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It is unlikely that humankind can deal with these challenges without global cooperation. It remains to be seen how such cooperation could be secured. Perhaps global cooperation can only be secured through violent clashes and the imposition of a new conquering empire. Perhaps humans could find a more peaceful way to unite. For 2,500 years since Cyrus the Great, numerous empires have promised to build a universal political order for the benefit of all humans. They all lied, and they all failed. No empire was truly universal, and no empire really served the benefit of all humans. Will a future empire do better?
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
The one-armed woman said, “There was a movie called Maple recently. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. At the end, an adult and a child stand in front of the grave of a Red Guard who had died during the faction civil wars. The child asks the adult, ‘Are they heroes?’ The adult says no. The child asks, ‘Are they enemies?’ The adult again says no. The child asks, ‘Then who are they?’ The adult says, ‘History.’” “Did you hear that?” The thickset woman waved an arm excitedly at Ye. “History! History! It’s a new age now. Who will remember us? Who will think of us, including you? Everyone will forget all this completely!” The three old Red Guards departed, leaving only Ye on the exercise grounds. More than a dozen years ago, on that rainy afternoon, she had stood alone here as well, gazing at her dead father. The old Red Guard’s final remark echoed endlessly in her mind.…
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
In reality, only for today’s affluent First World citizens, who don’t actually do the work of raising food themselves, does food production (by remote agribusinesses) mean less physical work, more comfort, freedom from starvation, and a longer expected lifetime. Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world’s actual food producers, aren’t necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do. Archaeologists have demonstrated that the first farmers in many areas were smaller and less well nourished, suffered from more serious diseases, and died on the average at a younger age than the hunter-gatherers they replaced. If those first farmers could have foreseen the consequences of adopting food production, they might not have opted to do so. Why, unable to foresee the result, did they nevertheless make that choice?
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
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