While the 3 technologies I just mentioned for portable social graphs are important, they don’t compare to the 10 Ways the World Might End, a TED talk by Stephen Petranek.
Number 10: We lose the will to survive.
Number 1: Earth is hit by an asteroid.
(I’ll let you watch to get the rest. BTW, I recommend downloading the video to desktop.)
Number 10 seems unlikely … the Darwinian instinct to survive is too basic to filter out over generations.
Number 1 does sound a bit more likely now that I know a civilization-ending asteroid missed Earth by six hours. Yikes. Spend more money finding asteroids, NASA!
And RE: spending more money: The speaker’s solution to all of these problems was more government funding. Personally, I generally prefer private foundations and donations funding such activities, since I believe those groups have more incentive to spend wisely and get a bigger social ROI. However, in the case of terraforming mars (to protect against solar flares) — which would be a 300-500 year project — could a private foundation foot the bill?
I hope so … because very few governments (nor the tax-paying citizens) are forward-looking enough to fund a project that will affect their great, great, great, great, great, grandchildren. Heck, we don’t even care about balancing the budget today, let alone 10, 20, or 500 years out. Politically, it’d be infeasible to give up current pleasures for such long-range problems. I’ll call it longterm-apathy, but there’s probably a better term.