The Bifurcation of Humanity

Forecasts for the near future reported in The Futurist (Nov. – Dec. 2007), hardly a pessimistic journal, include :

• A billion millionaires by 2025.
• 5.2 billion people facing water shortages by 2025.
• Population projections have been bumped up to 9.2 billion for 2050.
• Most of the 2.5 billion new additions will occur in countries least able to grow food.
• Worldwide consumption of crude oil will rise by more than 40%
• The number of road vehicles will grow from 0.8 billion to 1.1 billion
•  “The earth is on the verge on a significant species extinction event.”
• Because of the ongoing acidification of the oceans, mussels’ shell-building process will be 25% slower by 2100.
• The number of Africans affected by floods will increase 70-fold, from 1 million to 70 million by 2080.

The bifurcation of the condition of the world’s people continues unabated.  True, this has been a problem since the beginning of agriculturally-based civilization, when 95% of the people were relegated to the impoverished masses.  As the human story has unfolded in the past six thousand years, the lot of humanity has generally improved as a percentage of the total, but the absolute number of people suffering has increased exponentially.  In 1650, there were less than 500 million people on the planet.  Today, almost double that number go to bed hungry each and every day, and six times that number suffer from micronutrient deficiencies and the ravages of water-borne diseases.

As yachts, swimming pools and tropical, ski and eco vacations becomes the norm for increasing millions, the division of our human family into rich and very poor will surely widen in the future.  The rich will enjoy the comforts of green technology, smart homes, nano robots, bioengineering and virtual experiences.  The poor will suffer the horrors of famine, disease and war.  However, even the rich in gated communities and island hide-aways will not be able to fully escape:

·      the psychological and (for some) the economic repercussions of witnessing global famine.

·      the accelerating effects of global warming .

·      the unpredictable effects of potential ecosystem breakdowns in the context of species extinctions and global warming.

·      anxiety as “terrorist events become more common and deadly.”