Having secured unprecedented levels of prosperity, health and harmony, and given our past record and our current values, humanity’s next targets are likely to be immortality, happiness and divinity. Success breeds ambition, and our recent achievements are now pushing humankind to set itself even more daring goals. Instead they enraged the USA by the 9 / 11 attacks, and the USA destroyed the Middle Eastern china shop for them. Islamic fundamentalists could never have toppled Saddam Hussein by themselves. This is what happened in the Middle East in the last decade. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. So it finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts buzzing. The fly is so weak that it cannot budge even a single teacup. Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al - Qaeda. Whereas in 2010 obesity and related illnesses killed about 3 million people, terrorists killed a total of 7,697 people across the globe, most of them in developing countries. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way. Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. Previously the main sources of wealth were material assets such as gold mines, wheat fields and oil wells. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder. In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000).
Consequently, though in 2050 we will undoubtedly face much more resilient germs, medicine in 2050 will likely be able to deal with them more efficiently than today. With each passing year doctors accumulate more and better knowledge, which they use in order to design more effective medicines and treatments. Though science owes a huge debt to serendipity, doctors don’t just throw different chemicals into test tubes, hoping to chance upon some new medicine. In 2010 famine and malnutrition combined killed about 1 million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million.ĭoctors, in contrast, count on more than mere luck. Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by 2030. In 2014 more than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition. I think she would be bored silly after her life on Mars.For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little more people die from old age than from infectious diseases and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined. I wrote about how our damsel in distress would fare in Herland. For me it felt like a feminist lecture – hours of it. There was no passion no sensuality and life was all about getting things one in the most logical and practical way. It just went on and on and on about what a perfect, logical and practical world we would live in without men. I don’t think I would have continued with it if it wasn’t for the course. The feminist Utopian novel ‘Herland’ was a dismal read. Of course it is racist and sexist but then what do you expect. He rescues the Damsel in distress, brings together the warring factions and saves the day in so many ways. You have all the ingredients of the western and it opens with our hero being chased by Apaches. It is like a typical western story but set on Mars. Two stories this week from two different authors, Burroughs & Gilman - A Princess of Mars & Herland Coursera, Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World by Eric Rabkin.
0 kommentar(er)
