Many universities have individualized majors; that is, students devise their own undergraduate specialties. Students, their professors, and/or entire universities should institutionalize majors, programs, even departments in urgent global issues-- political terrorism, ecoterrorism, degradation of journalism and world communication, water shortages, the exponential spread of poverty--. Bring together multiple experts in individual problems to formulate not only global-oriented academic curricula, but also a "mathesis universalis," a common theoretical discipline capable of systematizing and even mathematizing global solutions.

@Nelson:

Yes, I agree. Among the various core courses offered to undergraduates should be systems analysis, emergence phenomenolgy, motivational psychology, and neuroscience. Guest speakers should come from time to time to inspire the undergraduates, people like Jared Diamond (author of Collapse), Al Gore (author of Future), and Daniel J. Siegal (author of Mindsight).

Attention should be paid to searching for various types of causes of problems, including proximate and ultimate; as well as distinguishing between correlations and causes.

Attention should also be paid to developing the students' abilities to be innovative and considering outlandish alternatives to solutions.

In my opinion, it's not about the threats to world civilization - world civilization as a such is a threat to humanity. Think about it, what's at the core of world civilization? We can find a certain model of politics, based on systematic exclusion, we can find a certain model of economics, based on over-exploitation of people and nature, we can find a certain model of culture, based on a dualistic view that considers some things as "low" culture. So, I think, it's not about saving world civilization from certain threats - it's about opening world civilization in a non-hegemonic way, a way that does not only allow all people to live their life the way they want, but also provides spaces of contact, so that everyone can learn from everyone else.

Sound's like utopia? I guess it is.

The trouble is, we've been propagating the wrong information now for millennia without change. Open-mindedness is required!

In my opinion, ignorance is & has been the greatest threat to us. Eradicate ignorance with knowledge, you got peaceful coexistence.

Philip, thanks for your fine precision. I would agree that we need to save humanity first, as civilization is merely a product of that humanity. I believe that Antonio agrees with you. Perhaps he might be persuaded to change the wording slightly of his question? Such a change would not alter the thrust of his proposal.

Yes I do agree with all that has been said so far. I guess what I meant by "civilization" is in contrast to a state of affairs in which the majority of the people are only concerned with physical survival and are ruled by superstition instead of knowledge.

We do urgently need a new paradigm to define a fundamentally improved version of "civilization" that is more humane. It is absolutely necessary.

I would like to shy away from using the phrase "save humanity", although one meaning means human beings, because it is closely allied with the word "humane". I don't think we are very humane yet.

To all: To provoke more discussion, consider the quotes of the six drivers of global change that Al Gore has defined:

1. Emergence of a deeply connected global economy;

2. Emergence of a planet-wide electronic communications grid;

3. Emergence of a completely new balance of political, economic, and military power;

4. Emergence of rapid unsustainable growth;

5. Emergence of a revolutionary new set of powerful biological, biochemical, genetic, and materials science technologies; and

6. Emergence of a radically new relationship between the aggregate power of human civilization and the Earth's ecological systems.

Do you think that problems of concern to you can be subsumed in this list? If not what would you add?

Is the list too long?

Would you suggest a modification in in items of the list?

If there is a global problem that you consider important, can you suggest how it may have arisen from items in this list? Any suggestions as to how it may be resolved, at least partially?

@ Ravi. I agree. I would go a step further, beyond open-mindedness, to, at least empathy.

Apropos, today, the Pope sent a message to the business leaders at Davo (sp?) who are having their annual global conference on economics. In essence, he said that these leaders, in their deliberations, keep in mind that the ultimate purpose of business is to serve the people, not the other way around of people serving business.

In other words, their equations should include terms of the impact on their fellow human beings welfare. So business people should maximize both profits and the general welfare.

Dear Antonio,

Knowing commercial greed, what the Pope said was utopian, and it is fitting that he be that!

Yes, on this note it is very interesting to contrast some countries regarding concern for the general welfare. Examples:

1. Japan, at least some years ago, had intimate governmental/business long-range planning and execution for the good of their society, rather than 1-dimensional, short-term maximization of profits.

2. Holland, before the overwhelming (for them) immigration of refugees, especially from Africa, had a very generous welfare program for all. After the diaspora of refugees to their country, they discontinued or greatly reduced many welfare programs. (I think France did a similar thing.)

3. In the USA, almost always being a heterogeneous society, was never so generous or concerned with the general welfare, voluntarily. Such benefits only came after struggles between those who fought (physically, politically, or through massive demonstrations), on the one hand, for the common man, versus those for business.

