We were hunters and foragers, wanderers on the savannahs and the steppes. There were no border guards then, no customs officials. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the Earth and the ocean and the sky.

Since we first emerged a few million years ago in East Africa, we have meandered our way around the planet.

There are now people on every continent and the remotest islands, from pole to pole, from Mount Everest to the Dead Sea, on the ocean bottoms and even, occasionally, in residence 200 miles up. Humans, like the gods of old, living in the sky.

These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success the explorers now pretty much stay home.

Vast migrations of people some voluntary, most not have shaped the Human condition. More of us flee from war, oppression, and famine today than at any other time in Human history.

And the World impoverishes itself by spending a trillion dollars a year on preparations for war and by employing perhaps half the scientists and high technologists on the planet in military endeavors.

How would we explain all this to a dispassionate extraterrestrial observer? What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth?

We have heard the rationales offered by the superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations, but who speaks for the Human species? Who speaks for Earth?

By simply considering, in every nation, major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental restructuring of economic, political, social and religious institutions.

We have reached a point where there can be no more special interests or special cases. Nuclear arms threaten every person on the Earth.

Fundamental changes in Society are sometimes labeled ‘impractical’ or ‘contrary to Human nature’, as if nuclear war were practical, or as if there were only one Human nature.

But fundamental changes can clearly be made, we’re surrounded by them. In the last two centuries, abject slavery, which was with us for thousands of years, has almost entirely been eliminated in a stirring World wide revolution.

Women, systematically mistreated for millennia, are gradually gaining the political and economic power traditionally denied to them.

A new Consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism, and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed.

We are one planet.