5 years down the road of the new millenium, maybe it's time to ask if we as the only self-aware inhabitants of this planet are on the right track to secure our future. Has mankind spent the time to target the most important problems? Or better still, what is the most important problem man will face this century?

I have thought up a couple of choices, but you are of course free to add yours.

Obviously, some problems are closely linked to each other. However, it may be controversial if one is the cause or consequence of the other, so choose whatever you think is more important.

in haiku form:

Globalization
fosters inequality
cultural clashes.

Globalization
Destroys age old modes of life
mormons hate new york.

I went with "[Uncontrollable] technological advances". Nanotechnology in particular is something we could come to regret.

When thinking of technological advances in general, it helps to think of the little brain teaser from grade school math class, where you're told you have to store a penny away on the first day of the month, and then double the amount each day throughout the month. After the first few days, it still seems like no big deal, maybe eventually it amounts to a buck or two, or four, or eight. Pretty soon you're talking real money, but it still seems manageable, if hefty (we're still in the first third or half of the month here). But as you get into the second half of the month, things just take on a whole new dimension. The whirlwind seems unimaginable and uncontrollable, and there's no way you can get a handle on it all.

Technologically, we're still in the "first half of the month" right now, but it's already becoming apparent that we're heading into the second. Any lessons we've drawn so far about how to deal with technology may wind up being woefully obsolete real fast.

Pollution and environmental issues would be number one. If we make the earth a place that cant really support life then everything else would really become second hand, its pretty blunt overall. Populations will continue to grow, this will make the requirement to sustain such life more and more, you can combine this with the current means of survival and it spells disaster to me.

Besides that, I would say understanding, real understanding would be paramount to our survival. Humanity collectively has never had this ever. Instead we have ignorance in some form guiding lives and actions and of course spreading through offspring. No one on the face of the planet can actually answer any questions about our nature, and moreover there is no real concern to do such, so to me that’s basically accepting to live in ignorance, which I could only think would lead to disaster, which I think it does and such is evident in our recorded history. Our explanations come from a multitude of fantastic ideas psychologists would put forward from many many years ago before even the structure of our brain or biology was understood in any basic form, past that you have religion, so really again there is no truth about us, or understanding really. I also feel that if society really cared about fact then many issues would not exist currently or hold there current form. SO basically when i wake up everyday and go out into the "wild" I basically know that what I am participating in is really just some temporary and flawed strategy for survival based on ignorance and opinions of people that happened to be in power at some point, I cant ever really say that what I live and work in is based purely on truth, I think that’s overall just a horrible way to conduct life.

There are any number of very real challenges.

I voted other. I don't think we can make much progress on anyh front if what John Dean calls "authoritarian conservatives" in his new book Conservatives Without Conscience, remain in power.

http://www.amazon.com/Conservatives-Withou...TF8&s=books

Also in haiku form:

Did you ever wonder...
where rats go when they die?
Spam knows where they go.

Seriously, I vote religious extremism. It ties into war, overpopulation, the environment, just about everything.

And BoF, perhaps you could ask John Dean - would you rather have an "authoritarian conservative" with good ideas or a "nice liberal" with bad ideas. He was unable to answer this when I heard him on the radio. To the point where he couldn't even say that abolishing slavery would be a good thing if done by an "authoritarian conservative." We are living in a society that seeks to govern by emotion, not logic.

I voted proliferation of WMD, for the same reason. The world has always has conflicts, and perhaps adding some new ones currently. However, we are rapidly getting to where any disgruntled group or even person will have the ability to kill millions of people. In essence, WMD proliferation heightens every other problem, and is therefore to me easily the most important problem we are facing moving into the 21st century.

At the time of writing, man-made climate change is leading the poll, but nobody has mentioned it in the thread.

I'l stick my head above the parapet - barring an unforeseen pandemic disease, or a global thermonuclear exchage, the only thing that puts ALL of our lives, and ways of life, in jeopardy, as a species, is global warming. Increasingly, scientific and political consensus are moving towards anthropogenesis as an aetiology (dontcha just love dictionaries!)

What I mean is, the more people study climate, and the more sophisticated the computer models, the more we seem to be faced with a real climate warming.

This is a change from a decade ago, when only a minority thought the climate was changing, let alone that we had anything to do with it.

And increasingly, especially in the last few years, mainstream science accepts that human activity has a role to play in that climate change. Not everyone yet thinks it is the main cause, and there are still those who deny the real measurable changes we've seen in climate are more than a statistically insignificant blip. But the shift in opinion seems to be inching towards man-made change.

A significant warming is likely to put even more pressure on the resources of tropical and subtropical societies, particularly water.