My point is that, we humans usually have a concept of US vs. THEM. We are often generous toward members of US, but niggardly toward members of THEM.

An illuminating reference about the biological origin of this attitude is the book, The Moral Animal.

The major problem facing humanity is that over 1 billion of us do not have enough food. "A rich man seldom starves to death." So now you know what needs to be done...

There are always more of "them" then there are of "us".

Holland is a case in point, by making their immigration policies too liberal, the number of "Them" that came to Holland and became welfare recipients burgeoned causing a change in the demographics of the welfare system, and thus a noticeable change in who was being served by it. This was used to deliberalize the welfare system.

Which came first, the deliberalization of the Welfare System, or the shift to a less liberal political agenda? In Canada it was the latter. At the end of the Cold war, Socialism was replaced with new free market radicalism. The Conservative forces took hold and punched up their agendas, and there was nobody to gainsay them.

A necessary balance between the individual and society was lost.

While feeding the hungry is a good thing, there are more of "Them" that are hungry than there are of "us" to feed them. Electrical Lighting is one cheap form of population control that everyone can agree is a good thing. It makes more sense to increase the lighting in the poor man's hovel and incidentally increase his productivity, and reduce his population, than it does to try and feed everyone, there simply isn't enough good food, and delivery of food in developing countries is fraught with problems that just can't be found in developed countries. Of course delivering power to each and every hovel is also fraught with problems.

I agree with you that multidisciplinary and systems approach should apply to address grave global problems. Formulation and implementation of strategies is multidimensional. Personally, global warming, water shortages, overpopulation, top soil depletion, renewable energy sources, income disparity, political polarity are collateral effects of technology, economy, and globalization. The dimensions of globalization; economic, technology, political, ecology, and culture are interdependent producing "domino" or systemic effects.

As an educator, I reduced the picture of concern by promoting formation of moral values and social responsibility through education.

Under normal circumstances, I believe that if we humans have the will to solve problems, there is nothing that can stop us. The solutions may not be optimal; but if they are satisficing solutions (i.e., they satisfy pre-defined requirements), then that is good enough. Hopefully, the circumstances have not yet reached a point of "no return."

Antonio, part of the problem is that the number of predefined requirements is increasing out of proportion to the amount of effort that is available to overcome them.

A good example is the climate, as temperatures increase only marginally the dynamism of the system increases drastically resulting in radical weather. It is not enough to limit the temperature increase to a set value because we are already beginning to see drastic shifts in the weather. Up north here it seems warmer winters are to be expected but only a little further south tropical storms are becoming super typhoons.

If by doing a dynamic programming analysis in which the satisficing goal is to reduce the rate of global warming by a certain percentage each year, then we need to look at the sources of the global heating.

Various approaches need to be investigated. At the present time, the CO2 cap and trade approach seems to be a technically viable approach, but it lacks political/economic will to be implemented fully. This is due ultimately to the vested interests in the fossil fuel industry.

Other alternate approaches that may not require political/economic cooperation therefore need to be pursued. The more conventional approaches appear to be solar panels, wind turbines, and tidal flows. (Nuclear reactors have never been viable, in my opinion, because of the unsolved problem of disposal of spent rods.) These approaches will probably not achieve the required reduction in global warming.

Fundamentally new approaches that do not depend on political/economic cooperation and hold the promise of displacing fossil fuels need to be investigated and developed under a crash international program. One such approach that is constantly ignored is "cold fusion." Names such as Rossi in Italy, Stanford Research Institute in California, and an agency of the Republic of China, among others, have been and presently are associated with giving this technology serious attention.

At present the two main problems it faces are: 1) It poses a threat to the fossil fuel industry; and 2) It lacks a solid theoretical foundation.

How Problem 1 can affect its progress is fairly obvious.

Problem 2, on the other hand, is more complex and subtle. Without getting into these machinations, consider this, as an example of discovering a fundamental energy source: FIRE. Cave man did not know the theory of combustion. He just knew it worked. The theory came much later. The same attitude should be taken with "cold fusion" (It now has a new name that is more descriptive of the process.). Take a purely empirical approach with regard to its development and testing - as a fast track. And investigate the underlying theory (paradigm challenging though it may be) with an open mind - as a slower track. IT CAN'T HURT!

Don't forget to add geothermal heating/cooling to your alternate energy options.

It's one of the most efficient ways of saving energy available. It essentially uses refrigeration to move energy from one place to another specifically from the ground which is passively solar heated to the inside of buildings and back to the ground when cooling, the main caveat is the high installation cost since it involves drilling of wells, and/or cut and cover trenches in the yard of the building.

