Note: The following statistics are difficult to comprehend and not at all reassuring. This has caused many to hide behind hopelessness in order to justify inaction and/or the continuation of business as usual. Whatever the case, this is a luxury that we can no longer afford.  Because of advances in technology, everyone in the World is now at similar risk, rich and poor alike. This leveling of the playing field confirms, for the first time in human history, that we all have a direct stake in the quality of everyone else's life; that is, if we expect to ensure the continuation of our own. This externally imposed constraint verifies, once and for all, the existence of a moral /ethical imperative of unprecedented proportion -- one the world can ill afford to ignore.

"I was happy and indeed honored to receive a copy of your letter to Allan Greenspan together with its informative supporting material. I fully endorse your argument and congratulate you on your courage and energy in putting it forward so forcibly and so widely.  My own concerns have been in the same direction for more than thirty years... 

One aspect of your Greenspan letter struck me forcibly  - "it is actually our thought process that is responsible for the predicament we find ourselves in."  I couldn't agree more.  Unless we find the means to change our thinking I can see little hope in solving the supreme problem of humanity -- its impending extinction."

Alexander King
Founder of the Club of Rome
(One of the World's preeminent think tanks)

 

Countdown to Chaos

uring the last century alone, the number of dead from political and religiously contrived situations, including war, genocide, tyranny and their aftermath, numbers upwards of 250 Million people... and this is a conservative estimate. Prior to the twentieth century the slaughter was similarly horrific.

You would think that over the last 6000 years humankind would have figured out a way to stop this senseless carnage. But, obviously it hasn’t, since it continues unabated. Even as you read this, war wages on several continents threatening to draw humanity into an exchange of weapons of mass destruction that will cause the prior suffering (at least in numbers) to pale in comparison. If this were not bad enough, a new threat has now emerged in the form of secular terrorism, a dynamic for which there is NO immediate solution.

For example: Some 42 million people have HIV in the world (the precursor to AIDS). This amounts to 1 in every 100 sexually active adults under the age of 49. Nineteen million of these are women. More than 16,000 new cases of this infection occur daily. 5 million occurred in 2006 alone and 2.9 million people died. By the end of 2007 some 22 million adults and children will have died from this fatal disease. At this rate, 70 million people will have this disease by the year 2010. AIDS has already resulted in 15 million orphans and by the year 2010 that number will swell to 25 million.

Hardest hit are third world countries.  In some areas of Africa one in four adults are infected with the HIV virus;  and Worldwide, U.N. studies indicate that "this disease now rivals the greatest epidemics in human history."  If all this were not bad enough, the physical debilitation that attends this illness provides an optimum incubator for a whole host of other diseases that are now on the increase.  Since the cost for AIDS treatment remains prohibitive, no hope for a resolution is yet in sight.

In addition to human/environmental problems, global stability is also being threatened by financial system instability.  As we begin our journey into the millennium, the world is experiencing its worst recession in over 50 years.  Nearly every nation that lacks the necessary resources to meet its growing need is now  financially unstable... and that includes most countries of the world.  Moody's Investor Service lists the world's dozen most fragile banking systems as: Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Venezuela, Indonesia, Pakistan, China, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea and the Ukraine. But the rest are not far behind.  The United States has not gone unscathed either.  It is now the world's greatest debtor nation with an increasing trade imbalance that is inherently self-destructive.  Worse, all of this is happening at a time when there exists no resolution to basic socio-economic system polarization.

Also, the potential for the misuse of high technology continues to escalate worldwide, hanging like an ominous cloud over humankind.  Five nations now possess extensive nuclear weapons capability.  They include the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France and Israel.  Others that have already demonstrated the ability to build and detonate nuclear weapons include: China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, South Africa and possibly Iran. The Director General of the International Atomic Energy Administration (Mohamed El Baradei) recently indicated that between 30 and 40 nations now have sufficient expertise to achieve nuclear capability. Many of these are both politically and economically unstable. Several, still cling to despotic ruler ship, others to communism. Hence, the dynamics for nuclear confrontation are still very much alive in many quarters of the world. Even a contained exchange of these weapons would have a catastrophic effect upon the many interdependent systems that now constitute our modern world. As a result, we cannot even begin to imagine the consequences that would result from an exchange of nuclear weapons, let alone prepare for it.

Then there are bacteriological and poison gas threats that must be factored into this equation.  Both are capable, in existing amounts, of destroying all sentient life on earth... hundreds of times over.  Worse, they are easier to produce, more easily hid, can be dispensed in any number of non-technical ways, and are far more insidious in the way they achieve their purpose. In the case of bacteriological weapons, they may now be genetically altered, self-proliferating, and near impossible to defeat. Not only is this threat unacceptable and incapable of being contained, but the maintenance and further development of these technologies, including potential defenses against them, drain away valuable resources that might otherwise be spent on improving the human condition.

This is nowhere near all of the problems we face. There are many more and each is rapidly growing in both scope and magnitude. So what’s going on here? Why don't we just take stock of this situation and begin fixing them?

The Underlying Problem:  As odd as it might seem, the real culprit in this equation is our "thought process." Because it is "infinite" in its potential and we are "finite," it was only a matter of time before it provided us with insights that outran our ability to control them. Since we have failed to institute our own checks and balances, we are now faced with a knowledge base that dwarfs our capability to comprehend the realities it empowers. Even computers have been useless in this respect. In fact, they have made the whole situation worse. Analyzing information at speeds approaching 1 petaflop (1,000 trillion floating point calculations per second) they have now pushed complexity far beyond our ability to even ‘hope’ that we might someday understand its relevance

This has set the stage for a dependency relationship between man and machine... one that has now degraded into our blind implementation of their directives. Monitoring and subsequent modification of any given result remains our last lines of human defense in this lopsided equation. When we are forced into decision making that involves time frames that prevent sufficient human reflection, this unholy union between man and machine becomes undeniable.

There is little doubt that every ‘human person’ owes it to themselves and those they love, as well as those who are yet to become important to them, to seriously consider how they can become a part of this effort. To do less is to deny the very importance of the potential they now defend (life itself). And make no mistake here, there is NO room for procrastination in this equation. If we fail to achieve this objective in the near future, there is little doubt what the outcome will be. And, no one will escape this time around, regardless of who they are, whom they know, or what earthly riches they possess.  Given the seriousness of this threat, some real soul searching is in order here.