The situation
“We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.” – Stephen Hawking
It may have taken humanity hundreds of thousands of years to go from Stone to Bronze Age, but it took us less than a century to go from conquering the sky to walking on the moon. Technological progress is exponential, so is our development and expansion on earth. During the 20th century and now in this exponentially accelerating 21st century, we as a species have completely modified and reshaped our environment, developed new technologies that no one would have imagined possible before and achieved an almost complete dominance over our surroundings and natural environment.
However, and despite the progress made, the countless and revolutionary technological innovations, we have not yet been able to find solutions to our deep rooted issues, such as conflicts, inequalities and crimes. Worst our collective greed driven addiction to infinite growth is insidiously destroying our planet ecosystems, while increasing social gaps globally and growing huge financial debts.
As a result, not only haven’t we solved our biggest problem yet, but we have to face the unsustainability of our current model of society which has set humanity on a collision course with a global collapse. Our contemporary model of society based on worldwide competition for unlimited growth on a limited space cannot be sustainable. In physics, a system based on infinite growth on a limited space is ultimately going to crash. In biology, infinite growth on a defined space is the archetype of the cancer cell, which ultimately, heal, or disappear with the host it ultimately kills. This growing systemic and global crisis is setting us on a collision course with a future collapse of potentially catastrophic consequences including in the worst case scenario, the probability of extinction of our species due to the destruction of our living conditions on earth.