Current Crises

The basics

The current predicament of humankind is most serious because human beings have now at their disposal means by which they could undermine the conditions of worthwhile life on Earth forever.

- Persson and Savalescu, Unfit for the Future

Climate change

Sources

These look promising

  • Heinberg, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels
    • "Climate change, along with the depletion of oil, coal, and gas, dictate that we will inevitably move away from our profound societal reliance on fossil fuels; but just how big a transformation will this be? While many policy-makers assume that renewable energy sources will provide an easy "plug-and-play" solution, author Richard Heinberg suggests instead that we are in for a wild ride; a "civilization reboot" on a scale similar to the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Afterburn consists of fifteen essays exploring various aspects of the twenty-first century migration away from fossil fuels including: Short-term political and economic factors that impede broad-scale, organized efforts to adapt The origin of longer-term trends (such as consumerism), that have created a way of life that seems "normal" to most Americans, but is actually unprecedented, highly fragile, and unsustainable."

Nuclear disaster

If an increasing percentage of us acquires the capacity to destroy an increasing number of us, it is enough if very few of us are malevolent or deranged enough to use this power for all of us to run a significantly greater risk of death and injury. It seems likely that within a decade or so the advance of scientific technology will make it possible for a single person with the relevant training to extinguish all higher life on Earth, and in a human population of more than seven billion it will not be long until there appears someone wicked enough to want to do so.

- Persson and Savalescu, Unfit for the Future

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