Future Tense: Civilization in Collapse in Bloomington, MN

Does humanity have a future on Earth—or beyond? With threats ranging from pandemics and global warming to extreme income inequality and global conflict, can we avoid the collapse of civilization as we know it? Unfortunately, the cause of all these threats—as well as the foremost obstacle to dealing with them—is the human brain itself and its all-consuming quests for procreation and self-interest. On a global scale, those motivations underlie overpopulation, famine, and conflict; on a societal level, they translate to such basic malfunctioning as racism, sexism, antiscience activism, climate change denial, political extremism, terrorism, and abstract violence. Of all the traits that contributed to the rise and eventual dominance of humankind, ingenuity was perhaps the most profound. Yet, it is our very rise and dominance that produced the coming clash between civilization and chaos. In the end, our ingenuity may prove to be our demise or our salvation.