From Scientific American:
The 21st century feels like a letdown. We were promised flying cars, space colonies and 15-hour workweeks. Robots were supposed to do our chores, except when they were organizing rebellions; children were supposed to learn about disease from history books; portable fusion reactors were supposed to be on sale at the Home Depot. Looking beyond the blinking lights and whirring gizmos, though, the new century is shaping up as one of the most amazing periods in human history. Three great transitions set in motion by the Industrial Revolution are reaching their culmination. After several centuries of faster-than-exponential growth, the world’s population is stabilizing. Meanwhile extreme poverty is receding both as a percentage of population and in absolute numbers. As humanity grows in size and wealth, however, it increasingly presses against the limits of the planet. These three concurrent, intertwined transitions–demographic, economic, environmental–are what historians of the future will remember when they look back on our age. They are transforming everything from geopolitics to the structure of families. And they pose problems on a scale that humans have little experience with. As Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson puts it, we are about to pass through “the bottleneck,” a period of maximum stress on natural resources and human ingenuity.
More here.