Solar energy is already dominated by the oil companies, inexpensive techniques like solar foil, have been bought up and are being held back from production by oil companies, but again the main limitation of solar energy is the high up front cost installation of solar cells costs significantly more than the solar cells themselves.

The main level at which this solar technology is doing well is at the solar stake level, where it is used to power led lights to light up your garden path at night, (a mostly decorative application) somehow they are managing to sell these stakes for less than the cost of materials to make them. It is suspected that most of the garden stakes are coming out of china and being dumped on the market here.

Gravest threats to contemporary world civilization?

I agree with Nelson Orringer. Economic greed and deteriorated moral values.

@ Graeme:

Thanks for you insights, especially the oil companies holding back production of solar foil.

I recently came across an article by Tom Engelhardt, where he provides an historic perspective on global warming. In this article, he compares and contrasts the hazards of global warming with the hazards of smoking, the hazards of ozone depletion, and the hazards from nuclear weapons. He says that these are all man-made hazards. So they should be amenable to man-made solutions.

In the case of ozone depletion, the effects of the remedies on established economic/political interests were tiny compared to those for global warming, so very little economic/political opposition was encountered when the gases responsible were prohibited.

In the case of smoking hazards, the tobacco companies (like the fossil fuel companies) knew (or know) the realities of the situation, but worked hard to deny or obfuscate them to protect their profits.

He also compared the threat of a nuclear holocaust with the threat of the end of thousands of years of civilization due to global warming. In this case, he said many people have a fatalistic feeling that these things are beyond their control, so why worry about them. Just go on doing your job and tend to your personal affairs - i.e., just whistle in the dark!

@Antonio

Many people who whistle in the dark, are trying to do their bit towards reducing fuel dependency buying smaller cars, installing more expensive light bulbs, and so on, but do not have any purchase on the problem. It's simply not enough, without carbon capture on a massive scale, and the willingness of the oil companies to accept that they are part of the problem, too little is being done.

Part of the problem is the dynamism of the problem, our society is not set up to deal with dynamic problems well, it keeps trying to apply linear responses. Reducing your carbon footprint on a personal level does not help when the economy is set on expanding the market for fossil fuels no matter how hard any one country tries to reduce it.

So many problems are interlocked. the problem of food production is partly one of the reasons why oil production continues, for without oil fertilizer would not be economical.

It's the insistence on cheap oil that is the problem. When the oil price goes up people try harder to save oil. By keeping the cost of oil artificially low, conservation techniques are seen as too expensive to sustain.

The U.S. is partly to blame for this because its economic viability is based on cheap oil for plastics etc.

A lot of the conservation efforts are seemingly wasted because inflation reduces the efficiency of the effect before it is felt. For instance LED bulbs cost lots of money and save big on fuel bills at the electrical company, but before the savings can be calculated, inflation has eaten the differential.

Incidently, Cold Fusion [or as currently referred to as Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR)] is stirring a lot of interest at many institutions these days - governmental, research, and private. It is still a problem, as to what to call it. Experimental evidence that it is a valid phenomenon is mounting, and new theoretical concepts are being developed. So it is an energy source that merits serious attention by everyone because it may provide an escape for humanity from burning fossil fuels.

Considering that it has taken this long to get any purchase we can't expect LENR to become an overnight success. It is still too proprietary a process to be economically spread around the world.

Dear Graeme,

Perhaps by stimulating informed 2-way discussions, such as this in ResearchGate, the word can spread about all the facets of global warming, and a wellspring of public opinion can emerge - strong enough to make all politicians become responsive to the electorate.

I don't know of other forums that encourage 2-way public communications such as ResearchGate, do you?

This is what a democracy needs - to be proactive, not just passively digest information/propaganda from the news media or blogs.

What do you think?

Antonio, while I think that 2 way discussions are critical for democratic reforms, I am not sure that ResearchGate is the best forum for changing government minds, it is too focussed in on scientists to really capture the imagination of anybody else.

Graeme, we need the scientists to get involved and be more pro-active. They are respected by the general community as being smart and not given to blindly following propaganda.

We just have to get them to look beyond their myopia and take a courageous stand on some things outside of their respective area of expertise, but for which they can apply critical thinking and their knowledge of scientific principles to arrive at their own independent views, as world citizens. And speak out boldly.

if they speak out too boldly they might not be scientists too long. It takes a while for a scientist to get the tenure needed to speak freely. Usually by the time they have achieved that level of tenure their juices are all dried up, and they don't have the energy to speak out. A few a very few manage to do so, but they are exceptional people.

What do you think the perceived threat would be to academics?

What about scientists outside of academia?

