Various Items Related to the Future of Humanity

“And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.…

The aging of modern world populations is a recognized problem. For instance, the growing ratio of retirees to workers challenges the economic viability of Social Security and Medicare. Of course, aging itself is highly problematic regardless of its economic implications;…

According to an April, 2014 report by the World Health Organization on growing drug resistance, “Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) threatens the effective prevention and treatment of an ever-increasing range of infections… a problem so serious that it threatens the achievements of…

Though development of organisms resistant to antibiotics is a widely recognized problem, its seriousness seems insufficiently recognized by the general public. In her review of Martin Blaser’s Missing Microbes, Dr. Abigail Zuger describes this threat as follows: “Imprudent antibiotic use…

Here’s how Charles Hill, former Foreign Service officer, now Diplomat-in-Residence and leader of the Grand Strategy seminar at Yale, describes the tendency for those in power to fail to recognize the decline of the established order: “…when an established international…

Trip Gabriel, in 50 Years Into the War on Poverty, Hardship Hits Back (NYT, 4/20/2014) paints a good picture of poor people in modern America, including the following excerpts (slightly reformatted): Of West Virginia’s 55 counties, McDowell has the lowest…

George Kennan was a renowned American political scientist, diplomat, and historian known as “the father of containment.” Talking to columnist Thomas Friedman in 1998, after the U.S. Senate approved expansion of Nato, Kennan commented as follows on expansion of NATO…

An article in the April 7, 2014 New York Times about the third annual National Preppers and Survivalists Expo (The Capitalism of Catastrophe, by Alan Feuer) mentions that a recent study found the industrial world might collapse within decades: Ever…

In Our Generation’s Finest Minds, in the 4/1/2014 Stanford Review, John Luttig and Miller Aaron discuss the extent to which today’s most talented students focus on money-making opportunities rather than on solving serious problems facing America. (Luttig is credited as…

Has American social and political discourse become progressively lower in quality? If a group of people are gradually going insane, how likely are they to notice? Humanity is in a world of trouble, but what are people thinking about? Let’s…