Are you worried?

[gay_Aleks]

Well, either him or Hillary Clinton.

 

[Perfection]

As technology increases so does our ability to screw ourselves over. I'm not sure we'll have the wisdom not to fall into some nasty pitfall.

 

[Bridog7]

One day your picking fights against former president George HW Bush, the next day your with him collecting welfare checks.

"It gets easier every week" he says

 

[Smellincoffee]

Not really. The soon disaster befalls us, the sooner people start doing practical things like rebuilding civilization and stop walking into traffic, eyes glued to their tablets.

 

[NickyJ]

Yes. The more I think about life overall, the more depressed I feel. It may be improving in certain aspects, but it's also slipping in others. I fear what the next 50 years holds for us.

And that's why I try to think about it as little as possible. Some people call it shallow, I call it avoiding a deep pit.

 

[Quintillus]

Empires rise, and empires fall. Humanity has continued to march on.

And there's no point in going 10,000 years back. Just a mere thousand years ago, murderous religious fanatics descended upon the Middle East, slaughtering everyone who didn't worship the right god the right way. They spared no one, and killed everyone from prisoners of war to children. Afterwards, more murderous imperialistic conquerors arrived and devastated even more cities. But after all that, things calmed down for centuries. And for the last hundred years, things have actually started to get quite a bit better.

ISIL / IS is most likely a minor setback, but even if it isn't, it too will pass, and civilisation will advance. Climate changes might be an actual problem, but even in the worst case scenarios, several billion will still survive and live in relative prosperity.

The advance of human civilisation will not be stopped by any of the foreseeable problems.

Well said. I'm not particularly concerned about the fate of humanity currently, either. Sure, the amount of harm one person (particularly dictators with nukes) can do is greater nowadays, but more than 50 years after the start of the Cold War, I don't think there's any reason to believe we're actually going to implode in the near future. Population growth and environmental damage is a concern, but population growth has been a concern for centuries. We should take preventative measures, but I see no reason to believe this is the time we'll walk off a cliff.

There is a tendency to thing that we're special, where "we" is whoever is alive at the moment. People in the early 1800s probably thought they were witnessing the beginning of French hegemony forever; throughout the centuries people have predicted that the Revelation was just a few years down the line - in the late '90s, I knew someone who was convinced it would come with the year 2000 - and it never comes to pass. Things do change, but so far widescale cataclysm has always be avoided. warpus is right that humanity isn't a species of saints, but ultimately we aren't self-destructive to that degree, either.