Do you think it has only become a habit for scientists to avoid speaking outside of their areas of specialties because they have to be so extremely careful and precise about what they say within their own specialties that they dare not speak about things they are not experts or devotees?

Perhaps this is an area for curriculum change in universities, namely to not forget you are a citizen too and that you, as a scientist, have a responsiblity to bring your knowledge and methodologies into discussions (involving science, as most issues these days do) that concern us all.

You raise interesting points, I can't comment on them however because I am outside academia.

I have structured global problems in Part Four of my recent book: Missing a Decent Living for Everyone: Success and Failure in 143 Countries. The book can be bought from www.morebooks.de or from www.amazon.com and it can also be read in ResearchGate. In principle, we have three kinds of problems: traditional, modern, and post-modern. In the background, we have a paradox: humans are better in creating complicated systems that in controlling them.

There are several threats to "world civilization", and they exist on various levels.  One structural threat is climate change, aka "global warming", which is both man-made and natural to the earth's cycle.  This represents a long term existential threat to much of life on earth.

Lack of development can be considered a threat to civilization at different levels: national, cultural, and regional.  For "developed" countries to continue technological, political, economic, etc. advancement without including the regions, states, societies, and cultures of the world creates a conflict at multiple levels: the global north and the global south, intelligent and technically advanced cultures and societies, and those clinging to life-systems that are more than 1000 years old.  (Living in Asia some years ago I saw skyscrapers built next to huts.  The huts were eventually demolished.  This same dichotomy can be explained in terms of social thought).

Unsophisticated (inter)national intelligence can constitute one of the gravest threats to world civilization.  When deficient intelligence foolishly convinced George W. Bush and his paranoid Vice President Dick Cheney that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction,  they started an unnecessary war against Iraq.  When deficient intelligence foolishly underestimated the dangers of the power vacuum in eastern Syria and western Iraq-- a vacuum filled by the bloodthirsty ISIS (or ISIL)--, the Western powers delayed too long in starting a necessary war against that force.

@ Norman and Nelson:

You both point out two important facets of a fundamental problem: A wide gap separating the "Powerful" from the "Others."

The Powerful want to exploit opportunities for their own interests.

The Others tend to accept (and may even defend - to their own detriment) the situations they have inherited.

In the examples you cited, Norman, the Powerful have only wanted to acquire more wealth and power, seeing the land and (sometimes, if even considered) the people as economic resources or units that can be used for their gains. Considerations of social welfare and equity were not part of the equation.

Recently, however, some corporations are attempting to be socially and environmentally responsible by including, to varying degrees, considerations of support to charities and designs to reduce energy consumption and waste. (To what degree this is happening, I do not know - but maybe someone in Research Gate can share some statistics on this.)

In the example you cite, Nelson, the Powerful are so focused on acquiring more wealth and power that they commit three errors: 1) Taking military actions motivated by fears of risking the investments that they and other like-minded Capitalists have made or potentially could make around the world; 2) Their minds are closed to truly understanding other cultures and values - they tend to project their own values and history onto the Others when it simply does not fit; and 3) They, like many in business have little regard for Truth - if it requires stretching the Truth or outright lying to make the sale, the profit, or avoid the loss, then, by all means do it. (Often, they, the Officers of a Corporation, are not held personally responsible, in the long run.)

As I could say, based on my short experience in social sciences and especially in the terms of anthropology, that the gravest threat to civilization is a lack of cognitive development of people in general. 

I perceive the issue you raised from the lines and prism of modern constitutionalism and broadly constitutional studies, in this insight I think that the most serious challenge and decisive threat to the modernity are the nullification of the outcomes of the so-called enlightenment era, the undermining one of the central pillar of the enlightenment pattern and narrative - rationality. The recent events in the world, particularly Paris attacks and continuation of the struggle between rationalists and dogmatists or fundamentalists confirmed this thesis or approach. Thus, as enlightenment philosophers and thinkers put it correctly Sapare Aude is the most desirable motto of our age. The struggle for rationality is dynamic and as Arab Spring and other global events indicated never ended phenomenon.

As the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights states, “[n]o free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to

justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” This was topical not only in the 18th century but remains as such today as well.

All the best,

Karlo Godoladze

The gravest threats to contemporary world civilization are deteriorating moral values and ethics and greed.

Dear RG Colleagues:

Wishing you and your family all the best, more power and success, and be blessed with love, peace, joy, good health, and prosperity, and with what your heart desires. Happy new year!

Thank you for your up votes, endorsement, and following my posts.

Sincerely,

Florencia T. Maldia RN.,PhD