There are three huge challenges for humanity (among the numerous) that outrank all the others, if only because the way we will rise to meet them, will determine their fate… and ours.
Those three major headaches are education, energy and governance.
Education.
This one has to be top of the pops. Education is fuel; it provides the brain power that drives creativity. Education drives prosperity like ignorance fuels despair. Educated people make for more peaceful living environments (generally…) extremists, of either the religious or the political variety, will garner more support among those susceptible to simple, or simplistic messages.
We need a deliberate collective approach to producing as much brainpower as we can. What our ever expanding server-and-hard-disk jungles does for the storage of ever more complex infinite sets of data, we should consider education, training and skills development as the main vectors for generating our future. Why we don’t, is beyond me, but it has to do a lot with our 20th century wasteful sense of consumption, and the selfish nation-based governance concepts that went with this me-first approach.
Energy.
Someone told me the other day that climate change is more important than energy. I beg to differ.
Climate change is one of the consequences of industrialised societies’ energy management (or lack thereof). The holy grail of satisfying our limitless greed for energy will ultimately not lie in energy conservation. There is just no doubt that we will need more of the stuff, not less.
As our societies delve further into the 21st century, our needs for additional kilojoules will expand, and so we will become more creative about how to get more without emptying the guts of the earth. (Hence the need for more brainpower, above and good governance, below).
The art will be to get our energy from non-depleting sources: the sun above all (since using the sun’s energy interferes least with our ecological systems), but also geothermal, wind and other renewable sources. This also includes the reform of agriculture, since agriculture is really nothing else than the provision of energy to our bodies… and brains. (Not to mention the fact that if one day we really need to escape from here and colonise Mars, that will require unimagined quantities of energy, so we better start thinking now…)
Governance.
Rising to the global challenges will take global initiatives.
Slowly, and surely, we are moving into that direction. Society of Nations, UN,G3; G5; G7; G8… G20… These institutions can only be successful if there is a sense of shared responsibility for global governance, which today is not the case (with a hopeful “yet” at the end of the sentence). Just witness the recent debates around nations’ commitment (or not) to reducing greenhouse gases.
The (eventual) spread of education, successful energy management and global governance values work hand in hand to ensure that we will still be running about at the end of this century.
In the process we will need to address all the other challenges that living in a mix of industrial and post-industrial societies bring with them, including those that have a currently undetermined impact (synthetic biology, nanotechnology, genetics, genomics…) and, of course, those we don’t even know about yet.
The 21st century is fast becoming the era of increasing abstraction where science becomes less and less tangible, where more and more people become more “abstract”, i.e. move up in the pyramid of the hierarchy of needs and where interrelatedness of concepts, nations and branches of knowledge create highly complex new entities that ignore traditional divisions and borders.
Governance, energy, education.
Today, our planet has shrunk. It is now too small for the me-firsattitude of nations to be viable. Today, the view has to be global, and while I am not advocating a global government, I firmly believe that we will need to really consider our planet as a global village. Just not quite in the sense that we came to give to that word at the end of the last century.
Harnessing technology and mustering political will for building the next society are the first steps. But long-term progress will ultimately come from actively grooming a next generation that will consider our endeavours as archaic and our debates as those of a previous and therefore ready for the bins of history.
Right now, our educational efforts don't get anywhere near achieving that. And so, we may just be creating the perfect conditions for jeopardising our chances of survival as a race.
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