Three Threats to Humanity

What can you do?

Egrets don’t threaten human existence. We do. Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash

Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian responsible for the global bestseller Sapiens: A Graphic History, said there are three threats to human existence:

• nuclear war
• climate change
• technological disruption.

These threats to existence have our fingerprints all over them. If there was a criminal investigation and an ensuing court case, we’d all end up in prison for life.

This ability to self-destruct isn’t shared by most of creation.

Outside my back door in the wetlands of Western Australia are wood ducks, cranes, herons, egrets, crows, kookaburras, falcons, and hawks. Blue wrens, golden whistlers, honeyeaters, robins, and firetail finches. Snakes, bobtails, frogs, and turtles. Spiders, dragonflies, bees, bugs, and bats. All these things are oblivious of the threat of nuclear war, climate change issues and potential technological disruption. They hatch, grow, breed, and die. They don’t plan genocide, poison the air, or create complex communication systems that could figuratively blow a fuse and collapse or be commandeered by dictators or modern-day pirates.

One would think that our high level of consciousness (awareness of ourselves and the rest of the world) and our burgeoning intelligence…