This, in turn, will not only pose climate change threats on the developed world in currently temperate zones(changes in weather and rainfall patterns, with knock-ons on agriculture, housing and industry) but will put massively increased immigration pressures from the warmer South (and North, in the Southern hemisphere) and from low-lying coasts to higher inland areas.

The movement in population, and climate change, on such a scale will expose new populations to new diseases (malaria in North Europe and New England, for example). Cultural clashes will be even more of a problem than they have been already.

And, while some pressure groups and some government shave begun to change their attitudes, nobody has yet begun to take any concrete steps to change behaviour in menaingful ways. Not so much to slow or reverse warming - if it really is anthropogenetic, it's probably already too late to make much difference, and if it isn't, it won't matter anyway. Just to adapt to the coming change. Instead, we're working ourselves up into a lather over this religious group or that rising economic problem. We're playing checkers while the gods put us in check. Chess lessons are urgently required.

A timely observation indeed.

Julian,
My take regarding global climate changeis that, by the time the models can accurately discern the man-made bits, we will be flying around in hydrogen air pods and telecommuting at rates of 50 - 70% (no gas needed). Looking at the pace of change in the 20th century I can't see why everything will stay the same for another 100 years, it just seems intuitive to me. (please I don't want to debate global warming here - I promise I won't say another word! Just wanted to sketch my reason for not checking that box.)

Leave it to religiously fundmentalist and extremist me, and card carrying conservative member of the Republican Party as well, to be the only soul so far to vote that poverty was, is, and will continue to be the most pressing concern. Our apathy and lack of compassion has killed more people than global warming, WMDs, and the rest, could ever hope to kill.

And, Julian, we don't understand clouds. Given that water vapor is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever hope to be, well, the models are next to worthless given our ignorance re clouds. And never mind that as the so-called "butterfly effect" demonstrates, that small variation caused by that butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil effects the entire system and so our weather forecasts are rather unreliable outside of a rather short window. And why a problem with water? There should be more water with more heat, I mean, clouds only hold so much vapor, then it must rain. And that's why, as I've related before on that other thread, where it is hot at the edges, say Greenland, it snows more in the interior. CO2 should otherwise agricultural production, since increased CO2 provides increased aerial fertilization. Hence that sound advice to do your plants some good by speaking to them [thereby exhaling CO2 in their general direction] One last point on this matter, accurate prediction from models is one thing, while reality is another. Simply consider Ptolemy's model and retrograde motion [so the model can provide great predictions but be physically wrong]. Sorry, one more. Compare your comment re malaria with my remarks above. Who gets malaria? The rich and developed, or the poor and underdeveloped? And so we care about global warming giving us malaria [as it were], but don't seem to give two hoots about the children, more than I care to contemplate, who are already dying from malaria each and every year. As our friends at wrongdiagnosis.com report:

"Each year, 300 to 500 million people develop malaria and 1.5 to 3 million–mostly children–die, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). (Source: excerpt from Malaria, NIAID Fact Sheet: NIAID)"

In a century, a brief moment in our history, and that's, on the low side, 1,500,000 x 100 = 150,000,000 humans dead from malaria. I'd call that a holocaust. And as you can read here re the experience in India, the various parasites that cause malaria are indeed a rather formidable opponent:

http://www.malariasite.com/malaria/MalariaInIndia.htm

And, Carlitoswhey, religious extremism? Does socialism count as such? I mean, while history teaches us that religious extremism has wreaked more than its fair share of havoc on humans, last century it wasn't religious extremism but the socialism of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Mao's China, and Democratic Kampuchea that killed the most [beating the religious extremists in a rout]. Might I simply ask you what the religious extremists have in common with those who ran the regimes in question? That's the danger.

And, gordo, poverty explains pollution in the so-called "Third World" [i.e., when it is immediate survival versus years down the road, cut down that forest, dump whatever wherever convenient, etc.].

Lastly, sevac, as you can see, I believe that one of our problems is the cause of some others.

Lets just say 100 years come to pass, and no real desire to change current trends of survival comes about in relation to say technology, which i doubt will really occur in any major form. The population of the planet I imagine at that point will have doubled easy, so for whatever amounts of environmental destruction we are causing in order to have toilet paper, cell phones, cars, and so on will i would say double, you can draw your own conclusions from that. We will need more and more to sustain, which going along with how we live simply implies that much more needed in that way, I don’t see any real promise in it you know, not to be negative or anything

Its just like a cumulative effect overall, so what will it lead to I have no idea I just don’t think it looks good at all. People don’t really take to the idea that so many people overall could be a force of nature like that, nor really understand what environmentalists talk about and what the draw there conclusions from or what any of that really means, so I have no faith overall in any of it, its just like that example of a frog in water slowly going to a boiling point and that’s basically what I imagine will occur overall.

gordo:

