This is strange. A BBC article lists fourteen challenges facing humanity in the next several decades, but omits the one challenge that must be met in order for any of the others to have a chance of being realized. Here are the fourteen:
- Make solar energy affordable
- Provide energy from fusion
- Develop carbon sequestration
- Manage the nitrogen cycle
- Provide access to clean water
- Reverse engineer the brain
- Prevent nuclear terror
- Secure cyberspace
- Enhance virtual reality
- Improve urban infrastructure
- Advance health informatics
- Engineer better medicines
- Advance personalised learning
- Explore natural frontiers
Some of these don't strike me as particularly urgent (e.g. advancing personalized learning), but in any event, none of them will be possible at all unless the West neutralizes the menace posed by radical Islam. Islamic imperialism is the paramount threat to the Western world and it needs to be defeated in each of three domains: the military battlefield, cyberspace, and the realm of ideas. If this challenge is not met, and it doesn't seem as if we're even addressing the third domain, none of the others in the list is going to matter much.
It's curious that this paramount and crucial challenge would be omitted from consideration by the contributors to the BBC's list. Perhaps the reason is that were it included it would be seen as at least a partial affirmation of the worldview of George W. Bush and that would be unacceptable company for sophisticated people to place themselves in.
RLC
