No Imagination

The Economist's recent Intelligent Life special issue examined the familiar question, What's the Worst That Can Happen? Positing the worst outcome often helps us make important individual decisions, such as whether to take a new job, buy a house, get married, or have children.

But here the Economist is taking the big picture, i.e., what is the worst that can happen from humanity's point of view? Six writers answered the challenge with essays on

Famine

War Between U.S. and China

Erosion (of values and connection with the real world)

Fear

Africa Unfulfilled, and

Imagining the Worst (a cheap meta-answer, in my humble opinion).

The above scenarios lack imagination in that "worse" events can indeed happen. In none of these is humanity's very existence threatened (although life would be far more miserable).

Personally, I am worried about and would have listed an extinction-level event such as a collision between Earth and a large asteroid. At this time in history we would be defenseless, even if we had months of advance warning. There is no nuclear-missile shield, nor do we have the capability of launching enough escape vehicles into space to ensure mankind's survival.

No organizations of any significance are planning to start building either of these solutions, which would cost trillions of dollars. Let's hope that they won't be needed anytime during our lives and those of our children and grandchildren.