to America to escape the pestilence that had murdered so many of their countrymen. Other waves of immigrants to America were to follow, as well, as men, women, and children fled the harsh conditions of life in their native lands, hoping to find better opportunities in a land whose streets, they had been assured by common gossip, were paved with gold. That those streets weren't in fact paved with gold -- that many or most of them weren't even paved -- and that, it turned out, they had to pave them -- didn't keep them from trying their luck in America. In spite of everything, it really was better in America than in the old country, at least on average; there was opportunity there aplenty, if not in the overcrowded, corrupt, and filthy cities of America's East Coast, then in lands out west, especially along America's fabled West Coast, with its gentler weather and kinder seasons, vast, fertile soils, enormous rivers, and exotic peoples, the Indians.
And as Genghis Khan and his people proved, where you have lots of people from all different backgrounds coming together in job lots, able to compare notes with one another and try out new things, you will have endless new inventions, fabulous discoveries, and everything that goes with them. The biggest and most important of which, of course, is Change.
With which the world began to change with a vengeance. Faster and faster the changes came, along with new wars and new social, political, technological, and cultural realities that evolved from those wars. By World War 2, massive changes had taken place in the world, so massive that serious disconnects had begun to afflict the relationships between generations. It showed most quickly and least importantly, of course, in the slang: the "lousy" and "swell" thrown around by teenagers and college-age children in the 1920s and 1930s made their parents and grandparents recoil. During the 1920s, women's hemlines rocketed from the ankle to the knee, the pocket-flask, filled with potent bootlegged whiskey or moonshine, became a commonplace at college events as well as at functions attended by adults, and young adults began to experiment with free love -- sex without consequences and single-parent families. Silent pictures, then the talkies, together with the jalopy, began to revolutionize life as nothing ever had before -- and the disconnect among generations widened exponentially as a result.
-- Which was as a candle to a hydrogen bomb compared to what came about as a result of World War 2 and its aftermath.
The Bomb. The Atomic Age. The Cold War. The Space Age. Apollo and the lunar landings. The exploration of Mars. The Hubble Space Telescope and its descendants.
The work of Alan Turing and his colleagues. ENIAC. Machine language and asssembly language and COBOL and FORTRAN and their evermore advanced cousins. Unix and Linux, MacIntosh computers and IBM clones, Windows operating systems: the computer revolution. The Internet. The World Wide Web. The Information Age and all it has brought.
Faster and faster the changes have come. Changes in slang are, as always, the least of it -- but whereas older generations only had to deal with colloquial changes, the current generations are becoming used to obscenities and profanities that would have left previous generations fainting on the floor as commonplaces.
But far more serious changes have been taking place in those 66 years since I was born, as well: pollution of the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, streams, soils, and everything else in our lives has begun to make radical changes in the chemical makeup of our environment. From conception on, we are exposed to weird chemicals and strange radiation whose like was never known on Earth before the 20th century. Radioactive fallout, produced in quantity during the era of atmospheric testing of nuclear devices (1945-1965), can still be found worldwide. With frightening regularity, testing of our waterways turns up larger and larger traces of modern pharmaceutical products -- products that may go some way to explain the growing incidence of such developmental dysfunctions as autism, ADHD and OCD, mental retardation, certain deadly conditions that can only occur as a result of mutations of germ-plasm that take place before conception, intersex conditions in a host of creatures, not just humans, even such conditions as narcissistic personality disorder and psychopathy, not to mention such potentially lethal diseases as cancer and leukemia. The junk-food dietary regimens that constitute most of the stuff eaten by Westerners have led to epidemics of obesity and diabetes -- and the drastic population shift in the West from farms to urban and suburban environments, with radically reduced amounts of the sort of exercise that people undergo on farms due to what has to be done to make those farms viable economic entities, certainly hasn't helped any. The very ecological dynamics and chemistry of our world's biosphere are changing so rapidly that it's a wonder that any of us can survive them at all, let alone produce viable children who will in turn produce viable, fertile children of their own -- and it's possible that one of these days, human survival and the continuance of our species may become extremely problematic, thanks to those rapid ongoing changes in the biosphere, all the short- and long-term results of human activities.
It gets worse. Whereas before 1945 almost all children were outdoors much of the time, playing or working, casually observing the sky at all hours and in all seasons, today more and more children spend most of their lives in malls, never seeing the sky, never leaving the mall to go outside and look at it. Whereas family pets before 1945 were mostly dogs and cats, today more and more of them are hamsters, guinea pigs, and other small deer. Whereas the favorite games of children were once softball and kickball played in the nearest vacant lot, which often was a part of nearby woods and thus exposure to wildlands, or pick-up-sticks and jacks, played on any available wooden or concrete surface (which sometimes proved to be an exposure to expletives uttered by exasperated adults who had to maneuver around those children in order to get from point A to point B), and graffiti were almost solely the provenance of small boys armed with chock and a growing interest in the opposite sex and a route to the nearest bridge abutment or across-the-tracks, tumbledown structures, today they are electronic games such as Grand Theft Auto, or, increasingly, hacking and trolling on the Internet, and the graffiti -- well, the less said about them, the better.
And then there are the commercial, industrial, financial, and economic changes, overwhelming in their numbers and natures. We've all ended up on the butt ends of them, and nobody but a few rich and powerful sons of bitches at the top are happy about them.
Consider a child born today to perfectly good, decent parents. Within mere days, all their assumptions and expectations about the environment in which that child will grow up will become obsolete, and not in insignificant ways. In so many cases, parents are unable to protect and nurture their children proplerly not through any failings of their own, but rather because our species and thus our world is now, and will be into the indefinite future, changing so rapidly and radically, scientifically, technologically, culturally, microbiologically, and ecologically that they and their children might as well be living on planets in different galaxies from one another. Since 1945, the world has changed more than it ever did between the beginning of the Neolithic era and World War 2. In some ways, particularly chemically and ecologically, those changes are more radical than anything that has taken place since the beginning of the Tertiary.
Poul Anderson's "Epilog" is, of course, science fiction. But it's also an astonishingly prescient vision of events and developments among human beings and their world, not over three billion years from now because of the evolution of human technology in the aftermath of global nuclear war, but just six and half short decades since the end of World War 2 as a result of snowballing technological, social, and cultural evolution of human beings in response to the cumulative events and processes of human history going back to the beginning of human existence.
It isn't pretty. Unfortunately, we're stuck with it. And what that means for the future is anyone's guess. But people should stop blaming themselves as individuals for such things as autism, allergies, the mainstream media, what passes for music these days, the terrible state of proofreading in today's publishing, paranoid school districts whose attorneys insist on shenanigans that ends up getting the sued far more and far worse than they would have been without the lawyers, the idiot Left and the even more idiotic liberals, today's "feminists," Whine Liberation, that idiot brother-in-law who leaves his filthy dirty boot-prints all over your brand-new furniture, and refuses to get a job, and worse and worse and worse (H. P. Lovecraft would have sued for copyright infringement because of some of this sort of horseshit). If blame for such things should fall on anyone or anything, it should be the Industrial Revolution that began in the late 18th century, the Renaissance before that, or even the hookup of East with West that came about as a result of Genghis Khan's safe, secure post-roads. Good luck on suing, though -- I don't think you can find a court anywhere that would accept such a lawsuit.