Sorry for my rather belated reply, but might I simply suggest that you consider birthrate in relation to wealth? Why are European populations increasing? By birth rate, or by immigration? How about us? Why are they coming here, because they're poor? As the one soul reported here prior, and I agree, we've otherwise our own modern day serf class growing and picking our fruit and vegetables. As near as I understand the matter from way back when I concerned myself with the same years ago, the theory then was that some had many since some lost many, and it was otherwise good to try to have many so that one might receive ample support in old age [no Social Security and/or pension plan for them]. As soon as they obtain our standard of living then they'll do what we do, go to college, sow some oats, and then after a while settle down and have a replacement or two. Of course, as James Loewen correctly notes in his Lies My Teacher Told Me, should the rest live at our standard of living with the same or similar resource consumption, then the earth is a desert, or soon would be. I would suggest that we scale back, practice that theology of relinquishment, and pull them up, but that probably won't go over too well in our America.

Its no problem in when you reply or even if you don’t, I pretty much read all the topics anyway.

I do not really think about the issue in aggregate, more or less i just do not see human population doing anything but growing. Now I look at this, I look at resources, resources will need to become more and more to sustain these populations, which exist in aggregate, and more often then not choose competition then cooperation also, which will of course take places on resources. I also look at the impact the farming of such resources takes on, and the cumulative day to day environmental impact of our existence in total. It simply just does not spell out success exactly to me.

Now if theology in aggregate wants to be pro environmental, I say more power to them, after all we do live on earth, and the planets we can live on currently is not something we can talk about in aggregates.

I have to avoid my personal interest and concern for the well being of other living things for the most part, its something i stick to for the idea that someday i will be working in the environmental field and for the most part siding with the animal means very little in the eyes of business and really most people I come to meet. If i was to walk out in broad daylight and smash a kittens head to pieces with a hammer in front of people i might think they would take offense, but none really ever try to develop and understanding of what happens to all the little creatures by extension from the day to day means they use for survival, and of course you have to work with state and federal obstacles and of course international ones, then you have to take into account the real lack of global conscious or awareness to the environment and other living things. Personally its what I plan to obtain as a job in the long run, though i truly find it pointless, and i am not trying to portray a nihilist position on that.

Then moving from the animals you have basically the other chemical physical realities to deal with, such as the atmosphere, have you witnessed those new commercials showing children asking about there future, then associated with this is coal really after a bit you just have to be able to laugh. Should read on what coal mining has brought on to the fine state of Kentucky.

so again no, I don’t really hold any hope or faith for change, I am sure there will be a struggle, drowned out by the very instincts which we fail to understand and of course blame in various ways though I am sure this again is just a product of our ignorance. The only real hope in my eyes for real change lies of course really in natural selection to me, at some point when the environment does reach a breaking point from stress people might actually care to change at that point, its only hope though, and well angels can burn in the fires of such.

What threatens to kill the most people?

A lack of food, resulting from a depletion of reasorces neccessary for cultivation and transportation. At its current bloated size, the Human race without a major collapse, cannot continue to survive without energy. It is speculated by some that we have already reached peak oil, and by all that we are at least approaching the top of the bell curve.

Can we get energy from places other then oil?

Certainly, and if the oil problem only develops slowly, i'm certain we'll be able to deal with it.

The "choices" themselves betray the bias and false premises in this post from the onset.

The GREATEST threat to mankind is perfectly clear. It's the elephant standing in the room. We can't deny it. We can focus on non-issues like "global warming" and try to take pot shots at capitalism (only the MOST successful economic system in the history of man), or we can try to find a way to "blame Bush" for all the world's problems.

But not recognizing the greatest threat to civilization is like saying that the "New Deal" was the world's greatest challenge in the late 1930's.

The single greatest challenge facing humanity in 2006 is the rapid rise of radical Islam. It's like a cancer that has infected almost all of the middle east, a growing section of Asia, much of Africa, and has grown serious tumors in both Europe and America.

If it is not stopped, it will overrun all civilized, free, and liberty-loving nations eventually. It's rigid and inflexible "moral code", which is a throwback to the middle ages, has no room for compromise, compassion, or accommodation. It's Nazi Germany, Stalinism, Japanese Imperialism, and Fascism rolled into one abhorrent package. It's steeped in religion and it's followers do not hesitate to kill themselves to further this cause.

It's the most dangerous threat our free world has faced since Kruschev banged his shoe on the table of the UN. It, in many ways, is FAR more dangerous in that threat because rational thought, as we understand it, is not on the side of the Jihadists.

OTHER: Adherence to the US Constitution is the most serious challenge of the 21st Century.

If we don't continue the experiment initiated by the Founders, we will follow all other despotic cultures.

Other than the Muslim faith, religion is a dying bread. Churches across the country are going bankrupt at a rate never seen before and less and less attendees.