Now that North Korea has exploded even a spindly nuclear bomb one sees a glimpse of a scary future where every little, fearful country wastes its lunch money on such paranoid fireworks. One glimpses the future too in the effect of science to make the at first difficult technologies as easy and common as hamburgers. Down the road we are coming to quantum and robotic technologies, immensely difficult now but eventually to be made easy and routine. Monstrous super computers will track populations and robots will do the work of killing, like a beastly terra cotta army. If N. Korea can starve its people to leap its rulers into the 21st century, then Pakistan (which already has the bomb) is primed to go forward to more horrible things using its opium money, and so with all the gang-run nations of the world. What's to prevent the drug lords of Colombia from getting the bomb for a menace to guarantee their capitalistic independence--or robot planes to deliver their products?
There are three great forces of terror in the world today: greed (as always), religion (as always) and technology (the relative newcomer). Clearly, the only good force in the world today is the will to survive and the evidence (to which most are blind) that survival of the self depends on the survival of the other. What an interesting horse race: to see if the human survival instinct will outperform the above three horses of the apocalypse. I think someone should try his or her hand at some speculative fiction: writing up some putative newspapers from the future--say a hundred years from now. Even if it were fiction, it would give an interesting perspective of someone looking back on the pot about to boil over and what happened to it.
Another excellent comment on this topic can be found at:
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