The Future doesn't look too good, does it? How many perils can we see, easily see?

1. Fuel. We're out of fuel. Nearly. Meaning the price rises. Meaning that people starve because food becomes not affordable. It costs too much to transport food to those that need it. Food gets grown for the sake of making fuel (for the rich and for the wars) instead of for food.

And what happens when people starve? Mostly nothing. They just die and suffer in agonies - their own agonies of starvation and the agony of watching their children die. That's all that usually happens. But every once in a while they'll fight and we'll have a war of some sort.

So that's not good.

2. China and India are coming 'online', are moving into 'developed world' status and reality, are becoming 'wealthy' and bulk conspicuous consumers. What's this mean? It means increased gap between haves and have-nots in those countries. It means more pressure on the fuel requirement. It means more pressure on the shortage of food. It means more pressure on the environment in terms of pollution.

AND: from here it certainly seems they can't succeed. They're doomed to failure. There isn't enough raw material in the world to create all the consumer goods they want. There isn't enough water in their countries to give them all a high standard of living and hygiene (flush toilets, liberal showers etc...). There's not enough space in their cities for the roads to run the cars if they did manage to get a car for every person. If there was the space to run them there wouldn't be the space to park them. If they could park them running them would pollute the environment to hell and gone.

What's going to happen when they get nearer to the 'failure' point? The rich'll get richer and the poor will get angrier. And that's not good.

3. Money. The world's money is changing hands and it's all going to the wrong places. The 'bad guys' have all the world's oil and all the world's drugs and oil and drugs are taking all the world's money. The bad guys are buying the world. The government of Saudi Arabia props up the government of the USA which is out of money. The USA has an enormous debt.


4. Global warming. We've all heard about that ad nauseum. You can argue till you're blue in the face about whether or not it has been caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions or is it a natural phenomenon. What you can't argue about is the fact that it is happening. The world is warming and the poles are melting. The seas will rise. Weather patterns will change. And from what we 've seen so far all the changes are for the worse, not for the better.

5. Disease. We've had a few scares recently. Asian flu. Bird flu. SARS. Whatever. The fact is that humans are moving themselves and things about like never before and the human density on the planet is greater than ever before. The potential for a swift epidemic is greater than ever before. No one likes to check out the facts of the last great flu epidemic, which was the Spanish flu of 1918 but just as a reminder they estimate somewhere between 10 and 100 million people died. This is kind of a 'natural' phenomenon - periodic instances of the sudden appearance of a viral mutation that causes enormous damage. It is to be expected. It is natural for such things to happen.

That's about it, I think. Did I forget anything?

I'm tired of thinking about it all, contemplating it all. Spill it out onto my blog and forget it, move on to thinking about nicer things.