The Future

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-238
Author(s):  
Constantine Michalopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Absolute Poverty ◽  
Global Inequality ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Challenges ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
The Many ◽  
Global Population

Much has changed since the Utstein Four burst onto the international scene twenty years ago: a resurgent nationalism and xenophobia are undermining efforts to address global problems. Yet, the world today in many respects is a better place than it was twenty years ago: the share of the global population living in absolute poverty is the lowest in human history; people are better educated and nourished, and live longer and healthier lives. Many challenges remain: while global inequality has declined, within country inequality has increased; women still fare worse than men in practically all aspects of the human condition; and climate change is inexorably marching on, threatening the very existence of humankind. Still, it has been said that a peaceful earth inhabited by about ten billion people without anyone suffering poverty is not a wild fantasy. It is feasible. That is what the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are about. Among the many things the U4 were credited with was their contribution to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015. The last chapter tries to draw lessons from the U4 experience of twenty years ago that can be useful in addressing the future challenges humanity faces in achieving the SDGs.

The Time Machine; or, the Fourth Dimension as Prophecy

PMLA ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 530-535
Author(s):  
Robert M. Philmus
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Fourth Dimension ◽  
Time Machine ◽  
Essential Aspect ◽  
Active Audience ◽  
Logical Conclusion ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Human Condition

Most of the early science fantasies of H. G. Wells are, as he defines the term, prophetic: the myths that they develop to a logical conclusion represent a critique of some historical or essential aspect of the human condition. The Time Machine, his first scientific romance, explores the premises of prophetic fantasy at the same time that it embodies a myth of its own. In it Wells envisions the future devolution of man, already outlined in previous essays of his, as the ultimate consequence of what he perceived as a present attitude of complacent optimism, an attitude he dramatizes in the reaction of the Active audience to the Time Traveller's account of the world of 802,701 and beyond. Although the Time Traveller accepts this vision as literally true, his own theories about that world make it clear that its significance pertains to it only as a metaphoric projection of tendencies existing in the present. Thus the structure of The Time Machine reveals the Time Traveller's point of view, like that of his audience, to be limited: his final disappearance into the fantasied world of the future vindicates the rigorous integrity of Wells s prophecy.

The weirdest people in the world are a harbinger of the future of the world

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 108-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Rozin
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Human Condition

AbstractAlthough North American undergraduates represent about 0.2% of humanity, and a very unrepresentative subset, they actually provide an advance look at what humanity is becoming. In the face of globalization, this is all the more reason to study the wonderful variants of the human condition before they become homogenized.

American Ideals of International Relations

1907 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 624-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Bushnell Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Many ◽  
United States Senator

Because of the many contributions made by America to the world's ideals of government, the nation has the feeling that it is quite adequate to work out its own principles on all other subjects without the aid of any other people. “ What have we to do with abroad ? ” said a United States senator from Ohio, only thirty years ago; and the word “ un-American ” covers a multitude of virtues. In fact the roots of American institutions of all kinds, social, economic, and political, are in the traditions of the English race; and American ideals have been modified by the experience of other European nations. Nor has the western hemisphere been separated from the great current of world affairs. Its destinies have been closely interwoven with those of Europe; and since 1895 the United States has awakened to the fact that it not only is a part of the sisterhood of nations, but is destined to be one of the half dozen states which will powerfully influence the future of all the continents. The world is no longer round about America; America is part of the world.

scholarly journals Water and Energy nexus: findings of the World Water Development Report 2014

2015 ◽  
Vol 366 ◽  
pp. 93-99
Author(s):  
M. Miletto
Keyword(s):  
Policy Makers ◽  
Water Development ◽  
Water Users ◽  
Regulatory Frameworks ◽  
Emerging Trends ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
The World ◽  
Access To Water ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
The Many

Abstract. The post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are likely to include increased access to water and energy services. The fifth edition of the United Nations World Water Development Report (WWDR) Water and Energy aims to contribute to the this international process by informing the decision-making about the interlinkages, potential synergies and trade-offs as well as by stressing the need for appropriate responses and regulatory frameworks that account for both water and energy priorities. The Report provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the impacts of ever-increasing energy production on water resources and water users, including agriculture, rapidly expanding cities, expanding industry and the environment. It analyses major and emerging trends from around the world, with examples of how some of the trend-related challenges have been addressed, their implications for policy-makers, and further actions that can be taken by stakeholders and the international community. As the first of a new series of theme-oriented reports to be released on an annual basis, the WWDR 2014 marks a pivotal new direction for the WWDR series, for the World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP), and the many partner agencies that contribute substantially in the production of the flagship report of UN-Water.

