CHAPTER 13 Grand Challenges

Human society is widely considered to have entered a difficult period. It is confronted with immense challenges of a globally pervasive nature. Extrapolating present trends leads to a grim picture of the possibility of a miserable collapse of civilization. Because of globalization, the collapse is likely to be global—whereas in the past, different “experiments” (types of socio-economic organization) were tried in different places, and the collapse of one (e.g., the Aztec empire) did not greatly affect others. During the previous half-century, destruction by nuclear weapons was considered to be the greatest threat, but this was clearly something exclusively in human hands, whereas now, even though the origins of the ...

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