One day, if Human civilisation ever wipes itself out, aliens or one of our successors will cast an eye on our ruined planet and ask themselves what ever happened to homo sapiens. The root cause was not a specific catastrophe, conflict or devastation that eradicates us; the problem began with the architecture of the Human brain.

For many generations, the Human brain was capable of extraordinary computations and combinations. Certain institutions were invented to optimize the Human brain: law, government, education, science. It worked, sort of. Humans kept wiping out parts of their fellows, but they did not kill yet the species as a whole.

Humans were always on the verge of developing violent hatreds of foreigners and manifested strong ongoing tendencies to slaughter strangers in vast numbers. They could never reliably see the humanity in all members of their own kind.

Even when confronted by data, Humans could only imagine the near-term future, a few years at best, viewing the long-term as a chimerical and unreal state. Its immediate impulses were left uncontained and worked to destroy its individual and collective future.

Though capable of immense intellectual achievement, Humans hated to reflect on themself, they  could not bear to submit itheir ideas to rational scrutiny, they preferred to act rather than think and daydream rather than plan. Humans had a narcotic desire for distraction and fantasy. Humans did not want to know themselves.

What caused the ultimate destruction was the increasing yet untrammelled power of the brain. This mighty tool eventually managed to capture fire, contain the elements, and give homo sapiens a godlike power over the planet – while the animal overall still operated with reflexes.

Its powers became uncontained while its wisdom remained intermittent and fragile. Eventually, its might outpaced its capacity for self-control; it became a nuclear armed rodent.

Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time.

And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well.

If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity we could plunge our world into a time of darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilisation and the Italian Renaissance.

But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet, to enhance enormously our understanding of the universe, and to carry us to the stars.

There was one thing that might have saved humanity: Love

– the Love of the stranger; the capacity to see the other as like oneself and worthy of the same mercy and charity.

– the Love of the unborn: the concern for those who do not yet exist and whom one will never know but whose lives one is shaping in the selfish present.

– the Love of the truth: the strength to resist illusion and lies and square up to uncomfortable facts of all kinds.

Historians in a thousand years from now will look back on our time as being absolutely critical, a turning point, a branch point in Human history. Because if we survive, then this time will be remembered as the time when we could have destroyed ourselves and came to our senses and did not.

When you look at the Earth from space, it is striking. There are no national boundaries visible. There have been put there by Humans. The planet is real. The life on it is real, and the political separations that have placed the planet in danger are of Human manufacture. All the beings on this little World are mutually dependent. It is like living in a lifeboat.

We breathe the air that Russians have breathed, and Americans and Chinese and people all over the planet. Whatever the causes that divide us is clear that the Earth will be here a thousand or a million years from now. The question, the key question, the central question, the only questions is, will we?