Global Law

2018 ◽  
pp. 750-768
Author(s):  
Richard Falk
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
World Order ◽  
Just World ◽  
Global Inequality ◽  
Global Policy ◽  
Sustainable Solutions ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
Robust System ◽  
Global Law

An emphasis on “global law” is responsive to the emergence of problems of global scope. The entrenched statist character of Westphalian world order obstructs the development of a robust system of global law. Obstruction also arises from geopolitical factors. Geopolitical discretion thus fills the vacuum created by the inability of international law to respond to the agenda of global problems, and it does so in ways that contribute to widening gaps of global inequality and to the refusal to allow the growth of global law to provide more equitable and sustainable solutions to the material and human rights concerns of the peoples of the world. The future of a peaceful and just world depends on overcoming obstacles to the growth of global law dedicated to upholding global and human interests, which will only happen if international civil society becomes mobilized around the global policy and equity agenda.

Fictions of Capital in 1870s and 1880s Beirut

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Holt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Production ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Many

Arabic readers in the late nineteenth century struggled to negotiate the contradictions of their position in the world economy: Beirut was at once a peripheral hub of speculation, a market for finished French textiles, and an industrializing source of the unrefined silk off which French factory owners profited. While Al-Muqtaṭaf, founded in 1876, was averse (at least in its Beirut years) to speculation and instead championed the local production of commodities in all their materiality, for Salīm al-Bustānī and Al-Jinān, it was becoming clear that finance, through the many fictions it enabled, was decisively changing the future of the region. Al-Bustānī offered late nineteenth-century Beirut and more generally readers of Arabic lessons in how the credit-driven consumption of material goods allowed the keeping up of appearances in his novels Budūr (1872), Bint al-ʿaṣr (1875, Daughter of the Age) and the early 1880s Sāmiyyah.

Need for Sustainable Development

2018 ◽  
pp. 30-46
Author(s):  
Samwel J. Kabote ◽  
Halima Omari Mangi
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Sustainable Development Goals ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Livelihood Security ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
Sub Saharan

Since 2015, the efforts to promote sustainable development turned into a new face after the 17 Sustainable Development Goals were embraced by the 193 nation states, in the world, to be implemented up to 2030. Despite this impressing milestone, the concept of SD is not explored sufficiently. This chapter reviews and discusses need for SD in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where poverty is rampant and livelihood security is deprived. The chapter argues that SSA needs SD. This can be achieved through a balance between the environment, society, economy and institutions, concurrently with interventions to eliminate abject poverty and improve livelihood security. Additionally, SSA should address the challenges that impede the efforts to promote SD seriously with considerations that the communities are heterogeneous and inequalities in different forms are lingering. The future research should investigate, among others, appropriate strategies and interventions to balance the environment, society and the economy for SD.

Toward Cloud Federation

2012 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Celesti ◽  
Francesco Tusa ◽  
Massimo Villari
Keyword(s):  
Cloud Computing ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The World ◽  
Cloud Federation ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Challenges

Federation in cloud computing is an emerging topic. Currently, all over the world in both academia and industry contexts many operators are picking up the advantages of cloud computing and federation in planning the Internet of the future. Nevertheless, cloud federation is at the early stage, and the scientific community is not fully aware how the federation will impact the cloud computing scenario. In this chapter, the authors try to clarify the ideas and discuss the main future challenges regarding cloud federation.

Realism and Responsibility

Basic Rights ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
Henry Shue
Keyword(s):  
Population Growth ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Theoretical Level ◽  
Adequate Nutrition ◽  
Population Explosion ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Subsistence Rights ◽  
Global Population

This chapter assesses the argument that the practical consequences of everyone's enjoying adequate nutrition—and especially the allegedly resultant global “population explosion”—would make the fulfillment of subsistence rights impracticable, however genuine the rights may be at a theoretical level. It would hurt the future poor. These population objections rest upon a thesis about inevitable deprivation: deprivation that is inevitable unless population growth is slowed by means of the international refusal to fulfill subsistence rights. If indeed the world now has, or soon will have, an absolute shortage of vital resources, then some people will simply have to do without the necessities for survival. On this thesis about the explanation of deprivation, the unavoidable deprivations resulting from the supposed excess of people are taken to be as purely natural as any social phenomenon could be, and attempting to provide social guarantees against the resultant starvation is made to look quixotic.

Technoscience, transhumanism, telos

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Vita-More
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Moral Perception ◽  
Future Scenarios ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Use Of Technology ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Key Events ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter focuses on human achievements accomplished with the use of technology and science as methods to explore humanity’s most daunting challenges. Each era of human achievement reveals previously unimaginable goals that, once attained, impact and positively transform the world and the future of humanity. Transhumanism offers a social construct for action-oriented strategies to inform and mitigate many of these threats. These strategies stem from diverse fields of inquiry, research, and analysis of possible future scenarios, and suggest the processes for implementing them. Notably, counterarguments to an intervention in the human condition—the characteristics and key events concerning human existence—often expose themselves as biases in moral perception that, in due course, fall short. Yet humans continue to be fueled by curiosity and a need for amelioration to transcend limits. What is lacking and most imminently necessary to address the exponentially increasing technology in our midst, and society’s varied perceptions and reactions, is straightforward guidance in navigating towards the telos of our humanity.

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